Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith, the sacred synod takes its direction from these words of St. John: “We announce to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you may have fellowship with us and our common fellowship be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:2-3). Therefore, following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council, this present council wishes to set forth authentic doctrine on divine revelation and how it is handed on, so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love. (Preface of the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Second Vatican Council, 1965)

When I was a studying at Mundelein Seminary in Chicago many my classmates and I were intrigued by the nearby Willow Creek Community Church. One of my friends heard about a “Generation X” service that they were offering. Being part of the population who have been labeled “Generation X” we decided to make a visit to see what the service was about.

One thing that immediately struck me about Willow Creek was that most of what I experienced in my visit there looked almost completely like anywhere else in American suburbia. As we entered, there were huge parking lots where people were directing traffic in like manner to what I have experienced when attending a baseball game. As we made our way through the massive complex I felt more like I was at the mall, than church. There were many auditorium like rooms where several services could take place simultaneously and a bookstore full of books mostly about financial planning (though I did find one copy of The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer). There was a massive food court and young couples with children running in every corner of the building. We entered the large room where the Gen X service was to be held that was full of men and women in their twenties. The service opened with a band who played a popular song at the time, One Headlight by the Wallflowers. Next, we watched a skit about relationships and then a young man took the stage to tell us about the one true source of revelation, The Bible.

I left Willow Creek that night disturbed by what I saw. While there is certainly something to be said about being able to attract thousands of people to a church each week, I wondered to myself what God was it that was being worshipped there. It seemed that almost everything I saw there pointed to a God remade in our image, rather than a search for the God in whose image we are created.

The words of the young man who passionately spoke to us about the one true source of revelation being The Bible continued to bother me. Each moment that I thought about what he had preached, the more strongly I found myself in disagreement. The one true source of revelation is not The Bible. Jesus Christ is the one true source of revelation and The Bible is a book that can teach us things about Him. Revelation is not found for Christians in a book, it is found in a person.

Later in my time at Mundelein I had the opportunity to take part in an ecumenical class where I was able to speak with a man who was at that time a minister at Willow Creek. He explained to me that before their church opened they surveyed the people in the area to find out what they wanted in a church and then designed the church around the results of the survey. He also lamented the fact that there was no requirement of any sort of baptism, profession of faith, etc. to become a member. He saw this as a tragic weakness in the church. The conversation made me wonder how one could combine the very successful outreach efforts of a church like Willow Creek, with the long held treasures found in our Catholic tradition.

St. Thomas is currently exploring how we can be a more welcoming parish. My hope is that we can improve our ministry of hospitality while not losing the depth of our tradition. In other words, I would be sad to see us become more of a church patterned upon our own image, rather than Christ. It is not an easy task.

It is 2:02 am and I am just getting back to the rectory. Earlier I received a call from a man whose wife is not expected to make it through the night. He wanted a priest to come to the hospital to pray with him, his wife and his family. As I stepped from the elevator the family greeted me with solemn faces that looked to me to do something to take away the anxiety, the pain, the uncertainty that comes with waiting outside an intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning. They told me they hoped I would bring a miracle. I offered to pray with them, hoping it would be God who could bring a miracle. Much of what priests do in this situation is to offer prayers on behalf of people who are so distressed that they are unable to themselves, but most of all we simply make Christ visible through our presence. I left the hospital after having celebrated the anointing of the sick and offering what words of comfort I could and drove home knowing it would be difficult to sleep.

Recently our news media has been giving a fair amount of press to the Catholic Church. Much of that press has to do once again with accusations of sexual abuse of minors or the mishandling of abuse by bishops. Some of what has been reported is credible and for this we should praise the media for bringing the truth to light. It seems also to me that some of what has recently been reported is simply shoddy journalism with an agenda against Catholicism. In our own diocese we are currently dealing with the revelations of one of my brother priests who has admitted to abusing children, and although the abuse reported happened 25 years ago, the effects of it are just as harmful today. It is painful to know that more often than not the news in the near future will focus more in our diocese on the sins of one priest than on the virtue of many more who simply want to be carriers of God’s love to others.

