The Creator is "Father," Not Merely "Supreme Being"

Blogger: If God were "Supreme Being," He would be supreme as  a part of creation, and therefore neither Creator nor God. As Transcending Creator, He dreamed of you, as you. Because He transcends, He is totally immanent to the creation - and particularly to you.

The Father Dreamed of You, as Expectant Parents Dream, Pope Says

Posted by ZENIT Staff on 13 October, 2016

Just as expectant parents dream of their child — how he will look and smile and what his name shall be — so the Father has dreamed of us, says Pope Francis. “The Father wanted you, not the mass of people, no — you, you, you. Each of us.”

The Pope said this today at Mass in the Casa Santa Marta, Vatican Radio reported. He was emphasizing that a characteristic of the Christian is that we are “chosen” and that this should give us great security.

“The Christian is blessed by the Father, who is God,” Pope Francis said in his homily, drawing from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Focusing on the “traits of this blessing,” he noted that the Christian is “chosen.” The Father chose us one by one, he loves us and gave us a name, God calls us one by one, “not as an oceanic crowd.”  The Holy Father reiterated, “we have been chosen, expected by the Father:”

“Think of a couple, when expecting a baby: ‘How will it be? And how will he or she smile? And talk? ‘But I dare say that we, each of us, has been dreamed of by the Father as a father and a mother dreams of their awaited baby. And this gives you great security. The Father wanted you, not the mass of people, no, you, you, you. Each of us. And ‘the foundation, is the basis of our relationship with God. We speak of a Father who loves us, who chose us, who gave us a name. ”

It can also be noted, the Pope continued, when a Christian “does not feel chosen by the Father.” But when they feel they belong to a community, “it is like a fan of a football club.” “The fan – Pope Francis commented – is choosing the team and belongs to the football team.”

The Christian, therefore, “is chosen, he or she is a dream from God.” And when we live like this, the Pope added, “our hearts are filled with great consolation,” we do not feel “abandoned.”

“The second part of the Christian blessing is feeling forgiven,” he said. “A man or woman who does not feel forgiven,” the Holy Father cautioned, is not fully “Christian”:

“We have all been forgiven with the price of the blood of Christ. But what have I been forgiven of? It’s a memory and a reminder of the bad things you have done — not your friend, your neighbor, you. ‘What bad things have I done in life?’ The Lord has forgiven these things. Here, I am blessed, I am a Christian. That is, the first part: I am chosen, dreamed by God, with a name that God gave me, loved by God. Second part: forgiven by God. ”

The third part, continued Pope Francis: the Christian “is a man and a woman walking towards fullness, towards an encounter with Christ who redeemed us”:

“A Christian cannot stand still. The Christian must always move forward, he must walk. The Christian who stands still is the Christian who received the talent and for fear of life, fear of losing, fear of his boss, out of fear or convenience, buried it. He is calm and spends his life going nowhere. The Christian is a man on a journey, a woman walking, who are always doing good, trying to do good and going forward.”

This, summed up the Pope, is the Christian identity: “blessed, because they are chosen because they are forgiven and forging a path.”

We, he concluded, ” are not anonymous, we are not proud”, so as not to have “need of forgiveness. “We are not still.”  “May the Lord – in his invocation – be with us through the grace of the blessing he has given us, that is the blessing of our Christian identity.”

This is a classic Robert Barron of hitting the nail on the head and shifting the hammer and nail into the right context. His title is a steal from Joseph Ratzinger at the presentation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church - when asked by the press if the CCC was a document of morality, answered: Yes! But you don't know what a man should do until you know who he is, and you don't know who he is, until you know who God is - and He tell you. Therefore, the CCC is composed of four  parts: Faith and Revelation; Sacraments; morality and --- prayer as the first act of faith. Barron transcends Fulton Sheen in communicating the most profound truth of Jesus Christ in understandable terms.

Knowing Who We Are; Knowing What We Are Supposed to Do

Posted by Bishop Robert Barron on 12 October, 2016

This fall I am giving presentations to all of the high school teachers, staff and administrators in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. These talks take place on an annual basis, and they are dedicated to a regular cycle of topics. This year, the theme is morality. Lucky me! My guess is that disquisitions on doctrine or Church history or pastoral practice wouldn’t raise too many hackles, but ethics is practically guaranteed to rile people up, especially now when issues of same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and assisted suicide are so present to the public consciousness.

I am not sure whether I’m delighting or disappointing my audiences, but I am not ordering my talks to address these hot-button questions. Indeed, it is my conviction that a good deal of mischief and confusion is caused precisely by characterizing Catholic morality primarily as a matrix for adjudicating such matters. A purely rational or deductive approach to controversial ethical choices is largely an exercise in missing the point. For to know how to behave as a Christian is a function of knowing, first, who we are as Christians. Understanding how to act is, if I can pun a little, a function of understanding what play we are in. The great Biblical scholar, N.T. Wright, has said that most of us are like actors who are dressed up for Hamlet, who have memorized all of the right lines from Hamlet, and who thoroughly grasp the thematics of Hamlet. The only problem is that we are in Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, what I am sharing with the good teachers of the L.A. Archdiocese is largely Christian anthropology, a fancy way of saying the articulation of what play we’re in and what role we’ve been given in that production.

