LENT FOR A DAY

SIMON

Who has never lost a pet

And cried at his demise,

Buried him beneath the soil

Under his last sunrise?

How many loves have I lost in life,

How many loves will I see no more,

Watching o’er the green green grass

Looking toward my own far shore?

His face is on my iPad screen;

I touch his image every day;

There’s no soft fur, no beating heart,

Just longing that won’t go away.

Lent is a precious discipline,

An exercise in loss and prayer,

For turning longing from the world,

Towards God whose being’s every where.

The little dog holds the sacred key,

He’s the scroll with the name divine;

Learn to read it with a love

That may no longer call him “mine.“

There’s nothing the self can claim but God;

Nothing the self can call its own;

Ordinate love is the only means

To reap that which was rightly sown.

Dead and gone my little dog,

Though memory keeps him lively,

Walking with me through the years

Or sleeping soft beside me.

MARCH: THE POETRY OF PRAISE

Published in the March Magnificat [LES]

The Poetry of Praise

The Terrible Irony of Sin

Anthony Esolen

“Ye shall be as gods,” says the serpent, that liar from the beginning, and Eve believed him. His lie was no simple utterance of an untruth. For Adam and Eve already were as gods. When God blessed them, he did so in the same terms he used to bless the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, but he added another, befitting their having been made in his image: they were to have dominion. Adam exercised this godlike authority when he named the beasts, just as God himself had named day and night, heaven and earth. The very nakedness was not childish but divine—free, open, without disguise. But the serpent said that God was sly and weak and envious, a God who does not say what he means.

And man believed it, and has been a creature of concealment ever since.

Mountains, fall on us

We say that we wish God would show himself openly to us, and speak clearly, and then we would believe and obey. We say it while we roll balls of wax to plug up our ears. The last thing the Jews could say was that God had not spoken clearly. He spoke through the Law and the prophets, and though in the latter we find many sayings that mean far more than the Jews of the time could imagine, they surely did not mean less. Yet man does not listen. He begs the mountains to fall upon him, to hide him not only from the wrath of God, but from his love. But God is love, and seeks us out, whether we like it or not, and mostly we do not like it.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, cried Jesus, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling (Mt 23:37).

That is why we put Jesus to death.

But the story of man does not end in sin. That God who summoned light out of darkness can bring forth good from evil, not because evil is necessary or because it harbors some secret good within, but because God, who created time, and to whom all time is less than the twinkling of an eye, dashes to pieces our plans for death, and turns the engines of our sin against sin itself.

The Reproaches

We see as much in the grave and bitterly ironic prayer for the ancient liturgy of Good Friday, the Improperia—the Reproaches. Imagine you are going up to venerate the cross, and you hear, from the loft above, such words as these (I have translated from the Latin of the old Roman Gradual) sung out by a pair of cantors:

My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me. I led you from the land of Egypt, but you prepared a cross for your Savior.

Then, phrase by phrase, two choirs sing alternately, the first in Greek, the second in Latin, Holy is God, holy and mighty, immortal God, have mercy on us.

That response, in which we pray in our own persons, is essential. Otherwise we would end in accusation, to which there is no answer. But the very reproach has become a promise, as we must feel as we behold the holy cross and show, abashed, our gratitude and love. For we have been led by that cross from a captor more slavish than any the children of Israel suffered.

The Reproaches continue, and grow ever more acutely ironic. In our current Roman liturgy, we use three of them, but there were another nine also, and the twelve were to be chanted all or in part, according to the number of the congregants. The second echoes the first, and continues the story of liberation from Egypt:

I led you forty years through the desert, and fed you with manna, and brought you into a good and rich land: but you prepared a cross for your Savior.

After which the choirs respond again, as above. We cannot help but think of the Eucharist, the great sacrament of love that Jesus instituted the very night before we handed him over to death: manna, in the shadow of the cross.

The third reproach brings us into Canaan, and echoes the words of God to Isaiah, for he chose a rich hill for his vineyard, and he cleared the land, and planted the sweet vines, and thought to get grapes from it, but instead he got the wild and worthless stuff; what is to the wine grape as the crab is to the apple. What more could be done for my vineyard that I did not do? asks the Lord (Is 5:4). God would give us wine, and we give him gall:

What more should I have done for you, that I did not do? For I planted you, my loveliest vine: but you have become most bitter to me, for when I was thirsty you gave me vinegar to drink: and with a spear you pierced the side of your Savior.

And the choirs respond as above, a third time.

Things and deeds, not ideas

After this, the Reproaches used to continue, nine more, without the Latin and Greek antiphons. Each reproach, however, would be introduced as the first one was, with the question of Christ: My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me. Of course there is no answer. There cannot be. God gives us existence itself at every moment of our lives, and how do we repay him? Not even with gratitude, most of the time—the easiest recompense.

What I find most powerful about these prayers is that they are unabashedly particular: God works his saving will by means of real creatures, real events, particular persons: by the manna and the quail, the dividing of the sea, the staff of Aaron; and these come to their full meaning in the deeds and the person of Jesus Christ:

For your sake I scourged Egypt and her firstborn sons: and you handed me over to be scourged.

