The Breastplate of St. Patrick 2022

St. Patrick offered a prayer called the Deer’s Song or the Lorica with his brethren as they walked into an ambush. As the Irish began to renounce paganism and believe the Gospel, they abandoned the conventional myths of their culture. Yet, there were some who were afraid of what would happen without paganism to hold Ireland together. To preserve a social order that benefited them, they plotted violence.  Instead of being intimidated, St. Patrick turned to prayer.

Myth can be a vehicle for truth.  When it is, it is an appeal to our imagination that helps us search for things that do not change in this passing world.  Myth can also be a tool for manipulation, an appeal to the imagination to establish the legitimacy of something that is not really legitimate in itself. This was as true of the pre-Christian pagan myths then as it is true of the post-Christian secular myths today. What appeals to the imagination is never enough for the human spirit and places it at grave risk of self-contradiction.  If we are not careful, myths can dispose us to what is irrational – for it is easy to be carried away by myth into strife and violence. 

As Christ challenged the conventional myths of pagan society, social standing, privilege, wealth, cultural influence were all at stake.  Those who used the myths of the day for their own benefit became convinced that the peace preached by this missionary had to be suppressed at any cost. They hatched the plot against St. Patrick believing in the power of violence. But the peace of Christ is more powerful than the rage that lives in the hearts of men.

His enemies were prepared to kill him and his comrades. St. Patrick’s response was to continue his mission undeterred. The prayer called the Lorica or the Breastplate was born in this holy determination. He taught this prayer to those who assisted him in the ministry. As they prayed together, their would be assailants could not see them – an unseen glory cloaked them.  Indeed, all the attackers could see was a few deer walking across a meadow. They were confounded. The prayer became known as the Deer’s Song. 

If true, the story is not surprising. There are many accounts of missionaries being delivered in miraculous ways.  Those who cling to the status quo and fear losing their power will always attempt to stand in the way of Christ.  But a new power that evil cannot overcome is unleashed – the same Power that holds together Creation is poured out for the salvation of those who will cry out to Christ.

In a special way, I ask you to pray this Deer’s Song in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the Ukraine surrounded by the rage of war — for their safety and protection during these days of great trial.  The peace of Christ is more powerful than human rage and our prayers can help His victory be realized in the hearts of those who are given to violence.

Now, I stand clad for battle in that Mighty Power

Of the Name of the Trinity:

Believing in the Three-ness,

Holding fast the One-ness

Creator of Heaven and Earth.

This day I stand ready with

The power of Christ’s Birth and Baptism;

The power of his Crucifixion and Burial;

The power of His Resurrection and Ascension;

The power of His coming to judge on Judgment Day.

I go forth today bound

By virtue of the Seraphim’s devotion,

By angels’ obedience,

By resurrection’s hope unto reward,

By Patriarchs’ prayers

By Prophets’ word of power,

By Apostles’ preaching

By Confessors’ faith,

By Holy Virgins’ purity,

By righteous men’s deeds.

I bind unto myself this day 

Heaven’s might,

Sun’s shine,

Moon’s gleam,

With fire’s glow,

Lightning’s flash,

Wind’s swiftness,

Sea’s depths, 

Earth’s firmness,

Solid rock.

Today, I rise up with 


God’s Power guiding me,

God’s Might upholding me,

God’s Wisdom teaching me,

God’s Eye watching over me,

God’s Ear hearing me,

God’s Word giving me speech,

God’s Hand guiding me,

God’s Way stretching before me,

God’s Shield sheltering me,

God’s terrible Army protecting me,

Against demon’s snares

Against vicious seductions

Against nature’s lusts

Against everyone who meditates injury to me,

Whether far or near,

Whether few or many.

I invoke all these powers, now

Against every hostile merciless force

Which may assail my body and my soul,

Against the false seer’s enchantments,

Against paganism’s dark laws,

Against heresy’s false standards,

Against idolatry’s deceits,

Against spells of witches, and smiths, and druids,

Against every knowledge that binds the soul of man.

