4.26.2025
Simplicity
4.15.2025
Change of Heart
I fell in love with G. Not for the first time, and it's not the first time for that sort of thing, anyway. But prior to this, I had no attraction to marriage as a calling. Now it's something I think I want.
Why? What's the point of this? Haven't there been enough callings I want that I can't have? Why do I need to go through this one too? I can't be a musician, a priest, or a monk. I'm a cripple. Now I need to fall in love with a woman I can't have in order to know how beautiful a holy marriage is? Isn't this some kind of sick joke?
I followed my heart the last time something like this happened and the pain of it nearly drove me to despair. I have no serious intention of following my heart this time, so it will just be unrequited love. I've dealt with it before. Those feelings will subside soon enough once I start directing them. But now it's unrequited love plus desiring marriage, a desire I didn't when I was 17. Or 34. But it's not marriage in general. I don't want to get married. I want to marry her.
Assuming these feelings are real and not just realizing how much I'm in love with her, this is very discouraging. I haven't accomplished anything in my life. I don't see a way forward, I just seem stuck, endlessly relying on others and not able to do anything myself at all. It's like I desire all good things but can't serve any of them. I don't know what to do with that. How can that glorify him? Isn't this meaningless?
4.04.2020
Temptation
Sometimes it's all consuming - like a black pit that swallows you up, that entices you with every delightful possibility, promising perfect ecstasy, until it seems impossible, inhumane, that you would ever refuse. I have felt that at least once, in the sense that an impulse - a powerful, all but irresistible impulse - arose from within me but not from me. But that scares you. It scared me half to death. That can put you on full alert - "Something is not right," you realize, your blood runs cold, and you jump to the solution of penance. If you know, you can defend, and once you call upon the good spirit, the battle is all but won - for now.
More often, it's quiet, subtle, promising nothing but beauty if you just watch. Like seeing a diseased, worm-eaten corpse become healthy, beautiful, full-blooded, seductive, life-giving, exalting, domineering, promising. Will you feed it with attention? Or let it starve? If you feed it, see above. If not, it quiets down again to be a splinter in your mind, sometimes calling for attention, other times remaining still, broadcasting the signal of indefinite pleasure.
The second is by far more dangerous. It lulls you into complacency, pride, self-reliance. "I have fought against it and won many times, therefore it is not truly a threat. I can dismiss it, for it is nothing to me any more." Reasonable. Understandable. False. Because there is good, and there is evil, and those two powers are far, far greater than we are. In my experience, the powers of evil are far more effective than good, because the good spirit respects my freedom, and the bad spirit is always seeking to make me bind my freedom by any means necessary. I do not know the power of God by experience.
That is the struggle of the initiate. Sages say that this struggle ends in some sense once we experience enlightenment, but the only way to enlightenment (but is this even really true?) is through struggle. Or perhaps a better way of putting it: understanding, acceptance, peace, and letting the self be what it is.
I feel myself divided, in conflict, at war. Is that an illusion? Is the only reality perfect wholeness? Is the perception of the divided self proof of a profound lack of understanding? I would say I know only one thing, but faith is not knowledge. So I cling to only one thing and lament my ignorance: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
11.28.2018
Seeking the Good
5.24.2018
The Holy Eucharist III
Thus the Eucharist is primordial: it is in the beginning, it is the Covenant, it is nuptial, one-flesh union. It is the center of a Christian metaphysics, wherein the true is free because the true is covenant. It is both history, for we can point to a temporo-spatial point where it 'began', and it is mystery, for it transcends the very limits of the time and space that would seem to be its boundaries. It is an icon of divine revelation, but unlike an icon it is without limit. Now, in the age of the sacramental, history and mystery become one, and they become one through the Eucharist.
More specifically, they become one through consecration: the hallowing, breaking, offering, and immolating of a pure and holy Victim; present also is the union of past, present, and future, for Christ as Antitype of the Old Law hearkens back to it, and His broken and immolated Body and Blood, offered to the Father in praise and thanksgiving, are really, truly, substantially, and sacramentally present under the appearance of bread and wine - vere, realiter, substantialiter, et sacramentaliter - in our present, which itself prefigures and foreshadows the Wedding Feast of the Lamb Who was slain at the consummation of all things. And all this occurs in consecration. By breaking the bread, Christ was offering Himself to be broken; the bread, consumed as food, is really His love and obedience to the Father. And because the Eucharist is now the ordering principle of reality, already accomplished but not yet complete, the same is true of us who celebrate the Eucharist, whether our Eucharistic role is clerical or lay. We, corporately (i.e. bodily) members of the Bride, share a transfiguring union with Christ our Head - what He is, fully human and truly divine, we also become, and this through the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which takes from us our false nature and restores us to His image and likeness.