I led you out of Egypt, and drowned Pharaoh in the Red Sea: and you handed me over to the chief priests.

I opened the sea before you: and with a lance you opened my side.

I went before you in a pillar of fire: and you led me to the praetorium of Pilate.

I fed you with manna in the desert: and you gave me up to buffets and scourges.

I gave you to drink of saving water from the rock: and you gave me to drink vinegar and gall.

For your sake I struck the kings of the Canaanites: and you with a reed struck my head.

I gave you a royal scepter: and for my head you gave a crown of thorns.

I lifted you up in great power: and you hung me on the gibbet of the cross.

What can we say? The facts confront us to our shame and to the glory of God, and yet, if we will but accept the saving work of Christ crucified, that same sign of treachery and violence, that sign of judgment against the judges of Christ, becomes the Tree of Life. Everything in the universe, every word spoken or deed done, is a work of grace to those who will receive it, for we know that all things work for good for those who love God (Rom 8:28).

Keep near the tree

We are apt to think that when Jesus says we must take up our cross and follow him, it is only a suffering to be borne, and not also a privilege, an invitation. The world sees a man hanging on a cross, and, at its most sympathetic, utters a couple of platitudes about what happens when you dare to question the political and religious authorities; and people suppose they will be brave likewise, and do what Jesus did. Pride, pride, wearisome and full of deceit! We Christians believe instead that the cross has become our joy, not because of what we did or what we promise to do, but because of what God has done.

Think of it: we planted that dead trunk in a hole in the ground atop Golgotha, intending bitterness, and instead we get the wine of life and the water of salvation, coming from the riven side of the Lord. Therefore we sing out with the choirs, after the Reproaches are done:

We adore thy cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify thy holy Resurrection: for behold, by wood has come joy unto all the world. May God have mercy on us, and bless us, and make his face to shine upon us, and have mercy on us. We adore thy cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify thy holy Resurrection: for behold, by wood has come joy unto all the world.

It is a stately and solemn chant, until we get to the Latin venit—“has come”—and then suddenly we sing eight notes on that little word, as the music rises in joy.

Can there be more? From the inexhaustible fount of God’s love, there is always more, even in the darkness of Good Friday. After that chant, you would sing the ancient hymn Crux fidelis: Faithful Cross, whose wood is sweet, whose nails are sweet, which bore the sweet burden of the body of Christ. We may sin, but he is faithful, and the cross is the tree whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations, fresh and green for all eternity. Let us gather in its shade—and its light.

A SLEEPLESS DREAM!

Under the Dream

The raven on my window sill,

Dark as a moonless night,

Cast its jaundiced eye at me,

At which my soul took flight.

I tried to hide beneath the sheet,

But the raven croaked once proudly;

I shivered like a candle flame,

And sobbed, but never loudly.

The raven spread his rough black wings,

Flew into the empty, dreamlike night,

Taking with his soaring flight,

All thoughts of love and mystic sight.

A youth in armored mail appeared,

Dressed for battle, conflict, war

Against a mighty, ancient foe

Like dragon, demon, death or more.

What more than dragon can there be?

What more than demon, death or sin,

Battles that no youth should fight

And serious, hope to win?

But if the youth were gifted,

An Angel sent with grace,

His sword divine, well tempered,

No struggle need take place.

As I threw off the covering sheet,

The warrior with the shining face

Restored my missing, frightened soul,

And my heart to its rightful place.

Image: Satan viewing the ascent to heaven (Paradise Lost, book 3, line 501) by John Martin, 1825 [The Clark Museum, Williamstown, MA]

AFFIRMATION

When Jonathan Edwards preached his extraordinary sermon, ”The Divine and Supernatural Light,” he based his text on the following passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

A reading from 
the holy Gospel according to Matthew16:13-19

When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” 

The Gospel of the Lord. “Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ!”

In other words, Edwards argued, as far as I remember, in his beautiful sermon, “The Divine and Supernatural Light,” that only God can give a person this insight. Otherwise the person comes out as an Arian, a person who believes he can save himself with his own “flesh and blood” knowledge: Jesus was a great moral teacher or a great prophet, but not God himself. This insight into Jesus’ real nature is from the Father and is a revelation of the Holy Spirit working within. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” To which Jesus responds, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.” Edwards beautifully brings reason to bear on an explanation of the nature of faith and how a person acquires it.

Magnificat’s Meditation for today provides an interesting perspective on Peter:

“Where Peter Is

The Gospels depict Peter as being the individual companion and special friend of Christ. He is one of the three who witnessed the Transfiguration on the Mount and the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and on each occasion he was named first (Mk 9:2; Mt 26:37). When Christ wanted to preach to the crowds which pressed around him on the seashore, he took Peter’s boat and preached from it (Lk 5:3). After the sermon, he put out to sea with Peter and took a miraculous haul of fish. Jesus said to him: Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men. Why did our Lord address those words to Saint Peter? Surely, all the apostles were to save souls? Peter is to be the leader in the great work of fishing for men….

The actual promise of the primacy is related by Saint Matthew (16:13-19). The text makes it clear that Christ is speaking to Peter alone. He changes to the singular. As Saint Jerome puts it: “Because you said to me, you are the Christ, I say to you, you are Peter.” 

