St.Mary Major

 

Basilica of St. Mary Major

St. Mary Major

Mary, the mother of Jesus, welcomes us to this church, the largest and most ancient of her many churches in Rome. On the summit of the Esquiline Hill, a short distance from the Lateran Basilica, the church was begun in the early 5th century and completed by Pope Sixtus III (432-440.)

Hardly a good time to build a church. In 410, Alaric and his Goths shocked the Roman world by sacking the city that all thought invincible. In 455 the Vandals under Genseric vandalized the city. Twice more in the century other barbarian tribes invaded.

The English historian Edward Gibbon called this period of Roman history a time of decline and fall.

In far off Palestine St. Jerome cried out in disbelief at Rome’s misfortunes. In Africa St. Augustine replied to the followers of Rome’s traditional religions who said Christian weakness caused the city’s devastation by writing his treatise “The City of God.”

Christians were not the cause the city’s misfortunes, the saint said; two loves are at work in the world building two cities. One love builds an evil city; Christianity builds the City of God, promoting love and justice, even when hard times come.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is honored in this church.  The Christian world then saw her as a defender of Jesus, her son, who was both human and divine. In 431, the Council  of Ephesus repudiated Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, for refusing to call her “Mother of God.” The title safeguarded Christian belief in the mystery of the Incarnation: Jesus is God and man, the council said.

The title does not make Mary a goddess, otherwise how could she have given birth to Christ who is truly human? Yet, she can be called Mother of God, because Jesus who is truly her human son is truly Son of God from all eternity as well.

Devotion to Mary ran high in the Christian world after the council, and churches dedicated to her arose everywhere. In the city of Constantinople alone, 250 churches and shrines in her honor were built before the 8th century. Pictures, icons of Mary holding her divine child multiplied, especially in churches of the East, where they became objects of special devotion.

St. Mary Major was not built just as a doctrinal statement, however, it was built also to shore up the spirits of frightened Christians who lived in dangerous times. Stories from the Old and New Testaments told on its walls call for courage and hope. God’s plan does not lead to decline and fall, they say, but to triumph in Christ.

In this church, Mary is Jesus’ mother and closest disciple. This place–to use a phrase of John Paul II– is “a school of Mary” who teaches the mysteries she has learned.
She has a leading figure in the sacred stories depicted here and is joined by a noticeable number of women from the Old and New Testaments who like her seem powerless, but are empowered by God.

The great 13th century mosaic in the church’s apse of Mary crowned by Jesus Christ as heaven’s queen proclaims God’s triumph in her, but also his triumph in the church as well. She is taken up to heaven “to be the beginning and pattern of the church in its perfection, and a sign of hope and comfort for your people on their pilgrim way.” (Preface of the Assumption)

It shouldn’t surprise us that many of the mysteries in which Mary had a special role were first celebrated  here. The Christmas liturgy, especially the midnight Mass on December 25th ,  began in this church  in the 5th century and spread to other churches of the west. Early on, a replica of the cave under the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the traditional site of Jesus’ birth, was constructed here. After the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in the 7th century,  Christian refugees placed relics here purported to be from the crib that bore the Christ Child and relics of St.Matthew, an evangelist who told the story of Jesus birth.

Besides the Christmas liturgy, other great Marian feasts, such as her Immaculate Conception and Assumption, developed their liturgical forms in this church.

Built on a hill where all could see it, near Rome’s eastern walls so often threatened by barbarian armies, St. Mary Major affirms Christianity’s ultimate answer to its enemies. It is not military might, but the power of faith and love that triumphs in the end.

 

Visiting St.Mary Major

The church’s 18th century façade was built by the popes to enhance the appearance of this  important church at a time when many visitors, especially  from England and Germany, were traveling to Rome on the Grand Tour to visit its classical and religious sites.

The church’s interior, with its splendid 5th century mosaics along the upper part of the nave, retains its original form better than any other of the major basilicas of Rome.

The Sistine Chapel at the right hand side of the nave was built to house a silver reliquary with relics of the crib brought from the Holy Land in the 8th century. Two popes, Sixtus V and Pius V are buried there.

The Borghese Chapel at the left hand side of the nave honors the ancient icon of the Virgin and Child that Roman Christians have reverenced for centuries. A reproduction of the icon is a nice remembrance to bring home.

The magnificent 13th century mosaic in the apse of the basilica presents the Coronation of Mary in heaven. It’s surrounded by 5th century mosaics depicting scenes from the birth of Jesus and the life of Mary.

Website:

http://www.vatican.va/various/sm_maggiore/index_en.html

Moving On

Tomorrow we’re moving from Union City, NJ to Jamaica, NY. Not a big move in distance, but a big move in other ways. I wonder about the place where I’m going and hold on to the place where I’ve been.