Christ, protect me now

Against every poison, against burning,

Against drowning, against death-wound,

That I may receive abundant reward.

Christ with me,

Christ before me,

Christ behind me,

Christ within me,

Christ beneath me,

Christ above me,

Christ at my right,

Christ at my left,

Christ keeping the defense,

Christ setting the course,

Christ giving the orders,

Christ in every heart that thinks of me,

Christ in every mouth that speaks to me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

Today I bind unto myself Mighty Power, 

The Name of the Trinity:

Believing in the Threeness,

Holding fast the Oneness

Of the Creator of all the heavens and the earth.

Dominus est salus, Domini est salus, Christi est salus;

Salus tua, Domine, sit semper nobiscum.

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Daily Mass and Technocracy

One of my friends shared how going to daily mass has provided his life an anchor. The repetitive liturgical action, rather than tedious monotony, has become the orientation point for his whole day. Everything else might change, but Christ’s offering to the Father in the power of the Spirit is in the center of his heart and feeds him the spiritual nourishment that he needs for whatever challenges come. 

His observation makes sense when we think about the Eucharist and the power of our faith. The power of the Christian faith purifies the heart, healing, restoring and raising up all that is good, noble and true in our innermost being.  This power comes from the Cross of Christ and is communicated through the truth and love of the Holy Spirit.  At Mass, the outpouring of the Spirit is manifest and establishes us in these realities.  Such faith allows the heart to receive this great gift and it renders the depths of human existence vulnerable to the merciful tenderness of God.  

My friend’s witness has helped me see that this is true even in a technocracy.  Indeed, he and I live in a society ruled by technological power.  Technology by itself is a good thing and can lead to human thriving.  But it can also be used for manipulation.  That is, instead of serving as a tool that protects and promotes human dignity, it can be abused even to the subjugation of a whole society towards a merely material end. Our use of technology should cede space to our faith not the other way around. This, however, is exactly our struggle: to protect and promote the sacred in daily life. 

When it is used to keep faith out of the public square and hidden behind the walls of a church or a home, technocracy has achieved a certain tyranny, locking the human spirit in the merely material and pharmacologically efficient. In such a world, there is no more room for the sacred in daily life and the result is the monotony of constant innovation, one irrational social policy after another until we think absurd inconsistency in normative. When my friend told me about his experience of daily mass, I was thinking about how we live in an era of extreme manipulation and I found in his observation an answer to how to be Christian in the midst of technocracy.  

His insight into daily mass is key.  If we do not find a way to live our faith in the face of social manipulation, we will easily come to worship the work of our hands. Indeed, the human heart is made for religious devotion even in an empty, de-sacralized world. If it does not find God, the heart will cling to something. 

Without the sacred, the world sinks into chaotic meaninglessness, a meaninglessness no heart can rise above without divine help. Still, even in nihilism, the heart needs to believe in something. This is why the world that cuts itself off from God has its own kind of faith that is opposed to the Christian faith. In this world, we put of faith in the making of things and the shaping of perception.  The tangible, visible, and measurable results are the absolute standards for life, and this creed demands that we shut our eyes to whatever is beyond the results of our own industry. If not actual in human making, even if the heart of a child, such a mentality blindly holds that it is not real. Such obscuriticism never knows the gift of creation or the even more wonderful gift of our redemption.  

To some extent, we need to examine our conscience about the ways in which we have failed to live our faith in a post-Christian world. For failure to receive the gift of God, we should not be so shocked when our children do not find our faith attractive. Instead of the power of Christ, we too often baptize them in the pusillanimity of the way we live it out. They see how we have allowed our social and pharmacological fears to drive our day to day existence instead of God, and they rightfully reject our hypocrisy. 

We must look at what we have not done in regards our faith in the public square.  We have allowed our educational systems to convince them that shared resentment over evil is actually able to hold a society together and advance it toward peace, and then we wonder why they do not see any advantage to forgiveness or mercy. We have allowed the entertainment industry to educate them about the meaning of human sexuality, and then we wonder why chastity is not attractive to them. They see us passively accept a spirit of accusation and resigned despair in our communities, and then wonder why our explanations of Christian hope fall flat.  We have failed to witness the power of God in the face of death and sin, and therefore cannot help lift their eyes to the fulfillment of all desire.  