Upon this rock: Jesus is promising Peter that he is to be to the Church as a rock is to a building. But a rock gives durability to a building. As a firm foundation it holds all the different components together; it makes them cohere and last. The metaphor of the house built on a rock and the house built on sand was perfectly familiar to the Jews. What is it that makes any society cohere and last? Surely, authority. If there is no proper authority there is no proper social existence. Hence Saint Peter here is promised the authority necessary to keep the Church together and to make it endure. To find the true Church of Christ, you must find the rock upon which it stands. To find the Church, find Peter. “Where Peter is, there is the Church,” Saint Ambrose said. “

Canon Francis J. Ripley

Canon Ripley († 1998) was an English priest, author, and apologist. / From This Is the Faith. © 2002, Thomas A. Nelson, TAN Books, Charlotte, NC (www.tanbooks.com). Used with permission.

JOB: MISSING IN ACTION

This Self Today

My life is like the book of Job,

Full of suffering, itch and sorrow;

I think I said that once before;

Yesterday, today, again tomorrow.

Satan in the book of Job

Is the being most to blame;

Though of course behind his work

God’s questions break the frame.

Life’s a blessed mystery,

No one quite knows how;

The only moment that we have

Is God’s eternal Now!

Time’s a river flowing fast.

Pain is suffering meant to test us,

Break us, make us, cause despair

Until in death Christ may attest us.

Tomorrow, who knows, though faith tends to remain constant.
Scary selfie follows. I apologize for both photo and verses. LES

MAGNIFICAT: WISDOM

Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?

James H. Toner

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022

Around thirty years ago, the redoubtable Father Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) asked and answered the question that is the title of this column. My present task is not to try to improve upon one of Father Neuhaus’s typically gleaming essays, but only to remind readers of it, and refer them to it (here).

Father Neuhaus answered the question in the negative: atheists cannot be good citizens. The kinds of atheists he described thirty years ago, however, are no longer merely “present.” Rather, they dominate our intellectual and moral discourse.  A smothering atheism not only trumpets the absence of God but insists that even references to God in the public square are dangerous and, therefore, impermissible.

Quoting historian James Turner, Father Neuhaus censured “shapers of religion” who “made God more and more like man.” We have aggressively de-divinized, or desacralized, much of the world. But there is a reason why the First Commandment is first.  Get that one wrong and what follows is a moral trainwreck of such immensity that no human engineer can rectify it.

C.S. Lewis observed, in The Problem of Pain, that “From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the center is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life.”

Once we remove God, Truth, or objective reality from society, the residue is egomania, leading to moral mayhem. And modern life is without authoritative standards, as Will Herberg (1901-1977) already noted decades ago.

In the absence of overarching moral standards, we necessarily turn to what suits ourselves. The result is ethical solipsism: having spurned our religious duty to become God’s, we become, instead, little gods.

When citizens limit themselves to the dimension of self-celebration, they increasingly have no means by which to assess the spiritual and political degeneracy around them – in which they share.  They are left only with the self-destructive mantra that “if it feels good, it isgood.”

What is legal is, then, no longer founded on what is just. Even custom and convention are no longer rooted in what is morally right (think of Antigone). Opinion finds little direction from knowledge and no guidance by wisdom. Justice, the natural law, wisdom – all these are, at best, “abstractions” with no place in, or bearing upon, matters of state.

Nor is there any Aristotelian “final cause,” the end or telos toward which we proceed and in which we “live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) Aristotle observed that “the main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.” (Nicomachean Ethics, I [9]) A secularized politics lampoons the idea that its task is to help us perceive and perform noble deeds.

The good citizen is marked by vision, the educated ability to tell good from evil in what we think and say and do. Now it’s been replaced by a moral myopia, which cannot see beyond this space and time, a nihilistic relativism buttressed by ignorance.

The good citizen is marked by virtue, which means, according to John Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000), “a good habit that enables a person to act according to right reason enlightened by faith.” In its place now is the vice of pursuing mere power or wealth.

The good citizen is marked by valor, which means chivalric bravery in seeking the truth and, having found it, acting conscientiously according to its principles. In its place today is mere risk-taking for personal advantage.

That we live because “God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so come to paradise” (CCC #1721) is rejected as contrary to our (arid) personal thinking and to our (vitiated) political sense.  That wisdom is “a reflection of eternal light, a perfect mirror of God’s activity and goodness” (Wisdom 7:26) is regarded as absurdity, for the only “wisdom” today is that there is no wisdom.

“A good citizen,” wrote Father Neuhaus, “is able to give an account, a morally compelling account, of the regime of which he is part. He is able to justify its defense against its enemies, and to convincingly recommend its virtues to citizens of the next generation so that they, in turn, can transmit the regime to citizens yet unborn.”

Neuhaus doubted atheists could present “a morally compelling account” – of anything. Paradoxically, today’s atheists share that judgment, except they contend that there is no morally compelling account to be given.  Such an “account” would proceed from a comparison between what is and what should be. The contemptuous dismissal of the supernatural means that politics is beyond rectification. The political anorexia that characterizes the last half-century reflects a poisoned wellspring.

