St Peter Damian

Today is the feast of the fascinating Saint Peter Damian, monk, theologian, bishop and doctor of the Church. He was a reluctant abbot of his community; by 1057 Stephen IX twisted Peter’s arm hard enough for him to give up his monastic desert and made him Cardinal-bishop of Ostia. Never could Peter give up church governance.

One Peter’s biographers writes:

“St. Peter Damian fought simony with great vigor, and equally vigorously upheld clerical celibacy; and as he supported a severely ascetical, semi-eremitical life for monks, so he was an encourager of common life for the secular clergy. He was a man of great vehemence in all he said and did; it has been said of him that “his genius was to exhort and impel to the heroic, to praise striking achievements and to record edifying examples…an extraordinary force burns in all that he wrote”. In spite of his severity, St. Peter Damian could treat penitents with mildness and indulgence where charity and prudence required it.” Not what you hear too often. We need confessors to be better of their craft: mild, charitable, smart, AND prudent! St Peter, helps us.

My friend J. Michael Thompson wrote this hymn for the feast.

1. Preach the Word! Proclaim the Kingdom!
Whether welcome or disdained,
Tell the world of Jesus’ coming—
Patiently proclaim His Name!

2. When sound teaching is deserted,
When all novelties are sought,
When the Truth is scorned for fables,
Then this lesson must be brought:

3. Bravely work in face of trials;
Make the Lord’s Good News your life!
Serve the Lord by serving others,
Faithful bide through ev’ry strife.

4. Thus Saint Peter, in his teaching,
Sought to follow Paul’s command.
Hearing him, we seek to follow,
Holding to the Master’s hand.

5. Glory be to God the Father,
Glory be to God the Son,
Glory be to God the Spirit:
Ever Three and ever One!

J. Michael Thompson,
Copyright © 2010,
World Library Publications

Purity of Heart

Work on purity of heart

At the beginning of Great Lent, but it ought to be daily practice, is ask ourselves how we are working with certain spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, almsgiving, charitable work, care for self, silence, living virtuously, forgiving wrongs, and the like. Purity of heart is one of those disciplines that we either are untrained in, purposely forget about it, or actively work against it. Like many other things in the spiritual life if we ignore something long enough our center deadens. The point of Great Lent is to reinvigorate our relationship with the Lord and re-train ourselves to be full of life –to thrive– in God’s grace.

What is the quality of your heart? How do you concretely live the grace of freedom? What does purity of heart look like in your life and with those you life and work with on a daily basis?

“Spiritual discipline is above all about purity of heart. We have within ourselves the opportunity, through grace, of purifying our intention, of seeking only a loving response to the love that is already present, that encourages us forward. The heart that is truly free knows what it is free for: to be the lover God has always longed for” (NS).

St Valentine the beekeeper

Happy St Valentine’s Day!

Hagiography reveals that Saint Valentine (+270) was a beekeeper himself and had a great love for these beautiful creatures. He was known for his gentle and caring treatment of the honey bees, and it is said that he would often talk to them and bless them with his prayers. (Something I do.)

Forgiveness Sunday

Today is called Forgiveness Sunday as it is the day before Great Lent –the Fast– begins. The day marks with a rather dramatic, beautiful spiritual exercise that is rather impactful. It is a time again for tears of repentance and forgiveness. How good it is that we can do this, wholeheartedly, as a custom, on a specific day to aid our maturing in Christian faith.

Croc tears would be a real problem for those serious about their salvation in Christ Jesus.

Theophany in octave

We think in the long-game: the Church has a long tradition of carrying on a significant feast day for eight days following. So there is such a thing the Christmas Octave, Easter Octave, the Dormition Octave, etc. We have the Epiphany octave. If we believe in the primacy of liturgical theology, then experience will demonstrate that the memory found in praying the texts bears a heightened awareness and a keen appreciation leading to spiritual generativity in our life. We can’t settle for the bare minimum of liturgical observance.

Troparion — Tone 1

When You, O Lord were baptized in the Jordan / the worship of the Trinity was made manifest / for the voice of the Father bore witness to You / and called You His beloved Son. / And the Spirit, in the form of a dove, / confirmed the truthfulness of His word. / O Christ, our God, You have revealed Yourself / and have enlightened the world, glory to You!

