Fr. Victor’s Blog

Karen Armstrong

Why do we have to go to Church for Mass every Sunday? Why is the Church placing so much importance on the Eucharist and ritual in general?  I think the gospel of this 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time may be seen as answering this important question.

Karen Armstrong is a British writer, world famous. Her particular staple is history of religions. She was a Catholic nun struggling with her faith. Eventually she walked out of her convent and for a rather long period she gave up any practice of religion. She turned into one of these liberal moderns who thought that religion was passé and destined for extinction.

She must have returned to some kind of faith later on. Her latest book is called “The Case for God”, a rather large volume full of erudition. I haven’t read it but I have seen some reviews and excerpts online. Apparently the way she sees God as valuable isn’t so much in what you say and write about God. Erudite dissertations on God are a waste of time for her. God is too big for our minds. So rather than indulging in idle speculation about God let us use this ineffable God as God is meant to be used. Instead of many ineffective words, we know well that human discourse can barely scratch the surface of the eternal mystery of God, let’s use silence. Silence is a great posture before God. Liturgy and contemplation draw us closer to God than anything else. Study human history and you will see that true religion is a force for goodness, morality, self-transcendence, self-betterment.

God is holy and the people summoned to have direct business with Him are also called to be holy. God is pure spirit and can slip through our fingers for he is the ungraspable God, but through mediation and participation in rituals, words and gestures we can make this evanescent reality something powerful in our souls. In liturgy there is a call to holiness, a call to curb the dark side of human nature, to curb our passions, our egotism, to transcend the limitations, weakness, faults, flaws and shortcomings of our fallible natures, to transcend our negativity. In Liturgy we are summoned to a vision of life lived in dignity and generosity and humble faith. It is a call to purification and self cleansing to overcome original imperfection and our natures so prone to transgression. Liturgy empowers us to discern the presence of God and appeals to our angel-sides.

Karl Marx

Carl Marx was obviously a very intelligent human being. Even the Pope said so and his analysis of history is penetrating and perceptive. He is probably right in his criticism of the Church. At the time of Marx the Church could have done much more for workers, to shield them from exploitation, to speak up for their rights, to protect their interests. Often enough instead the Church was arrayed on the side of the rich and powerful. No wonder the French Revolution targeted the nobility and the clergy. In good time the Church always amends it erroneous ways, negligence; it did so with the Rerum novarum, which should have come 50 years earlier. Marx was completely wrong however in denigrating religion, when he said that religion is the opium of people and heaven a tale invented by priests to keep the populace in servitude. According to him, they put up with hardship, injustice and oppression for the sake of heaven. If Marx had studied the Bible he would have seen that the Jewish God was a powerful God of liberation, freeing his people from their slavery in Egypt through mighty deeds. Study the Bible and the ethical demands of Mt Sinai and I think you will see that Karen Armstrong is right. Religion is conducive to holiness, to civilization, to harmonious communal living. Irreplaceable. Not the enemy rather the greatest force for progress and civilization.

I’ll put it in another way. The Guggenheim Museum will be fifty years old on October 21. It was conceived and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright with the purpose of making available to all a particular aesthetic experience. As you ascend or descend the spiral structure you walk into a visual tunnel designed to stir up a metaphysical experience. The first exhibition and the many that followed including the present one (Kandinsky) consisted of a certain type of abstract non descriptive art/paintings that by eliminating content and form disengages the mind and engages our emotions, our hearts, produces inner resonances, vibrations, feelings of a spiritual nature in other words a transcendental experience. Exactly what Karen Armstrong is talking about with regard to Liturgy. Arts and Liturgy are much interconnected. You need to approach both with a lot of creativity and imagination and eagerness to be impacted deep down.

The apostles are common folks like you and me and in today’s’ gospel they show their ambitions and petty jealousies. James and John who apparently were cousins of Jesus her mother could be a certain Salome of the Gospel or a Mary, wife of Alpheus or Cleophas, this latter according to tradition the brother of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Anyway they thought that because they came from the same village as Jesus and had lived together in Nazareth and were childhood friends they were entitled to special treatment. I would agree with them.

The Apostles

In the gospel of St. Matthew it is their mother, here in Mark it is themselves. They approach Jesus and make their request quite brazenly. They want to sit at the right and left of the throne of the Grand Vizier which they thought Jesus would be one day. The other disciples become jealous and angry with the two brothers. A row ensues among perfectly normal flawed human beings like you and me and why not if someone is powerful and rich and can deliver why not ask for special treatment? I love it. I love when the disciples in the gospel come out with those stupid questions that show that they had not understood one iota of what Jesus was talking about. Like sometimes children do in class. It shows them with all their foibles, faults and limitations, fighting for a good spot in the kingdom. They are totally like us and a reason for cheer.

So patiently and lovingly Jesus has to explain to them that the kingdom of God is a different reality from all earthly kingdoms, much more sublime and divine. “I have come not to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many”. Imagine the challenge to teach such lofty, noble ideals to ordinary fragile human beings. And we know for a fact that Jesus succeeded beyond measure. Not immediately but they did get it eventually. And we too can get it if we live close to Jesus.  We know for a fact that all the Apostles died martyrs for their faith. When we celebrate the feast of any Apostle (except St. John the Evangelist I think) the color of the vestment is always red. They gave their blood for Christ. I love the apostles; they are terrific human beings and I am so glad that the Church is called the Apostolic Church. We should be proud of them. We have special devotion to them here in SFDS because they are represented beautifully on our stained glass windows of the lower church.