Genuine education, Sydney J. Harris has remarked “turns mirrors into windows.”  Modern politics, though, is a house of mirrors: chaos reigns and corruption rules because the windows through which we should perceive truth are closed and nailed shut. So we wander in an ethical maze, unsure of our direction and of our destiny. (cf. Psalm 81:11-12)

From Genesis to Revelation, we are warned about idolatry, about false gods. Too rarely, however, do we realize that the most dangerous, the most perfidious, idols, are those with human faces who tell us, not only that we can be like God (Gen 3:5), but that we can be God.  There is the beating heart of totalitarianism, the specter of which haunts contemporary politics.

It wasn’t just Father Neuhaus who told us that atheists cannot be good citizens.  A prophet did the same: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind, who makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.’” (Jeremiah 17:5)

Image: Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Salvador Dalí, 1937 [Tate, London]

© 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary.

James H. Toner [author]

Deacon James H. Toner, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Leadership and Ethics at the U.S. Air War College, a former U.S. Army officer, and author of numerous articles, books, essays, and reviews, including multiple columns in The Catholic Thing, Crisis Magazine, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, The Imaginative Conservative, One Peter Five, and The Wanderer. He taught at Notre Dame, Norwich, Auburn, and Holy Apostles College & Seminary. He has also served as “Distinguished Visiting Chair of Character Development” at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

[This is the image [Dali] that goes with the article. In the past I believed that an atheist who believed in a moral order could be a good citizen and a moral and upright person. That person would also have to believe that the moral order was somehow inherent in the nature of matter itself. In other words that just as matter consists of atoms, chemical elements, etc., like its material components the idea of “justice” and “morality” etc. are also inherent in matter.

At least that is somewhat how an argument might go, let me hasten to add, “I think.” Obviously, however, that is not something that I believe, for I believe the explanation in the article, and I believe, to put it simply, that “justice,” idea, (mind or spirit) precedes matter; if matter contains a moral order, that is because God (“mind”) made it that way. I realize, again simply, that current thinking [from Darwin, Marx, Freud, etc.] is that matter gave rise to mind. My response would be again from the perspective of faith: the universe is as it is because God (see Genesis 1 and 2; John 1: 1-18) made it that way. LES]

MAGNIFICAT MEDITATION

Saturday, February 19, 2022. Scripture and Meditation from Magnificat: every once in a while I find something I really like. LES

No human being can tame the tongue.

A reading from 
the Letter of Saint James 3:1-10

Not many of you should ­­­­­­­be­­­­­­c­ome tea­­chers, my ­brothers and sisters, for you realize that we will be judged more strictly, for we all fall short in many respects. If anyone does not fall short in speech, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body also. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we also guide their whole bodies. It is the same with ships: even though they are so large and driven by fierce winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot’s inclination wishes. In the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretensions.

Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this need not be so.

The word of the Lord. “Thanks be to God.”

Ascending the Mountain to Find Jesus and Mary

Some years ago a traveler came to a high mountain. He had journeyed from teeming city to country village; he had joined in the reveling of metropolitan nightlife and small-town carnival; he had enjoyed the quiet of a family at home. Yet he was restless and he sought peace. The mountain beckoned him and he began to climb. Higher and higher he went, leaving far behind the noises of the marketplace, the cries of men at work. Soon even the earth itself was blotted out and he looked down only on the fleecy whiteness of leisurely clouds. He reached the top and found there a flower—a flower heretofore seen only by the sun, that had never been bruised or trampled by rushing feet, whose beauty was known only to God and the angels; a flower that reached out yet higher, striving for the limitless heavens above. He found a flower and he found peace, for through the flower he found God. 

The way of God is order and divine order is manifest in creation and in everything that God has done. A stone he made, but it could not grow or feel or think; a flower could not feel or think, but was and grew. The birds of the air came forth from his hands, knowing the breeze, seeking the sunshine. Out of the clay rose man, and God breathed into him an immortal soul. Yet even this was not enough, for to that soul God sent his Spirit, gave to it grace, made it like unto himself, partaker of his own eternity. Of all the souls thus lifted, God chose one to ascend to unimaginable heights, the soul of his own Mother, Mary, the flower of mankind, the lily of Israel. 

She may be called queen who ranks the first in any excellence. By such a measure is Mary Queen, indeed the Queen of queens. No angel is so pure but that she is purity. No prophet is so wise but that she is wisdom. No apostle is so zealous but that her love reaches out in him and before him in the souls of men. She is filled with grace, most like to God, and from her God takes flesh. God is holy, Mary is the holy Queen.

Father Elwood Ferrer Smith, o.p.

Father Smith († 1992) was an American Dominican priest, theologian, professor, and author. / From The Mariological Institute Lectures, Theological Series, Volume 1. © 1959, St. John’s University Press, Jamaica, Queens. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The Gospel today is the Transfiguration: Mark 9: 2-13. LES

BEINGS and NOTHINGS

Time to write a simple verse,

Though none comes quick to mind;

Perhaps I need a simple motto:

Like, be truthful, loving and kind.

