Once when I finished Morning Prayer, with it’s rhythm of prayers, Scripture, and song, the Spirit whispered to my heart, “You just participated in the heartbeat of the Resurrected Jesus”. This was a punctuated moment in my growing awareness that such worship is a cosmological reality, that the liturgy of the Church is a gift given by the Spirit to be used by the Spirit to draw people into the blessed cosmic order in which all things are oriented upon the grace and glory of God, an order in which if humans were silent the rocks would nevertheless cry out.

Tragedy is the nature of our existence in this age between the Fall and Kingdom completion, for we indelibly long for and envision a reality beyond what the world and our nature can presently provide. In this age, the best we can hope for by grace is a real but limited good that functions as a living sign that points to a fullness and perfection that will always remain on the horizon. Knowing this enables us to genuinely pursue good while resisting the narcotic call of perfection by which much evil has ironically been wrought throughout the pages of time.

The cross was Jesus’ enthronement. He was beaten, stripped, mocked, and shamed by a crowd who did not know that the shame he displayed in his body on the cross was their own. They only saw a failed messiah and yet Jesus’ seeming defeat was the beginning of his victory which would culminate in his ascension to the Father’s right hand in glory. This misunderstanding continues to this day for many do not get that the cross was the necessary enthronement for the kind of Kingdom he was bringing, and thus many cloak the shame he bore in worldly glory.

With the caveat that I’m intentionally being a bit provocative, I’d like to say that…

Regarding the well being of this country, violence might be necessary, but it’s the violence of Christians being fed to lions in the Colosseum, not the violence of Christians trying to take back Jerusalem in the Crusades.

The Gospel advances through our blood, not theirs.

People who believe in God but don’t believe that creation is teleologically imbued essentially believe in a dumb God, likely a God who merely exists to serve their own purposes. 

Teleology has a troublesome way of pushing back on our disordered desires, and I suspect that this is largely the reason we don’t, and in some instances can’t, see what is there.

As the dawn breaks on Holy Saturday two things come to mind…

Though Adam named all the animals and all creation, he did not name himself.

There are things in your soul that cannot be named for they alone belong to God.

I wonder if the foundational debate undergirding most if not all debates happening in our culture right now is about the definition of freedom: of whether freedom is to pursue one’s proper end, or whether it’s about denying there is a proper end so that one can pursue whatever they want.

A weird and sad expression of my fallenness is the fact that though I am far, far less holy than God is, I am also more judgmental.

I am learning that a critical key to spiritual growth is the realization that your sin is worse than you imagine and that God’s grace is greater than you imagine.

If we’re going to reflect upon the promises and pitfalls of Capitalism in light of the Gospel, we’re going to have distinguish the Hand of God from the Invisible Hand. To distill and paraphrase Catholic Social Teaching recently renewed in the words of Pope Francis, society must not serve markets, markets must serve the common good.