Friday, March 30, 2018

Help Us To Know You Dead. By:C.C.


Today we stop to pay homage to Your going.
The sun shines intensely and it's wounding, radiant with reason for it's being.
Burnt offering proclaiming God's goodness,
and the darkness of Your endured absence.

To the tomb , to the tomb, dead within us.
Weeping without hope, insensible despair.
Hidden from this great unknown
Yet, known to us it is by grace of time , 
how unmerited it seems.

The dream they wept for 
we live out daily.
All of this faith, all of our disbelief
woven in the experience of Cross to tomb

We slumber there in disobedience of the garden 
Trembling with the obedient consent You prayed in yours. 

While they mourned the loss of their hope
We mourn in the disbelief that is frequently ours.
Standing at the Cross in solidarity, 
mourning at the tomb in confused offering .

Messy praise ,and faithless glory, unknown Lord.
At times we come so unprepared.
What we know to call good emerges from this darkness .

Why have You told the sun to shine so brightly today? 

Haunted by the grace of Your rising
Please Lord , help us to know You dead!
Help us to see Your lifeless and bloody body offered. 
Help us to stand beside our Mother, Your Mother , 
help us to feel that sword!

Help us help to lay you in the tomb...

Just so maybe, for once, we can purify what we think we own in faith
Yet lack to claim by love.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Remembering The Cross. By: C.C.



A spirit of irreverence toward God increases to the measure that one lives mindless of the Cross.

The Cross that we can often be mindless of bleeds for our attention. Not just a look of acknowledgement but of trembling reverence, of complete and honest submission in whatever capacity we have received to offer ourselves. 


This remembering, though not pretty or comfortable is a necessity of our spiritual life and faith in Christ . It is by this alone that we begin to grasp the fragments of the understanding available to us about the height of Christ's radical love.

Love is taught here. 


Love is revealed.


Given life, learned in the giving up of Christ's life for us. 


The Cross is our unified place of belonging. It is the inescapable reality of our humanity . We , would rather suffer it without naming it, live chased by its shadow but keep running on our own esteem. 


Silly we are to run from such love. Strange love no doubt , but only in meditation of it do the implications of this love unfold to us, shaped as a cross.


"Do this is in memory of me"  becomes the necessity of remembering our belonging. The harness to our striving toward sanctity, and our encouragement along the way toward the eternal end. 


What we gain by our nearness to Calvary is the gift of the third day, the Resurrected Bread to consume and sustain us. 

The Liturgy is the place we walk this journey from the incarnation to the resurrection , intentionally. In this fullness and this completed mystery, yet ever hidden, we're made ready to see what has been eternally left to us. 


Do we know Who is among us? 

Are we aware of what is taking place?

We speak of encountering Jesus, we speak of authentic witnesses. He is met in the Calvary of our hearts an encounter all consuming , we must consent to be attentive to this greeting. This eternal encounter. At the table of Christ is where witnesses are made, where the Apostles were fed with necessary remembrance, and where transformation is radiated; from what dwells in the interior, and not from the peripheral matters we often select to be consumed by.


The priest at the altar carries us to this remembering, Fathers to us, Sons in the Son, to give us a nourishment eternal. 


We suffer from infinite longings in those areas of finite limitations. Only in relationship with the infinite can we sober ourselves to the uses of our finite things, our journey here, and of Calvary's visitation to us. 




The Eucharist is the Son, our light, so much the sun risen on the third day, conquering evil and darkness, not absolving us of our suffering, but claiming us as beloved. 

The Eucharist.  Father lifts the Son before us, in this rising mirrors that of the sun , expelling all darkness, redeeming so much by His light. This spotless , unblemished Eucharist that we gather to consume even before the sun is risen shines eternally for us even if the sun outside does not. There is such an important grace here, this is the only essential Light for us. This is what sustains us even if darkness was all we could perceive outside of Him. 

In the priests hands is lifted the Son, filling the faithful with rays of love, mercy, hope, and belonging. A grace of "keeping watch" with Christ . Of standing at the foot of the Cross while others fled. 


Stand there first fixed at the Cross. The love is agonizing.


Irreverence toward God begins in our forgetting of the Cross. You will know how to receive with an awe of reverence the Bread of Life, the love of Jesus, when you remember to remember the Cross.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

International Women's Day and One Universal Woman. By:C.C.


When woman lives mindless of her divine purpose all of man suffers the confusion of it's natural order.

Jesus, in His encounter with women at varying points in Scripture touches them with a profound sense of dignity, entrusting to them on more than one occasion the hiddeness of His majesty that through
them was further revealed.

Women by their very design make visible the invisible to man, and in the fertility of their ordained ability of receptivity to life bring forth, even in spiritual ways, a depth of understanding and sensitivity to the movements of the Spirit that ultimately encourage man to uphold all that is entrusted to him by God.