Hmm! Well, at least there is something new on the page. All I can think at the moment, however, is how much I miss my little dog. Gives me an excuse to post another picture or two of him.

Thought for the day: Time travel is of course impossible and illogical, for the past is fixed and if you could go back there you would simply be a ghost in a solid, unchangeable world. ( C.S. Lewis may have said that somewhere once.) And the future does not yet exist for one to go to.

I like the scholastic (I think) definition of God: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The only problem for me is that I often feel as though I have found the nonexistent circumference. Woe is me.

Daredevil is being taken off Netflix after February 28. 3 seasons, 39 episodes: I found it worth watching. Daredevil is Catholic which frequently makes a difference to his life and thought: sin, guilt, evil, the value of life, redemption, forgiveness, truth. Then there is the presence of Father Lantom who in the Defenders hears his confession; and, who at one point in Daredevil offers to hear his confession and give him the Eucharist, and who is always there for him, as is the Nun, Maggie, old enough to be his mother! Charlie Cox makes a very good Daredevil.

THE DEFENDERS: 1 season, 8 episodes. I watched this too. Father Lantom is still alive here, thank God, but the evil Hand also brought Electra back from the dead. Also going off Netflix after February 28.

Or, perhaps I need a simple prayer,

Though only one comes quick to mind;

Lord be present in my life:

Make me loving, good and kind.

The candle burns with a single thought,

To light the way in darkest night;

The little dog barks, ferocious, taut,

To hide from the world his nervous fright.

What is a super hero?

A woman or man with great power within.

What is a Christian saint?

A woman or man whose faith conquered sin.

I loved a little dog once,

A dachshund black and brown.

I held him in my arms and heart,

And then I put him down.

Will little dogs go to Heaven,

Since God’s love made them too?

Only if we give them up

And trust what God will do?

THE CATHOLIC THING

Pauline Freedom According to Aquinas

Eduardo J. Echeverria

THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 2018

In what sense does the moral law remain God’s will for the Christian who has been called to freedom in Christ? (Gal 5: 1, 13) To answer this important question, especially now when winds of antinomianism and confusing claims about conscience are blowing through the Church, we can look to Aquinas’ distinction between the obliging and compelling forces of the moral law. (Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians)

Aquinas reflects on two key texts: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17); “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” (Gal 5:18)

Paul is talking about the interior freedom of those who are moved by the Spirit. But those moved by the Spirit would not act against the moral laws expressed in the second table of the Decalogue, for these laws have an obliging force: “All the faithful are under the Law, because it was given to all – hence it is said: ‘I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it’ [Matt 5:17-19].”

Pace the antinomians, moral laws do tell us what one is allowed or not allowed to do, permitted or forbidden. Yes, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal 5:1) But our freedom in Christ does not mean that we are no longer obliged to be faithful in marriage (not commit adultery), to protect human life (not commit murder), to honor our parents, keep our promises, tell the truth (not bear false witness against our neighbor), and the like.

Being free in Christ does not mean that we’re above the law. Christians are not antinomians. This is evident from St. Paul’s description of those who “walk by the Spirit.” He writes:

Walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out [the] desires of the flesh. . . .If you are being led by the Spirit you are not under [the jurisdiction] of the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: Sexual immorality [porneia], [sexual] impurity [akatharsia; a term used of same-sex intercourse in Rom 1:24-27], [sexual] licentiousness [aselgeia]. . . I warn you, just as I warned you beforehand, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. . . .And those who belong to Christ [have] crucified the flesh with its passions and its desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. (Gal 5:16-25)

Regarding the compelling force of the moral law, Aquinas is clear that those who are moved by the Spirit are not under the law – and thus are not constrained or compelled by the law. But this means that they have the interior freedom to choose the good out of love for God, the dynamism of the Holy Spirit being their inspiration: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15)

Aquinas comments, “For charity inclines to the very things that the Law prescribes. Therefore, because the just have an inward law, they willingly do what the Law commands and are not constrained by it.” Indeed, the Psalmist speaks of the man of God as one who delights in the law, which is true and life-giving.

In this light, we see why Aquinas holds that he who would do evil but is held back by a sense of shame or by fear of the law is externally compelled to keep the law. He thus experiences the moral law as a form of bondage, which imposes moral precepts unrelated to his good. This man is still under the law, and hence not free in a Pauline sense:

A person is free when he belongs to himself; a slave, on the contrary, belongs to his master. In the same way, he acts freely who acts spontaneously, while he who receives his impulse from another does not act freely. Therefore, he who avoids evil not because it is evil but because of a commandment of God is not free. But he who avoids evil because it is evil is free.

Therefore, about Pauline freedom, Aquinas writes: “Now it is precisely this that the Holy Spirit brings about, for he perfects our spirit interiorly, giving it a new dynamism, and thus the person refrains from evil out of love, as if the divine law commanded it of him. He is free, therefore, not in the sense that the divine law no longer holds for him, but in the sense that his interior dynamism moves him to do what the divine law prescribes.” (Commentary on Saint Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 3, Lesson 3)

Aquinas’ concluding point – that the divine law still holds for the man of Pauline freedom – is clear because both Jesus and the Apostles appeal to the Decalogue (Matt 19:18; Rom 13:9; Eph 6:2; James 2:11). The moral law retains its meaning as, “holy law” and as “holy and just and good.” (Rom 7:12) Thus, on the one hand, that Jesus “fulfills the law” cannot mean that Christians can break with the moral law.