History, mystery, past, present, future, Apocalypse - all unite and are one in a still, small voice, when a priest holds a small host and whispers, "This is My Body, broken for you."
5.22.2018
The Holy Eucharist II
All this is chiefly drawn from, mediated by, and seen through the Church's ancient tradition and manner of worship. In the ancient Roman anaphora, the mystery of faith, the mystery of the Church, and the mystery of the Eucharist are interwoven, mutually illuminating, and wholly ordered to the praise and glory of the Holy Trinity. The rite is structured, bearing the stamp of austere Roman law, but it is the structure of an ecstatic act of worship. The mystery of faith is the simple affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again from the dead, and will come again; but it is transfigured in long paean of communion sacrifice, the anamnesis of the Roman Canon.
This structure shows the identity and dignity of the Christian, for it reveals the will of God - Him loving us in eternity and in time. The first part of the Canon makes repeated reference to the sacrifice of praise, which refers both to the Act of Christ on the cross, making the Church to be, and the action of the priest, re-presenting that same sacrifice for the praise and glory of His Name, culminating in the sacred banquet, feeding on the Holy Eucharist Itself.
These two motion are constantly informing each other through the Canon, like two voices in polyphonic music, but there is a third voice - a transfigured mystery of faith. The first was the simple affirmation of the life and death of Christ; the second, a hymn to the Holy Trinity: "Per Ipsum..." The act of faith, through which the Body of Christ is professed and the Mystical Body of Christ worshiped, adored, and consumed, leads us to the interweaving, ever-holy life of the Holy Trinity - the life of perfect communion. From these three elements - faith, Church, Eucharist , each with their own structure and logic, we can see the movement of man from death in sin to life in God All-Holy, for the praise and glory of His name.
5.18.2018
The Holy Eucharist I
When created, man fell almost instantly into rebellion, twisting his will against the will of the Father. Man was profaned, and from the instant of the Fall recognized his fallenness and need to return to God. This was tried first on man's own initiative: sacrifice, a setting-apart, a making-holy, that God eventually hallowed and required from His People. From the beginning (Abel) it was a bloody sacrifice, slaughtering a helpless and therefore innocent animal, burning some of its flesh and consuming the rest. An intuition that through sacrifice, man could return to God.
At first carnal, physical, and unspiritual (e.g. the guardianship of the Mosaic Law), in the Psalms and Prophets arose the conviction that the true sacrifice to God was a humble and contrite heart - i.e. a sacrifice on the order of the spirit, which is to say the order of reality. God is spirit, so union and reunion with Him must be on the order of spirit, but man is also carnal, so that reunion must be carnal as well. This tension could not be resolved within the limits of the Old Covenant.
Only in the Word-made-Flesh does the solution appear. As fully, integrally man, Christ unifies His flesh, His mind, His will to God; and as truly God, He gives those united by faith to Him a share of His own divinity, so that each believer can renounce evil and Satan, being conformed to Christ through the renewal of the mind.
This was accomplished, fittingly, through sacrifice. Adam severed his will from God, and death was the result. Christ united His will to the Father as far as it was possible for a man to do - unto and through suffering and torturous death. Through this act, humanity is restored and made holy again before the Lord.
The Sacrifice of Christ, as the antitype or fulfillment of the sacrifices of the Old Covenant, fittingly included a ritual meal - as seen at the Last Supper. Building on principles of hospitality, so important to the ancient world, a shared meal was the source and summit of human connection, human communion. But in the case of Christ, the communion is between man and God, so it was fitting that the means of the sacrifice - the Body and Blood of the Lord - should become the source of the communion meal, symbolized, figured by bread and wine, and being really, truly, substantially, and sacramentally present under those signs.
Thus the Eucharist is a sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. Not a different sacrifice, or a parallel sacrifice, or a new sacrifice, but the same act re-presented again for us; and the Eucharist is a sacrament, a mystery; for the power of God accomplishes through the words and actions of His bishops and priests what those words and actions signify - our redemption in Christ, culminating in Holy Communion with God and one another.