Whenever abuse by priests is brought to light, people bring up how it must feel to be unjustly judged by others who throw all priests into the camp of being pedophiles. This is true to a great extent. There are many who look upon priests as a symbol of all the negative things they have ever experienced in the Catholic Church. However, there are also those who see a man in a collar and judge him just as inaccurately to be a saint. Both extremes are frequently off the mark. My experience with most priests is that they are neither extreme sinners, nor saints, but simply men who are attempting to live lives of holiness while serving others with the gifts God has given to them.

I am not a perfect priest, nor a perfect Christian. On my best days I try hard to bring God’s love to those he places in my path. My hope is that most days I will succeed and that when I fail I have the courage to get up and try again.

Please pray for priests. We need your prayers more than you know.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing parts of Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church for Evangelicals is our stubborn insistence upon giving honor to Christ’s mother, Mary.  Thomas Howard’s discussion of the subject brings us back around to the importance that Christianity places on the physical. He notes that in the Old Testament we see worship of God that almost always involves a blood sacrifice of some sort or another. He then asks what happened as a result of Christianity,

But that was all primitive. Surely something spiritual would emerge from those elementary lessons. Surely thoughtful men might anticipate the day when all of this would be put behind and be replaced with elevated thoughts and spirituality.

Indeed it was all put behind. There came an end to those gory altars and all that slaughter. But it was not a tissue of elevated thoughts that replaced them. Rather, an angel appeared to a woman and said, “Hail!” What we now had, far from the summons away from the physical realm that highminded men might have wished, was gynecology, obstetrics, and a birth. Whatever we may imagine about the spiritual rhapsody that might have attended this angelic visitation to the Virgin, the one thing we know to have occurred was a conception. The Virgin’s womb teemed.

It was embarrassing to the religious mind. It proved a scandal. The whole ensuing story bothered and even enraged religious men, and it has continued to do so.

Once again it is the Incarnation that is the key to understanding the honor given to Mary in our Churches. We honor the fact that Christ receives his humanity from her, that God chose her to take care of His Son. How amazing it is to think about the fact that Mary was asked to share the responsibilities of being a parent with God, the Father of all creation.

I appreciate that Howard continues to point out our tendency of wanting to separate Christianity from the physical. The fact that there are still many among us who are uncomfortable with having a God who participates in even the most earthy elements of our humanity illustrates that Paul’s description of the scandal of Christ crucified is still around, even to this day.

It is also good to hear from a writer who can recognize that there are some, who in wrongly placing Mary’s place above her Son have gone too far and have need of being pointed back to Christ. Howard points equally to the folly of turning to the solution that claims that God’s glory would be diminished by giving honor to anyone else. Howard asks the question,

What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows…..He is a very great king, to have figures of shuch immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity.

God has indeed raised Mary to a place of honor in his kingdom. I see no reason for us not to do the same. In doing so, we are reminded not only of the great dignity He has bestowed upon her, but upon the entire human race by His glorious Incarnation.

All buildings are icons. They all bespeak something. The spare simplicity of a clapboard New England church speaks of the demure austerity and purity that should mark the Christian’s heart and , hence, the Christian’s mode of life. The World Trade Center speaks of power and commerce and money. The Taj Mahal evinces the delicate, almost weightless, grace of a beautiful woman and of a man’s love for her.

Where I myself once saw many church buildings as feeling like cold, manmade monuments built to serve a deep seated pride, I now see them as expressing in a material way the glory of God. It was Fr. Bob Barron who first pointed out to me that almost all of the beautiful European churches that I criticized with the argument that the money that built them could have been given to the poor, were in fact built by the poor. It also took time for me to see that my own words had been used first by one Jesus’ own companions, the one who was to betray Him.

Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil. and given to the poor?” (John 12:1-3)

Once again it is the Incarnation that paves the way for representing Christ now in stone, wood, glass and paint. One of the most striking examples I can think of is the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth that symbolically represents Christ in both his divinity and humanity by having a church with two floors. The lower church is very plain and spare to represent Christ’s humanity and the upper church very lavish to represent His divinity. The steeple of the Church is an inverted chalice that represents God’s pouring forth from heaven to earth at the moment of Mary’s fiat.

