Dear Friends,

I write on October 20, 2012. The changes made by "Blogspot" have made it almost impossible for me to continue posting on this site. To do so, I'm now required to use programming language. I'm too ignorant to do this efficiently and properly. Though I am an old dog and actually can learn new tricks, it now takes me two days to do a much simpler version of what I used to be able to do in three or four hours. So I'm going to have to move "St Joseph's Table" to a new site. I hope to post something within a week. If you're on my mailing list, you'll receive a email with the new site address and my weekly email notices as heretofore. If you're not on my list and want to be, please let me know. Send me an email at:

wilcoxiensis@yhoo.com.

Until next time,
Pax--Fr Gregory Lee Wilcox

"...In a Wonderful Order..."

“Mrs. Jesus?”

The last week or so newspaper columnists and television reporters have made headlines writing and talking about 30 words written on a 1,600 year-old scrap of paper—well, papyrus—smaller than a business card.

Here’s the reason for the excitement: the text, a fragment of eight incomplete lines written in ancient Coptic, reads in part “…Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’ ” WAS JESUS MARRIED? That’s what the words written a long time ago say. “If validated,” ABC News said, “this could have major implications for the Christian faith.” In other words, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!

All the excitement came as a result of a presentation made last Tuesday at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies which met last week in Rome. Karen King, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, presented the recently-discovered document at the Congress. She titled the papyrus scrap “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” which certainly gained notoriety for her discovery.

Professor King told the scholars gathered for the Congress, “the fragment doesn’t provide evidence that Jesus was married, since it was probably originally composed in the second half of the second century.” On that point, the professor is right. The fragment proves only the self-evident fact that somebody wrote these words down on a piece of paper a long time ago.

The text does have meaning. But what? It’s probably best to begin by saying ABC News or the New York Times aren’t the best places to learn about fourth-century Coptic texts.

To understand the text, we need to know something about where it came from. Egypt was a cauldron of speculative religious thought in the ancient world, centuries before and centuries after the birth of Christianity. It was the center of All Things Mystical. The ancient equivalent of our fortune-telling gypsy was an Egyptian soothsayer. Egypt was the land of magical spells and mystic formulas, the land of the Old Gods. Christianity took root early on in Egypt. There was a large Jewish population in Alexandria, its capital. St Mark the Evangelist is revered by Orthodox Coptic Christians today as the one who first preached the Gospel in Egypt; they count him as their first bishop. But from its earliest days, Coptic Christianity faced a great foe in Gnosticism.

Gnosticism predates Christianity. It came from Persia a few centuries before the birth of Christ and made inroads into most of the religions of its day. There were Jewish and pagan forms of Gnosticism. Gnostics took things they liked from all religious traditions and blended them together.

The basic doctrine of Gnosticism is that material things are evil; spiritual things are good. Our Faith tells us that God made everything “visible and invisible” (as we say in the Creed) and it is all good. Gnostics reject this. In this evil world, they believe, human souls are trapped in evil bodies. Salvation, according to Gnostic teaching, is escaping the evil creation in which we are ensnared. They believe freedom comes by acquiring secret knowledge (gnosis is a Greek word for “knowledge”). They crave is secret words and mystic symbols and arcane formulas. Esoteric, mystical knowledge, they believed, is the key to set oneself free from the bonds of the fallen, physical world.

The Church’s teaching is quite the opposite. God reveals Himself to us, we believe, through His creation. The world is good because God, Who made it, is good. The Gnostics rejected the Sacraments, because we believe God uses physical things—bread, wine, water, oil, the laying on of hands and so forth—to give us spiritual gifts. The Gnostics believed there were two gods—the evil god who created the world and all that is in it, and the good god, who wants to set immaterial souls free from the prison of the world.

Gnostic texts of the third and fourth centuries (the same time the text at issue is supposed to be dated) did sometime depicted Jesus as married, sometimes to Mary Magdalene, sometimes to one of several goddesses who descended from heaven to engage Him in a celestial marriage. The Gnostic initiate could rise above the “sensual world” by memorizing the names of the gods and goddesses of Gnosticism or learning the secret passwords preserved in Gnostic texts. Some of these Gnostic Gospels (you may have heard, for example, of the so-called “Gospel of Thomas”) pass on “secret sayings” of Jesus, which purport to enlighten the Gnostic devotee. The fragment of the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” seems to be one of these.

The “celestial marriages” of Jesus to some goddess or other, such as the one referred to in the text above, were part of the Gnostic scheme of salvation. But let me bluntly say none of this makes sense to anyone who tries to make sense of it, because Gnosticism isn’t sensible; it never was, it’s not meant to be. It’s “magic.” Not rabbit-in-the-hat stage magic, but “my lucky number,” “don’t let a black cat cross your path” sort of magic. Gnosticism was (and is, because in a variety of forms it still exists) silly and stupid.

Every student and professor of Gnostic texts (most of which have come down to us in the Coptic language) knows the oddity and utter incomprehensibility of Gnosticism. Professor King certainly does.

This has not made headlines because Professor King has sparked a sudden interest in Gnostic texts of the fourth century.

The excitable reports on television that “JESUS WAS MARRIED AND THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!” will sell newspapers for a day or two. Books like the Da Vinci Code pass along fiction as fact. They confirm the ill-informed and unbelieving in their suspicion that Christianity has a murky past the Church has desperately tried to hide.

So what do we make of all this?

Scripture and the Church’s tradition from the earliest times tell us about our Lord’s life. Through them, we know much more about Him than we do any other person in the ancient world. They tell us more than just the facts of His life here on earth. The Gospels and our tradition tell us what our Lord’s life on earth meant. Everything He did and said, all the choices He made, all of it has meaning for us. He chose to live a celibate life, and He told His disciples then (and us now) why. St Matthew’s Gospel records His words:

“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

Our Lord chose the celibate life for a number of reasons (a topic for another time), but most especially for the reason embodied in His words just quoted. His celibacy is a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole of His life was literally given over to the inauguration of the Kingdom. His chastity was part of His complete commitment of every aspect of His life to the Kingdom of God.

If that makes us squirm a little—even if we aren’t sure why—here’s something to make us downright uncomfortable.

Recall the story, related later in the St Matthew’s Gospel, of the Sadducees who asked the Lord about who will be married in Heaven. The Lord responded, “in the resurrection people will neither marry, nor be given in marriage.”

For the Gnostic, marriage is, like all other earthly things, evil. For the Christian, though, marriage is a Sacrament, a foretaste of the Kingdom. When the Kingdom of Heaven is come, there are no Sacraments (what this means for the men and women united in Christian marriage is the topic of another paper altogether!). God will then be “all in all,” as St Paul said.

So the Lord Christ is the living picture, the embodiment of Heaven here on earth. As God made perfect Man, He gives Himself for every person, “for the life of the world.” The Son of Mary says every woman who follows Him in faith (as she did perfectly) is His mother. His family is not a bloodline: it’s made up of those who are born, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

He is husband to none, to be Savior of all. THAT, beloved, does indeed change everything.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“We’re Not Like Other People Are”

The Book of Common Prayer is more than a collection of prayers. It’s a pattern for living. We’ve seen before, on previous examinations, how it guides us in the living of a regular Christian life: daily prayers and offices, weekly participation in the Christian sacrifice of the Altar, a yearly cycle of worship through the months and seasons, and the events of our lives—from baptism to burial—celebrated or observed in rites and ceremonies that ennoble the poor in spirit and humble the proud of heart.

In doing this, the Prayer Book makes our life on earth a path to Heaven. It fosters the life of Christ in us in ways both obvious and subtle. For the next few weeks I want to talk with you about some of those Prayer Book subtleties.

The Prayer Book “pattern” isn’t just an outline of services taking us from cradle to grave, though it is that. By its repeated patterns of prayer, of feasts and fasts, rites and ceremonies, it shapes our spiritual lives. Its old admonition that we are “to worship God in His Church every Sunday” builds up in our souls a regular, weekly habit of worship. It anchors an on-going habit of worship in our lives. Prayer Book worship is grounded in an understanding of who we are and Who God Is. When those two truths come together, worship is the inescapable result.

Every human being worships something: wealth, power, fame, pleasure—those are the usual recipients of human adoration, as St Thomas warns us. In every life these idolatries all turn tinny and ring hollow and we crave something more, something real. Following the tradition of Scripture, the Prayer Book takes us along a path, at once both ancient and modern, which enables us to grasp Something true. Its cycles of prayer and Sacrament allow us to look at Something other than ourselves all the time. Worship enables us to grasp the One Thing Necessary to make the rest of life fall into its proper place.

It’s not enough to “believe,” even if it’s to believe in Jesus “as your personal Savior,” as our Protestant friends preach. St James the Apostle grumbled “even the devils believe.” The Bible calls us to worship, and the Prayer Book tells us how. It forms the ancient, Catholic practice of worship in those who take its pattern for their own.

What are the subtleties of Prayer Book worship?

Here’s the first: we’re called to worship with others. There is a place—a very necessary place—for personal prayer. But Common Prayer is different. The old Catholic tradition, still a part of Anglican practice as well as church law for Eastern Orthodox Christians, forbids a priest from celebrating Mass without the presence of others. If I schedule a Mass and nobody shows up, there is no celebration (and happily for me and my job security, the converse is also true—if there is no priest, there can be no Mass). Common Prayer means we need each other. “Where two or three are gathered together,” the Lord said, “I am there in the midst of them.”

Here’s another: Common Prayer requires order and discipline. It has little place for how people feel; it’s not about being entertained by good music (although Palestrina is, I think, inherently good for the soul) or stirring sermons. The focus of Prayer Book worship is not us, but God. We come together for His sake. Our tradition never asks what we get out of worship, but what we put into worship.