On the other hand, as the law’s fulfiller, Jesus takes up the Law into His death and brings it to its deepest meaning, not only by perfecting and transforming it but also by interiorizing its demands. (see Matt 5:17-20) This fulfillment radicalizes the law’s demands by going to its heart and center, which is that we love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus says, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Mt 22:40) This is the central commandment of Love.

Because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the grace of the Holy Spirit, given to us through faith in Christ (Rom 5:5), not only does His love now indwell in, and act through us, but we act freely because God’s law is placed within our hearts. (Jer 31:33f.; Heb. 10:16).

Image: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles by Valentin de Boulogne (attributed), c. 1620 [Museum of Fine Arts, Houston]

© 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.orgThe Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

SOMETHING ON JOHN MILTON

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/157023/milton-you-should-be-living-at-this-hour

Milton, You Should Be Living at This Hour

Our understanding of John Milton's life and work has been scattered throughout the centuries. An inventive new biography seeks to make him whole.

BY ED SIMON

• Late one night at a Beech Lane pub in August of 1790, a few congregants of St. Giles-without-Cripplegate decided to dig up John Milton's corpse. Entombed within their parish some 116 years before, it was only then that a monument was planned for the most celebrated interment. But first the drinkers thought it necessary to confirm it was really Milton in that grave. The following morning, the Beech Lane regulars arrived at St. Giles—a Medieval gothic stone structure in London that is today surrounded by the brutalist Barbican Centre—and proceeded to disentomb Milton. Upon discarding rotten wood and cracking open the lead coffin, the exhumers revealed the shrouded remains of the poet, who claimed he had accomplished things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” in Paradise Lost (1667), his epic retelling of Revelation's War in Heaven between Lucifer and God and the Genesis account of the fall of humanity.

  The vandals discovered that Milton had decomposed except for the long, curly, chestnut hair that still clung to his scalp—"these redundant locks,” as Milton had described his titular character in Samson Agonistes (1671). The grave robbers fell into a frenzy, akin to those medieval accounts in which the pious paw apart the body of a saint still in the process of dying. It was a “most sacrilegious scene,” the pamphleteer Philip Neve wrote a few days later, "a transaction which will strike every liberal mind with horror and disgust." Some of the interlopers pried teeth from Milton's mouth or grabbed a loose jawbone or pulled from his pate long strips of hair that had once earned him the cheeky nickname "The Lady of Cambridge." Poet William Cowperdenounced the "wretches who have dared profane / His dread sepulchral rest." 

  Ironically for a committed anti-papist such as Milton, bits of his bone and hair were sold in London pawnshops, evoking the trade in sacred relics that he decried in Paradise Lost as the "sport of winds," all of those "beads / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls." "The fate of his body," Joe Moshenska writes in his excellent Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton (Basic Books, 2021), "feels curiously apt." Just as Milton's corpse was divided, so, too, has his thought been sundered; he comes to us now as a poet of dueling antipathies. There is Milton the consummate Protestant and the Italophile who dined with Jesuits, the staunch Puritan and the non-conformist heretic, the misogynistic prig and the celebrant of conjugal divinity, the incendiary pamphleteer and the erudite scholar, the English nationalist and the polyglot cosmopolitan. Milton is "encountered as a series of scattered moments and encounters which do not … add up to a cohesive whole," Moshenska writes. 

  Milton remains more respected than read. For all his canonicity, he lacks the cultural cache of his compatriots Chaucer, Dickens, Austen, and, of course, Shakespeare. Moshenska contends that Milton is "a national monument rather than a national treasure … there was no Milton museum, no gift shop selling Paradise Lost tea towels or 'Lycidas' lollipops." I would add that no adaptation of "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" follows television broadcasts of A Christmas Carol. Colin Firth has never risen like Lucifer from Pandemonium in a BBC miniseries; the National Theatre has never staged Milton’s masque Comus. There are reasons for Milton's relative marginality: he requires knowledge of Christian theology that most readers in our current secular age lack, and his sticky syntax, complicated grammar, baroque diction, and obscure allusions do not reward casual readers, even if his Lucifer is the most riveting dramatic character ever rendered….

This is the beginning of Simon’s article which is essentially a review of Moshenska’s new biography of Milton. The website for the entire Simon essay is listed at the top. Since I haven’t read the biography, and may not, I can’t comment on its quality. LES

A WHALE OF A DREAM

Two nights ago, following my visit to the foot doctor in Lexington, and stopping to eat broccoli-cheese soup and a pumpkin muffin along with a mango smoothie at Panera in Richmond on the way home, I had a dream, a very vivid dream that I remember very well for the most part. I had also, I should report, taken two Dramamine for the trip and later that evening, two diazepam to help with the sleeping and the itching, along with my regular pain medication. Trips to Lexington are always arduous and tend to knock me out for an evening and a day.