Like the great Shakespeare plays, the drama of salvation history consists of five acts: Creation, the Fall, the Formation of Israel, the Coming of the Messiah, and the Church. Comprehending the dynamics of all five acts is indispensable to knowing how to behave. So let’s take things one step at a time. According to the still breathtaking poetic account in the first chapter of Genesis, all created things come forth in an orderly and harmonious manner from the hand of the Creator. Sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth itself, animals, even those things that crawl upon the earth, come into existence as a sort of stately liturgical procession. What the author is showing, first, is that none of these things—all of which at one time or another in the ancient world were the object of worship—is divine. What he is demonstrating, secondly, is that all of them find their purpose in giving praise to the Creator. It is of crucial significance that the final element in the parade—like the last figure in a liturgical procession—is the human being. We are meant to see our identity and our task:  to give praise to God on behalf of all creation. Before the Fall, Adam was the first priest.

So what is the Fall? What takes place in act two is the loss of our priestly identity. Grasping at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we end up worshipping our own egos rather than God, and from this misdirected praise, chaos follows. Things fall apart, both inside and outside, that is to say, in our hearts and in the natural order—and the Garden becomes a desert. Throughout the Bible, the basic problem, though it manifests itself politically, culturally, psycho-dynamically, etc., is always bad praise.

But God does not abandon his people; on the contrary, he sends a rescue operation. Beginning with the covenant with Abraham, God shapes a nation according to his own mind and heart; he teaches a particular tribe to worship him aright, to be his priestly people. His ultimate intention is to use Israel for the instruction of all the nations of the world. Mt. Zion, the locale of the Temple, the place of right worship, is meant to become a magnet to the whole of humanity: “There all the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord” (Psalm 122:4). The entire drama of Israel is the content of act three.

But we hear, over and again, that Israel does not live up to its high calling, that it falls short of its vocation to worship the Lord alone. And so the best and the brightest among the chosen people commence to dream of a Messiah, a figure who would represent the full realization of Israel’s mission and identity. The coming of this anointed one is the central drama of act four. The still startling claim of the first Christians is that Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, is this long-awaited Messiah, the one in whom faithful Yahweh finally meets faithful Israel. Notice, please, how Jesus is consistently presented as a priestly figure. John the Baptist declares him to be the “Lamb of God;” at the climax of his life, he comes into the holy city of Jerusalem and cleanses the Temple, declaring, “I will destroy this place andin three days rebuild it,” referring to the Temple of his own body; and on the cross, bearing the sins of the world, he offers a final priestly sacrifice, offering right praise to his Father and bringing sinful humanity back on line with him. This is precisely why, in the light of the Resurrection, St. Paul would refer to Jesus as “the new Adam,” which is to say, the one who restores the human race to correct praise.

Now, we are ready for act five and the proper context for speaking of morality. Act five is the life and work of the Church. Grafted on to Jesus, members of his mystical body, all of the baptized are meant to do what Jesus did and be who Jesus was. We are meant, as Paul put it, to “offer our bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord.” This implies that we are to turn every aspect of ourselves—our minds, our wills, our personal affairs, our jobs, our recreation, and yes, our sexuality—into acts of worship. To make it more pointed, our bodies and their desires do not belong to us; they are not intended to serve our selfish purposes. They are designed to be turned to God’s purpose, which implies that they be placed under the aegis of love. Now we can understand why the Church is so demanding in regard to sex, why it stands so staunchly athwart divorce, contraception, same-sex marriage, masturbation, etc. It is not because the Church is against sex or against pleasure or against self-determination. It is because the Church is for turning the whole of life into an act of radical love. And its dearest hope is that the very quality of its right praise will attract the whole world to Christ. I realize that it sounds strange to put it this way, but the moral lives of the baptized are not meant finally for them; they are meant to be salt and light for the rest of humanity.

What I’m telling the Catholic high school teachers of L.A. is what I want to tell all Catholics: you won’t know how to behave until you know who you are. And you won’t know who you are until you realize what play you’re in!

I received the following email from Fr. Martin Henehan (Ireland) concerning Donald Trump's letter to  the Catholic Leadership conference in Denver:

Read Donald Trump's letter to Catholic leaders

Oct 6, 2016 (CNA/EWTN News).- 

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wrote a letter to Catholic leaders during a two-day conference in Denver this week, identifying himself as pro-life and vowing to support core values such as religious liberty and school choice.

“I have a message for Catholics: I will be there for you. I will stand with you. I will fight for you,” he wrote Oct. 5. “I am, and will remain, pro-life. I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions.”

Trump's letter was addressed to the 18th Annual Catholic Leadership Conference, being held Oct 4-6 in Denver.

He stated that Catholics are “a rich part of our nation's history” and that “the United States was, and is, strengthened through Catholic men, women, priests and religious Sisters.”

The GOP candidate has met a mixed reaction among Catholics. His commitment to the pro-life cause has been questioned by some advocates, due to his pro-choice statements in 1999 and 2000, as well as his comments during the campaign that his sister Maryanne Trump Barry would be an ideal Supreme Court nominee, despite her striking down New Jersey’s ban on partial-birth abortions as a judge. He has also pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.

While he later said that he is committed to appointing pro-life judges, his earlier statements have left some Catholics wary of his sincerity in being pro-life.

In his letter, Trump pointed to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s extreme pro-abortion record and support for the HHS mandate, which requires many religious non-profits to fund and facilitate abortion and related products against their religious convictions.

“Hillary Clinton supports forcing The Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839, pay [sic] for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate,” Trump wrote.

He added that Clinton “has been hostile to the core issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics: life, religious liberty, Supreme Court nominations, affordable and quality healthcare, educational choice and home schooling.”

The GOP candidate also noted that Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has a 100 percent voting record from the National Abortion Rights Action League and supports same-sex marriage, despite professing to be Catholic.