A host of unspoken truths lie embedded in Common Prayer. Truths so obvious we don’t think of them, but bear in mind they’re more than true observations. They’re the foundations on which our spiritual lives are built.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue our spiritual spelunking. But be warned, beloved. The hidden purpose of this little expedition is not only to acquaint you and me with some profound truths, but to open our eyes to some of our pathetic failings. These truths will fade to shadows if they’re not lived. There’s no room for us to thank God that we’re not like other people are. Sooner or later, we hear the Lord Jesus speaking to us and we have to answer (with a gulp) “Is it I, Lord?”—Fr Gregory Wilcox

"But I say to you, Love your enemies..."

I was going to continue an exploration of the “fundamental assumptions” underlying the world-view of the Book of Common Prayer. A death in the family and all that entails prevented my intention. The overseas events of the past week require me to put my ruminations on the Prayer Book to the side for another week. After several phone calls and emails with friends and parishioners, it seemed important to consider some notions about a Christian response to the events of September 11, 2001 AND 2012.


I write this the evening of September 12. Yesterday morning I marked the 11th anniversary of “9/11” by offering a Mass at 8.45 in the morning, the time the first hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower. I thought the day was to be a day of tributes to the fallen. It ended, as you know, as something else altogether.

Muslims in Egypt attacked the American Embassy, destroying property and defacing our flag. In Libya elements of Al Qaeda marked 9/11 by storming the consulate, killing staff members and murdering our ambassador. There are new dead now to be remembered. Among them, 80 Coptic Christians killed this week by Muslim rioters. There is little mention of this in the media, there rarely is. It will be some time before information trickles out about how many churches were ransacked and parishioners were killed on September 11, 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood, now controlling Egypt, has announced more “demonstrations” after mosques close following prayers on Friday. I don’t know, other than talking, what our politicians will do. I do know what we, as Christians, must do. We pray for the dead, and then, remember the Lord Jesus’ words, “…I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you.” Hard words, which only a Christian has the strength to put into practice. That’s our high—and very difficult—calling, one we dare not shirk, if we’re to be worthy of the name Christian.

“…To Ready Us for Heaven”

The Prayer Book has been revised numerous times since it made its first appearance in 1549. The initial version was revised four times in 120 years. The first American Prayer Book was revised three times more till 1928 (four times, if you count the Book of Common Prayer for Use in the Confederate States of America—which we do, where I’m from).

In all the intervening years and through all its revisions, the Prayer Book retained its essential form, until the radical versions of the 1960s and 70s altered its basic “shape.” It wasn’t simply the “shape,” the “outward and visible sign” of the Prayer Book that changed with those revisions. Its “inward and spiritual grace,” what it was designed to do, was lost. Books of “Common Prayer” still sit in the pews of Episcopal and Anglican Church of Canada parishes, but what those books were meant to do is quickly being lost.

Though many of us use the 1928 American revision of the Book of Common Prayer (there was a proposed but unsuccessful English 1928 Prayer Book, too), the Prayer Book remains an essentially English book. Not merely in its quasi-Shakespearean vocabulary and occasional quaint phrase, but more importantly in its structure and intent. It’s a book designed for use in an English country parish.

In spite of the soaring vaults of Westminster Abbey and the classical columns of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Prayer Book is most at home in a village church. It’s designed for use in a community that lives within the sound of its bell, a community which has celebrated the Eucharist, baptized its babies and buried its dead in cycles of centuries, a community where the gravestones tell of four and five and a dozen generations past. The Prayer Book envisions its users living their lives in close proximity with each other, and all the joys and sorrows that entails.

That doesn’t sound much like us. Americans change residences, on average, 14 times in the course of their lives (I’ve done it for the last time—when the time comes for my next move, they’ll be carrying me out in a box). We change jobs 11 times (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics); the American Society of Genealogists tells us most Americans don’t know the names or birthplaces of our great-grandparents. Over 50% of Americans now living say that they’ve converted from the religion of their parents. None of those statistics, it’s fair to say, are reflective of 16th century English country life.

Still, the Prayer Book can be wonderfully effective in the swirl of 21st century America. One thing its late-medieval view does for us is give us ground. It stabilizes us in an increasingly unstable and swiftly-changing society. Its steady, year-round, unending cycle of worship—Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Masses every Sunday and Holy Day—together with its sacramental shepherding of the major events of our lives from birth to death, ensure that God is always with us in very obvious ways. That’s one of the basic things the Prayer Book was made to do, and it still does, if we want it to.

The Prayer Book fixes common prayer and the Sacraments in a central place in our lives, but it does much more. It forms in us a fundamental Christian understanding of life, of our society, and of the world. It’s an understanding, not of the 16th century, but reaching back to Jesus Christ Himself. The Offices of Instruction and the Catechism teach us essential truths of the Faith, but the regular use of the Prayer Book, participating in its worship over weeks and years and decades, builds in our souls—almost imperceptibly—an assurance of its truths.

This is the genius of the Book of Common Prayer: it brings the ancient Faith, unchanged and full of grace, to the circumstances and surroundings of our ever-changing lives.

Sadly, some of the fundamental understandings the Prayer Book looks to form in us are slipping away. We no longer live in a world formed by it. Over the next few weeks, we'll look at some of what we're losing, ask if those things should be lost, and why their loss might very well be our loss, too. The Prayer Book isn’t about Shakespearean language, as grand as it is. The Prayer Book forms Christ in us: it’s been handed to us to “ready us for Heaven.”—Fr Gregory Wilcox

American Spirituality?

There’s a summertime exhibit on display at the Library of Congress right now. It’s called “88 Books That Shaped America.” It includes everything from Tom Paine’s Common Sense (with its famous line “These are the times that try men’s souls”) to Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. It’s an intriguing list as much as for what it excludes as what it includes.

Missing from the list are any books about faith or religion.

In a country where religion has played a pivotal role, where Puritans and Anglicans carried their English rivalry into the New World, where the fundamentalist movement with all its oddities was born and Mormonism was invented, the librarians of the Library of Congress don’t see religion as an essential part of American history and culture.

Roberta Shaffer, the Librarian in charge of the exhibit, did an interview explaining how they decided which 88 books they chose. During the course of the interview she was asked about why there were no religious books included. “A lot of the books we chose have a moralistic or ‘do-good’ tone to them, and that is more representative of America and our values. That is the spiritual ‘persona’ of America rather than religion per se.”

She went on to say that books like Ida Tarbell’s The History of Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle expressed American spirituality more profoundly than books on religion.

We’ve moved a long way from the Founding Fathers’ refusal to establish any particular religion to our modern excision of religion and faith from our history and culture. We’re cutting religion out of our past, which cuts it out of our present. We have such an anemic understanding of “spirituality” that The History of Standard Oil is being touted by the most prestigious library in the country as an American spiritual classic.

Is this an indictment of the LOC as a liberal pawn? That’s to misunderstand what’s going on in our society, and how our view of spirituality is being fundamentally re-shaped.

It’s not liberalism but secularism which poses the great threat to the Church. We are at war with “the devil, the world and the flesh” as the Baptismal Office in the Prayer Book tells us. Secularism replaces God with “the world and the flesh.” The secularist won’t discover till it’s too late that the devil (who he’s too smart to believe in) was hiding in the world and the flesh all along, and the hook has been swallowed with the lure.

Christians are at war with the world. We always have been and always will be. The temptations of the devil, the world and the flesh will attack us as long as we live here on earth (and that, as the matter of fact, is what spirituality is really about).

Roberta Shaffer and the Library of Congress aren’t enemies of God; they’re simply secularists. What they believe to be spirituality is a kind of spirituality; it’s just not very deep and doesn’t answer the real spiritual needs of men and women. But it’s the coming thing in our increasingly secular society and we as Christians must be aware of it. In our personal spiritual lives, we need to be constantly on guard. The devil, the world and the flesh are the enemies of God, and they’re our enemies, too. We are at war—it can be a joyful, exhilarating warfare—but if we forget that basic spiritual reality, if we forget our High Calling to be “Christ’s faithful soldier” (as the Baptismal Office names us), we just become a sad part of the problem.

God has made you for much more than the world promises you can be. The “spirituality” of the world, with its “moralistic and ‘do-good’ tone,” ends with the world. God has made you for eternity.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Why Common Prayer? Part the Second

We began Part the First of our inquiry asking why Anglicanism doesn’t have the popular appeal of Joel Olsteen’s Lakewood Church or the Worldwide Ministry of John Hagee (I admit it—I had to look these fellas up). We ended quoting a Syrian first-century bishop, St Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius tells us the Church is the saving presence of God in His creation. In order to fulfill her high calling, the Church must continually live her Catholicity. What does Common Prayer have to do with that?

When we say the Creed, we say we believe in the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. While the Creeds are one of the great treasures of the Church, there lies in them (or perhaps, in the “idea” of them) a danger: they may become something intellectual, like a set of geometry theorems, a set of “religious” ideas we accept. The Creeds weren’t made to be intellectual straitjackets. They’re intended not to constrain us but to set us free. They are to open our souls to see things which otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grasp.

When we say we believe in the Catholic Church, we’re saying we believe that God has revealed Himself to us in certain ways. Fundamental to that is that He reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ. He doesn’t do this, Mormon-like, in direct revelations to us, with the Lord Jesus or an angel personally visiting each and every one of us to instruct us in the truths of the Faith. We receive and live out the Gospel in the Church. We learn its truths through her Scriptures and come to understand them by her instruction. God made us less to understand Him, though, than to live with Him. We come into God’s presence and share in His life in many ways, but most profoundly in worship.