Through Jesus’ encounter particularly with the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalene there is a restoration by His touch to return to that divine origin and dignity that they had been created in, by calling them from the bondage of sin and into the fullness of His grace.

There is great intentionality in the way that Jesus appears to these women, and what unfolds after these encounters.

Through the Samaritan woman many unbelievers came to believe, and Mary Magdalene was the one to bear witness to the most important moment in all of history and the reason for our rejoicing. I find great symbolism in the way that our Lord made himself apparent to these women, to go forth and carry the news to man that he may believe and come to faith, and even endure in it.

There is a sacrament born in the life breathed into them by Christ’s presence that blesses those who bore witness to it. They, in tremendous ways brought the Good News to men. They, through the encounter of the nearness of God made visible the invisible power of the Lord. The souls of these women and their receptivity is the fertile ground that our Lord plants seeds of His truth.

Though I am much ignorant of “feminine theology” and also the direction that a lot of it seems to take. I am struck primarily by the ways in which a false sense of feminism has crept into the Church, and into the minds of women, this idea that there is an inequality of roles, that there is need first and foremost to be as man. And to ultimately fulfill duties that our Lord never ordained to us as women. God in his design made us “helpers” to man, to be as partners, to receive life physically and reveal the majesty of God’s blessing, tangible evidence of a miraculous God through the body of the woman. This, I see as an important point that translates even in to the spiritual, into the mystical reality of Christ.

I see a tremendous suffering of ignorance to the truth and role of women as willed by God. There is one woman alive who has boldly shared her sentiments on this matter with whom I agree greatly. And this is Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand. I worry there are far too few women imbued with the sense of understanding that she holds, and as she nears her end it is a blessing that she has left us with the abundance of her words upon pages and pages that will endure beyond her time on earth.

I recall a lecture I heard of hers where she spoke about the creation of Adam and Eve, she spoke to those initial days in the garden and brought us into the moment of God’s creation of man and woman, identifying that Adam was created from “the slime of the earth”, and that “Eve had the dignity of being made from the human person”. Eve was created by God through man, through part of his body, the body that God had made from the earth, and in this wondrous creation, from the rib, and thus the dignity of the body was made Eve. She spoke to this to begin highlighting the initial glory already belonging to woman. Her thought continued in Adam’s naming of Eve “Mother of all the living’, this lingers in my mind as a key point, and a necessary point of remembering, that even though woman suffers the wounds of original sin, nothing can eliminate this point of potential or even divine purpose of being called to be “Mother of all the living”,even in a culture where women have too often become the handmaid’s of death through killing the life of their womb.

Vonhildebrand, a lover of St.Augustine went on to allude to his comments regarding the temptation in the garden, and while he suggested that Satan came to Eve because she was the weaker sex, Vonhildebrand differs in that she was able to see Satan’s coming to Eve as a means of highlighting the power of woman’s influence over man, for good, or for evil.

She sees this approach to the woman in light of the great threat women are to Satan’s designs, because through woman comes all life, through woman is mirrored God’s glory in a profound way exceeding that of man. She speaks of this in relation to the ability to beget life within the womb, and reminds us that everything God touches, especially in regards to the potential of conception is sacred, immensely sacred and calls for a “trembling respect”.

When we come to view woman in light of having the capacity for the greatest influence over man, the chaos we suffer from today and many of the issues surfacing arise from this forgetting of woman’s divine purpose, by women themselves.

Satan comes not as a serpent in the garden, but in cunning, tremendous ways to cloud the concept of the feminine dignity and divine purpose that consequently leads man to roam around in the filth from where he was drawn.

In numerous ways there is an outpouring of women seeking worth and dignity in areas to claim some lofty status of headship, especially in areas of the Church, in my opinion this is pursued completely ignorant to the reverence necessary to hold man in his designated place and fulfill humbly the immensity of the role entrusted to them as women of Christ. When woman becomes the antagonist to man she is no longer helper, she is no longer “Mother of All the living”.

There is One Woman through Whom we must pass to understand our role as women of God and this is the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. When we seek to be near Her and to grow in the virtues that she so taught by her witness, then we uphold the role within the Church that God willed for us. To imbue it with the gift of life, to receive in the hiddeness and fragility, by our nearness to God, the eternal truths made visible by faithful servitude.

There is One Mother of The Church, One Divine Woman deserving of the role to sit beside the alter of Christ. That woman fails at large to recognize the magnitude of her worth and divine purpose is reflective that she has forgotten her tremendous belonging to the Maternity of Mary. What does it mean to be a woman of God, and His beloved daughter, but to uphold the dignity of ourselves by seeking to unfold the mystery that we are in Him, being helpers to man by utilizing our gifts in accordance to their design. By carrying the good news entrusted to us, by being a “mother of all living” and caring prayerfully for the many sons of God through whom we receive the Living Word and Bread of Life.