The way out of such darkness is the sacrificial love of Christ – believing in it to the point that we follow our crucified God in daily life. Under the shadow of the Cross, the storm of secularism is not the last word about humanity.  The love revealed in His death, a love that alone raises to new life, is more powerful than technology, more actual than results.  

This is where my friend’s comments about daily mass come in.  Mass orients us beyond ourselves and above what is merely visible. Daily mass puts one in the position of pondering the Word of God, taking up the ascetical discipline of our faith, resisting the boorishness of contemporary living, fasting, forgiving, seeking forgiveness, helping our neighbor, entering into silence before the Risen Lord, allowing Him to reveal the Father to us through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. 

All of this makes space for the glory of God in the world, even an overly technologize one. It is the glory of God shining through our lives that wins the hearts of those we love. Availing the world to the love of God, such faith provides the only compelling answer to the riddle of death, guilt and longing that plague the human condition.  Above and beyond what is comfortable and what might help us live longer, this is the one hope that remains even when everything else in the world falls apart.  

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The Gates of Holiness

“Open to me the Gates of Holiness: I will enter and give thanks.”  The holy is at once the point of departure and the destination of humanity.  What is sacred is also gated, a reality protected against the chaos of the profane and merely secular.  To enter into the Gates of Holiness is to find shelter from the dangerous voids that otherwise haunt our existence.  Bereft of what is holy, life easily drifts into meaninglessness. Indeed, failure to respect that the human person is first of all spiritual and religious before he is biological and political is a catastrophic failure of secular society.  

When we walk away from the Gates of Holiness and leave our hearts out in the cold, we loose the capacity to recognize the goodness of God and give thanks for the blessings that He lavishes on us.  We live in a world ordered toward the holy and we have begun to discover just how dehumanizing it is when we go against this order. Biological health and political acceptance are things lower than human dignity, things meant to serve the greatness of our vocations. Yet whenever we place a lesser good above a higher one, the human spirit is lowered rather than raised up no matter how respectable the lesser good seems to be. We are always diminished when we prioritize passing things over the unchanging love of God.  Those things were only meant to take us to the Gates, but they can only do so when we use them to seek God. When we seek them instead of God, we are locked out of the sacred, trapped in the profane. Bogged down in the mundane, we cannot lift up our hearts to the Lord, and we exist bereft of the truest and most just thing our frail humanity was meant to offer.

If we have done things that keep us locked outside the sacred, we also do not enter the Gates of Holiness because of things we have failed to do. We suffer coldness of heart, the coldness outside the Gates of Holiness, to the extent that we have allowed ourselves to be bullied into believing that it is okay to abandon the sick and dying when they most need a word of hope. We succumb to the manipulation of meaningless secularity when we convince ourselves to forsake gathering together with the Risen Lord at Mass, even if we do so for fear of earthly death. 

As creatures that are on their way through this world and not at home in it, we need sure reference points, signs that point the way, and standards under which we might rally to help each other move forward.  Such are the Gates of Holiness and Jesus Christ has opened the Way out of unsatisfied frustration and into a new fruitfulness for humanity. Without Him, even should we find these gates, we could not gain access or enter. But with Him, even in the very face of death and the loss of everything we hold most dear, a portal opens and we stand on that firm ground in whose vast horizons alone we find courage before the Face of God and the confidence to give Him thanks.   

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The Pathway of Extreme Humility

Jesus Christ has opened up the pathway to freedom and this pathway is the pathway of extreme humility. It is a trail blazed by the Word made flesh and a journey that leads to the Burning Bush where the limitlessness of God sets the limits of man aflame with love. Love alone knows how to find this trail and faith, unshod and thus vulnerable, progresses step by step into what would seem to be powerlessness.  Such a journey is never an evading of responsibility but it is courageously engaging the task at hand with total reliance on God.  It is a pilgrimage that one makes under the authority and power of heaven. 