The Anglican understanding of Common Prayer is forever bound to our Anglican understanding of Catholicism. It’s the same understanding St Ignatius had and many generations of those who’ve followed him in the Faith. Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 until 1961, put it most happily: “Wherever we go throughout our Communion, we find ourselves at home in a worship Scriptural, Catholic and congregational. The Book of Common Prayer knits us together and lies at the root of our fellowship.”

It’s not the words of the Prayer Book that knit us together—after all, even before the influenza of liturgical change gave the Church a bad cold, Anglicans in different countries have used different Prayer Books. The American 1928 Book isn’t the same as the 1662 Book which still remains the official Prayer Book of the Church of England. There is much they have in common, but each Prayer Book—English, Irish, Scottish, American, South African, Canadian, Welsh, Mexican, Japanese, Australian, to name but some of them—is distinctive. What Archbishop Fisher meant is not that the Prayer Book is everywhere the same, but that Common Prayer is a profound expression of our common and Catholic Faith, Catholic Worship and Catholic Life.

The Catholic Faith of our Anglicanism tradition grows from Common Prayer.

Essential to that tradition is common life. When Archbishop Fisher says “our worship is Catholic and congregational,” he touches on an easily-overlooked but necessary notion. Our Prayer Book worship traces back to the earliest centuries of the Church’s life. We didn’t invent it, we received it. We learn how to worship God by using it. The Prayer Book isn’t perfect and from time-to-time needs adjusting; but because the Prayer Book is Catholic in its scope, any revision must be approached “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.”

At the same time, as the Archbishop says, our worship is also “congregational.” That means that every parish embodies our tradition of worship. The Prayer Book comes to life when it guides and forms the individual parish. The Prayer Book works wonderfully well used in the setting of a soaring Gothic cathedral, but it was designed for use in a parish church. There, in a community of people living the Christian life together, the Prayer Book does what it was made to do. It centers the life of the people in God.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Why Common Prayer?

We have all had the conversation. Usually it’s with half-a-dozen people who’ve lingered in the parish hall an hour after coffee hour is over, or a few vestry members hanging around in the priest’s office long after the Vestry meeting adjourned. “Why doesn’t our parish attract the numbers that swell the ranks of the huge non-denominational conventicle on the freeway?” “I love the Anglican Church. Why don’t other people see what I see?”

There are a lot of answers, some of them actually—at least partially—correct: we think it’s in bad taste to talk to people about our religion, or our worship isn’t easy to follow if you weren’t brought up in it, or our church building is too small/old/hard to find. Our priest isn’t a good preacher, the hymns are too dull, or we don’t really want people we don’t know/who don’t look like us/who are of a different political party coming to our church.

A lot of these are silly, even if some of them are true. But even if we have a beautiful church building with a great choir and St John Chrysostom as the regular preacher at Sunday Mass, we won’t be giving the Abundant Life Center, with its 9,000 members, a run for its money anytime soon.

Why?

Because that’s not what Jesus had in mind when He founded His Church. At its heart, the Church is a group of baptized people, gathered with its clergy around the parish Altar. The Church is Christian people, living a common life, practicing common prayer.

St Ignatius, a first-century bishop of Antioch, was arrested and carried to Rome to be eaten up by lions in the Coliseum. As he traveled from Syria to Italy, he wrote letters to Christians he met along the way. In one of them, written to the people of Smyrna (a church mentioned by St John in his Book of Revelation), Ignatius said “Where the bishop appears [to celebrate the Eucharist], there let the people gather; just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”

This is the first time we have a written record of the Church being called the “Catholic” Church. This ancient and venerable word is familiar to most Christians. Those familiar with the Creeds know it because they say it every time they say the Creeds; those who aren’t equate it with the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants who use the Creeds (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc) are careful to explain that “catholic” (with a small “c”) means universal, as in “all Christians everywhere.” Our Roman friends quite happily refer to themselves as Catholics (with a capital “C”) and insist they are the Catholic Church.

When St Ignatius wrote his letter to Smyrna, however, he meant something different, something tantalizingly subtle with a bit of a bite. Catholic comes from the joining of two Greek words—kata and holon. Kata means “according to” and holon means “the whole.” This kataholon Church is the One Church, the one the Lord Jesus founded. Ignatius understood it, and so did the people he wrote to, as having a leadership coming from Jesus Himself through His Apostles down to the Bishops to whom the Apostles entrusted the Church. This One Church passed along the One Faith.

St Ignatius saw the One Church as revealing itself in a variety of ways. It was the One Church, spread over the whole world (the Greek word for this was oekumene, from which our word “ecumenical” comes). It was the One Church for all Christians who followed the Faith preserved by those who followed the Bishops appointed by the Apostles. The One Church is not only those who are alive at any particular time; it cannot be broken by death, since it is joined forever to its Lord, Who destroyed the power of death. It is all Christian people of all times, in Heaven, on earth, and those who are at rest.

But Ignatius understood that this Catholic Church spread throughout the world, held in common by all Christians living and dead, had a real existence. If the Church exists at all times and in all places, it must of necessity exist at this time and in this place. The Church shows itself most perfectly at worship. Scripture tells us this is the Church’s calling in Heaven; it is her highest calling here on earth.

So for Ignatius—and for Christians keeping the same Catholic tradition and Faith Ignatius had received from the Apostles—the Church shows herself most as the Church when she gathers to offer the Eucharist. That’s the meaning of Ignatius words above: “where the bishop is, there let the people be; where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”

Great. What does all this have to do with Common Prayer and Anglicanism?

Quite a lot. But to see how, you’ll have to tune in next week, beloved, for Part Two of “Why Common Prayer?” Till then, I hope you have good air conditioning!—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Change for the Better

Regardless of where you stood during the tumult of the 1960s and the cultural erosion of the 1970s, time has passed; perhaps enough to give us a better, hopefully more mature, understanding of the events of those days. For the Church, it was a time of tumult and upheaval, too. For people like me, brought up with a love of tradition which the years have only deepened, the assault on the Church was embodied in the controversy over the ordination of women to the priesthood. We saw it as an assault on ancient Catholic Order, a denial of apostolic tradition.

Since those troubulous times, my thoughts on that topic have changed little.

Other controversies gnawed at the Church, too, but at the time they seemed less crucial. Paramount of these was the change to the Church’s liturgy. At the time it was passed off as simply an “updating” of our worship, enabling the Church to keep pace with the changes going on around us. I didn’t care much for the new rites: the language was pedestrian, the multiplicity of options (Rites One, Two or Three; Prayers A, B or C) gave off an odor of “change for change sake.” But to my way of thinking the battle was elsewhere. Banal liturgy wasn’t fatal, but you closed your eyes (and ears) and “thought of England.” (A good friend once remarked of the New Rites: “No one denies Jesus is present in the new Mass, He is. But He’s there s reluctantly as everybody else!”)

It’s thirty-five years since those days. Female bishops are now commonplace and up-to-the-minute new rites are being written everyday (with brand new liturgies now required for homosexual weddings and divorce celebrations!). The impact of the changes is not what was promised, though perhaps it is what was by some envisioned.

Today, as I ponder that time of troubles, I see things a bit differently. Yes, with the priesting of women Catholic Order was abandoned. But with the profound alteration of the liturgy an axe was driven into roots than run very deep in the psyche of Christian worship. Though the new rites retain old titles, it’s not just the language of the Book of Common Prayer, or the structure of its liturgies, which have been changed—the underlying notion of Common Prayer itself.

The Prayer Book isn’t just collection of venerable and ancient rites. It’s a purposeful gathering together of 2,000 years of Catholic worship, arranged and organized to form a group of Christians into a worshiping community. Common Prayer gives us a common faith, a common practice and a common life. We may not live up to it, but that’s why it was put together centuries ago. The tradition of Common Prayer means to form us, to change us into Jesus’ disciples, believing and doing what Christians have believed and done since the Holy Ghost came down that first Whitsunday. The new approach to things is not that we should be formed, but that we can now form and create a new faith, believing and doing what we think should be believed and done.

If somebody wants to make up a new religion, it’s their affair. But for those who want to hold the Faith which never changes, let’s not look for ways to improve it; let’s bring it to life by living Common Prayer in the parish it’s pleased God to place us. There’s a real way to change things!—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Divine Arithmetic

We live by the numbers. Insurance companies, government agencies and sociologists parse out our lives by percentages: take an aspirin a day and add five years to your life; eat the delicious, crispy fat on your lamb chop (God intended us to take some risks) and subtract four. Our lives are hedged in by numbers.

The Psalmist says some of us will live an allotted “threescore years and ten,” others more, others less. We buy because numbers in our bank account tell us we can; we work because the same numbers tell us we must. The digital age which now dominates our world is, I’m patiently told by those who know, is built on an endless sequencing of zeros and ones in countless orderings. Numbers are built into the fabric of creation. They’re one of God’s inventions.

God, though, is above them—outside them. “God” writes St Maximus the Confessor with wonderful theological insight, “is above arithmetic.”

It’s one of the most basic notions of Christian teaching that God is not only above arithmetic but above everything. Before He said “Let it be,” nothing existed. Part of the basic notion that God is above everything is that God is above even existence. Existence, “being,” is part of God’s creation. Because God is above existence, we can’t even say, in a theological sense, that God exists. Existing is what created things do, and He is most definitely NOT created, or part of creation.

Yesterday I had a fun conversation with a very bright, very earnest and very unconventional Protestant minister. He and I are poles apart (he began our conversation by saying he “loathes tradition,” so you can imagine we had a hard time finding much common ground), but we both obviously relish lively conversation.