It happens that today’s reading is St. Augustine’s famous reflection about finding God. “Place” isn’t the main issue, he says, moving on means more than that:

“Where did I find you first? You could not have been in my memory before I learned to know you. Where then could I have found you in order to learn of you, if not in yourself, far above me?

“Place” has here no meaning: further away from you or toward you we may travel, but place there is none. O Truth, you hold sovereign sway over all who turn to you for counsel, and to all of them you respond at the same time, however diverse their pleas.

“Clear is your response, but not all hear it clearly. They all appeal to you about what they want, but do not always hear what they want to hear. Your best servant is the one who is less intent on hearing from you what accords with his own will, and more on embracing with his will what he has heard from you.

“Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!

Lo, you were within,

but I outside, seeking there for you,

and upon the shapely things you have made

I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.

You were with me, but I was not with you.

They held me back far from you,

those things which would have no being,

were they not in you.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;

you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;

you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;

I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;

you touched me, and I burned for your peace.

“When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labor for me, and my life will be alive indeed, alive because filled with you. But now it is very different. Anyone whom you fill you also uplift; but I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself. Joys over which I ought to weep do battle with sorrows that should be matter for joy, and I do not know which will be victorious. But I also see griefs that are evil at war in me with joys that are good, and I do not know which will win the day. This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! It is agony! See, I do not hide my wounds; you are the physician and I am sick; you are merciful, I need mercy.”

 

 

Lamp for a Dark Place

The sky over the boardwalk at Spring Lake sometimes gets swept with colors before nightfall, but soon the only light will come  from a lamp that shines through the night.

Here’s a reading from Augustine,  a beautiful commentary on the lamp burning in the dark, till the great Sun shines again. It’s a prophetic light, he says, lit till the time when “lamps will no longer be needed. When that day is at hand, the prophet will not be read to us, the book of the Apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the testimony of John, we shall have no need of the Gospel itself. Therefore all Scriptures will be taken away from us, those Scriptures which in the night of this world burned like lamps so that we might not remain in darkness.”

Life’s darkness is temporary; we are meant for the light.

“I implore you to love with me and, by believing, to run with me; let us long for our heavenly country, let us sigh for our heavenly home, let us truly feel that here we are strangers. What shall we then see? Let the gospel tell us: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. You will come to the fountain, with whose dew you have already been sprinkled.

Instead of the ray of light which was sent through slanting and winding ways into the heart of your darkness, you will see the light itself in all its purity and brightness. It is to see and experience this light that you are now being cleansed. Dearly beloved, John himself says, we are the sons of God, and it has not yet been disclosed what we shall be; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

I feel that your spirits are being raised up with mine to the heavens above; but the body which is corruptible weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind. I am about to lay aside this book, and you are soon going away, each to his own business. It has been good for us to share the common light, good to have enjoyed ourselves, good to have been glad together. When we part from one another, let us not depart from him.”

Love Someone Near

Jesus Christ reveals the love of God and teaches us to love, Augustine says:

“You are told “Love God”. If you say to me “Show me whom I should love”, what can I say except what John says?No one has ever seen God. But you must not think yourself wholly unsuited to seeing God: God is love, says John, and whoever dwells in love dwells in God. So love whoever is nearest to you and look inside you to see where that love is coming from: thus, as far as you are capable, you will see God.

”  So start to love your neighbout. Share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless pauper into your house. Clothe the naked, and do not despise the servants of your kin.

  “What will you get from doing all this? Your light will break forth like the dawn. Your light is your God, your dawn, because he will come to you to end the night of this world — he who, himself, neither rises nor sets but is eternal.

  “By loving your neighbour, by having care for your neighbour, you are travelling on a journey. Where are you journeying, except to the Lord God, whom we must love with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind? We have not yet reached the Lord, but our neighbour is with us already. So support your neighbour, who is travelling with you, so that you may reach him with whom you long to dwell.”

The Days That Follow Christmas

We follow the Feast of Christmas with the feasts of St. Stephen and St. John, two saints who point to the meaning of this mystery:

“The love that brought Christ from heaven to earth raised Stephen from earth to heaven,” St. Fulgentius says of the martyr who was put to death for proclaiming his belief in Jesus Christ.

St. Augustine comments on John’s words: “We proclaim to you what we have heard and seen.”

“Make sure that you grasp the meaning of these words. The disciples saw our Lord in the flesh, face to face; they heard the words he spoke, and in turn they proclaimed the message to us. So we also have heard, although we have not seen.

“Are we then less favoured than those who both saw and heard? If that were so, why should John add: “so that you too may have fellowship with us?” They saw, and we have not seen; yet we have fellowship with them, because we and they share the same faith.

“And our fellowship is with God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son. And we write this to you to make your joy complete – complete in that fellowship, in that love and in that unity.”

