Computer's on the fritz...

...and we just had a three-day weekend, one day of which I spent with students at a bazaar, discipling my friend, and then digging the Taichung jazz festival, and another day, yesterday, which I spent chilling at Sun Moon Lake. My school only, though, had Monday off since it's our 50th anniversary.

Thanks, all, for your comments, and prayers.

Reverse triumphalism

So a few weeks ago, I go into confession with Fr. John. I'm kneeling and he's donning his vestments before approaching the confessional. At the same time, he tells me the following anecdote: one time a woman came in for confession, knelt at the divider and proceeded to confess... while Fr. John was still getting ready in the back room. Hearing a voice, he entered, unnoticed, allowed her to continue, unawares, and then absolved her. Realize, I hear this hilarious little tale only moments before I'm about to confess my sins to Almighty God... and I couldn't help but laugh. I simply shook with muffled laughter! It was such a bizarre and wondrous scene: I entered contrite, then found myself chuckling at the kneeler and then resumed contrition, to find myself, grace of graces, absolved by the Almighty. It was all so quirky, so human, and yet so powerfully holy – as such, it was a quintessentially Catholic moment.

Later toward the very end of the same Mass, Mark is doing announcements, while his six-year-old pistol of a daughter is rocking back and forth with her spindly arms on the front-pew divider. All of a sudden, with Mark forming a sentence into the mike, she pulls herself forward into a complete head-over-heels flip and crashes down under the first pew. We all jumped and stared, jaws gaping. Not hearing any crying or groans, Mark glared, actually quite benignly (perhaps not the first time...?), and his little firecracker stood to brush her hair out of her face, which now wore a dazed, calculating look over its previous jocularity. For better or for worse, another Catholic moment.

Finally, in the foyer downstairs after this same mad-cap Mass, we're all mingling eating Moon Festival pizza. Fr. John decides to tell me one more little tale: years ago, maybe in Vietnam, his home, or in Taiwan, or the USA, I'm not sure, he saw a young girl enter the church and stand in line before the confessional. He knew she wasn't baptized and her family wasn't even Catholic, so he asked her, "Why are you waiting? This is for grown-up Catholics."

"I'm waiting," she said, "for the toilet too."

Cue once again the indefatigable humanness of life in the Catholic Church.

Oddly enough, the next day or so my dad emails me with his own crazy Catholic tale from the same weekend: a burly man in dark baggy clothes barges into the chapel, surges up to the altar, slams his fists on the table, and then hurries straight back to the confessional, booze and sweat trailing him, where he readies himself to hear confessions.

Impious? Unsettling? Inappropriate? Distracting? You bet, all of them. But, as I say, part of my joy as a Catholic is knowing, in remarkably vivid anecdotes like these, that I have found a home as rumpled and as erratic as I am, a home as vastly idiosyncratic and unpredictable as the species it was established to seek and save. Call it reverse triumphalism. May I boast not only in my weaknesses in Christ, but also in the weaknesses of my fellow Catholics. For in our weaknesses, God's grace is made complete. The devotional high point of the Mass for me comes with these words: "Look not on my sins, O Lord, but on the faith of Your Church." In a similar way, the existential high point of being Catholic reduces, for me, to these words: "Look not on my crippling strengths, O Lord, but on the weaknesses of Your Church." I am cracked; hence, I need a cracked Church; for it is through the cracks that grace soaks in and seeps out.

What God has joined let no man sunder

I was daydreaming this morning about one day writing a book about the East-West Schism. Unoriginal and straightforward enough, right? Well, actually, rather than analyzing the typical factors -- theological methodology, cultural pressures, diplomatic gaffes, crusades, excommunications, heresies and the like -- I wanted to make it a love story, of sorts. Since Christianity is fundamentally a marriage – between Heaven and Earth, between the Sheep and the Shepherd, between the Holy and the Forgiven, between all peoples and the Three Persons at one Table – we must view the Church too as a marital saga. A long, long time ago, the East and the West lived as one married couple. They exchanged theological and financial goods, gave birth to children, learned from each other – and also often wounded each other. At some point, the estrangement grew to be too much, and the couple separated. Yet, mysteriously, they could never be divorced, for God had joined them around that one marital Feast, for better or for worse.

Hence, in telling the story of the Church in East and West, I would like to make my saga a history of exchanged love, both verbal and practical, between these spouses. The rhetorical courtesies bandied about between bishops should not be shelved as outdated customs, but should be re-announced as a sacred deposit of love. Love, after all, is stronger than death, and far stronger than schism. I dream of this history as a movingly humane, and perhaps embarrassingly human, testament in a dispute that is overwhelmingly driven by polemical differences.

