Bread and Wine

After the homily at every Sunday Mass, we pray the Creed, that sweeping summary of what we believe as Christians.  We say it before we bring the bread and wine to the altar because it helps us understand what we’re doing. Its opening words are

We believe in God the Father Almighty,

creator of heaven and earth,

of all that is seen and unseen.

The bread and wine we bring to the altar are symbols of the heavens and the earth– the world God has made. They represent the totality of God’s gifts found in creation and we acknowledge those gifts when they are brought to the altar:

“Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.” “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of many hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”

These simple gifts remind us of all the gifts that come from an almighty God, a kind Father, the generous One who made the heavens and earth, the Maker “of all that is seen and unseen.” They point to a God, beyond our minds grasp, a good God, who is with us always; a loving God who is our friend.

These gifts represent God’s promise of life everlasting.

The prayers at Mass often speak to God, the Creator. “All life, all holiness comes from you,” (3rd Eucharistic Prayer) “All things are of your making, all times and seasons obey your laws,” (P33) “In you we live and move and have our being. Each day you show us a Father’s love.(P34)

At Mass we acknowledge God, the Maker of all.

In creating the world, God doesn’t act alone, but shares power with his creation. Our prayers at Mass remind us of that also: “You formed us in your own likeness, and set us over the whole world in all its wonder. You made us the stewards of creation to serve you our creator and to rule over all creatures.” (P33)

As human beings we have an important role in the world. We’re stewards of creation, in charge of things.  But we’re not the only power in our universe.  Creation itself has rights and a role in God’s plan. As the story of our own universe unfolds before us, we’re amazed by its mysterious development, its complexity and its beauty. It’s charged with the glory of God.  We’re meant to be respectful participants in its story.

That’s the vision of faith our Mass invites us to have. But is it true? Our experience of life can sometimes tempt us to doubt it. Is God really the creator of us all? Does God really care? Why do bad things happen? Why do people do what they do? Why do we die? Why is there suffering? Why is there injustice. Questions like that raise doubts. Besides, our preoccupation with ourselves also can weaken our vision of faith. We think we are the creators of the world and we are its gods.

The Mass tells the story of creation, but it’s also the story of salvation. The Creed reminds us that God sent his only Son to be our Savior. In the mystery of the Mass, Jesus Christ is sent into the world. He comes into the bread and wine, just as he came into the womb of Mary.  Listen to the words of one of our prayers.

“Father, you so loved the world,

that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our Savior.

He was conceived through the Holy Spirit,

and born of the Virgin Mary,

one like us in all things but sin.

To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation,

to prisoners, freedom,

to those in sorrow, joy.

In fulfillment of your will

he gave himself up to death,

but by rising from the dead,

he destroyed death and restored life.

And that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him,

he sent the Holy Spirit from you, Father,

as his first gift to those who believe,

to complete his work on earth

and bring us the fulness of grace.”

The prayer goes on to ask God, the Father, to send his Holy Spirit upon the bread and the wine, as he did on Mary.

“Father, send your Holy Spirit to sanctify these offerings,

Let them become the body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord

as we celebrate the great mystery

which he left us as an everlasting covenant.” (4th Eucharistic Prayer)

Our Mass is a creation story and a story of salvation.

Compasssion Magazine

The current issue of COMPASSION MAGAZINE, a publication of St. Paul of the Cross Province, is online. It began in print, but like most print magazines today COMPASSION is making a transition to the Internet. So many newspapers and magazines are negotiating the tricky road of change in the way we communicate, and I think COMPASSION is doing as well as any of them. If you take a look at it, I’m sure you’ll agree that its newly designed online face is beautifully done.

This issue, entitled Listening, has stories about the ministries of various members of our community. The first article is about how some priests from our Pittsburgh community who listen to those who come to our monastery on top of a hill overlooking that city. It’s a wonderful reminder of the power of the spiritual direction by many of our members that goes unnoticed, for the most part.

There’s an article on Pope Benedict’s latest encyclical, which I wrote.

Listening to Young Catholics is a perceptive look at the young from Fr. Robin Ryan, CP, who leads a program for young Catholics at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

A young Passionist volunteer tells about her experiences in Jamaica, WI. It’s a charming story of interaction between two people of different cultures and ages.

Fr. Paul Zilonka, a former missionary in Jamaica and editor of COMPASSION, talks about some of his friends who once ministered there. They’re some of my friends too. One of them is at death’s door now, so please pray for him.

There’s more to read there too.

