Should I stay or should I go?

There are two types of people in the world: those who think sports are really interesting and important, and those who find the whole sports-fan culture to be in equal parts perplexing and annoying, and don't understand how people can be absorbed by, much less passionate about, the prospect of extra-tall boys, wearing short pants and tank tops with the school name emblazoned upon them, chasing around a ball in a gymnasium for a couple of hours.  And in my observation, for some reason, parish staffs, and especially people involved in liturgy, tend to have a disproportionate number of the latter type. 

Rachel Carson for Holy Saturday

Today, as Jesus harrows Hell and breaks a trail to Heaven, our thoughts turn to the Hereafter and what will happen to us. Will we experience the holy light of hope that Adam and Eve and all the prophets saw as Jesus crashed through the gates of death to usher them into heaven?

Today we may hope we are Heaven-bound, but maybe it's worth remembering that we can get there only through what we do here on earth.

In that spirit, I read this piece about Rachel Carson in the New Yorker. In our old Unitarian Church, starting indoor seedlings for the church garden and Rachel Carson were part of our Easter observances. The Easter season ended roughly when the seedlings had grown hardy enough to be planted outdoors in Michigan the first week of June.

While Carson was perhaps not particularly religious in a conventional sense, she was clearly awed by and in love with creation, and she spent her life studying and trying to defend it.

I remembered a quote of hers about christenings that I had heard in my young years, and spent most of this morning trying to find it. Without some innate and natural sense of God, how could she have written this, which now reads to me like a prayer:

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from our sources of strength.

You could certainly do worse than to ask for these blessings.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Sight seen last night

After yesterday evening's Holy Thursday service, our parish had Eucharistic Adoration until midnight.  Around here, there is a tradition among certain folks - perhaps certain ethnicities?  I've never quite pinned down who all does it - to travel around from church to church during that time of that particular evening; they pray before the Eucharist at each one.  So it's common to see individuals and families, strangers to our community, but of course they're welcome, trickling in and out throughout the evening.

Last night, it was taken to the next level: a tour bus, presumably with flat screens and WiFi, because it looked like that kind of a rig, pulled up, disgorged at least 25 people, and waited in the parking lot.  The folks who disembarked gathered around a statue of Mary, taking pictures with their cell phones, while a leader said things to them - it looked like a tour group at a museum.  Then they all trooped inside.  We were on our way out so that's all I can report.

I guess, if you're going to take part in that tradition, you might as well get it organized and travel in comfort. 

At any rate, it was a beautiful service for us.  I sang in the bass section.  Today I'm "on": already led Morning Prayer, am leading Stations at noon, will be there for one of my kids who is doing teen Living Stations later this afternoon, and then will be deacon for the Good Friday service this evening.  A most blessed and prayerful Triduum to all of us.

Good Friday Musings

This address, given by then Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 on Bl. John Duns Scotus at a  general audience, is worth reading:
"He says in his "Reportatio Parisiensis":  "To think that God would have given up such a task had Adam not sinned would be quite unreasonable! I say, therefore, that the fall was not the cause of Christ's predestination and that if no one had fallen, neither the angel nor man in this hypothesis Christ would still have been predestined in the same way" (in III Sent., d. 7, 4). This perhaps somewhat surprising thought crystallized because, in the opinion of Duns Scotus the Incarnation of the Son of God, planned from all eternity by God the Father at the level of love is the fulfilment of creation and enables every creature, in Christ and through Christ, to be filled with grace and to praise and glorify God in eternity. Although Duns Scotus was aware that in fact, because of original sin, Christ redeemed us with his Passion, Death and Resurrection, he reaffirmed that the Incarnation is the greatest and most beautiful work of the entire history of salvation, that it is not conditioned by any contingent fact but is God's original idea of ultimately uniting with himself the whole of creation, in the Person and Flesh of the Son." 

From an article by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM:
"Scotus taught that the Enfleshment of God had to proceed from God’s perfect love and God’s perfect and absolute freedom (John 1:1-18)..."

And from piece by Jack Wintz, OFM:
"It’s a beautiful, developing drama, a beauty whose end we cannot see. Starting with the first day of creation, the Word of God—the co-eternal mirror of the Father—has been slowly emerging down the ages. The Word has become visible in the Incarnation and will reach its full revelation when Jesus returns in glory on the last day."

Many people struggle with some of the interpretations given to the life, and particularly the death of Jesus on the cross. Theologians such as Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Athanasius, not to mention people from the Reformation tradition such as Calvin and Luther; have wrestled with the theology of this intervention by God in human affairs.  It is a good day to reflect on these mysteries, and to realize that the theology is far from monolithic, though nearly all agree on the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sakes.  Personally it is a day to exist in the mystery, and ponder it; and also to realize that I will not fully understand it in this life, while realizing that it proceeds from the perfect love of the Trinity.

Nobody was driving, officer

 I am not a first user. I literally had to get a cell phone yesterday. It is my first, and I have no idea of how to work it. But I have been all in on driverless cars since I heard about them.

 Accordingly, I am not happy that Uber, which can't seem to do anything right lately, had a fatal crash in Arizona, which has suspended its efforts to make Volvos that can go without human help.  The governor of Arizona ginned up some political high dudgeon and banned further testing his his state.

Kosovo Again...

Has anyone been keeping up with these events?  The first I heard about it was this evening at Mass when the priest prayed for "...peace in the world, and for the situation in Kosovo."  I had thought a resolution of sorts had been reached several years ago. Nothing is ever really over, apparently.

A Tea Party of the Left?

Are Democrats getting their own Tea Party?  Several posts here at NewGathering have discussed the recent Democratic Illinois 3rd District Congressional primary, in which Dan Lipinski edged Marie Newman, who had primaried the incumbent Lipinski from the left.  Peggy's recent post on the race included a link to an interesting, if somewhat disorganized, post-mortem by David Weigel that appeared in the Washington Post, entitled, in part, "A Tea Party of the Left?"