The earth is filled with chaos and its own power and authority are subject to futility and death. For this reason, no earthly power ever succeeds in stemming death.  Yet, the temptation is to grasp for and covet control even to the point of coercing the behavior of others. Indeed, in a world that is passing away, self-preservation means either gaining control over circumstances as long as possible or else losing it all together. The more one lives by the struggle for earthly power and authority in this way, the more one’s own freedom is diminished until one is competely subservient to the very power coveted. 

On the royal pathway of true freedom, recourse is made to earthly power only as love for Christ deems necessary and then it is quickly surrendered. Indeed, regarding the possession of earthly power and authority, the pathway of extreme humility requires total indifference to anything that is not God’s will.  Rather than taking control for the sake of control, one patiently provides order only to the degree that others might be drawn to the truth by love. 

This kind of indifference to earthly power is impossible except to those who by faith live under the power and authority of heaven. In the Kingdom of Heaven, confidence in the Father overcomes earthly fears and anxieties.  Even if one dies, death is defeated and sin has no claim over the heart before the love of God. Instead, a love stronger than death reigns over the chaos of life and leads to the sacred until one crosses the threshold into God’s order and peace.  

A true orientation point for one’s whole being is found when one takes off one’s shoes before this Burning Bush and listens with the ears of one’s own heart. Here, true authority and power are given not grasped in accord with one’s identity and mission before the Lord. Here, God opens His Heart and one learns to rest in the glory of His Name.

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Christmas Light

Christmas is a special holy day. Normally, on holy days, there is one mass that is celebrated.  Three masses are celebrated for Christmas – at Midnight, at first light and for the rest of the day.  Each of these masses celebrates a sacred characteristic of the Christmas light. 

At Midnight, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is brighter than day in the dark of night and filled with angles and their songs. Thus, we celebrate the Mass of the Angels. It is that primordial and undimmed radiance shining above the world’s darkness from before the sun and the moon, on the first day of creation. This angelic light shows shepherds the way to the Messiah and evokes the gift of faith.

At Dawn, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is a new morning glory. It is the first light of day and under these rays those tending flocks beheld with human eyes the saving wonder heralded by heaven. Thus, we celebrate the Mass of the Shepherds.  The brightness of this new beginning is the only newness the tired out cycles of historical life have ever known. These cycles are subject to death. But this light reveals salvation has begun. Wrapped up in the swaddling clothes of a visible existence, First Truth babbles in humanity at last. It is the sacred truth that dawns in the chaos of the world to bring hope.

In the Day, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is a glory that the powers of darkness cannot defeat. Thus we celebrate the Mass of the Nations. In this liturgy, our hearts are filled with a victorious and sovereign light of peace, a light that no darkness can overcome, the light of eternal life. This unending light awaits us in the world to come but it also shines even now whenever we dare to love for the sake of God.

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The Word and Silence

In the Nativity of the Lord, the cries of the world, the cries of the human heart and the cries of God coincide.  These shared sighs and aches unveil silences overshadowed by Divine Power and out of which the Savior comes.  

Though unaided reason is ignorant of His presence, God has never been indifferent to the plight of even the least of His creatures. He is always at work on their behalf. That is why we find Him throughout the Scriptures searching in the world’s silences and poverties as a shepherd seeks out lost sheep in a wilderness or a father his lost son.  

The Living God implicates Himself in the misery of the most forgotten, overlooked and rejected until He too is rejected, overlooked and forgotten. He is not disgusted with his children when they cry to Him no matter how lost they are. He eagerly takes them home and embraces the consequences of their sins, suffering them with the wisdom that knows that evil is not without limits. Love goes farther than hatred, lasts longer than resentment and bitterness. Love heals what we have destroyed.   

