Drunk in God’s house

“They shall be drunk with the abundance of your house, and you shall make them drink of the torrent of your pleasure” (Ps 35[36]:9)

Spiritual refreshment consists of two things: the gifts of God and his sweetness. With reference to the first, it says: “they shall be drunk with the abundance of your house.” The house is the Church (1 Tim 3:15: “so you may know how to behave in the house of God that is the church of the living God”). And this house, which is now on the earth, one day will be transferred to the heavens (Ps 121[122]:1: “Rejoicing we shall go into the house of the Lord”). In both houses there is an abundance of God’s gifts, but in this Church it is imperfect, while in the other there is an utterly perfect abundance of all good things, and by it spiritual people are filled (Ps 64[65]:5: “We shall be filled with the good things of your house”). And even more: “they shall be drunk” insofar as desires are fulfilled beyond all measure of merit, for drunkenness is a kind of excess (Is 64:4: “Eye has not seen, O God, what things you have prepared for those who wait for you”; Cant 5:1: “Eat, o friends, and drink, and get drunk, my dearly beloved”). People who are drunk are not inside but outside themselves. Thus those filled with spiritual gifts have all their attention on God (Ph 3:20: “Our conversation is in heaven”).
And they are refreshed not only by these gifts but also by love of God (Job 22:26: “Then shall you abound in delights in the Almighty and shall lift up your face to God”). And so it says, with regard to the second point: “And you shall make them drink of the torrent of your pleasure.” This is the love of the Holy Spirit which causes a force in the soul like a torrent (Is 59:19: “Like a violent stream which the spirit of the Lord drives on”). And it is a torrent of pleasure because it causes pleasure and sweetness in the soul (Wis 12:1: “O how good and sweet is your spirit, O Lord, in us”). And good people drink from it (1 Cor 10:4: “They drank the same spiritual drink”).
Or “the torrent of your pleasure” could mean God’s pleasure, which is called a torrent (Prov 18:4: “The fountain of wisdom is like an overflowing stream”), because his will is so efficacious that, like a torrent, it cannot be resisted (Rom 9:19: “For who resists his will?”)
Such refreshment is a matter of being joined to the source, and as those who keep their mouths at a source of wine will become drunk, so those who keep their mouths, that is, their desire, at the source of life and sweetness are made drunk (1 Cor 11:21: “Another is drunk”). (Thomas Aquinas on Ps 35[36]:9)

[JAK:  I post this, first, to show Aquinas' appreciation of the delights of life in God and, second, to illustrate his method of exegeting the Scriptures by the Scriptures.]

Everything is gratis

Let us love God purely and chastely. A heart is not chaste if it worships God for the sake of reward. What, then, are we to have no reward for worshiping God? Indeed, we shall, but the reward is the very God whom we worship. He himself will be our reward because we shall see him as he is (I Jn 3:2). Consider what reward you will attain. What did our Lord Jesus Christ say to those who love him? “Anyone who loves me will keep my commandments, and whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him” (Jn 14:23). This may seem a small thing to someone who doesn’t love. But if you love, if you sigh for, if you freely [gratis] worship him by whom you were freely [gratis] bought–you had not merited it that he redeemed you–, if you sigh for him as you consider his blessings to you, and if your heart is restless with desire for him, then don’t seek something apart from him: he is enough for you. No matter how greedy you are, he is enough. …
Let me give an example from human marriages of what a chaste heart is in relation to God. In human marriages, a man does not love his wife if he loves her because of her dowry; a woman does not love her husband if she loves him because he gave her something, not even if he gave her something great…. If, then, a husband is freely [gratis] loved if he is chastely loved, and a wife is freely [gratis] loved if she is chastely loved, how is God to be loved, the soul’s true and faithful husband?… Let us love him, then, in such a way that nothing apart from him is loved, and then happens in us what we have said, what we have sung, because here is our voice too: “On whatever day I called on you, behold I came to know that you are my God” [Ps 55[56]:10). This is what it is to invoke God: to invoke him freely [gratis]. (Augustine, EnPs 55, 17; PL 36, 658)

 

[JAK: God’s love for us is gratis, gracious, generous, not given because we earned it. Our love for God is supposed to be gratis [Gratis amandus Deus, he writes elsewhere], because it is not love for the sake of reward. It is hard with a single word to convey these meanings in English.]

“Now is the day of salvation”

The second reading for Ash Wednesday invites us to apply to the season of Lent the words, first, of the prophet and, second, of the apostle: “‘In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you.’ Behold, now is the acceptable time! Behold, now is the day of salvation!” (2 Cor 6:2). Here are two passages in which St. Augustine echoed the theme:

In the first, he has been urging his people not to put off their conversion.