Idealistic? You bet your scapulars it is! Naïve? You can bet your bottom antidoro! Simplistic? You can bet your Inter-Communion Ecumenical Comission on it! But, by God, we need such daft naïveté! We need to reverse the “polemical polarity” with a flood of sweet nostalgia, fond memories and loving words between a husband and wife who, for now, can only tolerate to live in separate houses. How silly it is to say we deem the other to be, techincally, orthodox on this or that point after a prolonged theolgoical examination, when we fail the whole time to proclaim loudly and unabashedly, "I love you in our shared Eucharistic bliss, O Easterner! I love you in our sahred, beloved Jesus, o Westerner!" Far from smothering over differences with sweet words, my (daydreamed!) history aims to put the disputes in the right light, namely, the light of Love.

Eastern Orthodox homework for the week: find out one new fact about the Western Tradition and share it appreciatively with a Catholic. Also, say, "I love you."

Catholic homework for the week: find out one new fact about the Eastern Tradition and share it appreciatively with an Eastern Orthodox. Also, say, "I love you."

Trans trans trans what?

[I was perusing a thread about the Real Presence over at Papal Ponty's and decided to make a few comments in reply to an unabashedly liberal priest ("Spirit of Vatican II"). If I'm reading him aright, SoV2 claims a non-ordained Communion is Christian enough for him, since all transubstantiation really means is the transformation of our worship into a genuine mystical union with the Paschal Mystery. I disagree. I didn't intend it become such a lengthy reply, but there you have it, a lengthy-ish consideration of transubstantiated worship. Let me know what you think.]

There is much to learn from SoV2’s liberal fundamentalism.

First, we see the rigidly exclusionary logic of liberal theology. “Since the Eucharist is a communal celebration transformed into the Paschal Mystery-for-us, then it can’t be anything else, least of all sentimental, outdated, medieval notions of extra-communal Adoration.” Whatever transsignification occurs in the Eucharist does not occur at the exclusion of the real, enduring, substantial Presence of Christ in the Holy Gifts. The Mass effects an enduring transubstantial transsignification, not one element of which precludes the other.

Second, I find it just as ironic (but not delicious like BHM-ref’s tack, rather bitter and nauseating) that while liberal sacramentology always aims to “deepen” or “liberate” our view of the sacraments with (much hipper) talk of "transsignification" and "existential transformation" and "broader truths beneath narrow words" and “entering the paschal mystery” etc., it actually evacuate the Church's *total-ly* Eucharistic nature. By reducing (really, just condescendingly modernizing) "transubstantiation" to the transsignification of a particular ecclesial *action*, such talk actually truncates the Eucharist from the total, enduring, liturgical life of the Church and reduces it to a particular, temporal, anthropological act of the Church, rather than what it is: the ultimate *fulfillment*, the climax, of what the Church is at every moment. Liturgy is (literally) the “public act” of a community driven and filled by an ongoing inner work: the eucharistization[1] of humankind. United on every level of being with Christ the Holy Offering, we ourselves become a holy offering to the Father. The Eucharist, and Eucharistic adoration, is but the maximal exemplar of the Church's fundamental sacramental constitution, a structure which finds expression in numerous other practices. Icons, for example, are not venerable only when they are made, or brought into a church, or held up – all discrete actions – but are venerable at any moment precisely because they are manifestations of Christ ever-present and ever-active in the whole Church. Adoring an icon, therefore, is not a mere, discrete action of the Church or of a Christian, but is a sacramental node, a sudden bulge, of the larger, *ongoing veneration* we give to all things in an ascent to the adoration (latria) of God. So too with the Eucharist: it is not merely adorable in the discrete action of consecration or reception, but rather endures as a temporal, iconic "fixture" of Christ's transtemporal, propitiatory Presence with/in the Church, whole and entire *IN each local church FOR each individual Christian*.

Presumably, SoV2 recognizes the fact we must adore Christ in our hearts before, during and after receiving the Eucharist. As temples of the Holy Spirit, and as people allowing Jesus to cleanse us as His temples, I presume SoV2 recognizes the enduring, substantial Presence of Christ *in us* who have received. His Eucharistic endurance in us is the “fuel” that remains from Mass to Mass; He is the food that never empties as we feed on Him in our hearts; otherwise our theosis proceeds in jumps and starts. We can adore him in our hearts not by mere psychological recall, but in fact because of the perhaps embarrassingly literal fact that Jesus lives, grows and reigns in us, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. But, following SoV2’s thinking, does the Eucharistic Christ-in-us evaporate after we’ve consumed Him and the liturgical dust settles? I doubt he would say this. Hence, why does he deny the perfectly obvious corollary: that because Christ “abides” in the Holy Gifts even beyond the epiclesis, we can adore Christ outside the liturgy. For, just as Christ-abiding-in-us is God’s supreme means of divinizing us, of “Christifying” us, so too is Christ-abiding-in-the-Gifts God’s supreme way of unceasingly sanctifying even the stones and soil that make up a church. As I said, confining the Eucharistic transubstantiation to a temporal liturgical action not only fractures the totality of the Church-as-perpetually-worshipping Body, but also in fact sever our existential, embodied connection to the very places we worship. The church itself, and its grounds, become consecrated as the property of the King who abides there. We do not go to Mass, then, to “conjure Christ” (à la transsignification), but to *encounter* Him as He awaits us in the Gifts He Himself prepared.