Such a pathway involves humiliation in the short run and in the exigency of the moment looks as certain defeat. But God’s love is never defeated. In the pure excess of His love, God chooses the humiliated and the humble even to the point of his own humiliation and death. But His love is stronger than death and the chaos of Hell has no hold on this Light. So He raises up those who are bowed down and refreshes them for the great journey home. The humble “yes” of those who choose to serve Him leads to all this and more. The object of his Divine Affection, these are the souls who He invites into even deeper silences, spacious places that the world cannot know, nights so dark that they alone can hold a light brighter than day. 

For those who choose to trust Him, He invites them to go where no creature has ever gone before. He makes this invitation by entrusting to them His Son. The invitation is by way of faith, the decision to believe when this choice seems most difficult to make. This is because trust alone welcomes God and trust only becomes strong when it is tested. The Word comes to those who will welcome him in times of trial and hardship – He sees the strength of His Father in them, and this delights His heart. He comes in the vulnerability of a baby. He comes as the pure gift of the Father for no other reason than love and love alone. 

Into the silence of the world, the Father has spoken his Word.  Into humanity’s deepest silence, the Word entered and resounded.  That deepest silence was in the form of “let it be done to me.” It is not only a silence of soul but also a silence of body, a taking flesh in a loving womb because so perfectly held in a humble heart. Sin does not know this silence but through this silence the Word communicates power to overcome sin. This same power waits to be enfleshed in our own lives too – a transformation in light and love. 

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St. Nicholas and the Byzantine Monks of Northern California

One of my favorite churches is the Temple of St. Nicholas at Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Redwood Valley, California. The Byzantine Monastery was founded by Abbot Boniface Luykx, a Norbertine who participated as a periti at Vatican II. He was convinced that the Church needed to recover the riches of the East so he began to found Ukrainian monasteries first in Africa and then here in America. 

I made a retreat at this beautiful place of prayer in Advent of 1988. The chanting and the silence, the icons and the forest, the fasting and the joy all live in my heart this many years later. Most of all, the bells calling us to prayer, ringing out through the valley, reminding the heart of resonances beyond this world. I remember the powerful conversation that I had with the Abbot. I remember also the witness of the monks – their dedication, perseverance, authentic joy. 

Just as has been the case in so many communities, the monastery went through many difficult trials. Even still, Fr. Raymond Gawronski, so instrumental in building up the spirituality year in Denver and laying out the vision for a spiritual formation program at St. Patrick’s in Menlo Park, joined the monastery and found in its way of life an island of humanity.  Notwithstanding natural and supernatural hardships, the community is dedicated to drawing close to the Lord and to conversion of life.  The rhythm of silence and intense liturgy is challenging and refreshing at the same time.  The monastery chapel, called the Temple of St. Nicholas, is at the very center of this holy work for God. 

That this space should be dedicated to St. Nicholas is fitting. This saint was a man above all who encountered the Lord in a world that was hostile to the faith.  The monks of Mt. Tabor also live by this encounter in historical and cultural circumstances not unlike those of the saint. Though he lived very simply in self-imposed poverty, St. Nicholas was known to be a very generous man and a giver of secret gifts to those most in need. This spirit lives in the monastery where souls come with all kinds of poverty to find the riches of Christ.  The monks, as did the saint, live dedicated to conversion from sin, rigorous asceticism and kindness to others. This attracts young men who want something other than a meaningless and indulgent life. If St. Nicholas was noted for his loving concern for those entrusted to his pastoral care, so too the monks of Mt. Tabor who provide a refuge for those needing shelter from the fire storm of secularism raging in our time. 

We need places of refuge and prayer, sacred places of healing and holiness to put us in touch with the truths to which St. Nicholas witnessed. If the monastery protects a great truth about living out our faith through dedication to the praise of God, St. Nicholas was a man of deep prayer who safeguarded the truth of the faith with courage. If the monks are dedicated to dying to themselves out of devotion to Christ, the presence of St. Nicholas in their midst reminds them that the love of God is more powerful than death. 