Howard continues his reflection by moving away from the place to pray and on to the way in which we do so as Christians. He notes his own distrust for set prayers that follow a strict order and that are many times repeated. Like Thomas, I have encountered Christians who saw these prayers as being too rote and that it was precisely this type of prayer that Jesus came to abolish. However, if one looks closely at Jesus’ own practice we see that he in fact followed the Jewish rituals of his time. We hear that as a boy his parents took him to Jerusalem to take part in these rituals and we see this throughout the Gospels. We also many times hear him praying from the Psalms. My own experience is that both set prayers and more formal repeated prayers are important in our lives as Christians. Even after more than 30 years of hearing the same prayers of the Eucharist, my level of understanding of what lies beneath the prayers continues to grow. The prayers, far from becoming rote, have deepened.

Howard also goes on to share his realization that he needed to overcome a sense of individualism that kept him from opening up to different types of prayer. He says,

the sense in which all that doctrine and correction and instruction will take root in the Church and bear fruit in wise disciplines did not present itself to me. It was as though the Church had never really existed. It was as though the Bible had been written yesterday and I were the first man to open it.

One of the things that I have never understood in the criticism of those who do not believe in the teaching authority of the Church is how they themselves claim a sense of authority. No doubt many claim that the only true Christian authority is the Bible, in reality there is always more to it. It is not just the Bible that has been presented to me in every case when I have been faced with believers of this doctrine, but an interpretation of the Bible that came from the standpoint of the person trying to convince me that there was no need for outside interpretation. The real question that is usually overlooked is which interpretation is more in line with the truth? For most evangelicals it is a modern tradition that holds more weight and this is where I find problems in that many modern evangelicals’ interpretation seems very subjective and leans more toward placing our own experiences upon the Bible rather than searching the Scriptures as objectively as one can for the truth. In a sense we are really called upon to allow ourselves to be judged by the Scriptures, not the other way around. The Catholic interpretation of the Bible relies more on the entire 2,000 year history of the Church, paying special attention to the early fathers of the Church. We attempt, although not always entirely successfully, to take into account the wisdom of generations of Christians.

As always, your comments are welcome.

A Position for Prayer

Howard spends a good deal of time speaking about the proper position for prayer. He describes his journey to understanding the value of kneeling for prayer. As a Catholic growing up in the South I have always had to field questions about why we are constantly in motion during our celebrations of worship. We sit, stand, kneel…..sit, stand, kneel….genuflect, make processions, cross ourselves, etc. Our worship is a very physical act which again harkens back to the Incarnation of Christ. Christ did not come only to bring salvation to our spirits, or to our minds, but to our entire being. This includes the physical and so our prayer mirrors that. It is impossible to get around the fact that we are physical beings. We need to eat, sleep, exercise and do many other physical tasks in order to live. Our prayer mirrors this.

Posture in prayer is a powerful tool. Traditionally I can think of three primary postures that can aid us in prayer. The first posture is the most ancient which is standing. Standing with arms outstretched is the oldest posture of Christian prayer. It physically mirrors the image of Christ crucified. We use this posture today to communicate praise and thanksgiving. In our Catholic liturgy we see it most often used when we are singing, when we are addressing a prayer directly to God the Father, when the Gospel is proclaimed and in many countries for the praying of the Eucharistic Prayer. It makes sense to me that we would choose to stand upright when giving praise and thanksgiving to God. The second posture for prayer we often see is sitting. Sitting is a posture of reception, one that indicates a willingness to listen to God and to receive what he offers to us. In the liturgy we see this posture most readily in the proclamation of the readings from Scripture. We sit in order to receive the Word of God. The third posture is kneeling. Kneeling has long been seen as a gesture of penitence but also in our country has come to symbolize reverence, which is why in the United States we kneel during the Eucharistic Prayer.

From Attitude to Act

Howard notes also that,

Worship, in the ancient tradition, was not thought of as an experience at all, it was an act.