What’s that you say?
“God promised me forgiveness; he’ll give it when I turn back to him.”
Of course he’ll give it when you turn back to him, but why are you not turning back to him?
“Because whenever I turn back, he’ll give it.”
Yes, indeed, when you turn back, he will give it, but when is that “when” of yours? Why is it not today? Why not as you listen to me? Why not when you cry out? Why not when you praise? Let my shouting be a helper on your behalf; let your cry be a witness against you. Why not today? Why not now? (Augustine, Sermon 20, 4; PL 38, 140-41)

That judgment will come…, and you who in this life refused to set your heart right to the rightness of God and to prepare yourself for his right hand where “all the right of heart will be praised,” you will be on his left where you will hear: “Go into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25: 34, 41). And will there be time then to set your heart right? Set it right now, then, brothers and sisters; set it right now. What is stopping you? The Psalm is sung, the Gospel is read, the reader has spoken, the preacher has spoken. The Lord is patient. You sin, and he forgives. You sin again, and he forgives again, and then you add another. How long must God be patient?
You know that God is also just. We frighten because we’re afraid. Teach us not to fear and we won’t frighten you. But God teaches us to fear better than anyone teaches not to fear. For “everyone has feared, and they proclaim the works of God” (Ps 63[64]:10). May God reckon us among those who feared and proclaimed. Because we fear, we are proclaiming to you, brothers and sisters. We see how eager you are to hear the word, how urgently you demand it, how much you love us. The rain is falling on the ground; let it yield grain and not thorns; there’s a barn for grain but fire for thorns. You know what to do with your field, and does God not know what to do with his servant? The rain that falls on the fertile field is welcome, and so is the rain that falls on the thorny field. Will the field that yielded thorns accuse the rain? Will not that rain be a witness at God’s judgement and say, “I fell sweetly on all the fields”? So look at what you’re yielding and consider what’s being prepared for you. If you’re yielding grain, expect the barn; if you’re yielding thorns, expect the fire. But the time for the barn and the time for the fire have not yet come. Prepare now, and you will not be afraid.
We who are speaking to you in Christ’s name are alive, and so are you to whom we are speaking. There is still space and time, is there not, for getting one’s plans right, for changing a wicked life into a good one. If you want it, can it not happen today? If you want it, can it not occur now? What must you buy in order to do it? What medicines do you have to search for? To what Indies must you sail? What ship must you get ready? Change your heart while I’m speaking, and that happens which you have cried for so often and so long, and if it does not happen, the result is eternal punishment. (Augustine, EnPs 63[64], 19; PL 36, 772)

Veterum si! Sapientia no!

Fifty years ago tomorrow, February 22, 1962, there gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica several thousand priests, seminarians (among them your humble servant), and religious, forty-one Cardinals, around a hundred bishops, members of the Roman Curia, the members of the Central Preparatory Commission, and many lay people. Pope John XXIII’s chief purpose in gathering such an imposing audience was to give the clergy an exhortation to prepare themselves and their people for the celebration of the Second Vatican Council whose opening had been announced for October 11, 1962. But this intention was overshadowed by what preceded it when Pope John signed the Apostolic Constitution Veterum sapientia, on the study and use of Latin in the education of priests. (The Latin text can be found here, an English translation here.)

“Behold, I am doing something new!”

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 19, 2006 – Blessed Sacrament

 

There is wisdom in the Church’s choice of today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah to prepare us for the Gospel we have just heard, in which the healing of a paralyzed man is presented as the proof that “the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth.”
It is natural, and not really wrong, to emphasize the importance of that assurance for individual sinners. After all, Jesus was healing and forgiving that individual man, lowered down in front of him by the extraordinary efforts of his friends.

 
But the passage from Isaiah places this individual blessing in the context of a larger blessing that comes to Israel through the ministry of Jesus.

God’s Yes and our Amen

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 19, 2012 – St. John’s

Our second reading has one of those statements that briefly sum up the essential Christian message. In a slightly different translation than the one we heard, it says: “Jesus Christ is the ‘Yes’ pronounced upon all God’s promises; that is why, when we give glory to God, it is through Christ Jesus that we say ‘Amen!’” Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to his promises and the Amen of our thanksgiving. A message echoed each Mass at the end of our great prayer, when we say: “Through him you give us all that is good, and through him, with him, and in him all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever. Amen.”

 
Every blessing we receive comes from Christ.