Holy Souls

Before the altar in our chapel in this month of the Holy Souls, there’s a large stack of names sent in to be remembered at Mass. Just names written on paper. No eulogies, no lengthy description of who they are, what they did, or anything else about them.

In one sense, they represent us poor mortals as we are in death. We have nothing, except hope in the mercy of God. We are in God’s hands.

We place the names of our dead before the altar and great crucifix that hangs over it because of  the promise of Jesus Christ:

“And this is the will of the one who sent me,

that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,

but that I should raise it on the last day.”

Our prayers at Mass say the same thing; we don’t earn eternal life, it is a gift to us. “All life, all holiness comes from you, through your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, by the working of the Holy Spirit.”

God blesses the bread and wine with the presence of his Son, and he blesses the world he loves so much.

“Remember those who have died in the peace of Christ, and all the dead whose faith is known to you alone.”

Even though others forget, a merciful God remembers.

Politics goes beyond the local

All politics is local, the saying goes. But we hope politicians–and we who elect them– go beyond local interests. The Second Vatican Council says it well:

“Christians should co-operate, willingly and wholeheartedly, in building an international order based on genuine respect for legitimate freedom and on a brotherhood of universal friendship. This is all the more urgent because the greater part of the world still experiences such poverty that in the voices of the poor Christ himself can be heard, crying out for charity from his followers.

There are nations, many of them with a Christian majority, which enjoy an abundance of goods, while others are deprived of the necessities of life, and suffer from hunger, disease and all kinds of afflictions. This scandal must be removed from the human family, for the glory of Christ’s Church and its testimony to the world are the spirit of poverty and the spirit of love.”

Beautiful image in that quote–the poor are the “voices of the poor Christ’.”  We should elect people who can listen to the world as well as to their own constituents.

All Saints

I help out at a website on the Internet called Bread on the Waters;  part of it is called “Ask a Catholic.”  People email their questions and a number of us try to answer them.

One question I got the other day was ” Why don’t we call the great figures of the Old Testament “saints?” Why don’t we say “Saint Moses,” “St. Abraham” “St. Isaac.”

I answered by saying that the Old Testament, instead of speaking of individual saints, prefers to speak of a holy people. God calls all his people to be holy, not just a few.

If you look at the New Testament, St. Paul does the same thing. He begins his 1st Letter to the Corinthians, for example: “To the Church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Jesus Christ, called to be saints…”(1 Cor.1,4) Everybody in that church is called to be holy.

The title “Saint” used today in the Catholic Church usually describes those who have been formally  canonized by the Church. They’re individuals recognized for some outstanding work or virtue.

For example, the church recently canonized a French woman, Jeanne Jugan, the foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who take care of the elderly poor,  and a Belgian priest, Damian De Veuster. who for 16 years worked in a leper colony in Molokai in Hawaii. They were heroic figures.

From what we know about the church in Corinth from Paul’s letters, the Christians there were hardly  saints in the same heroic degree. Paul describes them as suspicious of each other, fighting among themselves, some sexually immoral, some betraying their principles to get ahead. Not a church of canonized saints at all.

But they have been made holy by the grace of Jesus Christ, Paul writes.  He is their Savior, their Shepherd who will bring them home.

Our Feast of All Saints is about saints like them and like us.

Being Apostles

It may be a good thing that we know so little about the apostles of Jesus. The gospels say very little about them, who they were or where they went or what they did. On the other hand, knowing little about them makes us reflect more on their mission–they were apostles.

We certainly don’t know much about Simon and Jude, whose feast we celebrate today. Cyril of Alexandria, in today’s Office of Readings, speaks about the mission of the apostle which we share in, as members of an apostolic church.

The apostle follows Jesus. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus says in the Gospel of John. “Once he said: I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance,” Cyril says. “And then at another time he said: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. For God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

Like the apostles, we are not just created to exist here on earth, we are sent. We have a mission. We are not just to take from this world, we are to give. Jesus told his apostles ” to heal those who were sick whether in body or spirit, to seek in all their dealings never to do their own will but the will of him who sent them, and as far as possible to save the world by their teaching.”

That’s what he tells us to do too, as his followers.

Passionist Media

I’ve been involved in the  “New Media” for a number of years now, and I’ve learned a  bit. But it’s a fast moving field and not easy to keep up with.

The New Media comes from the rapid rise of the computer and the growth of the internet in the 1980s. Until then, we used print, radio and television for public communication.

Today, the New Media is found not only in web-sites, blogs, communication tools like e-mail,  Facebook and Twitter, but it’s also transforming the “Old Media” through digital television and online publications.