Kontakion — Tone 4

Today You have shown forth to the world, O Lord, / and the light of Your countenance has been marked on us. / Knowing You, we sing Your praises. / You have come and revealed Yourself, / O unapproachable Light.

Baptism of the Lord

The Theophany narrative is one that includes the testimony of the Lord’s Baptism. The Baptism of Lord reminds us that the fact of the Lord’s Baptism forms in our consciousness a living icon of the Trinity, the revelation –a Theophany; the manifestation of the Tri-One God. In the Baptism, the world’s waters were sanctified and the Cosmos underwent a metamorphosis of Divine Energies.

What we commemorated on January 6, the Theophany, has direct consequences in how we live today.

Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, from a Sermon by Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop (330-389 AD):

Today let us do honor to Christ’s baptism and celebrate this feast in holiness. Nothing gives such pleasure to God as the conversion and salvation of men, for whom his every word and every revelation exist. He wants you to become a living force for all mankind, lights shining in the world. You are to be radiant lights as you stand beside Christ, the great light, bathed in the glory of him who is the light of heaven.”

Examine yourself

The more I examine myself, the more I see that a life devoted to constructing and organizing, a life which produces positive results and which succeeds, is not my vocation, even though, out of obedience, I could work in this direction and even obtain certain results. What attracts me is a vocation of loss—a life which would give itself freely without any apparent positive result, for the result would be known to God alone; in brief, to lose myself in order to find myself.

Father Lev Gillet (A monk of the Eastern Church)

The Dignity of being Christian

Merry Christmas!

From a sermon of Saint Leo the Great, pope
Christian, remember your dignity

Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.

No one is shut out from this joy; all share the same reason for rejoicing. Our Lord, victor over sin and death, finding no man free from sin, came to free us all. Let the saint rejoice as he sees the palm of victory at hand. Let the sinner be glad as he receives the offer of forgiveness. Let the pagan take courage as he is summoned to life.

In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took for himself our common humanity in order to reconcile it with its creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which he had overthrown mankind.

And so at the birth of our Lord the angels sing in joy: Glory to God in the highest, and they proclaim peace to men of good will as they see the heavenly Jerusalem being built from all the nations of the world. When the angels on high are so exultant at this marvellous work of God’s goodness, what joy should it not bring to the lowly hearts of men?

Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because in his great love for us he took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins he brought us to life with Christ, so that in him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off our old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh.

Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.

Through the sacrament of baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.

Salvation brought with crooked lines

In the Byzantine Church, we hear proclaimed the genealogy of Jesus, reminding us how God’s plan of salvation comes through a lot of interesting characters. Every time I hear this gospel passage I am reminded for two things: God uses the imperfect for the revelation of the perfect and therefore gives hope, and that our Savior, Jesus of Nazareth, the foretold Christ, is in the middle of our messy and complicated history offering us the gift of salvation. What is true is that God makes his home with us, and He “has a better plan for us” and we are an essential part of that plan.

“Matthew’s genealogy is extraordinarily comprehensive in his theology lf the roots of Jesus’ story in the Old Testament. But that is only one part of the story of Jesus Christ. The story has a sequence as well; and the continuing sequence is what makes the genealogy “good news” for Matthew’s audience and for us. Human being have been empowered to preserve, proclaim, and convey salvation brought by Jesus Christ throughout history. The God who wrote the beginnings with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness.

A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world hearkened and women upon whom the world frowned –this God continues to work through the same melange. If it was a challenge to recognize in the last part of Matthew’s genealogy that totally unknown people were part of the story of Jesus Christ, it may be a greater challenge to recognize that the unknown characters of today are an essential part of the sequence. The proclamation of that genealogy in the Advent liturgy is designed to give us hope about destiny and our importance.

By stressing the all-powerful grace of God, the genealogy presents it greatest challenge to those who will accept only an idealized Jesus Christ whose story they would write only with straight lines and whose portrait they would paint only in pastel colors. If we look at the whole story and the total picture, the Gospels teach us that Jesus’ ministry was not thus; the history of the church teaches us that the sequence as not thus. God’s grace can work even with people like us.” (Father Raymond Brown, S.S.)