How desperately God must love.

"It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. Christ had told the rich young man to sell all and follow Him, but that was an easy rational step compared with this that God had taken, to put Himself at the mercy of men who hardly knew the meaning of the word. How desperately God must love, he thought with shame."

"...God would never work a miracle to save Himself. I am the cross, he thought, He will never speak the word to save Himself from the cross, but if only wood were made so that it didn't feel, if only the nails were senseless as people believed..."

"Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away -- like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it. Oh God, he thought, I've killed you: you've served me all these years and I've killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drum and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You served me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me and I wouldn't trust you.
"'What is it, sah?' the corporal whispered, kneeling by the body.
"'I loved him,' Scobie said."

"Through two-thousand years, he thought, we have discussed Christ's agony in just this disinterested way."

"You say you love me, and yet you'll do this to me -- rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I've wept your tears. I've saved you from more than you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach. There are no capital letters to separate us when we talk together. I am not Thou but simply you, when you speak to me; I am humble as any other beggar. Can't you trust me as you'd trust a faithful dog? I have been faithful to you for two thousand years. ...

"So long as you live, the voice said, I have hope. There's no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God. Can't you just go on, as you are doing now? the voice pleaded, lowering the terms every time it spoke like a dealer in a market."

Today (well, yesterday, now) is the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross, and while I was sitting in Mass this morning that one line from Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter (from whence all these quotes come*) came to my mind, "How desperately God must love." I don't even know how much I want to (or can) expound on that... for me, it is the Truth of God and the History of Man's Salvation. God might have spent His vast eternity in Perfect Love, forever with His Son and the Spirit. There would be no Fall, no sin, no hell, no sorrow or suffering, no Incarnation and no Crucifixion... yet somehow, beyond our comprehension, God's love is so great that it not only fills a Trinity that can never be filled, but spills over the top and fills Man. How desperately God must love.

God does not need Man for anything; he makes Man to love him, that he might be happy with him. So He makes Man to be like God, able to love like God can. The creation of Man is God's first humility, not that he lowers Himself, but that He raises creatures up to such a height to be with Him. And then Man falls from that height, and God does not destroy him as would be his right. Instead, here is God's second humility, greater than the first -- He loves a fallen race. He "wastes" his Great Love on creatures that aren't deserving. He stoops to Man, speaks with him in human tongues, guides him, and promises that He will not abandon him to death. But Man has denied God, has denied love, has turned away. Man, formed by the living clay of God, has turned himself into naught but dry dust and dead ashes.

And God, whose first humility was to make Man and whose second humility was to love him still after he had fallen, is yet more humble, and He -- Divine Maker of all that his, Supreme Love, Sufficient in and for Himself for all eternity, Unblemished, Unapproachable, Mighty and All -- He becomes Man himself. He sheds glory for ashes, because He loves madly and without reason. And from the Incarnation, that great Third Humility of God, He takes on the shame of sorrow, toil, hunger, sweat, and tears. He does it because he loves Man, but Man takes one look at God-become-flesh, Glory-become-dust, Life-become-death -- and Man kills Him, not even as they would a highborn man, but as they would a stranger from a distant land (when he made and knows each of their souls) or a thief (who came only to steal death and sin from out of the greedy grasp of Man).

And God, who is All Mighty, the source of All Life, in whom all men live, and move, and have their being -- God, who has created, by love, Man to be happy and glorious and like unto Himself, who loved even when Man did not deserve it, who followed Man into the flesh and into the obscurity and sorrow of the world -- God died at the hands of Man to save him. He died as a mortal thing, as Man or cow or worm dies. How desperately God must love.

And when He had risen, he did not shake out from his robes the dust of the earth and flee to the inaccessible heavens, but left Himself behind in something less than even Man, in bread and wine. He humbled Himself to become like us, and then He humbled Himself even further. Men rarely have the humility to admit they are not gods, while God Himself is willing to fall below the dignity of Man if only He might save our souls in that. How desperately God must love.

"So long as you live, the voice said, I have hope. There's no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God. Can't you just go on, as you are doing now? the voice pleaded, lowering the terms every time it spoke like a dealer in a market."

I will make you. You fall? Then I will love you anyway. You refuse it? Then I will come to you in the flesh. You kill me? Then I will stay here, locked in this tiny room, looking to your eyes like a little scrap of bread and a bit of wine, always waiting, ready and eager to be taken into your hands and your mouth, that I might give you my great love. Do what you will with me, I will remain here, waiting for you. I can go no lower, or you will ignore me completely. I will remain here, waiting for you, and in Heaven as well. Please come to me. "I am as humble as any other beggar."

How desperately God must love!

May we never take the Exalted Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for granted. No one but God could be so Humble and love so desperately that death on a cross would even be an option.

