I am in Morganton, North Carolina, visiting one of my daughters and family for Christmas vacation.  Daily communicants, such as myself, have a little dilemma on Christmas and New Years – if we go to midnight Mass and there is no daily Mass earlier that day, then we miss one Holy Communion. Some consider such dilemmas to be super-scrupulosity deluxe, but we dailies like to think that it is a special love bond with Jesus never to miss a Holy Communion.  Sort of the way happily married couples feel if the spouse is on a trip. We miss the daily real presence of the beloved.

Anyhow, this year my solution was to go to the Hispanic 8 PM Mass Christmas Eve, and then hang around for the midnight Mass where family members would join me. I thought that being a dedicated widow with an hour of quiet prayer in my rule, extra hours in front of the tabernacle between these Masses would be glorious.

Those hours were glorious, but in a way different from what I expected!

Our town has many Guatamalan immigrants in it. The Church is very small. The Hispanic Mass spilled over into the Hall. When I arrived at 8 PM sharp both the chapel and the hall were stuffed with eager Guatamalan families about 750 strong!  I never cease to wonder how these mothers and fathers never seem rattled if their kiddies are rolling on the floors during Mass.  Sometimes anglos object if such families come to “our” Masses and the parents don’t supervise their kids the way we do.  Fr. Ken points out that, generally, hispanic kids keep coming to Mass when they are older, whereas ours, perhaps because they associate regimentation with Mass, are more likely to drop out. 

Anyhow, I was the only anglo at this 8 PM Mass, since most of us who don’t go to the midnight Mass, go to the 5 PM Mass, also full to the gills for Christmas. Immediately, when one of the younger single men saw the “gringa anciana” standing in the hall, he jumped up and gave me his seat.  I was touched.

After the guitar Mass, I moved to the chapel expecting it to be empty. No way!  For the Hispanics, the Church is their celestial living room.  The priest could hardly get into the parish office to deposit the collection for choir members grabbing him to have their photos taken with him as a Christmas joy. Groups of teen-age boys, dressed to the nines, jumped up to the front of the altar and took photos on their I-pods, I-phones, whatever, of themselves in outrageous merry poses.  Some of the families, however, brought the youngest child and sat him or her right in the large nativity and took photos of that.  An engaged couple posed blissfully before the altar surrounded by well-wishers.   

It was an hour before the Guatamalans cleared out of the chapel.  Soon came the choir practicing for the midnight Mass. This choir is directed by a former concert organist and features glorious music at Holy Communion such as from composers such as Lassus and Victoria.  The serious anglo Midnight Mass group came a half-hour early to be sure to get seats.  The lights dimmed just before the Mass and everyone fell silent.  A gong was rung and then came the chanting of the martyrology. Such a splendid way to signify that ours is not a mythic religion but a historical happening, re-enacted through the centuries. As Kierkegaard used to say “Christianity as a fairy-tale is charming. As a reality, it is terrifying.”  I wondered if Pope Francis was echoing that thought of the Danish Lutheran when he described St. Stephen’s day right after Christmas as manifesting that Christmas is not a fairy-tale! 

“In my house there are many mansions” could be seen as illustrated by the contrast between these 2 Masses.  Like little Therese, I like to say “I take everything.”  Some of us, for many very good reasons, prefer one to the other, but we don’t have to choose.

Meanwhile, our 70 year old plus pastor, the only priest in the parish, hardly slept before getting up for the 6:30 AM Mass. Only about 30 people come to that one, but our priest insists on the liturgical beauty of including this specific dawn liturgy.  After that came another one at 9 AM so that old folks who don’t drive when it is dark would have one to go to.  That is 5 Masses in less than 24 hours.  I love to recount these stories to the seminarians where I teach lest they think their study and prayer schedule now is too taxing.