He declared the Church’s teaching was fundamentally flawed with its dogma of the Trinity. “It’s a logical impossibility,” he said with an assured certainty. “You can’t have three equaling one, or vice versa. Ever since 325” he said (the date of the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated our Nicene Creed), “the Church has been teaching an absurdity.” We had a fun conversation, and he said he wants to stop by St Joseph’s to cross friendly swords again. I look forward to it, but this morning I sent him an email of a single sentence. It’s the quotation from St Maximus: “God is above arithmetic.”

For us human beings, three equaling one is a logical absurdity. God the Three-in-One, though, isn’t an arithmetic problem. We know He is Three in One because Christ our God told us so. He didn’t concern Himself with proving it, any more than we can prove God’s existence—and you can see from the above that we needn’t even bother to try. It’s not because belief in God is illogical, but because it’s above logic—above numbers—above existence. That’s the “high and holy place” where God simply Is. And incredibly, unbelievably, if we consider Who He Is and who we are, that, St Maximus further says, is where He calls us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

What’s God Saying?

Genesis tells us God spoke to Adam. Before the wily serpent enticed them from friendship with God, Adam and Eve walked with Him in the Garden He made for them. The words that passed between them as they walked together were meant to be the beginning of a Communion, a “sweet converse together.” But rather than the words of his Friend, Adam chose to listen to the enticements of the snake. The friendship God created us for faltered; Adam’s hearing (and ours as a result) became garbled. God continues to speak to us, but what we hear, we often misunderstand.

God hasn’t changed. Since the beginning, His words of love and friendship for us remain the same. Since Adam munched the apple, though, our hearing has changed, and the clarity of God’s words has become muted.

Our hearing problem isn’t only with God, it’s with each other. The problem isn’t really with our ears, but with our hearts and minds.

I hear what I want. All of us do. God’s call to us is plain, but it’s not a call I particularly want to hear. At all times and in all places, He calls us to His charity, not just when we want to, not just with those we care for, but with every person, like ‘em or not. He’s calling us to be like Him, to love like Him. He means us to show His love in the ho-hum everyday circumstances of our lives.

When the Lord Jesus did this—and that’s practically all He did when He walked the dusty roads of Roman Palestine two thousand years ago—it cost Him. But He heard the Divine Voice with crystal clarity, and He passed it on to us. “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what He did every day of His life. Every person He met, the bitterest Pharisee and the most corrupt tax-collector and the scoffing, full-of-himself know-it-all, He loved them all perfectly and fully. He loved—and loves—every human failure: each one of us who tell ourselves we’re so successful.

“God,” St John tells us, “is love.” That is the core of Christian truth, the necessary dogma of the Catholic Faith. It has nothing to do with sentimental schlock or pious emotion. At the center of everything visible and invisible is this Truth: the Father eternally loves the Son, the Son eternally loves the Father, and the Holy Ghost, the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, is their living Bond of Love. God created us, mirabile dictu, to enter into those ties of Love. That’s what salvation is. That’s your High Calling and mine.

God bothered to make us out of nothing at all, so we could come to know love and become partakers of His Love. That’s why we’re alive. It’s not to see who wins, who claws his way to the top of the human heap, who has the most stuff when he dies: we’re made to find out what love is, so we can understand what’s going in when we wake up in eternity. The language of eternity is Love—the Father’s Love for the Son, the Son’s Love for the Father, and the Holy Ghost breathing that Love into us. Love is self-giving.

Hell isn’t so much a fiery lake of bubbling magma as much as it is a state of utter, joyless incomprehension. It’s an eternity spent in the presence of Love when you don't know what Love is.

A lot of people say they wish God spoke to us now as Scripture tells us He spoke to them then. The Good News is that He does. His call to us is the same now as it was when He spoke to Adam. He still wants us to walk with Him as friends. In this fallen world, though, the Gospel choice always costs us. As we walk with Him along that narrow Way, we hear a little more clearly the Voice which is calling us. It is Love Who speaks, calling us to be who we were made to be.-Fr Gregory Wilcox

“Maker of Heaven and earth…”

We’re born into splendor. Whether we first see light in a ghetto or a palace, we see light.

The light we see flooding the front yard at breakfast time left the sun eight minutes earlier, rushing at 186,282 miles a second, to get here. What do we see in its light? Trees and grass, flowers and bumblebees, grazing deer and coiling snakes: the earth is pregnant with wonder. Fireflies, diamonds, moss and nosehairs: we live in a storehouse of treasures.

The Creed says God is “Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” We can see butterflies and waterfalls, but what about those things we can’t see, the realities our senses can’t perceive?

Over the past few centuries we’ve amassed mountains of information about the heavens and the earth. Schoolchildren memorize banal facts that would have beggared the imaginations of Galileo and Kepler. We can graft skin from the back of a cadaver to renew the burned skin of a baby. In the days of Augustus Caesar, the average person died at 28 years; today our life expectancy is 68. Within a few years, people will be vacationing in space.

Collecting facts—even coordinating them to build a car or replace a liver—doesn’t lead to wisdom. We all know the names and something of the careers of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, celebrated scientists, famous thinkers and dedicated atheists. They knew much more about the sun than anybody who’ll read these words, but they dismissed as naïve a belief in the Maker of the sun. They “had no need of that hypothesis,” as the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace replied to Napoleon when asked about God.

Most people wouldn’t go as far as Laplace. Most people, if asked, will say they believe in God. He’s a convenient explanation for things. We need to explain the overwhelming sense we get when we look up at the night sky spangled with stars. God fits the bill. He’s a useful hypothesis.

Over the next few centuries (assuming we don’t destroy ourselves), we’ll continue collecting facts. Facts to make Sagan and Hawking seem like Neanderthals by comparison. But the great and invisible Truths that make it all matter won’t be then—and indeed, can’t ever be—calculated by computers. They’ll never be in science books. They’re the invisible stuff of the Spirit. Here is its most profound Truth:

“And the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”

All wisdom, all knowledge, all facts, all life leads to us to God the Trinity or it leads us astray.

All our accumulated knowledge, every scientific discovery, every mathematical calculation advances our species. Medicine can restore lost limbs, renew sight, lengthen our lives and overcome unendurable pain. But none can answer childhood’s constant question: “why?” The answer doesn’t lie in ourselves. It doesn’t even lie in the totality of God’s creation.

The “why” to creation is completely outside creation. Sagan and Hawking and you and I will never find the answer as long as we look in the wrong place.

God made the heavens and the earth. But He is utterly outside them. He is completely different. We’re created, we exist, because He said (and still says) so. He is Uncreated. We exist in time. He does not. St Thomas Aquinas tells us the problem with even talking about God is we have to use words (they’re all we have) to say things about Him, and He’s above the ability of words to describe. No wonder there are atheists. To accept the Trinity is to accept that there is Truth above our capacities.

We’re born into splendor. The splendor around us, though, is a “preparatory” splendor. To discover wonder amidst the butterflies and bees (and scorpions and rattlers), is a necessary step in opening our eyes to the Splendor beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend and a love our hearts can never fathom. An Uncreated Heart beats at the center of all creation. For those who have eyes to see, It is the One Thing Necessary, the fountain to which all wisdom and knowledge lead, and from Whence they come.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Extraordinary Time

Trinitytide, coinciding (in Texas at least) with the long, hot summer, is on us. Stretching from June to November, it’s “green”: not from ecological commitment, but ecclesiastical custom: green vestments of the clergy, green hangings on the Altar, the liturgical color traditionally representing “hope.” Trinitytide is a medieval English and French invention. Before that, those days reaching from Whitsunday till Advent were simply lumped together as tempus per annum, “time through the year.” Nowadays, with our lowest common denominator language, many call this season “Ordinary Time.”

Whether we follow Medieval English or contemporary American use, this long season seems to lack the focus of the “other” half of the Church’s Year. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost: every child who’s gone through confirmation class knows these great seasons and what they celebrate. Trinitytide, the tempus per annum, seems to be the time of year we tread water till November reminds us Advent is coming again. It’s a time for committee meetings, clerical conferences and continuing education programs.

Nothing wrong with any of that: building committees need to meet. Maybe we’re missing something, though. I think there may be something in the treasury of the Church’s tradition we’ve overlooked for a while, and the clue to what it is lies out in the open, right in front of us, waiting to be picked up again and restored to its former use.

Trinity Sunday, the day we’ve set aside for reflection on one of the two great dogmas of the Catholic religion, comes after those cycles of celebration of the other great dogma of the faith: the Incarnation—God became one of us in Jesus Christ. From Advent through Easter we keep the feasts of that great truth. Whitsunday, the end of that cycle, is not a feast of the Incarnation—our Lord wasn’t around anymore when the Holy Ghost fell on the Apostles. He was in Heaven. Whitsunday is a feast celebrating “what are we gonna do now?” Now that God has come “for us men and our salvation,” what’s next?

When our Lord was about to ascend with His human body and soul into Heaven (taking the fullness of our humanity into glory) He told His disciples “Wait here. You’re about to be given power from on high.” They did and they were.

The power (dunamis is the Greek word; our English word “dynamite” comes from it) they were given was—and still is—the power of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is God’s power active in Christians today. It’s the dunamis of the Sacraments, the dunamis of prayer, the dunamis of sacrifice, the dunamis of love. The Holy Ghost is meant to be the Power of your life and mine as disciples of the Lord Jesus. The Church’s ancient calendar teaches us how to live out that dunamis.

We need times of reflection, of contemplation, retreat, times devoted to bathing in the deep waters of the Spirit. We need Advents and Lents. We need times to discover joy, to renew ourselves in the realities that answer our spiritual needs. We need Christmases and Easters. But God didn’t put us into His creation to rise, guru-like, above it. We are an integral and necessary part of God’s creation. We need Lenten discipline and Easter joy as we need Whitsun fire and dynamite.