In any case in the dream I was asked to substitute for an art teacher. The classroom was large and there were a number of students present who were not very attentive. I remember losing my temper and yelling at several of them, especially several girls who were giggling and talking near the back of the room. I even swore at the class at one point. The interesting thing though was that I delivered a lecture on art, mystery and manners, using Moby Dick. The point was that Melville/Ishmael has chapters on every aspect of the sperm whale, including the penis, I said, so that we know a great many facts about the physiology of the sperm whale, but that the whale itself remains a mystery. Dissecting the whale will give you facts, but only confronting the living whale on the open ocean will bring you face to face with the essential mystery of the creature. I think Ishmael himself makes that point. Being is a gift and a mystery, meaning that it is essentially unresolvable. To develop the idea a bit beyond the dream, everything that is has being, but only God is Being itself. As God says to Moses in Exodus, tell them “I Am” has sent you. And Jesus affirms it: “Before Abraham was I Am.” That, as I remember, didn’t go over well with certain Israelites.

I hardly ever remember dreams, but this one remains vivid; I could even remember some of the students’ faces, though they have faded significantly now. I don’t know why I chose Moby Dick in the dream though I taught it regularly when in my early years at Berea I taught American Literature. I suppose no one here teaches it anymore. Too bad, for it’s an adventure of a lifetime. For an excellent book on Mystery and Manners though, one of the best sources is Flannery O’Connor’s book of that name. Her essays and insights are excellent, as are her short stories: “Revelation,” “Parker’s Back,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” etc.

MEDITATION of the DAY

Sharing in the Blessedness of Christ

Holiness demands a constant effort, but it is possible for everyone because, rather than a human effort, it is first and foremost a gift of God, thrice holy. The Apostle John remarks: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. It is God, therefore, who loved us first and made us his adoptive sons in Jesus. Everything in our lives is a gift of his love: how can we be indifferent before such a great mystery? How can we not respond to the heavenly Father’s love by living as grateful children? In Christ, he gave us the gift of his entire self and calls us to a personal and profound relationship with him. Consequently, the more we imitate Jesus and remain united to him the more we enter into the mystery of his divine holiness. We discover that he loves us infinitely, and this prompts us in turn to love our brethren. Loving always entails an act of self-denial, “losing ourselves,” and it is precisely this that makes us happy…. 

In truth, the blessed par excellence is only Jesus. He is, in fact, the true poor in spirit, the one afflicted, the meek one, the one hungering and thirsting for justice, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemaker. He is the one persecuted for the sake of justice. The Beatitudes show us the spiritual features of Jesus and thus express his mystery, the mystery of his death and Resurrection, of his Passion and of the joy of his Resurrection. This mystery, which is the mystery of true blessedness, invites us to follow Jesus and thus to walk toward it. To the extent that we accept his proposal and set out to follow him—each one in his own circumstances—we too can participate in his blessedness. With him, the impossible becomes possible and even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle; with his help, only with his help, can we become perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect. 

Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI reigned as pope from 2005 until 2013. / From Homily at Holy Mass on the Solemnity of All Saints, November 1, 2006, Vatican Basilica, Rome. Used with permission of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

A reading from the first 
Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians15:12, 16-20

Brothers and sisters: If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. 

But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

The word of the Lord.

[From Magnificat Sunday, 2/13/22]

MAGNIFICAT MEDITATION

MEDITATION OF THE DAY

The Way to a Purified Heart

My son, give me your heart (Prv 23:26). This is why Jesus came into this world: he wanted to be loved by us. He wanted to seek out the hearts that would love him, so that he might offer them to his heavenly Father.

His love is the sum of all perfection, the summation of all the virtues; it is the holy life. Our lives should have a goal: love itself. God’s love is as strong as death. It has wings immaculate as those of a dove and strong as those of an eagle to take us away from the miseries of earth and lift us up to the regions of infinite happiness.

Jesus’ thirst is insatiable. Its depths are unfathomable. He loves and desires to be loved. He loves and, in his sovereign humility, wants us to let ourselves be loved by him. He wants us to ask him to love us.

What do we mean by “letting ourselves be loved by him”? It is to receive his approach of love even if it embarrasses us. Letting ourselves be loved by him is to open ourselves to all the demands of love.

It means looking at him when he wants us to look at him. It means loving him as he wants us to love him. It means being silent when he needs us to be silent. It means speaking when he is listening. Listening when he is speaking. Being in spiritual darkness when this pleases him and enjoying his light when he sends it. In a word, letting ourselves be loved means losing our soul in Jesus and being a flawless mirror that reflects his glance.

Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida 

Blessed Concepción († 1937), also known as “Conchita,” was a wife, mother, widow, and mystical writer. She was the first Mexican laywoman to be beatified. / From What Jesus Is Like, Most Rev. Donald W. Montrose, Tr. © 2008, The Fathers and Brothers of the Society of St. Paul, ST PAULS/Alba House, Staten Island, NY. www.stpauls.us. Used with permission.

PECULIARITIES! SELFIES! GRACE!

Nursery Rhymes and Nothing Much

Chipper

Little dog, little dog, where have you been?

Your feet are all filthy, and so is your chin!

Little dog, little dog, what have you done?