On a different note: since I am big into simplicity of life in order to give as much as possible to the starving through Mother Teresa’s nuns who surely don’t waste any money on “overhead” administrative costs,  I always find lavish Christmas giving upsetting. The rest of my family have no such priorities and with 10 around the Christmas tree and each present to be opened singly in view of the whole group, with bathroom and snack breaks, this lasted 7 hours!  Each year I vow to spend the following Christmas at a monastery, but love for family always draws me back. 

The day after, my oldest grandson, giver of fantastically funny creative gifts, happened to mention that he was going to the local post-office to give blood. Turns out he donates blood every 3 months and was last told by the organization that runs this that he probably saved 18 lives in the last few years. I lowered my head in shame for my harsh judgments of the gift-giving jamboree.  I give money to the poor, but this young man is giving his life-blood!

When will I learn to rejoice that I have the sheer grace to easily live simply (I hate the up-keep of things anyhow – what you don’t have you don’t have to dust!), and rejoice in what others with grace do easily and cut out the judgment! 

Dear reader,
I feel a need to send a bunch together of the remaining entries made in the year 2013. If they get too lengthy, you can read them slowly on separate days. Smile.

This Advent an old image I have used in talks seemed apt also as a Christmas meditation even if it is a little faulty as a metaphor. I like to explain why daily Mass is so important to me with a questions for the sceptic:

If Jesus leaps down from heaven to be in our bodies, shouldn’t we be there to receive Him?

Of course, I mean for those who can get to daily Mass but just never thought it that important.  Obviously mothers of children at home whose husband takes the one car to work usually couldn’t get to daily Mass.

This Christmas I thought of it as us being like Mary receiving the Son of God who leaped down from heaven, as it were, through the Holy Spirit into her womb.

My friend Deacon Richard Ballard, a reader of my blogs, sent this quotation to me from the famous Protestant theologian Richard Niebuhr, in his book The Kingdom of God in America. Niebuhr criticized the social gospel as, "A God without wrath, brought men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment, through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

I found the quotation thought-provoking.  Relating it to Pope Francis’ version of social justice ministry as we have so far gotten to know it, I am of two minds. On the one hand, there are certainly Christian thinkers whose social justice teachings can be described in the way Niebuhr criticizes. Taking lines out of context of everything Pope Francis has taught since he began his papacy, one could think that he leans in this direct.

On the other hand, one might claim that the wider context of those statements involves a critique of  some Catholics who give the impression that God looks upon us with wrath only, as sinners who rarely do good out of love, where most people surely go to Hell, and where there is only sin and suffering in the world with ersatz pleasures our only joy until we sneak into heaven. Some seem to think there is no social justice issue since all the destitute, homeless, and underfed as just lazy louts including the children. Not that we should not engage in personal charity to the suffering, as the Pope himself surely exhibits, but that such people think care for the poor should never as part of any governmental outreach.

Surely a good Christian will want to avoid either of these theories in favor of the ethical norms explained with such balance in the social encyclicals of the Popes and in the documents of Vatican II. My surmise is that such norms are what Pope Francis is also eager to have implemented.

Here is an interesting observation from Fr. Ken Whittington of the parish where one of my daughters lives in North Carolina.  I was talking to him about the conformity in dress and manners at the seminary where I teach most of the year. Since Fr. Ken is a creative, think and act outside the box personality, I expected him to weigh in against such conformity. But he, a late vocation man, said that he thought a certain degree of conformity at the seminary was good because non-conformity can be giving too much weight to dress and manners!  To rebel against such is to consider that they are essential to personality rather than a mode of normal societal getting along with one another.

I thought that stereo-typing on the basis of dress and manners could be wrong-headed in a related manner. To jump to the conclusion that anyone with longer hair is a lefty or that anyone with a crew-cut is a male chauvinist, etc., etc., etc.; isn’t that a kind of defense mechanism?   Do I try to psyche out others on the basis of relative externals because I am protecting myself, thinking if I can pigeon-hole them I can avoid them, instead of just being loving and trusting in God?

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Many of the things I stick in this blog are ideas you can also find from years back in my journals (the older ones to be found in my book Becoming a Handmaid of the Lord, or in my last 20 years of journaling One Foot in Eternity. See www.rondachervin.com for these and many out of print free e-books and free audios.)