(*Incidentally, when I looked up "whence" to make sure I wasn't being redundant in saying "from whence," the quote offered as an example was from Graham Greene. Life is weird sometimes.)

Memento, homo...

...quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

Yeah, if "Remember, O Man, thou art dust..." doesn't sound intimidating enough in English, there's always Latin.

Here's wishing you all a solemn, penitential, and spiritually gratifying Lent!

Thoughts of the Diaspora

No, this isn't a reflection on Jewish dispersion. But, like, ya know how in the 8th-6th centures BC, the Jewish population was gradually scattered all throughout the Roman empire due to various conquests of their homeland, etc? Yeah? Well, that's how my thoughts have been of late -- scattered and without concentration or organization! There's just so much stuff going on! I'm either doing something, or at home completely wasting time and pretending that I have so much crap to do that I don't have time to do it, when really I'm just eating sixty consecutive clementines and reading football blogs.

So, maybe there isn't as much going on as I like to think. Actually, the real problem for me is that there are so many different things that I'd like to do that I can't actually pick between them, and so I end up doing something to fill in the spaces.

Anyway, writing anything theologically interesting has sort of fallen to the wayside, which I'm going to try and reverse as soon as midterms are over. Again, any topics anyone wants to hear about I'll address. I don't have anything burning a hole through my skull to be written right now, although aforementioned random Calvinist still ought to be addressed sometime.

As a new feature, you can now search this treasure trove of barely updated religious wisdom via witty labels, located at the bottom of the right sidebar. Thus, if you're interested in seeing everything I've written dealing with anything described as, say, "Protestants and other things that make me giggle" (homie joke!), "we have feast days because Catholics like to party," or "Biblicalicious," you can get there much schneller.

In other news, I totally get to sit in on the interviews for our new youth minister this week! Which is going to be sweet. I should probably get out my bishop costume from last year, and see how all potential candidates react when brought before the Inquisition. We have no room for the weak at SKD.

Get this... there's apparently going to be a "Clericus Cup" in Italy sometime soon, featuring soccer teams made up entirely of priests and seminarians. The new Vatican Director for Christian Sport and Recreation (or something... I'm waaaay too lazy right now to go looking up any actual "facts") was all, "Yeah, we could totally have a wicked Vatican soccer team sometime, in like, the World Cup." Which would be hilariously cool, especially if the Pope was on the team. Which I doubt. But for God, nothing is impossible.

Speaking of which, He does some pretty amazing things for me sometimes (i.e. all the time). Like the moment I think everything I need is right beyond my grasp, He reminds me that He's the one doing the reaching, not me, and He'll hand me whatever I need right as soon as He thinks the time is right.

Oh man, today I also discovered how easy it is to become attached to really stupid things. I was cleaning my room, which is notoriously filled to the brim with little bits of crap, and I was trying to come up with things that I could, you know, get rid of. But it was the hardest thing ever, even despite the fact that all the stuff I was thinking about throwing away was worthless. But for some weird reason I had an intense psychological attachment to it. I really think I have a disorder, judging by the effort it took to get rid of some of this stuff. For instance, a rough draft of a 9th grade history paper... couldn't part with it until the bitter end. A magazine cutout of a beaver, that wasn't even extremely cute... nearly saved it. A bunch of broken hair clips... BROKEN hairclips. So much other stuff... it's just nuts. And the stuff that I kept... even knowing that I'll never use it, ever.

Which got me thinking about how, if we can get attached unduly to broken hair clips, how much more we can get attached to things that we think are so much more important... success, wealth, popularity, certain other people. It all reminds me of The Great Divorce, when all the people in Purgatory had to get rid of those things that were keeping them back, like the man with the little lizard on his shoulder, and, most importantly, the lady who was so attached to her son that it was keeping her out of heaven. Which is almost a scary thought... we can "love" other people so much that it actually keeps us from loving God as we ought to. It's not love, really, then, but it sure can feel like it. I dunno, I guess I was overly thoughtful while cleaning my room today, instead of just mindlessly ploughing through the mountains of weird trinkets.

"Life's been good to me so far." I can't say I disagree.

I read a book on John Paul II over the last couple of weeks, a reflection on his life by Peggy Noonan. I admit, I was skeptical, as warm-and-fuzzy books of the sort never do much for me, but I enjoyed reading it. It's a good thing I like the current pope so very, very much, or I'd be much more mournful at our old pope's passing. As it is, though, I'm just happy that there's another great saint praying for all of us down here.

I've been actually rather amazed recently at a series of introspective insights. Normally, I sort of live with the minimal knowledge of my own existence, but I think I'm starting to understand myself a little bit better now. It's not all pretty, but it's what I've got for now.