“On issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics, the differences between myself and Hillary Clinton are stark. I will stand with Catholics and fight for you,” he said. “Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile to these core Catholic issues for a long time, and is only going to be worse with Tim Kaine now following her lead.”

Trump’s commitment to religious freedom has been questioned, due to his proposal for an indefinite ban on allowing Muslims into the U.S. and a potential system of monitoring those already in the country.

And while the GOP candidate says he opposes same-sex marriage, he has attracted criticism from defense-of-marriage groups who note that he has bragged in the past about having affairs with other married women. 

Trump concluded his letter by saying that he “offers a much brighter future for our beloved country” than does Clinton.

The presidential candidate's letter comes amid a tumultuous election season.

Last month, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said he believes “that each candidate is very bad news for our country, though in different ways.”

“One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse control problem. And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities,” the archbishop added.

Donald Trump's Letter

October 5, 2016 Gail Buckley, President Catholic Leadership Conference 9409 Pendennis Lane Charlotte, NC 28210

 Dear Friends: Unfortunately, my schedule precludes me from meeting and talking with you at the Catholic Leadership Conference today in Denver. First, I would like to send my warm greetings to the Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila. In discussions with my Catholic Advisory Group, it is clear Archbishop Aqulia’s leadership in the Denver Archdiocese has been exemplary, as was the leadership of his predecessor, Archbishop Charles Chaput. Second, should I be elected President, I look forward to working with these two respected leaders of the Catholic Church in America, their brother bishops, and Congress, on issues of critical importance to the Catholic Church and Catholics. Catholics in the United States of America are a rich part of our nation’s history. The United States was, and is, strengthened through Catholic men, women, priests and religious Sisters, ministering to people, marching in the Civil Rights movement, educating millions of children in Catholic schools, creating respected health care institutions, and in their founding and helping the ongoing growth of the pro-life cause.

 I have a message for Catholics: I will be there for you. I will stand with you. I will fight for you. As First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State, and two-time presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has been hostile to the core issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics: life, religious liberty, Supreme Court nominations, affordable and quality healthcare, educational choice and home schooling. For instance, Hillary Clinton supports forcing The Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839, pay for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate. That is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump Administration. 

 Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the issues of greatest importance to Catholics is made worse by her running mate Senator Tim Kaine. Once pro-life and against partial birth abortion, Kaine now has a 100% voting record from the National Abortion Rights Action League. Kaine once was for traditional marriage, even saying "it is a uniquely valuable institution that must be preserved", but as of 2013, Kaine no longer supported traditional marriage. And on religious liberty? Shockingly, even Kaine supports forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives in their health care plan, and to have the government fine them heavily if they refuse. On issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics, the differences between myself and Hillary Clinton are stark. I will stand with Catholics and fight for you. Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile to these core Catholic issues for a long time, and is only going to be worse with Tim Kaine now following her lead. On life, I am, and will remain, pro-life. I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions. I will make absolutely certain religious orders like The Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs. I will protect and work to expand educational choice, the rights of homeschooling families, and end Common Core. I will repeal and replace Obamacare so you can have better and more affordable health care. I will keep our country and communities safe while respecting the dignity of each human being. I will help Catholic families and workers, and all families and workers, by bringing jobs back to our country where they belong. And I will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench, like Justice Clarence Thomas and the late and beloved great Catholic thinker and jurist, Justice Antonin Scalia. We are at a crossroads in our country. Much like 1980. But the stakes are higher now - the highest they have ever been. We have two candidates representing entirely different agendas for our country that will take it in two completely different directions for generations to come. And our direction offers a much brighter future for our beloved country. Thank you for giving me the time to share my thoughts with you on some of the critical issues facing us today. Please keep me and my family in your prayers. God bless you and may God bless the United States of America. 

Sincerely Yours,

Donald J. Trump

I am in another computer without the password for wordpress, so I want to try this (blogspot) again hoping I can post from here.

 Today is August 5 and feast of Our Lady of the Snows - the first Marian basilica of the West in honor of the Council of Ephesus. Ephesus is the magisterial proclamation of metaphysical Christology in that Christ is duly affirmed to have a total and complete human nature. He is truly man as He was affirmed to be truly God in Nicea. This is the harbinger in 431 of Chalcedon in 451 that will solemnly pronounce Christ to be only one divine Person with two ontologically distinct natures, the divine and the human. What is exciting about this is the following christological council of Constantinople III that explains the relation of the two natures - which is really the explanation of the relation of uncreated to created [consider grace/nature, faith/reason, church/state...]  This is supremely important in that the two natures, which are ontologically distinct and not suppressed or diminished in any way by their assumption by the Person of Christ, are not in parallel but "one" (not united extrinsically) personally. 
   The key is this: the divine Person of the Logos (the Person of Christ, the only Son of the Father) assumes the human nature (which is complete) and is in no way diminished, damaged or suppressed, but rather enhanced precisely as human. And this because it exists with the esse of the Person of the Son. Hence, the created human will of Christ, is capable of bearing - in its humanity - the total gift of Self Which is the ontological, Trinitarian status of the Son of the Father. That is , the union of the divine and the human can be found only in the person in the act of self giving. I refer to Arwen to Aragorn.

   The fundamental insight for this is to realize that wills don't will. Only persons will. St. Thomas: "Actiones sunt suppositorum." "Will" is an abstraction of the acting person. We speak of a person willing. But we are talking about a person transcending self. So, in our case, the divine Person lives out His transcendence as obedience to the Father through the mediation of His created and assumed humanity. What's the basis for such lucubration? John 6, 38: "I have come down from heaven, not to do my [human will], but the will of Him who sent me."
 