I am putting some of them in this blog because they come to mind and I think even readers of older things of mine would like to read them.

Here’s one of my favorites. Do you have a Joan of Arc complex?  Someone described this as tying yourself to a stake and handing out matches to your enemies!

A personal example – I tend to ignore red flags. I get close to someone who everybody else thinks will never be a real friend.  Then, when the predictions of others come true, I feel like a martyr!  

A fascinating theory of my daughter, Carla, the poet.  She claims that we prefer  people to love us for our faults rather than for our virtues.  If they love us for our faults, we can’t disappoint them. If they love us for our virtues we are always afraid we will disappoint them!   This seemed like something from Pascal’s Pensees. A little cynical but worthy of self-examination.  An example, groups of people who gossip together rarely feel disappointed. Groups of spiritual-strivers are usually disappointed in each other. ______________________________________

I woke up in the night upset because of the incident involving a person I thought was a friend who seems to have done something awful. I asked Jesus: why do I love the wrong people?  He seemed to say: “You don’t love the wrong people. I gave you the gift to be able to see the beauty of their souls in their personalities. But it is their souls that are lovable and that will last for all eternity; not their frail earthly frames that you want to lean on. I told you not to put your trust in princes. Can you love them in their weakness, the way I love them? Will you let Me teach you how?”

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My twin sister, Carla De Sola, the sacred dancer, sent me a fantastic tape of Osvaldo Golijov’s  Pasion Segun San Marcos.  Golijov is a Jewish Argentinian now living in the United States.  He was brought up in a family of classical musicians. He responded to a challenge from a musical institute in Europe for composers to write something in the same format as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but in a contemporary motif.  Golijov composed a sort of oratorio with Cuban/African performers, Caribbean instruments, dancers, and a minimalist base for the music and arias.  You might look up some of it on You-tube. This has been performed in major concert halls throughout the world.

What struck me, watching the CD was that there is an energy in Christian life in other milieus totally different from what we in the Church in the United States ever experience!  Twice as passionate as gospel or charismatic music, this performance seemed, interestingly enough, probably more like what the Jews felt during the Passion!

 It also reminded me of an insight of my friend and co-author Sister Mary Neill, O.P. When I was in misery about the terrible polarities in the Church, she remarked: “Ronda, you don’t think the academics will save the Church. The anawim will save the Church.” Anawim is the Hebrew word for the “poor/ordinary” people Jesus spoke to vs. the rabbis and leaders.  This Cuban/African music, no matter how sophisticated in its origins, conveyed that spirit of the poor.

I am impressed by how important it is for priests to minister to the elderly, such as myself. Feeling grateful for such ministrations, I sent one such priest this little poem I wrote:  

To a Priest for the Elderly

When I take off

on the wings you have strengthened

may a Son-bleached feather

descend into your wounded hands. 

Re-reading Bernanos’ great novel Diary of a Country Priest for a course I am teaching I had some new thoughts about it.  This book was a favorite for dedicated Catholics of the mid-20th century. It recounts the fictional interior struggles of a highly sensitive priest dealing with people in a peasant-like small town. We loved the intensity of the priest’s mental sufferings, generalized into fascinating theories about good and evil and God’s Providence. Myself being one to over-analyze things, this reading so many decades afterwards I thought that the introspections of the priest bordered on an almost neurotic melancholy.  I thanked God that He seems to have partly saved me from such a syndrome through charismatic renewal.  For me, that joyful praise and worship was an antidote to over-introspection. At such meetings I could be like all the “anawim” simply pouring out in song my longing for salvation and joy in the promises of Jesus.

Not that I don’t still love Bernanos’ novel. I see it now as manifesting how God can save any sincere seeker after His will by means of suffering and ultimately Sister Death with heaven on the horizon.