John’s letters and gospel are read at Mass on the days that follow the Feast of Christmas.

Praying in Weakness

Prayer is more than looking for something we know, Augusine says in  a letter to Proba, a woman asking him about prayer. It’s not only looking for a cure for sickness or success in getting a job. In prayer we search  for something we do not even understand, it expresses the hope we have for something beyond anything we know now.

“There is one thing I ask of the Lord. This I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come. To gaze on the loveliness of the Lord…” The psalms express that hope very well.

We have an “instructed ignorance,” the saint says and the Spirit of God helps us our weakness.

“The Spirit pleads for the saints because he moves the saints to plead… to plead with sighs too deep for words by inspiring in them a desire for the great and as yet unknown reality that we look forward to with patience. How can words express what we desire when it remains unknown? If we were entirely ignorant of it we would not desire it; again, we would not desire it or seek it with sighs, if we were able to see it.”

Trinity Sunday

A story’s told that St. Augustine, one of the great intellectuals of our western world, was walking along the seashore one day and saw a little boy playing on the beach, taking water from the sea in a small bucket and pouring it into a hole he had dug in the sand. Back the forth the boy went. “What are you doing?” Augustine asked, “Do you think you can put the whole sea into that little hole?”

“No,” the little boy answered, “And neither can you put God into that small mind of yours no matter how smart you think you are.”

The story reminds us how limited our minds are before the mystery of God, even the smartest, most brilliant minds,   God is beyond us. The Feast of the Holy Trinity is a reminder of how incapable we are to know God completely.

And yet, this feast also reminds us that God has approached us and revealed  himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As Father, God’s the creator of heaven and earth. All creation ultimately comes from God’s hand. The gift of life, the gift of all things. God, our Father and Creator, has given us everything. Through these same gifts we come to know him.

God has also made himself known to us in Jesus Christ, who was born of Mary over two thousand years ago, who walked this earth and died on a cross, who rose from the dead and remains with us in his church and his sacraments.  We have his words, his actions, his promises. He’s our Savior and Redeemer, a sign of God’s love;  he’s promised us life eternal..

The Holy Spirit also is God with us, within us, guiding us and our world to our common destiny.

Yet,  though we believe that God reveals himself to us, we’re still like the little boy on the seashore. We’re looking at an unmeasured sea that we approach with the little buckets of our minds. We can’t grasp it all.

You remember the story of the conversion of Paul the Apostle; one of the most dramatic stories in the scriptures. Saui, the unbeliever, was on his way to the City of Damascus to persecute the followers of Jesus, when suddenly a blinding light throws him from his horse. “Who are you, Lord?” Paul cries out. “I am Jesus whom you persecute, “ the voice from the blinding light says.

Jesus Christ is like the blinding light of the sun. He shares in the nature of God, who is brighter than sunlight, who blinds us when we try to see him. God dwells in light inaccessible, the scriptures say. So, even though we know so much about Jesus from the scriptures, even though great scholars can describe him, he is still beyond anything we can know.

Like the sun, Jesus is like a blinding light, yet, paradoxically a light that shines into the darkness of creation to give life and light. At the beginning of his gospel,  St. John says: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.” (John 1,18)

As people of faith we’re not like those who say you can’t know God at all or like those who say God doesn’t exist because my mind cannot grasp him. Yet, as people of faith we know God little by little. That’s why we come to church week by week, that’s why we pray for our daily bread, that why we search for God in life as it unfolds day by day.

As we consider the mystery of God today we also have to recognize that we are children of the Enlightenment, that movement in our western world that tells us there’s no need to pay much attention to God. Pay attention to the world at hand. Pay attention to yourself.  That’s the important thing.

But, we should never leave the sea. We’re meant to stand before the mystery of God and reach out to him with our minds and to love him with our hearts, small as they are.

There’s a trivialization of the mystery of God today.  I think you can see it in the way the name of God and the name of Jesus Christ are tossed about in our ordinary talk. “You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.”   You can see it in God’s absence from our culture, our schools, our media. our homes. You can see it in the belittling of our church and the signs of God’s presence. Even churches can become human gathering spaces, instead of holy places where we meet God.

The Feast of the Holy Trinity is a holy reminder of the mystery of God at the center of our life and the life of our world.

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Knowing Jesus Christ

St. Augustine has an important reflection in his commentary on the psalms in today’s Office of Readings. It’s about the way we see Jesus Christ, who is God and also human, the Word made flesh.

“We contemplate his glory and divinity when we listen to these words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made. Here we gaze on the divinity of the Son of God, something supremely great and surpassing all the greatness of his creatures. Yet in other parts of Scripture we hear him as one sighing, praying, giving praise and thanks.