We have here on this feast the dynamic Christology of the self-gift which is the prototype and meaning of Christological anthropology and the meaning of man, the acting person.

I've just revisited this blogspot page and looked at the stats. They seem to say that people keep coming to blogspot although I'm not putting anything new on it. Like yesterday I found

Pageviews today

8

Pageviews yesterday

126

Pageviews last month

2,563

 That seems better than what's going on in "actingpersonblog.wordpress.com," but I haven't put anything here on blogspot since April. Take a look at "actingperson....." and see if there's anything there of use to you. And if anyone is coming to this page, there's nothing new since I've been aimiing at the wordpress blog. Fr. Bob

I'm glad to let you know that I've been modernized, and after receiving much advice, I've decided to move my blog to another platform.

You can find my stuff on www.actingpersonblog.wordpress.com and you can follow me on facebook www.facebook.com/actingpersonblog. I am writing this on June 20, and I don't know if the new blog and pictures is any help.

I'm trying to learn how to post the pictures that are worth 1,000 words. I put up Bp. Barron on Pope Francis' Amoris Laetitia which is very helpful  I'm sure he will have more to say. And I will have something to say after this. Thanks for putting up with the inconvenience for the switch. Fr. Bob

Barron: Amoris Laetitia

On a spring day about five years ago, when I was rector of Mundelein Seminary, Francis Cardinal George spoke to the assembled student body. He congratulated those proudly orthodox seminarians for their devotion to the dogmatic and moral truths proposed by the Church, but he also offered some pointed pastoral advice. He said that it is insufficient simply to drop the truth on people and then smugly walk away. Rather, he insisted, you must accompany those you have instructed, committing yourself to helping them integrate the truth that you have shared. I thought of this intervention by the late Cardinal often as I was reading Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. If I might make bold to summarize a complex 264-page document, I would say that Pope Francis wants the truths regarding marriage, sexuality, and family to be unambiguously declared, but that he also wants the Church’s ministers to reach out in mercy and compassion to those who struggle to incarnate those truths in their lives. 

In regard to the moral objectivities of marriage, the Pope is bracingly clear. He unhesitatingly puts forward the Church’s understanding that authentic marriage is between a man and a woman, who have committed themselves to one another in permanent fidelity, expressing their mutual love and openness to children, and abiding as a sacrament of Christ’s love for his Church (52, 71). He bemoans any number of threats to this ideal, including moral relativism, a pervasive cultural narcissism, the ideology of self-invention, pornography, the “throwaway” society, etc. He explicitly calls to our attention the teaching of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae regarding the essential connection between the unitive and the procreative dimensions of conjugal love (80). Moreover, he approvingly cites the consensus of the recent Synod on the Family that homosexual relationships cannot be considered even vaguely analogous to what the Church means by marriage (251). He is especially strong in his condemnation of ideologies that dictate that gender is merely a social construct and can be changed or manipulated according to our choice (56). Such moves are tantamount, he argues, to forgetting the right relationship between creature and Creator. Finally, any doubt regarding the Pope’s attitude toward the permanence of marriage is dispelled as clearly and directly as possible: “The indissolubility of marriage—‘what God has joined together, let no man put asunder’ (Mt 19:6) —should not be viewed as a ‘yoke’ imposed on humanity, but as a ‘gift’ granted to those who are joined in marriage...” (62).

In a particularly affecting section of the exhortation, Pope Francis interprets the famous hymn to love in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (90-119). Following the great missionary Apostle, he argues that love is not primarily a feeling (94), but rather a commitment of the will to do some pretty definite and challenging things: to be patient, to bear with one another, to put away envy and rivalry, ceaselessly to hope. In the tones of grandfatherly pastor, Francis instructs couples entering into marriage that love, in this dense and demanding sense of the term, must be at the heart of their relationship. I frankly think that this portion of Amoris Laetitia should be required reading for those in pre-Cana other similar marriage preparation programs in the Catholic Church. Now Francis says much more regarding the beauty and integrity of marriage, but you get my point: there is no watering down or compromising of the ideal in this text.

However, the Pope also honestly admits that many, many people fall short of the ideal, failing fully to integrate all of the dimensions of what the Church means by matrimony. What is the proper attitude to them? Like Cardinal George, the Pope has a visceral reaction against a strategy of simple condemnation, for the Church, he says, is a field hospital, designed to care precisely for the wounded (292). Accordingly, he recommends two fundamental moves. First, we can recognize, even in irregular or objectively imperfect unions, certain positive elements that participate, as it were, in the fullness of married love. Thus for example, a couple living together without benefit of marriage might be marked by mutual fidelity, deep love, the presence of children, etc. Appealing to these positive marks, the Church might, according to a “law of gradualness,” move that couple toward authentic and fully-integrated matrimony (295). This is not to say that living together is permitted or in accord with the will of God; it is to say that the Church can perhaps find a more winsome way to move people in such a situation to conversion.

The second move—and here we come to what will undoubtedly be the most controverted part of the exhortation—is to employ the Church’s classical distinction between the objective quality of a moral act and the subjective responsibility that the moral agent bears for committing that act (302). The Pope observes that many people in civil marriages following upon a divorce find themselves in a nearly impossible bind. If their second marriage has proven faithful, life-giving, and fruitful, how can they simply walk out on it without in fact incurring more sin and producing more sadness? This is, of course, not to insinuate that their second marriage is not objectively disordered, but it is to say that the pressures, difficulties, and dilemmas might mitigate their culpability.  Here is how Pope Francis applies the distinction: “Hence it is can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace” (301). Could the Church’s minister, therefore, not help such people, in the privacy of the rectory parlor or the confessional, to discern their degree of moral responsibility? Once again, this is not to embrace a breezy “anything-goes” mentality, nor to deny that a civil marriage after a divorce is objectively irregular; it is to find, perhaps, for someone in great pain, a way forward.