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Brother Declan, a wonderful member of the Brothers of the Holy Eucharist, a new community for contemplatives who also give Eucharistic missions, who is a seminarian at Holy Apostles, gave a talk in a spirituality class of mine about contemplation. Another seminarian took notes. I am appending these hear for your edification:

 

“To touch souls

To die to all things

We encourage Christ suffering and death in our heart

We experience a change in our heart, the fruit.

 

Realize no one wants to meet ‘me’, they want to meet Christ

How?

Invite him to walk with me – this takes contemplative thinking

To preach and teach in missions

Very much asking ‘what would Jesus do?’

 

Called to kindle love for perpetual adoration in parishes.

 

Contemplation

How can reaching the next room in the mansion be real for me?

Ask, why is it not for me, why no burning desire to go there?

We realize the stumbling block is me.

We become content with our love for Jesus and don’t want to be taken from our comfort zone.

We have important things to do and have little time for a lot of contemplation.

 

But it creates a zeal in our hearts for the love of Jesus.  We can then share this.

We accept suffering that we come across, ours and others.  Thank God for this.

Renounce yourself, schedule, tasks, etc…  everything will come, all is a gift, joy or sorrow.

Now we have something to give.

People are hurting so much today, they need love, the only cure for the world’s problems

 

Practical sensible things to help

Thank him for receiving him, don’t rush out of chapel.

Prepare for Holy Communion, think of how I need him, and then thank him.

Look at your private schedule where he is cut out of, find that place and humble yourself asking him to help you.

We are all contemplatives, it is all Catholic.

 

Do we want it?  A secret relation to Jesus.  He will show me.

 

How to balance?

The devil will tempt you with a good thing.

The more we learn of God the more we can love him.

Knowing Jesus is the real degree, more than academics

If I am killing prayer time in order to study, that is not good.

Have faith, let your trust in Jesus be trump.

Holy priests, not functionaries are needed.

 

What is happening in church?  There is a Eucharistic movement in the church, we can receive it daily and adoration chapels for perpetual adoration are being started all over the world.

Dark Night is a gift and it simply needs perseverance.  Nothing can console us, not even  food, people, etc.  We feel as if we were being abandoned by God.  Remember we gave Jesus permission to act in helping us know him more.   We have to know it is a gift to make the soul more a tuned to God.  We recognize this after this experience. 

It is difficult not to mistake this gift of the Dark Night from thinking we are simply not interested.

Disinterest comes from sin, the desire to keep some sin in our life.  When we have a desire in our heart to rid sin, then that speaks of sincere interest in heart.

Sometimes it is a memory that holds us back.

Speak to your spiritual Director about this.

Faith is the real relationship with the real God, especially when in the dark night.

 

I was reading a book by a very spiritual woman who mingles Christian deliverance prayer with belief in re-incarnation. I realized that belief in reincarnation can be a way to get God off the hook on the problem of suffering. One can accept suffering because it is all bad karma.  If you progress spirituality, that will diminish, life-time after life-time. It is all self-redemptive. For us, suffering comes from original sin and our own sins, but then through the redemption of Christ we can have the total promise of heaven.

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Concerning many problems in the Church, if I defined myself more as a penitent or a child, Little Therese style, instead of as a “leader,” I wouldn’t have to figure everything out, would I?

Here is a letter to I wrote to my Distance Learning ethics students about Pope Francis’ emphasis in an interview on reaching out to former Catholics and others:

“Perhaps you are wondering what your professor of morals is thinking about certain aspects of the thoughts in that interview. In the reading for today, Sunday, St. Paul writes to Timothy (1 Tim. 2: 1-8 "This is good and pleasing to God our Savior, who wills that everyone be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth."

I was struck by how that passage reflects the fact that the huge, loving, evangelistic outreach of John Paul II was matched by many an outreach to teach the moral truths of the faith with love. All the moral truths. His many letters included teachings about sexual ethics, and about social justice (including abortion).

I am happy that because of the teachings you are receiving at Holy Apostles Distance Learning, you will be able to evangelize with love and teach with love. As we pray and work for the New Evangelization so urgently promoted by Pope Francis in his teachings,  as instruments of the mercy of God,  may we be there in our parishes and schools ready to greet those coming back in or coming in for the first time "speaking the truth with love."

