Don't talk to me...

Don't talk to me of God's love apart from Christ. The cosmos and man's inner world are too much of a mess to salvage that unreconstructed faceless optimism. There is nothing natural in natural theology of that supernatural Gift.

Don't talk to me of God's love in Christ apart from the communion and authority of the Church. The religious landscape is too charred and the testimony of my own solo-wisdom is too myopic to salvage that ecumenical buzz. There is no baby apart from the womb.

Don't talk to me of the Church's fellowship and authority apart from the Mass celebrated in the chain of bishops, chained to a church in the person of a priest. Dogma is an abstraction that only finds flesh in the One True Flesh, Flesh offered up by human hands to human mouths.

Don't talk to me of the Mass apart from Christ's risen and undying offer of Self to Me in the very act of self-depossession, self-release, self-starvation that forms the heart of devout communion. Don't talk to me, that is, of the Eucharist apart from God's love.