Third, SoV2’s scrutinization of Trent’s Latin trees misses its whole sacramental forest. Notice, and notice very well, that Trent, with the Catholic Tradition generally, teaches the adoration of *the Eucharist as realized in the Holy Gifts*, but does NOT teach adoration of the Eucharistic assembly or its discrete actions (which is the view of transubstantiation you expressed). By focusing adoration on the discrete communal action itself, SoV2 has effectively turned the Mass on its head: the actors and the actions become central; the Lord offered to us in the Host becomes peripheral; once "we" are "finished" with our sacramental "act", the Lord wisps away into the heavens again. Precisely by "freeing" Christ from the "beck and call" of transubstantial consecration and adoration, you have actually imprisoned him in our actions.

Finally, it should go without saying, SoV2’s nonchalance about ordained or unordained Eucharistic presiders has not even a toe to stand on in light of the biblico-patristic record. Without a bishop, or his personally commissioned presbyter, there is no Eucharist. Period. Of the non-denom Lord’s Supper he attended, SoV2 says, “I think it was a Eucharist much as Christ intended.” How nice. SoV2 is free to think what he likes about what he likes; despite how much varnish it gets in light of his ordination, SoV2 is not fooling anyone with the sophistical charade of thinking with the Church.

[1] Did I just coin that word? No [as I discovered {bottom} after brief research]! As longtime FCA readers know, I have a penchant for creating (usually unsuccessfully) neologisms, like "the Interneterati". Another miss!

The Holy Mysteries at last!

It took me one week to do the first 60% and then six months to do the rest, but I have done it: here is the whole series for my report on the Sacraments. I began this before I was received into the Church, but only posted up to Anointing. Today I've posted Orders, Marriage and the Epilogue. Fin. I'm nothing if not (even embarrassingly) faithful to my word. Enjoy!

Part 0: Preface

Part I: The Heart of the Mysteries

Part II: Sacramentalism

Part III: Baptism

Part IV: Confirmation

Part V: The Eucharist

Part VI: Confession & Penance

Part VII: Anointing of the Sick

Part VIII: Holy Orders

Part IX: Matrimony

Part X: Epilogue - To Explain the Invitation?

Signs and Wonders: The Holy Sacraments in the Life of One Unholy Christian Man (X)

Epilogue:

The following are some thoughts I wrote to my Evangelical teammates here in Taiwan, in order to prepare them for the Easter Vigil and why non-Catholics cannot receive the Eucharist in Mass. I think they put the Sacraments in the proper context of the grand Sacrament of Salvation, the Church.

The Church is what Christ uses to reach the world today just as Christ was what God used to reach the world “back then.” As His Body, the Church is modeled on our Lord. Since Christ was not merely a spiritual or emotional entity, neither is His Church. Our Lord was a man of flesh and blood, and his grace was communicated precisely through those "mundane" materials. Being formally unified with the Church is as "mundane" and "material" a requirement as touching Jesus' body was to fully encounter Him back in the day. This is the basis for the sacraments themselves: they are the material channels God has given the Church so He can convey His grace into Christians, so that we, in turn, can convey His grace into the world. The sacraments are the “hem” of Christ’s garment, from which His power flows. In the Incarnation, and today in the Church’s sacraments, the materiality is not pitted against the spirituality, nor is formality pitted against faith. The Eucharist is the fullness of Christ's offer to mankind today. Receiving this gift entails mankind be as fully – officially and spiritually – united to His Body as possible. Agreeing to be formally united to the Catholic Church means you agree with its view of the Eucharist and desire to be just as formally and fully united with Christ himself in that gift. The reverse is true as well: desiring to receive Christ in Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity means signing on formally to the Catholic Church (or the Orthodox Churches).

Thus shall my “report” on the Sacraments end. I admit I feel kind of silly “explaining” the Sacraments. They are mysteries. They are existential realities which invite us to encounter God, not to examine them self-referentially. The Sacraments are the grips of God’s grace as we totter or tumble (or dive!) over a sea of sin. And as little as I would “explain” the how and the what of a man’s saving grasp on me as I nearly plummeted off a cliff, so little inclined am I to “understand” the Mysteries as I encounter God in them. Come, let us be on our way!