This past December our parish took on the challenge of what is being promoted by a group of Christians as the Advent Conspiracy. One of the four tenants of the Advent Conspiracy is the challenge to “Worship Fully”. This past year I have spent a good amount of time reflecting upon what it means to worship fully and my conclusion is that it involves offering our entire life fully to God. We gather each Sunday to give thanks to God for all he has given to us and we offer Him our lives. We place our triumphs and our failures upon the altar of sacrifice. Doing this each week should draw us each week closer to the God who gave Himself completely to us in His life, death and resurrection.

In Spirit and In Truth

One of the things that certainly tends to be a sticking point between the Evangelical churches and the more Liturgical ones is the use or non use of set prayers. We as Catholics use many set prayers, but not to the exclusion of spontaneous prayer. Our prayers used for worship follow a set pattern. We pray to God the Father, through God the Son, in God the Holy Spirit. There are many different words that we use throughout the liturgy and throughout the liturgical year, but they all come back to this set structure that the Church has followed from the early centuries of Christianity. Probably the most important reason we do this is to protect those of us who have received the faith from error. When looking at the history of the early Church it is easy to see that words matter. Changing one or two words like changing one degree of the compass when setting a direction can lead to disastrous results. This seems to be one area, in my opinion, where Evangelicals seem to follow a similar course. At least when it comes to the Bible, all Christians–Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants–would agree that we cannot change the words of the Scripture.

It also seems from my own observations that most Evangelicals do follow a pattern in prayer. Usually the prayer begins by addressing God the Father, it then moves into a section of prayer of thanksgiving or praise (we just praise you for your care for us), there is a petition (we ask you to watch over us with your care) and the prayer ends with the phrase, “in Jesus’ name we pray”. This doesn’t seem at all that different from the Catholic pattern that is described above.

Howard also notes something that he noticed with regards to repeated or memorized prayer by pointing out the beautiful tradition of hymns that have developed over the centuries in the protestant church. Hymns composed by the likes of John Wesley and learned by countless Christians have helped us to pray and to maintain our faith through repetition and song.

Attire

As a priest who often is seen wearing vestments while leading prayer, Howard’s comments on attire seemed right on target. It has often suggested to me that perhaps we Catholics have it wrong in dressing our clergy in special attire that is meant to draw more attention to them. It has always been my understanding that the vestments are meant to draw our attention away from the person wearing them. Catholic clergy first put on the white garment of baptism to remind us of the common call we share with all Christians. Then we wear vestments as a sign that it should be Christ who is speaking through us. This, in fact, is another reason for having set prayers for the Eucharist. In these most significant prayers it is the words of Christ that matter most, not my words or the words of any of my brother priests. We are, in a sense, to become invisible through the wearing of vestments so that that Christ can be made more visible.

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Thanks again to Elizabeth for beginning this book discussion. It has been very enjoyable and engaging so far and I hope many of you will continue the respectful dialogue which she has begun.

Today I am happy once again to be taking part in Elizabeth Esther’s Saturday Evening Blogpost. Elizabeth is hosting a special new year’s edition by asking bloggers to share their favorite post of the entire last year. My first thought was that it would be incredibly difficult to choose my favorite post from so many, but I quickly decided upon one entitled, Our Life In Christ. It is my favorite as it was the most successful post in opening up some dialogue on the Eucharist. There is still much to ponder simply in reading the comments.

I hope you will head over to Elizabeth’s site also to check out the many other bloggers’ best of 2009!

One of the things that is most exciting to me about the new site is our use of new media to communicate the Gospel to those in our parish and hopefully to many who have not yet heard the good news. My friend Jim and I have been having lots of fun with that aspect of the site, though it takes much more time to produce good content than what I would have imagined. The good news is that Jim’s seriousness about the production side of things is matched by mine for excellent content.

We have two new podcasts on the site you might want to check out. The first is entitled Focus on Ministry, that will highlight the many ministries at St. Thomas the Apostle. The second is called Faith Seeking Understanding that will attempt to answer questions about the Catholic faith which will be submitted via the new website.

I hope you will take a few minutes to visit our new site and that it will be helpful to the growth of your faith. You can find it at www.sthomaslc.com.