Strait from the Heart of Lent

From the conversation I mentioned earlier, a word from the heart of Tyson, who has answered us all in the spirit of Truth:

Greetings Eric and Dom (et al.),

I agree that there is not need for dichotomy theologically, but it was hard yesterday speaking with a mother of a friend of mine. She lives a 7 hour bus ride outside of the city and is only able to afford a visit once a year. Her son, Alfonso, is disabled and is in a boy’s home attending an American school. She is a mother, and though she speaks Spanish with limitations (she is indigenous and speaks Quechua), she was able to express what any mother would feel, the sadness at being so far from her son, who after 5 years in this home is bored to go to the village where he grew up. We spoke about their lives, the hard work and the small pay (a family with four kids living with them earning under $2 a day), and about Canada, the cost of a flight from there to here, and how shamed I was. Sure, I am trying to make my way through this country scouting for the footprints of Christ and where they will lead, yet we are separated by my Love which does not extend far enough to those so inflicted by the injustice and inequality present in our world.

It is a good and fine thing, I suppose, to discuss whether or not my post was creating an unfair dichotomy. My philosophical / theological communication is not the greatest.I will then post some new questions, plain enough I hope for clear understanding. While there needn’t be a separation between a belief and life, why are so few Christians leaving behind their wasteful lifestyles in the north? Why do they waste on coffee in a week what some entire families survive on in a month? Why do the sermons preached about our neighbors and Love rarely lead to extreme shifts in our lifestyles?

This post is about the Church’s responsibility, right? In the context of sharing the truth which is in our baptismal confession:

“Do you reject sin so as to live in the freedom of God’s Children?”- What is this freedom? Does it not bind us with all of God’s children who are suffering? Do we then ache for their pain and poverty?

“Do you reject the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?”- Glamour? Vanity? Excess? Covetousness? Inequality?

“Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?”- He also gave birth to the gap between the wealthy and poor, to entire nations crippled by disease…

“Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth?”- creator of all, Lover of all, as a father it would hurt me so see so many of my children living high at the expense of my other equally-loved children

“Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father?”- born into a poor family, a life of emptying and solidarity, is this Life our leading, or it is a one-time break?

“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting?”- This drives us to bring the Good News, but to whom? To all, to those who know it not perhaps as a tradition, but more so to those living in the results of what its lack has done in this world. The prostitutes, the glue-sniffers, the abusing fathers, the … sick.
No, there needn’t be a dichotomy between belief and loving works, but there is because the two are very often not in accord with one another.

I post emotionally, not with a very sound or calm mind. This may be something to count against me and my perspective. But it is very hard, very very hard, to be living here and engaging people whose struggles are very much against the results of sin, and very often the sins of others.
I
love my spiritual director, a Catholic priest with an incredible heart. When I first came to him, I was thinking about becoming Catholic, he was focused on me following Christ more closely. They can be found in the same place, but it is the latter that is most important.
True belief in the heart may often express itself in different words and traditions - even faiths - but it is declared true not by these but by its fruits. Our lives should be those of gardeners, some sowing, others tending, others harvesting, all working.

My thoughts.

Peace in Christ,Tyson

It is easy for us in the West, especially the rich, educated, and comfortable, to fester in an opulence that we are blind to. We must not only recall the beatitudes, not only pray them, not only reference them to those who live them, but we must conform our lives to them. And we must always remember the story of Lazarus and Dives.

But, most of all, we must trust the Lord, as much as we are able.

And remember, that justice necessitates the eschaton, the end, the final judgment. There will be a reckoning.

Church? What do You Mean?

There is an interesting conversation going on at Dom's blog. It covers a wide range of subjects, not the least of which is the question of the Church, and what it's good for. A part my contribution follows:

The Orthodox and the Catholics have a relationship with God that is personal, in the most intimate sense. God himself is present in the sacraments. ...trying to form communion with God in cultural isolation is like forming a relationship with your wife exclusively through email. You may develop a profound relationship, but you’re never sure who is on the other side of the screen, so to speak, and your relationship cannot be consummated. Through the sacraments, we consummate the relationship we have with God. It is not an alternative to prayer, it is the fulfillment of prayer; a prayer of the highest kind. It is God’s will that he stepped out of the prophylactic smoke surrounding the Holy Mountain, and revealed himself to us in material, in flesh, in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And God’s will to reveal himself to us, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, in material is manifest in his instituting the sacraments. Humans are cultural beings, and meaning is mediated to us through cultural products. At the heart of CULTure is cult. At the heart of the Christian cult are the sacraments. At the periphery of the Christian cult are sacramentals, signs and symbols that foster our prayerful reception of grace in the sacraments.

Many contemporary Protestant communities have forsaken the culture of the Church, and have, as a consequence, renounced the cult at the same time. The Bible remains - an object of Christian culture through which most of what they know of Christ may be derived - and so they are able to maintain a relationship with the Lord with some degree of orthodoxy. Also, many have Baptism, though recent conversations in this blog have revealed that many reject even that. The consequence is that many of these communities are not Church, but devotional associations. I believe that you can know God, and that you may even be saved from it. But it is a scraping after the minimums. It is accepting Christ as spouse, while rejecting the feast. It is elevating the relationship of words, while forgetting the joy of sacramental union, communion, courtship and consummation.

Our Baby's Heart

We heard our baby's heartbeat, this evening.

Lindsay's mother is a doctor and works in a low-risk pregnancy clinic, so she invited us in after-hours to listen.

I expected it to sound percussive, like a little drum hammering away. But, it was a different sound, reminding me of what you might expect from a sheet of metal being flapped up and down.

And earlier in the day, a woman I worked with who is away on maternity leave dropped in with her month-old daughter. The girl, Mya, was beautiful.

It's remarkable, at the end of the day, how much weight is carried in the memory of eight pounds of baby and a nine week old heartbeat.

Ash Wednesdsay

Lent has begun.

Catholics are called to 40 days of spiritual preparation in anticipation of the glory of Easter. On each Friday we are obligated to abstain from eating meat, and we are encouraged to devote ourselves to the good works Christ commends to us; we are called to fast, to pray, and to give alms.

And we are called to do so in a spirit of humility and smallness.

Father Edmund, our pastor, suggested that Lent is something that is, in a way, imposed on us by the Church, and for our own good. And it all begins on Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting that we are required to observe.

The forty days of Lent recall several events in the Biblical history, but none so clearly as the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert. There he was tempted by the devil, and prevailed.

The more seriously I take my faith, the more I understand the seriousness of what I am called to. The special character of the Ash Wednesday service is the imposition of the ashes of the burnt fronds from the last year's Palm Sunday. The palms recall the triumphant entry of Jesus the Christ into God's city, Jerusalem. Those fronds, the palms of triumphant entry laid at the feet of Christ the King, are burnt up, consumed in fire, and what remains, lifeless ash and coal, is marked in a Cross on the forehead of the devoted. And the words are intoned, "Remember, man, you are dust, and to dust you will return (Gen 3:19)".

You were not, and you will be not. You will die.

Such is our invitation to the forty days in the desert, where we are promised a struggle with the devil himself.

It is no small relief that the forty days of Lent do not include Sundays. Every Sunday is Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection.

Fast, pray, give alms.

Be humble, be small.

You will die.

This will all conclude with Holy Week: the scourge, imprisonment, indignity, execution and a tomb.

But on the horizon, the Sun is rising.