Will Amoris Laetitia end all debate on these matters? Hardly. But it does indeed represent a deft and impressive balancing of the many and often contradictory interventions at the two Synods on the Family. As such, it will be of great service to many suffering souls who come to the Field Hospital.

The Ultimate Reality: Jesus Christ, and Therefore, The Epistemic Trump.

All authentic indicators point to Jesus Christ - God Man - as the ontological center of all that is.  Therefore, Christ is the Epistemic Trump and only key to authentic Knowledge. 1) Joseph Ratzinger: " Psalm 18... It begins like this: “In aeternum, Domine, verbum tuum constitutum est in caelo... firmasti terram, et permanet”. This refers to the solidity of the Word. It is solid, it is the true reality on which we must base our life. Let us remember the words of Jesus who continues the words of this Psalm: “Sky and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away”. Humanly speaking, the word, my human word, is almost nothing in reality, but a breath. As soon as it is pronounced, it disappears. It seems like nothing. But already the human word has incredible force. It is words that create history, it is words that form thoughts, the thoughts that create the word. It is the word that forms history, reality.       "Even more, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our notion that matter, solid things, things we can touch, is the most solid, the most certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of one’s life: sand and rock. He who builds on sand only builds on visible and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day will vanish. We can see this now with the fall of two large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. Who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is he who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is he who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life" (Keynote Address, Synod on the Word of God, October 6, 2008). 2) Robert Barron (commenting on Col. 1, 15): “In this Jesus, all things have come to be; he is the prototype of all finite existence, even of those great powers that transcend the world and govern human affiars. If we re tempted to understand his influence as only a thing of the past, we are corrected: 'in him all things hold together' v. 17).  Jesus is not only the one in whom things were created but also the one in whom they presently exist and through whom they inhere in one another. And if we are inclined to view the future as a dimension of creation untouched by Christ, we are set straight: ‘Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’(v. 20). Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him. Mind you, Jesus is not merely the symbol of an intelligibility, coherence, and reconciliation  that can exist apart from him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all reconciling Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and space;" "The Priority of Christ" Brazos (2007) 134-135.  3) Romano Guardini: "The person of Jesus is unprecedented and therefore measurable by no already existing norm. Christian recognition consists of realizing that all things really began with Jesus Christ; that he is his own norm - and therefore ours - for he is Truth.    Christ's effect upon the world can be compared with nothing in its history save its own creation: 'In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.' What takes place in Christ is of the same order  as the original act of creation, though on a still higher level. For the beginning of the new creation is as far superior to the love which created the stars, plants, animals and men. That is what the words mean: 'I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be kindled"' (Luke 12, 49). It is the fire of new becoming; not only 'truth' or 'love,' but the incandescence of new creation" ["The Lord" Henry Regnery (1954) 306-307] Barron's Conclusion: “Now what follows from these breathtaking descriptions is a centrally important epistemic claim: that Jesus cannot be measured by a criterion outside of himself or viewed from a perspective higher than himself.”[1] Blogger: That is, you cannot apply a metaphysic of “being” taken “from below” – i.e. from the experience of the created world [except the created human person going out of himself]. And this because there cannot be any created things without the Creator. The Being of God and the being of things have two totally different meanings save that they are (or can be). Barron writes: “He cannot be understood as one object among many or surveyed blandly by a disinterested observer. If such perspectives were possible, then he would not be the all-grounding Word or the criterion than which no more final can be thought. If we sought to know him in this way, we would not only come to incorrect conclusions but also involve ourselves in a sort of operational contradiction. To be consistent with these accounts, we must say that Jesus determines not only what there is to be known (since he is the organizing principle of finite being) but also how we are to know what is to known (since the mind itself is a creature, made and determined through him).                 “A Christ-illumined mind in search of Christ-determined forms seems to be the epistemology implicit in Colossians and the Johannine prologue. Further, as Bruce Marshall has argued, this primacy implies that the narratives concerning Jesus must, for Christians, be an epistemic trump, that is to say, an articulation of reality that must hold sway over and against all rival articulations, be they scientific, psychological, sociological, philosophical, or religious. To hold to Colossians and the prologue to John is to have a clear negative criterion concerning all claims to ultimate truth: whatever runs contrary to the basic claims entailed in the narratives concerning Jesus must certainly be false.”[2] [1]Ibid 135. [2]Ibid And now, Richard Rohr:  Dying and Living in Christ Thursday, April 7, 2016

Paul uses the phrase en Christo, in Christ, around seventy times. He's trying to describe this larger life in which we are participating. He speaks of belonging to Christ, of being possessed by Christ, captured by Christ, apprehended by Christ. He says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). Paul speaks of being clothed by Christ. He tells us to put on Christ. He says he suffers with Christ, he's crucified with Christ, he dies with Christ, he's buried with Christ. He's raised up with Christ, he lives with Christ, and Paul says he's making up in his body the afflictions which still must be undergone by Christ. Paul writes, "All belongs to you, you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God" (see 1 Corinthians 3:21-23). He's grasping at mystical language for describing how we participate in this reality that is larger than our individual lives. Being "in Christ" will eventually lead us to join in the universal pattern of death and resurrection that Christ went through. This is the universal initiation experience, the transformative experience that all human beings go through whereby we come to know what's real. We must go into the death of the small self in order to discover the Big Self, the True Self. At the mystical level, all the world religions say this. In contemplation we're consciously choosing to let go of our identification with our mind and our identification with our life situation or our false self so that we can fall into the One True Life, which is bigger than each of us, which is moving into a different body, a different state, a different consciousness that Christians call Christ consciousness. For Paul it is his participation in Christ which gives him the courage to walk through each state: passion, death, and resurrection--all of which are brought to focus in the life of Jesus. Most people were told to love Jesus without being invited to love Christ. "The Christ" is the Big Picture of God's enfleshment in all of creation since the beginning of time (Colossians 1:15-20); Jesus is the distilled, personal enfleshment that brings this primal "anointing" of the material world to one concrete loving and loveable moment.