The birth of Christ began a new era and changed the course of the world.  It divides all time into before and after.  Still today, almost every nation on earth numbers the years of time from Christ’s birth.  
And yet, the birth of Christ is shrouded in secrecy, and hidden from view under the layers of history.  The Gospels give many details regarding the date: who was Roman emperor, and who were the local rulers at the time; they also specify the village of Bethlehem, David’s ancestral hometown a few miles from Jerusalem.  Nevertheless, historians are still not sure of the exact year, or month.  

Jesus was born during the time of a census that required Joseph to travel to Bethlehem.  Even though he grew up in Nazareth, very few people knew or remembered that he wasn’t actually born in Nazareth.  

And most importantly, throughout this time of moving back and forth, during the betrothal before they lived together, the mysterious details regarding Mary’s pregnancy were kept secret.

It would only be later, after his death and resurrection, as the Gospel was being proclaimed and written down, that the details surrounding his birth would be recalled by the few people left alive, who were there, most especially his mother Mary.  

It is still to her that we must go, in order to find out about Christ’s birth.  As we meditate on the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, it is Mary who reminds us of the Angel, who appeared not only to herself and Joseph, but also to Zechariah the father of John the Baptist, and the shepherds in the field.  It is Mary who reminds us of the simple conditions of the stable, because there was no room at the inn.  And Mary recounts how even in those circumstances, certain chosen people found out, and had to come see for themselves: not only shepherds from the nearby fields, but even wise men led from distant countries by a star.  

Once they come to the place where he was placed in the manger, it is again Mary who shows them the child.  

And even though these individuals were able to find and adore Christ, King Herod the Great could no locate him despite all the information at his disposal, and an intelligence service in his government.  Christ is at once revealed to those who are humble, and hidden from those who are haughty.  

What was true 2013 years ago, remains true today.  Christmas, the “Mass of Christ’s birth,” remains a deeply hidden event, shrouded in secrecy except for those to whom it is revealed by an angel, or a star.  We come to Bethlehem not merely by our own power or through our efforts, but rather in the revelation we have received through faith.  

Christmas remains elusive, except for those who draw to Mary, and to the Church of which she is the perfect image.  It is the Church, in imitation of Mary, which shows Christ to us, and presents him to the world.  It is by means of the Church, that the memory of his birth is kept alive, and its meaning explained; and it is within the Church, that the joy of that event is truly celebrated.  

St. Leo the Great, in one of his Christmas sermons from the 5th century, calls upon the Church to rejoice with spiritual joy, because in the fullness of time there has dawned for us this new day in which “the Son of God enters these lower parts of the world, descending from His heavenly throne and yet not quitting His Father's glory, begotten in a new order, by a new nativity. 

“Being invisible in His own nature He became visible in ours, and He whom nothing could contain, was content to be contained.  Abiding before all time, He began to be in time.  Lord of all things, He obscured His immeasurable majesty and took upon Himself the form of a servant.  Being God who cannot suffer, He did not disdain to be man that can suffer; and immortal as He is, to subject Himself to the laws of death. 

“By a new nativity He was begotten, conceived by a Virgin, born of a Virgin, without paternal desire, without injury to the mother's chastity.  For when God was born in the flesh, a Virgin conceived, a Virgin bore, and a Virgin she remained.”

In adoring the birth of our Savior, we find we are celebrating also the beginning of our own life. For the birth of Christ is the source of life for Christians, who through baptism are reborn to his divine life.  

Let us then keep ourselves pure for the celebration of this feast, having undertaken the penance and prayer of Advent.  Let us keep ourselves firm in faith, humble of heart, undistracted by false sentimentality and ugly worldliness.  

In the heart of the Church let us adore the Savior, professing with great reverence the words of the Creed.  And in our hearts let us create the true and hidden beauty of Bethlehem, free of pretense, ready to welcome our Eucharistic Lord, who nourishes us even as he is nourished by the hospitality of our soul.  