There are many stories of St. Nicholas coming to the aid of the poor in his own lifetime even raising from death those who suffered under great evil. Among the monks, there are men who also have been raised up by Christ to begin the discipline of the Christian life anew.  After his death, the number of miracles attributed to him confirmed that St. Nicholas was a wonder-worker for the whole Church. Mt. Tabor also is a place of miracles where the veil of our Lady protects souls in peril. 

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Silences Filled with Meaning

Prayer that waits for Christ’s coming in glory opens to silences filled with meaning.  The silences that live in the shared gaze of lovers or at the bedside of a dying family member are filled with meanings too deep for words. The depths of these silences approach prayer because they reach down to what is truly sacred in life. Prayer, however, plunges even deeper than these tenderest moments – it knows the tenderness of the King who comes.

Prayer knows an abyss deeper than the depths of eros and death. In that silent depth, prayer discerns the exquisite melodies that the unaided heart cannot hear – but aches to know. This abyss down into which prayer descends is bottomless and the silences there are pregnant with meanings too much for space and time to contain. 

Every human love and every misery are circumscribed in the meaningful silence that prayer explores. In the depths of this contemplative prayer, earthly friendships are purified and vindicated because they are re-established in deeper truths than space and duration can bind.  Betrayal, denial and abandonment do not define the heart that pours itself out in this way. Instead prayer unlocks mysteries more powerful than every human frailty. Death itself ceases to be the last word about one’s existence, for this prayer accesses new life. 

Fear of death is an absence of faith but prayer under the shadow of the Cross triumphs over death.  This prayer under the darkness of Christ’s last wordless cry conquers disintegration.  Prayer re-establishes and heals bonds between the body and its powers, between body and soul, between one’s own soul and souls of one’s neighbors, between the soul and God.  Prayer unleashes the courage to love where love seems most absent. Prayer gives birth to hope when all seems most lost. In the face of hardness of heart, prayer draws down the power to forgive and to seek forgiveness. The prayer of faith, the prayer that lives in the Church, the prayer of the Church, this prayer brings back to life.

This kind of prayer is a baptism into the life and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Prayer knows that His Cross establishes such new silences in the heart that even after so many centuries we have hardly explored their breadth and length, height and depth. Prayer sees His radiance as it illumines all human loves and fears, even in the darkest night.  Prayer find rest even in suffering because His peace conquers rancor in the heart even as the world falls down around us.  

By prayer, His truth dispels lies even when the exigency of the moment attempts to limit our freedom. Prayer is convinced that the bottomlessness of his mercy is deeper than the abyss of any misery. Prayer holds fast His imminent return and instills that conviction that His justice swift even when evil seems to be winning the day.  When the sorrow of death stings in the moment, prayer discovers that His consolation is forever.  When the heart feels most empty, prayer is filled with Him. 

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Prayer’s Power

It is time to return to prayer and to believe in the power of God. The power of God defends and holds up human freedom. Prayer is the safeguard of human dignity.The power of God is able to dispel the fog of anxiety and rage that has gripped our communities.  

Under a cloud of great social anxiety, we tend to make judgments in accord with a certain mass hysteria and surrender things that we would otherwise never surrender. When cave into such things, it is always at the price of human dignity and freedom.  For people of faith, as we experience such societal movements, we must hold fast to the teaching of St. Paul not to conform ourselves “to this age”, not to be carried away “by every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness,” not occupy oneself with “myths” (see Romans 12:2, Eph. 4:14; and 1 Tim. 1:4).

To hold fast to this teaching, we need God’s power. We need prayer. The power of God unleashed in Christian prayer roots the heart in truth. To be rooted in a truth by prayer is radical but when we pray, God does root us in being, goodness and beauty. Before the changing winds of the times, we need this kind of radical. We are not at the mercy of the cunning and crafty when we humble ourselves before God. He protects us from the kinds of social “myths” that gave birth to Gulags and re-education camps. Only God can help his creatures rise above a culture of death. By prayer, He opens the path of life.