St Leo the Great never tires of saying “Christ is born in us at Christmas. He suffers in us on Good Friday. He rises in us on Easter.” The calendar doesn’t merely recall those long-ago events, in the Liturgy it makes them active in us. That dynamite ignited by the Spirit on Whitsunday wasn’t meant to fizzle out on Trinity. Let the necessary building and finance committees meet. But Trinitytide should be the time for letting the Power of the Spirit, burning over our heads at Whitsunday, to explode like dynamite. Let’s make it so. Ask and then, like the disciples waiting to be turned into apostles, wait. The dunamis we so desperately need is not our own.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“…there are not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreateds…”

“Trinity Sunday,” the old adage runs, “is the one Sunday on which no clergyman should be allowed to preach!” As with every pithy saying, there’s more than a kernel of truth to this old bon mot. It’s certainly true that no one can grasp the truths it proclaims and few preachers, ancient or modern, up to the challenges it presents.

Nonetheless, in many parishes tomorrow, the stately and intricate phrases of the Athanasian Creed will be recited. Though it’s lacking in the American Book of Common Prayer, the American Church is singular among Anglicans in not printing this ancient version of the Creed in its Prayer Book. In spite of that, for generations many American parishes have sung it on this day.

In younger years, I spent Trinity Sunday engrossed in the wonderfully obscure repetitions and delightful Latinisms of the Creed. “Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly…we worship God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.” And so on it rolls, if not tripping off the tongue, at least tantalizing to the mind.

And yet, if we allow ourselves to fall into its phrases we can find ourselves instructed beyond its words. Its repetitions and reiterations draw us in like a Bach fugue, the verbal interplay teaching us a Truth beyond words.

The Creeds that are our daily teachers, the Apostles’ Creed of the Office and the Nicene at the Mass, are happy anchors of our Faith. While the words are pregnant with meaning, they’re straightforward in their presentation. Not so the Athanasian. It reminds us of an essential but sometimes shaded aspect of our Faith: the Athanasian Creed helps us to hold on to essentials of the Faith by telling us not only what we do believe, but also by insisting there are things we do not believe—and even more importantly—insisting that much of the Truth about God is completely and forever beyond us.

“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…and yet there are not three incomprehensibles…but one incomprehensible.”

God, St Athanasius’ Creed ponderously but enticingly insists, is utterly beyond us. We cannot understand Him and we never will. He is, the Creed proclaims, “uncreated,” “eternal,” “incomprehensible,” “almighty”: and we are not. We never will be. Even in Heaven, we will ever remain created, contingent and limited. “He became like us,” St Athanasius says, “to make us like Him,” but not by nature—by grace. Through God’s saving acts we become like God because God recreates who we are.

The more we allow God to draw us to Himself, to renew His image and re-shape His likeness in us, the more we rest happily in the Complete Difference between He Who Is and we who are His creatures. Every sin I commit and every corruption I cherish distorts the likeness He’s planted in me. That’s why sin is so bad, demanding our contempt and combat. It keeps me from God because it convinces me, as the Serpent so long ago hissed: “Do what you want and you’ll be like God.”

The Truth of Trinity Sunday, the Truth of the Athanasian Creed, is that God does want us to be like Him. But to really enter into the Trinity Truth, we have to spend the rest of the year, day by day, embracing the Truths we recite on this day.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Pentecostal Fire

We all know the story of Pentecost: the disciples assembled in prayer, as the Lord Christ had commanded; the mighty blast of wind, bursting the closed doors and shuttered windows open to the world; the heaven-sent flames, setting afire the hearts and minds of those over whose heads they danced; and the miracle of “tongues.” Everyone who heard the first Whitsunday sermon heard it in their own language. Those tongues were the first, but not the greatest miracle of Pentecost. That day the uncertain disciples were transformed into bold Apostles—men who were “sent” (apostle in Greek means “someone sent”). After that Pentecost they would never be the same. From that day, the world has never been the same.

So much of who we are traces to that day, but we’re often uncomprehending. Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday, is, we commonly say, the “birthday of the Church.” It’s the day the Holy Ghost came with power (dunamis in Greek, the word we get “dynamite” from) to the Church, but we seem to have forgotten. We keep the feast, but extinguish its dynamite.

So some Christians, well-meaning but untutored in the Faith, try to recapture the Pentecostal fire by re-kindling some of the fireworks. They “speak in tongues,” declare hopeful prophecies and end up following strange doctrines. They do it because at many times and in many places, the One Church has not lived the Pentecostal promise.

We are timid tenders of the Pentecostal flame. I speak as one of the most timid. I look to my own failings first and with most certainty.

Pentecost isn’t about waving hands in the air or knowing I’m “saved”; it’s not about a smug assurance that my spiritual insights are better than yours. The Pentecostal fire kindles humility and charity. It teaches me that my knowledge and understanding and spiritual experience is relevant to my salvation only as much as it the knowledge and understanding and spiritual experience of the One Church on which the Fire first came. The Pentecostal Fire teaches me that salvation—my personal salvation—isn’t about me.

Pentecost calls us to say, “it’s no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.” The Holy Ghost moves us to put ourselves in His hands—or better—to throw ourselves into His burning flame—a Fire that burns but does not consume. The Twelve Apostles sent by the Holy Ghost, twelve men of modest means and talents, carried the Pentecostal torch and set the world on fire with it. Twelve turned the Roman Empire upside down, and took the Gospel to places which had never heard the name of Rome. They threw themselves into the Pentecostal flames and paid for it with their lives. The fire they passed on still burns today.

They passed it on to us. It burns in the Church, though we often don’t know what to do with it.

The Church—One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic—is the keeper of the Pentecostal fire, but we sometimes become caretakers rather than fire-bringers. Nothing wrong with caretakers, but the Fire wasn’t given us merely to tend.

We are meant to be fire-bringers. Men and women who've been given the Light to spread it. To bring the flaming torch of the Spirit into places where darkness reigns: into lives where faith is gone, to men who are too timid to live, to women who’ve lost their high calling, to a whole world that thinks it’s an end in itself.

The Fire of Pentecost enables us to see beyond ourselves: first, to God Whom we must worship; second, to those around us whom we must love. It’s not easy, it’s not meant to be. You were not created, redeemed and sanctified just for your personal salvation and satisfaction. What a squinty view of the Fire that cleanses and renews the cosmos! We were created to be—each of us—living torches of the Holy Ghost, fire-bringers to a world content to live in darkness and call the darkness light.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“Why Stand Ye Gazing Up into Heaven?”

The Feast of the Ascension of Christ is the feast of His Going Away. The old and delightful iconography of the feast makes a point of it: the Lord Jesus feet are protruding from a cloud that has removed Him from their sight. He’s outta here.
He’s outta here, though, for a reason—rather, for several reasons: all of them good but one demands some pondering.

You know that after His Resurrection, the Lord Christ came and went as He pleased, to the extent that He walked into rooms with thick walls and locked doors, appeared and unappeared as He wanted, and, as I’ve mentioned, His friends were often initially unsure as to Who He was when He did show up. Scripture tells us repeatedly they took Him for a ghost, so He walked and talked with them in the sunlight, sat down and ate with them, gave them His hands still marked with nail prints to poke their fingers through. Whatever had happened to Him, this was no ghost. On that certainty they were willing to bet their lives—which, as the matter of fact, every one of them did.

They knew that He’d been dead “as a doornail,” to use that great old Latin phrase. Now not only was He alive, He was alive beyond what they understood “being alive” to mean. Their Lord, Who’d wrestled with death and won, was surely here now would set everything to rights. Forty days after His Resurrection, He met one last time with His disciples (they didn’t know it would be a Very Long Time before they would see Him again). “When they had come together,” St Luke tells us, “they asked Him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ ”

They still didn’t get it. They were hoping the Lord Who created the heavens and earth would raise an army and kick the Romans out of Palestine. They didn’t understand He was calling them to overturn not only the Roman world, but every human thing that puts itself in the place of God.

So Jesus led them to the top of the Mount of Olives. There, “as they were looking on,” says St Luke once again, “He was lifted up and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” He was gone.

He wouldn’t walk on the Galilean seashore anymore, pray with them in Gethsemane, no more would they hear Him spin out a parable. He was gone. Why?

If He remained with them, their faith, and ours, would have focused on the Amazing Man who died and came back to life. He might have globe-trotted like the Dalai Lama, or ended up 24/7/365 healing the sick, raising the dead and in continual demand as a marriage and family counselor.

He left them so the Truth He’d planted, the One Church He founded, could come to be. No more would His hands be the only hands to heal, His voice the only one to pronounce forgiveness or teach His followers to pray. His hands, His voice, His love, all of which a thirsty world still craves, now come to that world through us.

His disciples looked up longingly toward the cloud, but He was gone. He didn’t stay because His kingdom is not of this world: our hearts, as His disciples today, aren’t meant to be focused here any more than theirs were. The Only-Begotten Son became one of us to lift our gaze from the beauty we can see to the Beauty our unresurrected eyes cannot see. One Day, He will come again, in glory we cannot imagine and power we cannot comprehend. He will come for us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“We Have Seen the Lord!”

On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene encountered the resurrected Lord in the garden outside His tomb. She didn’t recognize Him and took Him for a yardworker.

The evening of that same day, two of the Lord Jesus’ disciples, walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus seven miles off, met a Stranger Who walked and talked with them. Though their “hearts burned within as He opened the meaning of the Scriptures,” they didn’t know Who He was.

After those first days, the disciples returned to Galilee, their homeland. Again and again they saw Him, but didn’t recognize Him.

Yet, when the Lord spoke Mary Magdalene’s name, when He blessed and broke bread at the Emmaus Inn, when He called to His disciples from the shore of the Galilean lake, they did know Him. They knew who He was, not by how He looked, but by what He did.