Dying To Self

Dying to Self Wednesday, April 6, 2016

In truth, we must change our very self-image rather than just be told some new things to see or do. To be a Christian is to objectively know that we share the same identity that Jesus enjoyed as both human and divine, which is what it means to "follow" him. In fact, I believe that this is the whole point of the Gospel and the Incarnation! (Read John 14 and 15 in their entirety, lest you think I am overstating my position; or study the early Fathers and Mothers of the Eastern Church, who understood this much more clearly than the Western Church.) This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own. Afterward, we know in a different way, although we have to keep relearning this truth over and over again (the point of daily prayer). But it demands a major dying of our own small self, our ego. Maybe that's why so few go there. As Jesus clearly puts it, one "self" must die for another "Self" to be born. That message is quite explicit in all four Gospels (Matthew16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:24). In the practical order, this mostly feels like taking my "self," my ego--both its hurts and its importance, which are largely manufactured by my mind--less seriously day by day. Growth in salvation is growth in liberation from the separate self and falling into ourfirst nature, which is our "foundational holiness" or original, ontological union with God. God has always--and only--been in union with an obviously imperfect humanity. That is the essential character of divine mercy. Salvation is always pure and total gift from God's side. Living and thinking autonomously, separately, or cut off from such a Vine or Source is what Paul means by being foolish and unspiritual. Living in union is wisdom. One must fully recognize that mystics like Francis and Clare were speaking from this place of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God, and such union was realized by surrenderingto it and not by any achieving of it. Surrender to Another, participation in Another, and divine union are finally the same thing. Once we are aware that we participate in this union, we look out at reality from a much fuller Reality that now has eyes beyond and larger than our own. This is what it means to "live in Christ" (en Christo), to pray "through Christ," or to do anything "in the name of God," phrases with which Christians are quite familiar. Rohr

Deals Make Contracts; Covenants Engender Identities

How Covenants Make Us

David Brooks APRIL 5, 2016

When you think about it, there are four big forces coursing through modern societies. Global migration is leading to demographic diversity. Economic globalization is creating wider opportunity but also inequality. The Internet is giving people more choices over what to buy and pay attention to. A culture of autonomy valorizes individual choice and self-determination.

All of these forces have liberated the individual, or at least well-educated individuals, but they have been bad for national cohesion and the social fabric. Income inequality challenges economic cohesion as the classes divide. Demographic diversity challenges cultural cohesion as different ethnic groups rub against one another. The emphasis on individual choice challenges community cohesion and settled social bonds.

The weakening of the social fabric has created a range of problems. Alienated young men join ISIS so they can have a sense of belonging. Isolated teenagers shoot up schools. Many people grow up in fragmented, disorganized neighborhoods. Political polarization grows because people often don’t interact with those on the other side. Racial animosity stubbornly persists.

Odder still, people are often plagued by a sense of powerlessness, a loss of efficacy. The liberation of the individual was supposed to lead to mass empowerment. But it turns out that people can effectively pursue their goals only when they know who they are — when they have firm identities.

Strong identities can come only when people are embedded in a rich social fabric. They can come only when we have defined social roles — father, plumber, Little League coach. They can come only when we are seen and admired by our neighbors and loved ones in a certain way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”

You take away a rich social fabric and what you are left with is people who are uncertain about who they really are. It’s hard to live daringly when your very foundation is fluid and at risk.

We’re not going to roll back the four big forces coursing through modern societies, so the question is how to reweave the social fabric in the face of them. In a globalizing, diversifying world, how do we preserve individual freedom while strengthening social solidarity?

In her new book “Commonwealth and Covenant,” Marcia Pally of N.Y.U. and Fordham offers a clarifying concept. What we want, she suggests, is “separability amid situatedness.” We want to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living. But we also want to be situated — embedded in loving families and enveloping communities, thriving within a healthy cultural infrastructure that provides us with values and goals.

Creating situatedness requires a different way of thinking. When we go out and do a deal, we make a contract. When we are situated within something it is because we have made a covenant. A contract protects interests, Pally notes, but a covenant protects relationships. A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love: Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people.

People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts. Out of love of country, soldiers offer the gift of their service. Out of love of their craft, teachers offer students the gift of their attention.

The social fabric is thus rewoven in a romantic frame of mind. During another period of national fragmentation, Abraham Lincoln aroused a refreshed love of country. He played upon the mystic chords of memory and used the Declaration of Independence as a unifying scripture and guide.

These days the social fabric will be repaired by hundreds of millions of people making local covenants — widening their circles of attachment across income, social and racial divides. But it will probably also require leaders drawing upon American history to revive patriotism. They’ll tell a story that includes the old themes. That we’re a universal nation, the guarantor of stability and world order. But it will transcend the old narrative and offer an updated love of America.