As you can probably tell, I really don't have much I want to say tonight. No driving point, which sucketh to write and to read. Again, I'm in that in-between mode. I have a laundry list of things I'd like to do, books I'd like to ready, and so on, but I can't pick one and just do it and be content with it, so I'm here rambling my life away. Plus, there's just stuff on me mind in general.

I should go. I'm going to go pick something and do it! Good for me.

Another belated feast day!

A quick glance over this icon might just leave you thinking, "Oh, yet another Byzantine style Madonna and Child." To which I would like to respond:

WRONG!!!!!

Closer inspection of the iconography of the piece (direction of the child's eyes, clothing styles, stars on the child's forehead and shoulders) and the general appearance of the two figures instead indicate that this is, in fact, an icon of Madonna and Mother, aka the Blessed Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne.

Which is perfect for yesterday's holy day -- the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That is not, as is commonly believed, the Virgin Birth or the Annunciation, but when Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin.

There are people who get all worked up because this dogma wasn't infallibly declared until something like 1850, but it was a belief of the church for just about as long as it's been around. Take, for example, this quote from the 16th century:

"It is a sweet and pious belief that the infusion of Mary’s soul was effected without original sin; so that in the very infusion of her soul she was also purified from original sin and adorned with God’s gifts, receiving a pure soul infused by God; thus from the first moment she began to live she was free from all sin."

And some other quotes:

"She is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin—something exceedingly great. For God’s grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil."

"The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart."

"[She is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ…She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough."

So, in conclusion... yeah, it's a pretty rock-awesome feast, as they go.

(Oh, and by the way... you know all those quotes? Yep, you guessed it -- Martin Luther himself!)

Solemnity of Christ the King, one day late

Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne.
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.
Awake, my soul, and sing of Him who died for thee,
And hail Him as thy matchless King through all eternity.

Crown Him the virgin’s Son, the God incarnate born,
Whose arm those crimson trophies won which now His brow adorn;
Fruit of the mystic rose, as of that rose the stem;
The root whence mercy ever flows, the Babe of Bethlehem.

Crown Him the Son of God, before the worlds began,
And ye who tread where He hath trod, crown Him the Son of Man;
Who every grief hath known that wrings the human breast,
And takes and bears them for His own, that all in Him may rest.

Crown Him the Lord of life, who triumphed over the grave,
And rose victorious in the strife for those He came to save.
His glories now we sing, Who died, and rose on high,
Who died eternal life to bring, and lives that death may die.

Crown Him the Lord of peace, Whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.
His reign shall know no end, and round His piercèd feet
Fair flowers of paradise extend their fragrance ever sweet.

Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Crown Him the Lord of Heaven, enthroned in worlds above,
Crown Him the King to Whom is given the wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns, as thrones before Him fall;
Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns, for He is King of all.

Crown Him the Lord of lords, who over all doth reign,
Who once on earth, the incarnate Word, for ransomed sinners slain,
Now lives in realms of light, where saints with angels sing
Their songs before Him day and night, their God, Redeemer, King.

Crown Him the Lord of years, the Potentate of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.
All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise and glory shall not fail throughout eternity.

So many saints. So few feastdays. Hooray for All Saints!

Hark! the sound of holy voices, chanting at the crystal sea,
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Lord, to Thee;
Multitude, which none can number, like the stars in glory stand
Clothed in white apparel, holding palms of victory in their hand.

Patriarch, and holy prophet, who prepared the way of Christ
King, apostle, saint, confessor, martyr and evangelist;
Saintly maiden, godly matron, widows who have watched to prayer
Joined in holy concert, singing to the Lord of all, are there.

They have come from tribulation, and have washed their robes in blood,
Washed them in the blood of Jesus; tried they were, and firm they stood;
Mocked, imprisoned, stoned, tormented, sawn asunder, slain with sword;
They have conquered death and Satan by the might of Christ the Lord.

Marching with Thy cross their banner, they have triumphed, following
Thee, the Captain of salvation, Thee, their Savior and their King;
Gladly, Lord, with Thee they suffered; gladly, Lord, with Thee they died;
And by death to life immortal they were born and glorified.

Now they reign in heav’nly glory, now they walk in golden light,
Now they drink, as from a river, holy bliss and infinite:
Love and peace they taste forever, and all truth and knowledge see
In the beatific vision of the blessèd Trinity.

God of God, the One begotten, Light of light, Emmanuel,
In Whose body joined together all the saints forever dwell;
Pour upon us of Thy fullness that we may forevermore
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost adore.

Christopher Wordsworth

(PS. Yes, I realize I've been a little sparse on posting as of late. And no, I didn't switch to my Xanga for posting on religious matters... contrary to popular belief, Brady Quinn is not a god. Heh.)

Okay, random Calvinist.

You are so on.