They didn’t recognize Him because He looked different. His body was changed. Not by the scourging and nails, the bruises and cuts, but by His Resurrection. The Lord’s body was no longer subject to cuts and nails and bruises. His transfigured body was the body of the New Adam, the First-born from the dead. The Lord Jesus emerged from the tomb with the body He had so long before intended for us—for Adam and Eve—an immortal body, no longer in the clutch of suffering or death. “Jesus took a body subject to decay,” wrote St Athanasius the Great, “that our decaying bodies would be clothed with immortality.”

When Adam chewed the pomegranate (or ate the proverbial apple) from the Tree of Good and Evil, he forfeited the chance to eat from the Tree of Life. Both his body and soul, made for immortality, began to change. Having turned from perfect communion with God, the thing for which he was created, Adam unwittingly chose decay, suffering and death. It’s the choice every son of Adam and daughter of Eve (excepting one), has made ever since.

Christ took our nature to change our nature. Again, St Athanasius: “He became like us to make us like Him.” He took our mortality to give us His immortality.

That immortality is not a “spiritual” immortality, a ghost-like survival of the soul after death. The Creed is insistent: “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.” Your body. Mine. We aren’t souls trapped in bodies, as Buddhists believe; in us, the spiritual and earthly meet. It’s that way on purpose. God made us that way. He intends for us an immortality of body and soul. It’s what God meant for us all along. Adam and Eve, and you and I, flubbed it. So God became one of us, to lift us to Heaven. The upcoming feast of the Ascension is a feast of the lifting up of our humanity to God.

Christ’s body changed after His Resurrection. He is now, as St Paul says, “the man of Heaven.” His Resurrection transfigured His body from an earthly one to a heavenly one. One day, pray God, your body—and maybe even mine—“will be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” to be like His. No longer will we be subject to suffering or pain, but that’s the least of it. We’ll be changed to what we were intended to be, not what we’ve made of ourselves. And the Gospel truth—the Gospel Joy—is this: on that Day, we’ll see Him, and recognize Him, and know Him as He is—and He will call us by name, because He knows us, too.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Forty Days for Easter

For forty days after His Resurrection, from Easter morning till Ascension Day, Christ was with His Disciples. We celebrate the forty days, calling them Eastertide. Through the season we sing Easter hymns, exchange the ancient Easter greeting, “Christ is risen! Alleluia!” and are anciently free from days of fasting and abstinence.

Lent was the time for fasting and penitence; now is the time for joy. In the Gospel appointed for the Third Sunday after Easter, the Lord Jesus says so plainly. Speaking to His disciples at the Last Supper, He tells them “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.”

Happiness and joy aren’t the same thing. We’re happy when we find a steak restaurant where “medium rare” really is medium rare, when we receive a letter from an old friend, telling us we’re loved and missed, when we watch as a mama duck teaches her ducklings how to fly. I’m happy when I find my reading glasses. Life is rich with occasions of happiness and flashes of delight.

Christian Joy is something different. Happiness and delight are discoveries—they come and go—but joy is a deep, underground spring, always there, constantly flowing if rarely perceived. Joy and peace are intimates, profoundly related. If happiness lightens our spirit, our anima, joy graces the soul.

Joy is not a sudden discovery but an abiding gift. St Paul counts it as a high gift of the Holy Ghost. “Your joy,” the Lord Christ says to His disciples, “no man takes away from you.”

He was telling them this, on the night in which He was betrayed, because their joy was about to be snatched from them. Within a few hours, He’d be arrested. They would abandon Him and run away in terror. He’d be beaten and mocked, tortured and killed. His broken body would be buried. His shivering disciples would go into hiding. His words about joy were driven from their minds by iron nails and shrapnel-tipped Roman whips.

Then-Easter.

Forty days of Easter, forty days of being with the One Who was dead and now is alive. During those forty days He taught them and their minds began to understand what He’d been saying to them all along. He healed their guilt, freeing them from their sorrow. He taught them the Faith they thought they already knew, breaking the Bread with them and opening the Scriptures to them. Those forty days of Easter became the foundation of the rest of their lives.

They can be the foundation of the rest of ours, too. No less than them, we’re His disciples. We sometimes are as clueless as they were to the meaning of His words. Like them, we sometimes run away and hide for fear.

The most abiding gift of those forty days of Easter was joy. The disciples came to see, some maybe gradually, some maybe all at once, but all with a certainty, that their Lord, Jesus, the Victor over death, had not only overcome death and hell Himself, but He’d destroyed its power over them, too—over all who would ever be His disciples. You and I and “as many as have been baptized into Christ” are free. Not only free from death, but called to joy.

The Joy of Christians is Jesus Christ Himself. Not a sentimental, saccharine joy that gushes about how meek and mild He must be, and so we’ve got to be milquetoasts, too. Joy is no effeminate or adolescent virtue. It’s the virtue of those who’ve been squeezed through the wringer, put out to dry, and who’ve found grace in the breath of the breeze in which they were hung. Joy comes from knowing with a certainty that we belong to God, He’s doing with us what He wants and nothing else matters. That is “the peace of God which passeth understanding,” the pax God holds for all, and the joy which is the Spirit’s high gift.

That’s a feast of forty days, joy a lifetime can’t adequately celebrate.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

“He Descended into Hell…”

We say this every time we recite the Apostles Creed, but what in the world does it mean? Why would the Lord Jesus descend into hell? What did He do while He was there? God going to hell sounds too strange and paradoxical to have any real meaning. Yet there it is, in the middle of the Creed, set amidst the most essential Christian beliefs.

Take a look at the picture above. This was the standard depiction of Easter in every Christian Church for a thousand years. It’s not the picture we’ve become used to, of Christ rising at sunrise, victorious from His tomb. The old ikon doesn’t show Easter morning at all. For 50 generations, our Christian ancestors knew the Easter Feast began not at sunrise, but in the midnight depths of hell, where Christ the Lord descended to crush death and destroy every human fear.

That’s what the ancient Easter ikon depicts. Christ has descended to hell. He’s knocked down its doors (notice the shape they fell into), broken its chains and shattered its locks (see them laying in the blackness). He stretches out his hands to an old man and woman, lifting them from their graves. They’re Adam and Eve, our first father and mother. Around them stand other figures of the Old Testament, particularly the prophets. They look on in adoration, rejoicing that the Day they so long ago predicted has come at last.

Christ descended into hell. He submitted His humanity to the death common to us all so His divinity could break the grip in which death held every one of us.

St John Chrysostom said:

“Hell took a body, and met God face to face.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took that which was seen, and was crushed by what it could not see.”

It was necessary for Christ to descend into hell, as it was necessary for Him to be born, necessary that He be tempted, necessary for Him to be crucified, necessary for Him to rise from the dead, appear to His disciples and commission them as His Apostles, to ascend in His glorified humanity to Heaven, necessary for Him to send on His Church the Holy Ghost. His birth, death, descent to hell, resurrection and ascension are all one thing: the way He redeemed mankind.

Christ descended to hell because that’s where we're all headed without Him. Since Adam, every single one of us had made the same choice Adam did: we choose ourselves over God, selfishness over generosity, sin over holiness. What we don’t grasp is that in making those choices, we’re choosing death over life. The ikon shows Christ lifting Adam and Eve from death; in lifting them, He lifts us from death, too.

The great sixth-century bishop and poet, Venantius Fortunatus, in his hymn The Royal Banners, depicts Christ on the Cross, not as a suffering victim, but as a victorious King: “God is reigning from the Tree.” Christ descended into hell not as its victim but its Conqueror.

What is death and hell to you and me? To us, who share the redeemed humanity of Christ (that’s what your baptism really means), death has the same power a third-grade bully holds over an adult. Christ has risen and we are free. Rejoice for these fifty days—and live a life worthy of that which Christ has given you. Always and in all things rejoice. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia,—Fr Gregory Wilcox

THE PASCHAL SERMON OF ST JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

If any of you is devout and a lover of God,
enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast.

If any of you is a wise servant,
enter with delight into the joy of your Lord.

If any of you have labored long in fasting,
now receive your recompense.

If you have wrought from the first hour,
today receive your just reward.
If you have come at the third hour,
keep this feast with thanksgiving.
If you have arrived at the sixth hour,
have no misgivings, you shall in no wise be deprived.
If you have delayed until the ninth hour,
draw near, and fear nothing.
If you have tarried even until the eleventh hour,
be not alarmed at your tardiness;
for the Lord, who is jealous of His honor,
will accept the last even as the first.

He gives rest unto the one who comes at the eleventh hour,
even as unto him who has worked from the first.

He shows mercy upon the last, and cares for the first;
to the one he gives, and upon the other he bestows gifts.

He both accepts the deed, and welcomes the intention,
He honors the act and praises the offering.

Wherefore, enter ye all into the joy of your Lord,
and receive your reward, both the first and also the second.

You rich and poor together, hold high festival.
You sober and you heedless, honor the day.

Rejoice today, both you who have fasted
and you who have ignored the fast.

The table is fully laden; let all feast sumptuously.
The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.
Enjoy the feast of faith;
receive all the riches of loving-kindness.

Let no one bewail his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one weep for his iniquities,
for pardon has shone forth from the grave.

Let no one fear death,
for the Savior's death has set us free:
He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it.

By descending into hell, He made hell His captive.
He sickened it when it tasted of his flesh.

Isaiah, foretelling this, cried:
“Hell was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions."

Hell was embittered, for it was abolished.
It was embittered, for it was mocked.
It was embittered, for it was slain.
It was embittered, for it was overthrown.
It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains.

It took a body, and met God face to face.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took that which was seen, and fell before the Unseen.