We hesitate to attribute these words to him because our minds are slow to come down to his humble level when we have just been contemplating him in his divinity. It is as though we were doing him an injustice in acknowledging in a man the words of one with whom we spoke when we prayed to God. We are usually at a loss and try to change the meaning. Yet our minds find nothing in Scripture that does not go back to him, nothing that will allow us to stray from him.

Our thoughts must then be awakened to keep their vigil of faith. We must realise that the one whom we were contemplating a short time before in his nature as God took to himself the nature of a servant; he was made in human likeness and found to be human like others; he humbled himself by being obedient even to accepting death; as he hung on the cross he made the psalmist’s words his own: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

We pray to him as God, he prays for us as a servant. In the first case he is the Creator, in the second a creature. Himself unchanged, he took to himself our created nature in order to change it, and made us one with himself, head and body. We pray then to him, through him, in him, and we speak along with him and he along with us.”

In these final weeks of Lent John’s gospel sees Jesus claiming to be “I am,” the Word confronting his opponents in the temple. Soon, we will see him praying with fear in the garden, silent before his enemies, struggling to bear his cross, dying a cruel death.

If we neglect his divinity, we call into question God’s gift of redemption to our world and our our own call to be God’s children. If we neglect his humanity, we call into question our own humanity, becoming other-worldly and ignoring the lowliness of our human condition.

We need to keep a “vigil of faith” as Augustine says.

Temptations are Teachers

There are two wonderful posts in the blogs from Commonweal Magazine for March 22,

One by  Fr. Joseph Komonchak, “Finding  out who you are,” the other by J.Peter Nixon “Spiritual Excercises.”

The first is a quote from St. Augustine on temptation. I hope Fr. Komonchak wont mind if  I give in to the temptation to steal from him:

“Is God so ignorant of things, does he know so little about the human heart, that he can find what a man is only by testing him? Of course not, the testing is so that the man can find himself….

“You should recognize that God does not need to test in order to learn something he did not know before; it’s so that by his testing, by his investigating, what is hidden in someone might come out. A person is not as well known to himself as he is to his Creator, an ill person doesn’t know himself as well as his doctor. Someone becomes ill, and he’s the one suffering, not the doctor, but it’s from the one not suffering that the sufferer expects to hear what’s wrong.

“The Psalmist cries out: “Cleanse me, Lord, from my hidden things” (Ps 18:13). In any person there are things hidden to the very one in whom they exist. They don’t come out, aren’t laid open, aren’t discovered, except by his being tested. If God ceases to test, the teacher ceases to teach….

“Why do I say this? Because a person is ignorant of himself until he learns who he is by being tested. But once he has learned who he is, let him not be careless about himself. If he was careless when he lay hidden from himself, let him not be careless now that he knows himself.” (Augustine, Sermon 2, 2-3; PL 38-28-29)

St. Paul of the Cross has a similar view of temptation, as far as my reading of him teaches me. He tells people not to be afraid of temptations, or be ashamed of them; they’re teachers of humility and messengers to remind us who we are.  They lead us to God, our teacher, our doctor, the One who makes us whole.

J.Peter Nixon’s blog is about taking care of your body. See what he says for yourself.

 

Desiring God

Here’s a wonderful reflection from St. Augustine on desiring God, from today’s Office of Readings:

“The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied.

“Suppose you are going to fill some holder or container, and you know you will be given a large amount. Then you set about stretching your sack or wineskin or whatever it is. Why? Because you know the quantity you will have to put in it and your eyes tell you there is not enough room. By stretching it, therefore, you increase the capacity of the sack, and this is how God deals with us. Simply by making us wait he increases our desire, which in turn enlarges the capacity of our soul, making it able to receive what is to be given to us.

“So, my brethren, let us continue to desire, for we shall be filled. Take note of Saint Paul stretching as it were his ability to receive what is to come: Not that I have already obtained this, he said, or am made perfect. Brethren, I do not consider that I have already obtained it. We might ask him, “If you have not yet obtained it, what are you doing in this life?” This one thing I do, answers Paul, forgetting what lies behind, and stretching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the prize to which I am called in the life above. Not only did Paul say he stretched forward, but he also declared that he pressed on toward a chosen goal. He realised in fact that he was still short of receiving what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived.”

I’m reading “The Education of Henry Adams”  now, by one of the great observers of our time. Adams was overwhelmed by the complexity of life brought about by the machine and rapid industrialization he experienced in the latter part of the 19th century. Though seen as progress, the changes caused a loss of a unified vision of life. There were too many things going on; too many facts to evaluate, too much happening to look ahead to the future. The world was entering a dizzying stage. 

We are still in that stage.

How does our time affect the way we desire God? In a more settled time, God had a recognized place. Not so now. Augustine speaks of desire as a container, a sack that we must enlarge to be filled. We might  use the image today of a shopping cart that’s filled to the brim with stuff, and there’s still more to come.

How can we make room for desiring God?