The New Media is changing the way we communicate.  In the crisis in Iran a few months ago, the government shut down outside television coverage, but the world learned about it anyway,  largely through the New Media.  A shift is taking place in who controls mass communication today and the means to do it. I commented on this in a previous blog.

The New Media tends to be less expensive and less dependent on professionals than the older media. Anyone with a digital camera, a computer and a little know-how can put a video on YouTube or Vimeo. A maze of blogs and websites on the Internet offers a bewildering range of opinions and subjects.

For religious communities like mine, the New Media offers a real opportunity. We are a global community to begin with, and the New Media is global in its outreach. We have a solid spiritual and pastoral tradition and the bazaar of conflicting religious ideas needs some solid religious teachers.

We are branching out from some of our old media ventures to incorporate the new. We have a good province website. The Sunday Mass has a site on the internet.  Compassion Magazine has an online edition. Many of the print publications and videos from Passionist Press can be sampled or seen online.  There are some Passionist blogs around, from the UN and for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of  Creation. A quick look at Google Search, the standard for measuring new media success, says we are still proclaiming the Passion of Jesus.

I was encouraged last Tuesday to see some proposals for our chapter this May involving the new media and the media in general,

I hope we commit ourselves to it.

Looking Ahead with Confidence

I just returned from a pre-chapter meeting of my community. We’re getting ready to chart the course for the future–as much as we humanly can– and elect new provincial officers. Not easy today, when the future is so murky and our numbers older and fewer.

But our time is our time, and we have to live it to the full.

I like Pope Benedict’s words in “Charitas in Veritate:”

“The current crisis obliges us to re-plan our journey, to set ourselves new rules and to discover new forms of commitment, to build on positive experiences and to reject negative ones. The crisis thus becomes an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future. In this spirit, with confidence rather than resignation, it is appropriate to address the difficulties of the present time.”

The pope isn’t doing our thinking for us; he’s telling us to  discern and to plan the future ourselves, with confidence.

Praying the Lord’s Prayer

You wont find any prayer in scripture that isn’t found in some way in the Lord’s Prayer, St. Augustine writes to Proba, a woman looking for advice about how to pray. The words of prayer are teachers of prayer, a school of prayer, and no prayer is more important than the Our Father for leading us into union with God. “Teach us to pray,” the disciples of Jesus ask him and gave them this prayer as their norm. It’s a norm, Augustine tells Proba, ” So when we pray we are free to use different words to any extent, but we must ask the same things: in this we have no choice.” The saint is recommending a meditative way of praying the Our Father, a prayer that easily becomes one we say by rote. Sometimes it’s good to leave long prayers for a simple rest in this one. http://www.cptryon.org/prayer/teach.html

No Life Without Sacrifice

In this Sunday’s gospel (Mark 10,35-45) James and John, two of his disciples, want something from Jesus; they want the power and position they believe he can give them. “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.”

But they want glory without any cost. Grant it and it’s ours, they say to him. They’re looking for an easy way to get something good. Jesus says they want glory “without drinking the cup,” a life without struggle, effort and suffering. But there’s no life without sacrifice.

You can’t live without sacrifice. You can’t have it all and you can’t have it easily. That applies to every level of life.

We have to sacrifice for our own good. For example, we can’t be healthy without adopting a healthy life style, something often hard to do.

We make sacrifices for others, and that’s often hard to do. Parents sacrifice for children; children for parents. Sacrifice for strangers–that’s very hard. Soldiers have  to be ready to give up their lives for their country. The ultimate sacrifice, we say.

Jesus described his own death on the Cross as a sacrifice. That sacrifice was the culmination of a life given for others.

Sacrifice has a holy dimension we may forget.  We remember that dimension at Mass, where we use the word frequently. Sacrifice comes from    two latin words that mean “doing something holy.” If  what we do is good, for ourselves, for others, for our world, we are brought  to God through it, and God blesses our efforts, our struggles and the suffering what we have done entails.

“We come to you, Father, with praise and thanksgiving, through Jesus Christ your Son,

Through him we ask you to accept and bless these gifts we offer you in sacrifice”

What are the gifts we offer to God in sacrifice? Yes, they’re the gifts  of his Son, who offered himself to his Father once on the Cross and now becomes our offering to God who blesses us through him.

But they’re our gifts too, our sacrifices, many and varied as they are, that are joined to his and they bring down God’s blessings on us and on our world.

Let’s keep our sacrifices holy.