O Death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is risen, and you are overthrown.
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen.
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice.
Christ is risen, and life reigns.
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave.

For Christ, being risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.

Quo Vadis?

I have a good friend whose wife is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. What’s more, she knows it. She struggles every day to combat its pernicious impact on their lives and has learned a lot of coping mechanisms, but every time I speak to my friend, she has just a little more trouble than the time before.

She’s his boon companion and a delightfully gentle woman—the love of his life. He’s a retired marine colonel, tough as nails, but her influence on him over the decades has—not softened him, but—enabled him to view life and the world with kindness. He goes to daily Mass and makes regular retreats with the Benedictines in Gethsemani, Kentucky. I am lucky to have him as my friend.

I’ve prayed daily for and about the both of them for years. I don’t ask the Lord anymore for answers to my questions. Why this terrible thing came to them is beyond my understanding. What I can do is pray for them and ask the Lord to make their burden bearable and to give me some small share of their load. That’s easy, since they’re 1,500 miles away.

The other night I was saying my prayers and remembered the two of them before God. I prayed as I usually do, asking the Lord to help the two of them to bear it and still be assured of the certainty of His love. I asked Him to allow me to bear some small part of their burden. I was immediately struck: “Is that what you really want? How far will you go to share their heartache?”

I was shocked—and scared. What would God ask of me? What would I really be willing to do for my good friends?

Those who know me know I have a stony heart, but I pride myself (in the worst way) on my intellect. I can think of nothing worse than Alzheimer’s which robs you of the mind. Until the other night I never seriously considered the possibility that I would come down with it. For me, surrounded with a lifetime’s collection of books, many as dear to me as the closest of friends, with my cherished memories and intellectual joys, what would it be to have it all slip into oblivion? Could I ever be as brave and noble as my good friend’s wife? What does it mean to have the companion of a lifetime slowly slip away—not to die, but to seem to disappear? The two of them are walking a dreadful road to Calvary. They walk it with the Lord Jesus, but it’s hard for me to imagine a Way of the Cross more painful.

When I compare all my sufferings and sorrows to theirs, I’m ashamed to call anything that has ever happened to me “suffering.” The Lord said “To whom much is given, of him much is required.” When we say to Jesus that we want to follow Him, to be His disciples, He tells us unequivocally to pick up our Cross and start after Him. We don’t know what our Cross will look like, but it will be heavy and costly. It will also be full of Grace.

As I look at my friends, I am full of admiration for the love and patience they show each other. I’ve never seen a more unselfish picture of Love—not just the love a married couple has for each other; through this terrible trial, this Cross they both carry, their love has transcended the natural affections. It’s the Love of Jesus you see alive in them. Their hard, daily struggles are unvarnished signs of Grace.

During Passiontide we consider what it means for us to follow the Lord Christ on the Way of the Cross. Hidden around us are those who are actually doing it. They lovingly pick it up every day and continue on the Way to Calvary. The pain and suffering of our lives can be stuff to whine about; we can think of going to Friday night Stations as walking the Way of the Cross, but if we ask the Lord, not for suffering but for Grace to follow Him, we’ll each discover our own Cross. It’s been custom-made, just for you. It’s probably been lying around and you’ve averted your gaze for years. I don’t blame you one bit.

“But to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”

Passiontide & Holy Week

The last two weeks of Lent, from Passion Sunday (the Fifth Sunday in Lent) until Holy Saturday (the day before Easter), are called Passiontide. The second week of Passiontide, called Holy Week, includes some of the principal days of the Church Year: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Vigil of Easter (Easter Even). The three main days of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday often go by their ancient Latin title, the Triduum Sacrum (the Three Holy Days).

From New Testament times, Christians specially observed Easter. While every Sunday recalled the Lord’s Resurrection, by the end of the first century, Christians also kept a spring-time Easter celebration near the date of the Jewish Passover. Beginning a few centuries after the birth of Christ, many Christians traveled to Jerusalem from across the Mediterranean world to re-live the Lord’s last few days on the sacred sites themselves. The ceremonies associated with Holy Week have their origins in the worship of the churches in Jerusalem during those early days of pilgrimage.

The Lenten color used in most churches today on vestments and hangings is purple. But in medieval English churches—and still today in quite a few churches in England—the Altars and churches are hung in what is called “the Lenten Array,” unbleached linen with decorations (often the “symbols of the Passion”) colored with blacks, reds and dark oxblood. It’s customary for the weeks of Passiontide to veil all the crosses, holy pictures and statues within the church. In medieval England, these veils were placed not just during Passiontide, but for the whole of Lent. Another custom, almost completely vanished, is the Lenten sanctuary veil. This giant veil was hung at the Altar rail entirely blocking the view of the sanctuary. When the sanctuary veil was used, it was drawn back during Mass just enough to let the congregation see the Altar.

The services of Holy Week include the blessing and procession of palms on Palm Sunday. The Passion Gospel (according to St Matthew) is read, the clergy and people taking the various “parts.” The Mass of Maundy Thursday celebrates the Lord’s institution of the Eucharist. After the Mass is concluded, it’s customary for the priest to wash the feet of his parishioners; then, the Altar and appointments of the church are all stripped while Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”) is chanted and all leave the church in silence. On Good Friday, special readings and collects precede the unveiling and veneration of the Cross. Ancient practice forbids the celebration of the Mass from Maundy Thursday until the first Mass of Easter. The Holy Saturday services begin in the evening, with the blessing of the New Fire, the blessing of the Paschal candle, the Paschal Procession and the singing of the Exultet, an ancient Easter Proclamation.

Pope St Leo the Great, in a sermon he preached in AD 457, said, “We not only know about the reconciliation of the world wrought by the Son of God by hearing of these past events, but through the power and work of God, we ourselves experience these things through the mystery of the Liturgy and Sacraments.” For us, these services are not remembrances of the past, but the Saving Acts of God present with us now.

The services of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are some of the most ancient and beautiful of the Church Year. They will all be celebrated at St Joseph’s this Passiontide. They are the perfect prelude to the grand festivities of Easter Day. I hope you will join in as much as you can.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

St Joseph the Wrestler

This weekend we’ll anticipate St Joseph’s Day (Monday, March 19) by celebrating his feast on Sunday. Rose Sunday seems a good day for keeping a feast. So we’ll be setting up St Joseph’s Table (after which this site is named), with tasty pasta dishes, antipastos, festive breads, Italian creams, gelatos and wine. This is the way to keep a feast during a fast!

The veneration of St Joseph dates from before 800 AD, when he was celebrated as the “guardian of the Lord.” Over the centuries he’s been seen as the ideal of masculine chastity, the protector of families and in 1870, Pope Pius XII declared him the Patron of the Universal Church (he also has become the upside-down-underground intercessor for those Americans anxious to sell their homes!—if you do’t know what I mean by this, don’t ask; some things it’s better not to know). Among the Eastern Orthodox churches, St Joseph is called on as “the righteous Joseph the Betrothed.” St Ephrem the Syrian depicts St Joseph as crying: “Who hath given me the Son of the Most High to be a Son to me?”

There’s much to ponder about St Joseph, much to emulate and much to inspire.

St Joseph embodies masculine chastity, a never-too-popular virtue. If you Google “masculinity,” you won’t find “chastity” linked to it. Chastity hints at anemic and unmanly connotations, with androgyny and latent homosexuality lurking just below its surface. The devil has done his work well.

For many, chastity and celibacy are the same thing. They’re not. It’s possible to be chaste but not celibate, and celibate, but not chaste. All Christians are called to chastity—including every Christian man—but not all Christians are called to celibacy.

Chastity comes from the Latin castus, meaning “pure.” Bearing that in mind, I can be celibate because I might not have the opportunity to be otherwise, but I am chaste by choice. There’s nothing manly about the indulgence of unchastity—nothing challenging nor disciplined—but anybody who follows St Joseph’s chastity soon discovers how easy wrassling alligators is by comparison. Chastity is limp-wristed only to those who’ve never wrassled with unchastity.

“Righteous Joseph the Betrothed” wrassled. He wrassled with doubts about St Mary (and her chastity!), with doubts about what God was doing to him, and with God’s unique call to him to be the “guardian of the Lord.” He was called to be the chaste and celibate spouse of the Virgin. No doubt he wrassled with that, too.

By grace he succeeded. St Joseph lived up to his calling and more. Because he followed where God led, because he took up the castus to which he was called, the Lord opened Joseph’s heart: “Who hath given me the Son of the Most High to be a Son to me?”

His calling to chastity was a high one. Ours is no less.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

The Noonday Devil

Three weeks into Lent—we’re not quite half-way through the Fast, but far enough into it for you to have a sense of how it’s going. Some of us never really began the Fast at all, those tell themselves it’s just not for them; some of us started to keep a good Lent, but when their intentions wore thin, they let it go. Some of us are still trying. For the first ten days or so, your stomach made occasional protestations as it mourned the loss of its accustomed foods, but now that’s pretty much past. Whatever the Lenten disciplines are that we’ve chosen, we’ve getting used to them now: we’ve learned our Lenten prayers, we’re setting aside our alms, we’re not too tempted by the rows of Ghirardelli chocolates we pass in the store. We’ve got it under control.

That’s when the noonday devil worms in.

The “noonday devil” is mentioned in Psalm 91: “the devil that walketh at noonday.” The noonday devil saps the fervor of our faith: he leaves behind a dullness of spirit, a lack of energy for the challenges of the Spirit, boredom with the things of God. The noonday devil watches, waits, and creeps up unnoticed. He wants us to feel that “I’ve tried that”—prayer, fasting, almsgiving, forgiving enemies, restraining my tongue, saying my prayers every day, being nice to the co-worker I don’t like, reading the Bible—“but it doesn’t really make a difference. I’m not a saint, you know.”