Touching lepers

Sixth Sunday of the Year – February 12, 2012 – St. John’s

 
Much in the brief story we have just heard may appear foreign to us. Leprosy is very rare among us, and appears to be disappearing elsewhere. We know that it is a disease, what causes it, and how to treat it and prevent it. None of that was known in the time of Jesus. Because of that ignorance, the only way to prevent its spread was to forbid lepers to live in the towns and cities, to isolate them apart in leper colonies or in leprosaria, as is still done even today in some parts of the world. (St. Peter Damien went to the island of Molokai to work among the lepers there.) In ancient Israel leprosy was also considered to render people ritually unclean, and to touch them was to make oneself unclean, too. The passage was easy to the conclusion that the disease was the result of sin and the work of the evil one. Lepers were among the most outcast of people at the time, doomed to wander muffled in a cloak, crying out in warning: “Unclean, unclean!” There was a rabbinic saying that it was harder to heal lepers than to raise the dead.

Meeting Christ on the road

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 5, 2006 – Blessed Sacrament

Our first reading today was taken from the Book of Job and might almost be taken as a classic description of depression: life a drudgery, months of misery, troubled nights, restless sleep, day after day flies by like the wind: “I shall not see happiness again.” The Psalm of response, of course, hastens to reassure us: “The Lord heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds. He tells the number of the stars and calls each by name”–and if the individual stars, then surely he has a care for you, the Psalmist tells the depressed.

But the real counterweight to Job’s complaint is found in our Gospel reading,

Receiving and preaching the Gospel

5TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR – BLESSED SACRAMENT – FEBRUARY 6, 2000

Both New Testament readings emphasize the preaching of the Gospel. St. Paul speaks of his ministry as an obligation placed upon him, which he exercises without claiming the right to live by the effort, doing so in order for him to be able to share in its blessings. That insistence on the duty to preach is heard also in the Gospel where Jesus himself says that this is why he has come: “For this purpose have I come”: to preach the Gospel.
That Gospel, of course, is the good news St. Mark had already summarized as the message of Jesus: “The time has come. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” It is what St. Mark was himself doing by writing his book. Preaching the Gospel for him meant telling the story of the one who announced and brought the Gospel.

This is also what is happening at this and at every liturgy.

Contrasting views of what Vatican II should say

The second phase of the unfolding of Vatican II was the Preparatory Period which ran from November 1960 through to the very eve of the Council’s opening on October 11,1962. During it ten commissions prepared texts for discussion and approval when the fathers assembled in St. Peter’s for the Council proper. It was also the period when the rules for the conciliar deliberations and decisions were drawn up. I have discussed the preparation of the Council in a long chapter in the first volume of the five-volume History of Vatican II, under the title, “The Struggle for the Council during the Preparation of Vatican II (1960-1962).” My title indicates that in the course of the preparation distinct and even contrasting views of what the Council should do and should say became clear and, after revealing themselves here and there in the work of the commissions, openly confronted one another during meetings of the Central Preparatory Commission which had the task of supervising the preparatory work, of reviewing the documents prepared by the various commissions, of recommending emendations, and of judging whether the texts should be submitted to Pope John XXIII for his approval as an agenda for the Council. Although the preparatory commissions had been encouraged to form joint subcommissions to deal with matters that fell under the competence of more than one commission, not much collaborative work was undertaken.

The Preparatory Theological Commission (PTC) in particular resisted the idea that it had to collaborate with other commissions, particularly not with the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) which the PTC dismissed as a mere “information-bureau” for non-Catholic bodies. The PTC reserved all doctrinal matters to its exclusive competence and pledged, in turn, not to involve itself in practical matters. Only the preparatory Liturgical Commission and the SPCU refused this separation and did not hesitate to engage the doctrinal issues that underlay their work. As the commissions began their work in November 1960, certain documents reveal already different visions of the Council.

The following documents illustrate some of these differences:

The plan for the Council drawn up by the Holy Office;Holy Office Plan for Vatican II

The questions proposed to the preparatory commissions; Questions for the Preparatory Commissions

Four brief outlines of documents to be prepared by the PTC; Brief Outlines 1960

Fr. Yves Congar’s counter-proposal for a conciliar agenda; Congar’s plan for the Council

An unpublished paper of mine on the initial work of the PTC;  Preparatory Theological Commission

An essay of mine originally published as “The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the Preparation of Vatican II,” Centro pro Unione Semi-annual Bulletin, 50 (Fall 1996) 11-17. SPCU amd Preparation of Vatican II