Those who are radically with God are not radically ideological, but open to truth.  Driven by anxiety and the need for control, the radically ideological cannot admit when they are wrong. Prayer brings repentance. Radical ideology brings hardness of heart. 

The radically ideological could be commercial or political or even medical, it does not matter, but self-enchanted with social myth, they strive, even without realizing it, to make an absolute claim over our existence. Because ideologically driven myths see the good, beautiful and true only in terms of a means to an end, they are prone to fail to rise to the true greatness that is at stake. The absolute claim they would make of human life easily robs us of the joy of loving one another and being present to each other as true neighbors.  

Whenever we are carried away by ideological claims, we gain a sense of security always at the expense of the truth. When we worship falsehood, truth must be sacrificed on its altar. But with truth, there is peace. With falsehood, anxiety and fear of death. 

A soul at peace feels no compulsion to spy on or report his neighbor, but an anxious soul is duty bound to make sure the non-compliant are shamed.Without the truth, I cannot see my neighbor as a child of God but only the “other” who is alien to me or else a co-conspirator who makes me feel validated in my foolishness. Blinded by ideology and social anxiety, I only see obstacles, cogs and sycophants. An obstacle or a cog in the wheel of social progress does not challenge me to love anymore than a sycophant. Only a neighbor can do that. 

To see our neighbor in truth, the fog of social anxiety and radical ideology need to be lifted. Only the power of God can dispel falsehood and free the heart to see rightly. Christian prayer accesses this power. A child of God, a real neighbor, does not leave me indifferent but summons sacrifice. Prayer calls down power that allows me to welcome this gift.

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The Eucharist and the Church

The Mystery of the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of Christ that continues in the Church, reconstitutes the whole cosmos and every heart that welcomes it. In this ecclesial action, the saving action of the Word made flesh is renewed and extended in space and time. An interplay of heaven and earth unfolds in this worship so beautiful and breathtaking as to elude the power of human reason to grasp.

When the Word made flesh blesses and gives to those with whom He has greatly desired to share this sacrificial meal, a kiss is exchanged between the Creator and creation, and the Image of the Invisible God unveils to mere mortals what angels fear to look upon.What is above and what is below embrace. In this dance between the Bridegroom and His Bride, the Church, it is difficult to discern where divine action begins and human action ends.

In this gathering of the meek and lowly, an unvanquished greatness lifts their hearts.  Terror and joy, sorrow and hope explode all at once by the Church’s humble act of faith. Sins are cleansed. The ego quelled. The heaviness of any burden born away by Love’s wings. In this Eucharistic mystery. the Bride is again made holy and immaculate because the Bridegroom did not hesitate to lay down His life.

Deep waters cannot quench such love. A mystery stronger than death unfolds.  In the valley of the shadow of death, the Eucharistic Lord has prepared a banquet. His body, real food and his blood, true drink. In the face of mortal enemies, this Good Shepherd gives to drink with overflowing abundance. Simply to gaze on this mystery, to ponder the Eucharistic face of Christ, is to take hold of the very joy of our desiring. 

Out of the depths, He cries with us and the Father hears His cry. On the battlefield of life, the Captain and Perfecter of our Faith opens the door to our true home.  The One true Mediator transforms our frail offerings and makes them worthy.  His Risen presence gives over his Body ready to suffer as food for us in our sufferings, who make up in our bodies what is lacking in his sufferings for the sake of the Church. The High Priest opens access to heaven, here and now, so that we might know the glory that the Father has given to Him out of pure love.  

And the Father receives all this from His Son and rejoices.  At last we have tasted that love that the Father has desired us to know from before the foundation of the world. We have finally picked ourselves up from the mud of the pigsty and turned back home.  He predestined us for all such blessings in His Son, and so He spoke His Word into our most painful miseries and waited until at last we might hear. Whoever sees the Son sees the Father.  The Messiah’s longing to celebrate this Sacred Banquet with His friends reveals the longing of the Father that we might know His delight. In the echoes of Christ’s agonized wordless cry, the eloquence of the Father’s suffering love, his mercy, is entrusted to us once and for all. 

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