The noonday devil doesn’t tempt us with sizzling enticements to sin, but with dull, ordinary ones—so ordinary we don’t even notice them; they don’t seem to be temptations at all. We’re not tempted to abandon our Faith, or become apostates from God: all we’re tempted to do is take a long, spiritual nap.

The noonday devil doesn’t strike at us—actually, he doesn’t “strike” at all, he insinuates himself—not only during Lent, but Lent is certainly one of his busiest times. Those who keep the Fast need to guard against his guile more than those who don’t—he’s already bagged the rest. We need to do an occasional spiritual inventory. Am I complacent with my keeping of Lent? Self-satisfied? Do I compare myself with others and secretly congratulate myself on what a good Christian I am? He’s always ready (in season and out) to sidle up to you and suggest what a very exceptional person you are—and most of us are always ready to believe he’s right!

So what do we do about spiritual self-complacency? How do I tweak the nose of the noonday devil?

There’s no need to try and “rev up” our spirits to produce an emotional excitement about our religion or whip up a sense of enthusiasm for our Faith. Our fundamentalist neighbors do just that with their periodic “revivals.” Such things don’t last. They produce a roller coaster sort of spirituality, centered less on my spiritual life than on my feelings.

So what do we do?

We continue. We plod on. We say our prayers when we don’t want to, fast when we want to eat, give when we want to grasp, be kind when we want to snarl. If we determine to do those things, it’s certain we’ll sometimes fail. We’ll skip our prayers now and then, eat what we’ve said we wouldn’t, be selfish when we’ve been given an opportunity to be generous. That’s when our Lenten test really comes. None of us will keep perfect Lents. What matters is what you do when you realize you’ve stumbled. If you “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again,” then you’re finding your way to a truly holy Lent. Then you realize you’re not keeping Lent for yourself and your sense of accomplishment. You’re learning humility the hard way (which, incidentally, is the only way it can be learned!).
Against that, the noonday devil has no snare; and your Lent is well-spent.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wenesday

Shrove Tuesday
February 21, 2012

6.30 PM Gathering of the Cooks
7.00 PM Evening Prayer
7.30 PM The Mardi Gras Festivities Commence: The Crowning of the Queen, the Pancake Fanfare and Procession; the Eating; the Jokes; the Last Bite before Lent; the Forgiveness

Ash Wednesday Services
February 22, 2012

7.00 AM—The Penitential Office, Imposition of Ashes and Holy Communion from the Reserved Sacrament

10.00 AM—Morning Prayer and the Imposition of Ashes

12.00 PM—The Penitential Office, Sermon and Imposition of Ashes

7.00 PM—Evening Prayer, the Penitential Office and Mass

Fr Wilcox will be available to hear Confessions from 7.30 AM until 12.00 PM and from 5.00 PM until 6.45,

Anemic Fasts and Tasteless Feasts

I’m in a parish of cooks. Like Katherine Keenan and Sylvia Muff and Deacon McKenzie and Judith Vallejo: people who know how to create rich sauces and sizzle savory meats, who know what it means to dice an onion to bring out its possibilities and use real butter in their pans. I’m in a parish of people who know what it means to be hospitable: not merely to entertain, but how to open their homes and make you feel an honored and special guest, who host a lavish feast like the Mackies or an intimate evening like the Boyers. I count myself makarios—most happy and blessed—in these things.

Real cooking and real hospitality, alas! like good conversation and music, are vanishing arts. We’re being trained to settle for much less: haute cuisine from a steam bag, diners without candlelight, talk about television (or worse—computer advice), synthetic music from a boom box. We’re being re-trained how to live—all with the best intentions, I’m sure, but at what cost?

God made us to rejoice in His Creation, to drink deeply of its delights: to watch a sunrise from the first hints of rose in the night’s darkest blackness to its blinding glory as it floods the horizon with gold; to nurture the year’s first daffodil to blossom; to admire the arch of the deer’s perfect leap over the fenceline.

Hilaire Belloc, the poet, sometime theologian and occasional politician, wrote:

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There’s always laughter and good red wine
At least I have always found it so
Benedicamus Domino!”

We rush through busy lives, but somehow a lot of us have misplaced the meaning of what we're doing.

Popular Protestantism wants to tell us life isn’t about anything so narrow as “religion,” but our Catholic Faith teaches us that “religion” is what life IS about! It’s just that our Protestant friends have too constipated an idea of what “religion” is. It is about laughter and sunshine and good red wine. It’s about how to live and die squeezing every drop of joy from the whole affair.

We’re losing our grip on the rich texture of life, settling for banalities: we’re reducing poetry to text messages. We’ve forgotten how to Feast and how to Fast, and we’re less for these losses.

Lent is coming. The Great Fast which a whole lot of Christians will observe by giving up chocolate for 40 days (it’s okay—the Chocolate Companies will already have banked their Valentine’s Day profits). This is fasting for children.

How about giving up enough food (if your doctor allows—mine would be shocked into amazed acquiescence) so your stomach growls at you for the first 20 days of the Fast? How about turning off the TV for all but the news and weather? How about reading one of the Gospels for 40 days (I have a little pamphlet to help you do just that)? How about fasting from criticizing behind their back your favorite verbal target? Make this a Fast to remember.

And then, when it’s over, when the Alleluia is resurrected along with the Son of God, make Easter a Feast you’ll never forget.

If we’ve forgotten how to Fast, Feasting is even more of a lost art. Our fasts have become anemic and our feasts tasteless. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our Fast should be rugged and our Feast robust. When they’re over, we should have fasted and feasted so we’ll remember.

Lent is coming. Get ready.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

The Seeds of Lent

The Church sets aside a period of weeks, commonly called Pre-Lent, the “gesima” Sundays, which we begin tomorrow with Septuagesima. Two-and-a-half weeks for us to prepare for the Great Forty-Day Fast of Lent. She gives us this time to plan our Lenten exercises so we can keep a holy and vigorous Lent. Her intention is simple—she calls us to be a little less sinful, a little more holy after Lent than we were before. She asks us to plan the ensuing Forty Days and Forty Nights, so we don’t jut endure Lent but profit by it and grow through it.

She provides us with three tools to help us do that: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving. There are many ways to “keep” Lent, but any profitable observance of the season requires us to use these three inestimable tools of spiritual growth.

Prayer—Morning and Evening Prayer, Compline, the recitation of Psalms, the Litany, and the Church’s greatest Prayer, the Mass—these “public” prayers of the Church must form a part of our Lenten observance. But public prayer is only half of the Christian’s prayer. Personal prayers, drawn from a manual such as St Augustine’s Prayer Book or The Practice of Religion, to name two American Anglican classics, “conversational” prayer, meditation, sacred reading, these too, are essential to a healthy and lively spiritual life. St John of Damascus, writing 1300 years ago, defined prayer as “the lifting of the heart and mind to God.” Our Lenten plan must include regular times personal prayer. The Book of Common Prayer has a collect recited every day of Lent during the Church’s public worship. It’s found on page 124 of the Prayer Book. You might consider adding it to your daily prayers during Lent.

Fasting and abstinence are integral to our Lenten devotions. We are composite creatures, having souls and bodies. That makes us sacramental beings. Our outward, visible self acts in conjunction with our inward, spiritual nature. What we do with our bodies impacts our souls; the inner life of our souls affects the bodies God has given us. To discipline our bodies with fasting is to train our souls for eternity.

The Church Year has times of feasting and fasting. Both are necessary. We need parties and fun and laughter, times to rejoice in God’s many gifts and wonders. But equally do we need times of quiet reflection and focused discipline. A plan of fasting and abstinence through Lent enables us to truly enter into the joys of Easter.

Almsgiving, the giving away of our money to benefit others, is a powerful ally during Lent (and any other time, for that matter). St Augustine calls almsgiving “the second wing, together with prayer, that allows our souls to fly to God.” Money is a gauge of what we think is important: the Lord Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Money tells of power, prestige and position. St Thomas says there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but he warns there’s nothing right about them either. Our characters are shown by how we use our money and power and prestige.

Almsgiving isn’t the same as giving money to upkeep the church or to support her work. Those are tithes and offerings. Almsgiving is giving to those in need, giving away something of our treasure to benefit another. Almsgiving is good, anonymous almsgiving is better. The Lord said, “Let not your right hand know what your left is doing.” Almsgiving allows us to participate in the charity of God. He gives freely and continuously, out of love, to benefit us—who are often unaware of His gifts and sometimes ungrateful for them. To give alms is to do something which benefits another without considering any benefit to ourselves. That kind of love is reflective of God’s love.

Lent is a time for spiritual growth, for deepening our relationship with God. For most of us, spiritual growth means struggling with sin. It means uncovering the temptations I’m most susceptible to. Each of us has what writers on the spiritual life call “besetting sins”—our favorite sins, the ones we commit most often. During these days of preparation for Lent, we need to plan our Lent to address our sins. Think of a farmer planning his year. He wants to grow certain crops in certain fields in certain seasons. He knows the harvest he hopes for, and to get it he prepares the field beforehand, aware of the dangers to his crop from insects and pests, drought and flood, cold weather and hot. He makes sure all his tools and equipment are in working order, that he has the right seed, the proper plan for irrigation, the workers on hand to do the job. All this before a seed is sown.

What do you hope for from Lent? Lose a few pounds? See whether you can go without chocolate or brussel sprouts for forty days? Give up the evening news? Nothing wrong with any of those things, but, as St Thomas says, nothing right about them, either. Lent is a time for sowing the seeds of your eternal life. What sort of harvest are you expecting? You will reap what you sow.—Fr Gregory Wilcox