In an interview with Bill Maher last month, Senator Cory Booker nicely defined patriotism by contrasting it with mere tolerance. Tolerance, he said, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means “love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”

That emotion is what it means to be situated in a shared national life.

Feast of the Annunciation – April 4, 2016 (because Good Friday and the Annunciation of Our Lady fell on the same day: the date of the Incarnation of God and the date of His death].

1)      Our Lady is the first Christian believer. What she has done is the meaning of Christian faith. The absence of sin in her made her capable of saying “Yes” to the invitation to receive God in her, and to give Him a complete humanity. All the humanity of Christ [soul, body, faculties of intellect and will, etc.] are all from her. Not that she creates the soul of Christ, but the egg from her and therefore all the DNA must have an organizing principle reasoned to by the Greeks, and that must be present for the material of the body to be body.  The soul, however, is not the Person. The soul is created; the Person is uncreated. The gift that she was asked to give was her entire humanity. Any demurral in her faith would have meant a lack in Christ’s humanity, which would have jeopardized a full redemption.

2)      Consider that Christ wants to be incarnated  again  - and over and over again – throughout history in each one of us. If you make the same gift of yourself as she, and you therefore become Ipse Christus, Creation has achieved the fullness of its meaning.

3)      This act of faith is not ideological but anthropological. Faith is not a book you can put in your pocket. It is a living act of divinization whereby you become what you were meant to be: God as Son of God, “another Christ.” Faith as obedience set the Jews apart as “the People of God.” It creates a culture, a people. Sokolowski writes:

“The Jewish religious understanding was centered on Yahweh, who was taken to be different from any of the gods worshipped by other nations. The understanding, however, did not concern only God; it also concerned God as having elected Israel and as having made a Covenant with them, a Covenant that raised them to responsibility and obligation and not just to privilege. The understanding was about God in his actions, about the people toward whom he acts, and about the world as a setting for these actions. In all this the Jews sharply distinguished themselves and their God from other people and their gods; indeed, the myriad distinctions enjoined by the Torah – between different kinds of animals and different kinds of food, different periods of time, different forms of clothing and utensils – may have been not just ceremonial rubrics or practices useful for preserving health and public order; they may have served as a training for the Jews in the very habit of seeing that this is not that, so that they would be all the more able to realize that ‘they, the other nations, are not ‘us,’ because their ‘gods’ are not Yahweh…

                NOW, “Within this Jewish tradition, which had already distinguished itself so sharply from the others, another distinction was drawn when Christ and his Church appeared. The new distinction, between the New Covenant and the Old, was not like that between Israel and the Gentiles. The God of the New Covenant is the same as that of the Old. The Father whom Jesus addresses is not somehow the truth of which Yahweh is only the shadow: the Father by whom and from whom Jesus was sent is Yahweh, And yet a slight new distinction is drawn between the God  who could not eer become part of this creation – it would be degrading to hm and blasphemous to make him part of what he created – and the God who became incarnate. It isnot just that we must now distinguish between the Father and the Son, but that we must now distinguish a deeper sense of the divinity, a deeper sense of the Godhead. It is not another and different God, as Yahweh is other than and different from the ‘elohim, from Baal and Moloch and Zeus, but it is the same God newly understood. No new proper name is revealed, but Yahweh is now called Father in a distinctive way; he is called Father instead of being called Yahweh. There is a change in the way the transcendence of God is understood. Not only does God create the world and sustain it, not only does God act toward his people, but he also enters into his creation, without diminishing his divinity. He is so transcendent that even this will not compromise the God-head. The Old Covenant educated Israel in the transcendence of God by preventing any embodiment of the divinity, even any image of it. This pedagogy was necessary to distinguish Yahweh from the gods of the Gentiles. But in Christ the New Covenant shows that God could become incarnate, that he could humble himself and take on the form of fallen man and become obedient even to death on the cross, and this humiliation, rather than dishonoring the divine majesty, showed forth its glory in a way that no other act of power could have done.[1]

---

[1] Robert Sokolowski, “Eucharistic Presence,” CUA (1994) 144-147.

I Just Visited Mimi Silbert's Delancy Street in San Francisco and It Taught Fr. Paul Donlan, Fr. Mark Manion and Myself that the Following Text of Richard Rohr Holds For Us