                                                                                                                                       Fr. Glen Mullan

I want to share with you one of the most important spiritual breakthroughs of this past year. You need a little back story to understand it:

On the  20th anniversary of my husband's Martin's death,  I woke up this morning early with Mahler's 8th symphony singing through my mind and heart and imagination. 

I was a convert from an atheistic Jewish home, but my husband came from an orthodox Jewish background from the lower east side of NYC where most of the children were 2nd generation from the Polish immigrants.  They mostly became atheist left-wingers. 

He was searching for God, however, and found a relationship to Christ through music, especially that of the Jew who became a Catholic, Gustav Mahler.  The vision of Catholic truth that Mahler enshrined in the 8th symphony was rapturous, transcendent.  The part my husband especially loved was the music in that symphony that Mahler composed with the lines from Goethe's Faust "all that is earthly is only an image...eternity, eternity, eternity."  

On our wedding rings my husband had the engraving of the word "ewig" - eternity.

Now, just before this 20th anniversary of Martin's death, someone was talking about a wife being jealous of her husband's love of music. My marriage had plenty of strife in it for many decades, but the 20th anniversary of my widowhood morning came with Mahler's 8th melodies in my heart and also the whole sense of everything absolutely wonderful about him. 

I felt how ALL OF US, in marriage, and other close bonds, give not what we succeed at - we give what we LOVE. 

He gave me what he loved:  music, life, love of our children. And I gave him what I loved: the truth of the Catholic faith and love for the unique selves of each of my children.

And with that came a desire to show more appreciation for what each of my adult children loves and what the grandchildren love. That what they love is more important than what they succeed at. 

As God pours out on us, all HIS LOVE FOR TRUTH, BEAUTY, LIFE, AND US.

This all happened in November, but I thought you, my readers of this new blog, might want to use it as a Christmas meditation. As you gather in families or remember in your hearts long past times with close ones, think about what each person loves(d) the most. And, then, what you, yourself, love that God teaches you to love.  "And the word became flesh and dwelt among us."


LISTEN:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSYEOLwVfU8

 O Emmanuel, God with us, our King and lawgiver, the expected of the nations and their Savior: come to save us, O Lord our God.

Sometimes everyone knows I am doing something either wrong, disgusting, or just silly, but no one has the courage to tell me. Then, voila, one day I am told and I cringe with shame.
This one seems funny now, so many months after I was told, but it didn't seem funny then.
"Ronda, you annoy at lot of people around you at Mass by whispering the rosary or other prayers. Why do you do that?"
I didn't know I did it, the habit is so automatic. Many years ago, when I first became a Catholic, pre-Vatican II, I noticed old ladies praying the rosary during the Mass. I thought they were kinda too senile to read the prayers in the Missal. I made a vow when I was 25 to pray the rosary every day with the intention that my husband become a Catholic.  It took 20 years, but he did become a Catholic. In the meantime I got to love the rosary.  They say we all have tension in different parts of the body. Some in the neck, some in the shoulders. Well, my tension is in my hands. I used to knit constantly, even in the dental chair! 
At one point I started praying the Jesus prayer on the mercy chaplet beads between things. Since that chaplet bracelet is on my wrist all the time, I slowly drifted into praying on them during Mass. 
This was conscious, but I really didn't notice that I had gone further, by whispering the prayers!
I remembering reading some liturgical document after Vatican II that told pastors not to admonish old people who prayed the rosary during Mass. Even if they should be praying the words of the liturgy instead, they were probably too habituated to the older mode that it would just hurt them to insist they change. 
But, now, admonished for actually annoying other people next to me, I knew the game was up. The only way I have found to change is to clench my few lower teeth into my upper dentures with passion so that, at least, any prayers I may be using as a sort of mantra, will not be "showing."
The wider relevance of this story is not about praying the Mass, but really about how little we know ourselves!  

Do you dare ask people who know you well what little habits you could easily change that could be a relief to them?