The same transforming reality is available to us in the Eucharist. Why does the Church demand that we go to Mass every Sunday because in the Liturgy we encounter the Risen Christ, because there we come into contact with the saving reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection? Because there on the altar we celebrate and renew the memorial of his saving sacrifice of the cross, of the body given  for us, of the blood being poured forth as a ransom for many. The gospel connects us with the most central truth of our faith: the Death and Resurrection of Christ. The Paschal Mystery. Aren’t you glad and moved by it? Make it real. Believe it. Buy into it. It will transform and change and save you. Your life will never be the same.

I like the humility of Jesus in this the gospel when he says: “You know how among the gentiles those who are powerful make their authority felt, they lord over their subjects. It shall not be so among you.” I am afraid the Church sometimes in her history has given us bad example and has not followed the example of her Founder and has not chosen the path of humility, poverty and service of which Jesus speaks in today’s gospel.

Pope John XXIII on the Sedia Gestatoria

You know when Pope John XXIII became Pope he gave a raise to the pallbearers because he was rather robust and weighed a bit (a lot) more than his predecessor. That was a Pope that had the sense of love and service of which the gospel speaks. When they asked him: Well now you are Pope what title shall we give to your brother Saverio, like count or marquis? The Pacelli brothers became princes. Or some such thing. He replied: What more honorific title can you give him than being the brother of the Pope? So poor Saverio got no titles and was much relieved. It was Pope Paul VI who abolished the sedia gestatoria and the flabella, those ostrich plumes contraptions used by the Egyptian Pharaohs to keep flies away. I read in some conservative magazines that they want the Pope to reinstate these trappings of power.

Fr. Damien's movie

Last Sunday in Rome Father Damien was canonized and rightly so.  When he reached Molokai as young handsome, energetic, rather conservative missionary from Belgium, there were something like a couple of thousand lepers living in that forsaken island, I seem to remember. It is all in the movie. It was a veritable hell and they were living like animals with a lot of violence and lawlessness, abandoned by all. He arrives there with almost nothing; do you know the first thing he does? The little chapel lay in ruins and he fixes it by himself and cleans it up and then he begins to celebrate Mass by himself and the lepers come and spy on him through the cracks on the wood or crevices on the wall, look in with curiosity at the strange European man saying the Mass and little by little, one by one, they come in and sit down in the pews and listen to him. Some begin to answer and pray with him; others even learn to serve Mass and prepare the altar and get involved. There is even a little choir and he teaches them songs and pretty soon a nice, loving community is born around the Eucharistic table. And it is beautiful and it is moving and it is inspirational.

Now no one dies ignored and abandoned like a dog. When one dies there is a proper funeral and a mass is celebrated and the whole community gathers around to honor the dead and give them a proper burial. Who says that religion is the opium of people? I would say rather the very opposite; it is strength, force, energy, power and hope. And it makes a huge difference because now they are no longer cursed people but children of God. And it is the priest that turns them into children of God. That is the transforming power of simple faith and giving God a chance to be a real loving God in our lives. As always, there are some problems, a few that remain unredeemed, but the general impression is they are taken care and given dignity and comforted and helped to die in dignity. There was no cure for that awful disease; it will come a century later, when I was a young boy. Damien eventually contracted leprosy and died a leper. He had lasted 14 years. In his lifetime that hell was transformed in a haven of care and dignity. Heroic nuns inspired by his example came to join him and brought much improvement, they ran a hospital etc. and it was a totally different reality. The transformational nature of the Kingdom of God. Like it or not.

Mother Teresa

Mother Theresa when allowed into an Arab country asked the Sultan to have a little chapel built for her sisters where Mass could be celebrated daily for the sisters. She explained to the Sultan that without the Eucharist her sisters could not receive the strength to do the heroic work that they do on behalf of the poor. Here, she said, we do everything for the love of Jesus. That is what I mean by simple faith and accepting the living reality of Jesus in your life. It transforms you. Like the stupid lump of marble which legend or tradition says was abandoned in the square of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and it was so misshapen that nobody knew what to do with it until a genius like Michelangelo saw the potential and drew the acrobatic, daring, fantastic David out of it. We are like the amorphous material than can be modeled and molded and chiseled by God’s grace into a master piece through the Eucharist. Viaticum, is also a similar concept. It refers to the Eucharist brought to the early Christian martyrs who were preparing to go into the arena to be martyred. Bread for the terminal journey.

So why do we go to Mass on Sundays? Well, to nourish our souls, to refresh our spirits, to keep God’s presence in the forefront of our lives. To be refueled, to be recreated afresh. Listen, human nature has an enormous potential for wickedness and badness and evil and cruelty and terrible things being done by us human beings. Just look at history. And if you live in the secular society in which we live you need this constant reminder and constant effort to transcend. Otherwise it is the slippery slope.  Listen, we don’t have to be brutal and cruel and greedy and selfish and nasty and horrible human beings or whatever. All it suffices is the little lies, the little inauthenticities, the small indifferences and soon we are on skid row until we no longer recognize ourselves.  We get turned into cold cynic monsters, stereotypes of this uncaring secular culture with no God and no desire for virtue, no appetite for holiness. The Mass is the antidote.  Let’s the reality we celebrate, the love shown for us on the cross, the generous self-giving of our Divine Savior wash over us, transform us with its redemptive power. Amen

Guggenheim Museum

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