Rohr

In Need of Mercy Thursday, March 31, 2016

Why does the Bible, and why does Jesus, tell us to care for the poor and the outsider? Is it first of all because people need help? Maybe, but I believe it has a much deeper genius. We are the ones who need to move into the worlds of powerlessness for our own conversion! We need to meet people whose faith, patience, and forgiveness tell us we are still in the kindergarten of love. We need to be influenced by people who are happy without having all the things we think are essential to happiness. When we are too smug and content, we really have little need for the Gospel, so we make Christianity into pious devotions that ask nothing of us and do nothing for the world. We are never in need of forgiveness because we have constructed a world that allows us to always be right and "normal." We are highly insulated from the human situation. When we are self-sufficient, our religion will be corrupt because it doesn't understand the Mystery of how divine life is transferred, how people change, how life flows, how we become something more, and how we fall into the great compassion. Only vulnerable people change. Only vulnerable people change others. Jesus presented us with an icon of absolute vulnerability, and said, "Gaze on this until you get the point. Gaze on this until you know what God is like!" That demanded too much of us, so we made the cross instead into a juridical transaction between Jesus and God ("substitutionary atonement theory"), which in great part robbed the cross of its deep transformative power. It has been said that religion is largely filled with people who are afraid of hell, and spirituality is for people who have gone through hell. As all initiation rites say in one way or another:you have to die before you die, and then you know. Jesus is always on the side of the crucified ones. Jesus is what mythology called a "shape-shifter." He changes sides in the twinkling of an eye to go wherever the pain is. He is not loyal to one religion, to this or that group, or to the worthy; Jesus is loyal to suffering! Do you realize that takes away all of our usual group-think? Jesus is just as loyal to the suffering of Iraqi and Russian soldiers as he is to the suffering of American and British soldiers. He grabs all our boundaries away from us, and suddenly we are forced to see that we are a universal people. Most people do not like being that exposed and that shared. Yes, God is on the side of the pain, and goes wherever the pain is (which is abundantly clear in the Gospels). We can no longer preempt Jesus for our own group, religion, or country. People seeking power cannot use him for their private purposes. He belongs to the powerless.   A lawyer who joined the Catholic Church and then became a Franciscan said to me one day, "You know, this Church is harder and harder for me to understand. We claim to have the perfect medicine, the healing power to restore and renew hearts and souls, but we seem to say in the same breath, 'But make sure you don't really need it! Because if you really need it, you are a less than ideal member!'"   Too often it seems forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, and healing are mere concessions, carefully doled out, to those unfortunate sinners and outsiders, instead of the very path of salvation itself. Thank God, we live in a time where we have a Pope who is shouting mercy from the housetops--for everybody who needs it and wants it. Desire is the only pre-requisite. Some cardinals and bishops who apparently don't think they need mercy are very stingy and regulatory in handing it on to others. What does not come around, does not go around, it seems.

The Disturbing Fact of the Resurrection

“If Jesus was not raised from death, Christianity is a fraud and a joke; if he did rise from death, then Christianity is the fullness of God’s revelation, and Jesus must be the absolute center of our lives. There is no third option”

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs, and all the Christian faithful should leave their churches immediately. As Paul himself put it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” It’s no good, of course, trying to explain the resurrection away or rationalize it as a myth, a symbol, or an inner subjective experience. None of that does justice to the novelty and sheer strangeness of the Biblical message. It comes down finally to this: if Jesus was not raised from death, Christianity is a fraud and a joke; if he did rise from death, then Christianity is the fullness of God’s revelation, and Jesus must be the absolute center of our lives. There is no third option.

I want to explore, very briefly, a handful of lessons that follow from the disquieting fact of the Resurrection. First, this world is not it. What I mean is that this world is not all that there is. We live our lives with the reasonable assumption that the natural world as we’ve come to know it through the sciences and discern it through common sense is the final framework of our lives and activities. Everything (quite literally, everything) takes place within the theater of our ordinary experience. And one of the most powerful and frightening features of the common-sense world is death. Every living thing dies and stays dead. Indeed, everything in the universe, scientists tell us, comes into being and then fades away permanently.

But what if this is not in fact the case? What if the laws of nature are not as iron-clad as we thought? What if death and dissolution did not have the final say? What if, through God’s power and according to his providence, a “new heavens and a new earth” were being born? The resurrection of Jesus from the dead shows as definitively as possible that God is up to something greater than we had imagined or thought possible. And therefore we don’t have to live as though death were our master and as though nihilism were the only coherent point of view. After he had encountered the risen Christ, Paul could even taunt death: “Where is your sting?” In light of the resurrection, we can, in fact, begin to see this world as a place of gestation, growth and maturation toward something higher, more permanent, more splendid.

Here’s a second lesson derived from the resurrection: the tyrants know that their time is up. Remember that the cross was Rome’s way of asserting its authority. Roman authorities declared that if you run afoul of our system, we will torture you to death in the most excruciating (ex cruce, from the cross) way possible and then we will leave your body to waste away being devoured by the beasts of the field. The threat of violence is how tyrants up and down the centuries have always asserted their authority. Might makes right. The crucified Jesus appeared to anyone who was witnessing the awful events on Calvary to be one more affirmation of this principle: Caesar always wins in the end.

But when Jesus was raised from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians knew that Caesar’s days were numbered. Jesus had taken the worst that the world could throw at him and he returned, alive and triumphant. They knew that the Lord of the world was no longer Caesar, but rather someone whom Caesar had killed but whom God had raised from death. This is why the risen Christ has been the inspiration for resistance movements up and down the centuries. In our own time we saw how deftly John Paul II wielded the power of the cross in Communist Poland. Though he had no nuclear weapons or tanks or mighty armies, John Paul had the power of the resurrection, and that proved strong enough to bring down one of the most imposing empires in the history of the world. Once again, the faculty lounge interpretation of resurrection as a subjective event or a mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want, for it poses no real threat to them.

The third great lesson of the resurrection is that the path of salvation has been opened to everyone. Paul told us that “though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself and took the form of slave…accepting even death, death on a cross.” In a word, Jesus went all the way down, journeying into pain, despair, alienation, even godforsakenness. He went as far as you can go away from the Father. Why? In order to reach all of those who had wandered from God. Then, in light of the resurrection, the first Christians came to know that, even as we run as fast as we can away from the Father, all the way to godforsakenness, we are running into the arms of the Son. The opening up of the divine life allows everyone free access to the divine mercy. And this is why the Lord himself could say, “When the Son of Man is lifted up, he will draw all people to himself,” and why Paul could assert in 1 Corinthians, “When everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all.” The resurrection shows that Christ can gather back to the Father everyone whom he has embraced through his suffering love.

So on Easter Sunday, let us not domesticate the still stunning and disturbing message of resurrection. Rather, let us allow it to unnerve us, change us, set us on fire.

Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.