Your toys have gone missing, were you out having fun?

The backyard tree is lonely,

For the child has now grown up;

There’s no one left to play with him,

Not even the scruffy pup.

His only love’s the left-behind

Grave of the backyard pup.

They buried him quite solemnly

And then went in to sup.

There’s a cross of wood and stone,

On the grave beneath the tree;

There’s the body of a well-loved dog,

A well-chewed bone, and me.

i heard you made a metaphor

And tied it to a verse,

Then buried it beneath a tree

In God’s good universe!

Selfie

I’m King of the doggerel couplet;

I’m Jack of the metric crowd;

I’m the Fool who juggles nonsense words,

Then troubles them out loud!

Lord, I’m Joker in this well-worn pack,

An Ace that’s way too proud!

I’d ask for help if I could pray,

But the deck is stacked against me,

And there’s nothing left to say.

The Trace

I’m looking for the Queen of Hearts;

Of Heaven they say she’s Queen.

Amongst the stars in darkest night,

She’s the brightest to be seen.

The only star that’s fixed in place,

They say she is the Queen of grace,

And once behold her glorious face,

Earthly beauty’s but a trace

Of that Divine perfection.

ENTOMOLOGY

Going Mental

If I’d an ounce of common sense,

I’d put iPad and stylus down

And simply jump the fence;

Where the grass is always greener,

Or so they always say,

If you like the grass that’s been around

For six weeks and a day.

Jumping now to farther shores,

Across a roiling sea,

I, like Coleridge, sinking down

In the darksome night,

Through caverns measureless

With light, under the sunlit bee.

The sunlit bee with wings of gold

Is huge and blinding bright:

He flies through air, dark, dense and cold,

Matter for grave concerns,

Spreading pollen like winter snow,

Giving the dark a golden glow

As if the world that lives below

For conflagration yearns.

Truth

There’s a little touch of Paradise

In every soul that yearns

With a sinful and a restless heart,

A heart that for Christ burns.

The Pilgrim’s Gift

The weary Pilgrim’s troubled

By clouds of biting bugs,

For blood loss is quite painful

When there are no soothing drugs!

Rainwater Profit

The cistern in our backyard,

Was old and built with brick;

The pump upon the concrete slab,

Required a well primed kick!

Simon: Expiration Date

What do you do when your little dog dies,

After the sorrow, the tears and the cries?

You remember the joy that he brought everyday.

He was, after all, not here to stay!

He was a good gift for a limited time;

Now, only my memory holds him in his prime.

That, of course, and an album of photos, of which, the following are two.

The Saint with the burning heart is, of course, Augustine.

TRANSFORMATIONS

Overnight

The wooden bunny changed his form:

He now looks like a chicken,

Hiding from the gathering storm.

My, how the pot does thicken!

Into the plot the chicken goes;

Simmer for six hours or more;

Look to the dog if you need more bark,

Or check the corner grocery store.

Remember what your mother said,

”A watched clock only has two hands,

Boil and simmer, high and low;

So don’t expect celestial bands

To play at Whiskers’ funeral.”

The gathering storm has passed us by

And Finnigan has awakened;

So here comes everyone again,

Time’s relatives aren’t mistaken.

A funeral is a costly mess

When Whiskers is the victim;

Consider that a paper bull

And not a campaign dictum.

I‘ve looked again at the scruffy pine,

Trying to see what’s hidden;

The universe is playing tricks,

Just doing what it’s bidden.

A scruffy tree can be a sign,

Or an entrance into Heaven.

It just depends who bakes the bread

And who supplies the leaven.

STUFF AND NONSENSE!

Maybe, Maybe Not

The wooden rabbit sits upon

A scruffy pine tree limb;

Always facing north he is,

Tiny, fit and trim.

He’s a never-stirring icon

Of nature’s quiet grace;

Silent and immobile,

He can never show his face.

Imagination found him,

Sitting in the cold,

Waiting to be spotted

By imagination bold.

He’s the loadstar from my sickbed;

He’s the ever-present ghost;

Always in the moment,

Always the perfect host.

“Seeing is believing,”

Says St. Thomas filled with dread;

God is right in front of you,

Too late once you are dead.

Still the rabbit sits there

In his forlorn tree,

Waiting for the Presence,

To bring life to him and me!

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

This Magnificat meditation was such a delightful tribute to Aquinas that I couldn’t resist copying it and putting it here. The lady did an excellent job of getting at the heart of the great saint’s work and being that I wanted it frequently available. Aquinas and Saint Augustine are my two favorite saints and heroes. Well, of course there is Saint Francis for other reasons. G. K. Chesterton writes that: Francis was “a most sublime approximation to his Master….a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ.” Then, as James C. Howell interestingly notes, Chesterton “shrewdly suggested” that “if St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis. And my present point is that it is very enlightening to realize that Christ was like St.Francis.” The entire passage is wonderful, as is Chesterton’s entire biography. So is Howell’s essay, for that matter. I would have quoted the entire passage where Chesterton goes on to explain what he means except that my hands will not easily allow it and the entire quote is lengthy. LES

Quoted by Howell, “Christ Was like St. Francis,” in The Art of Reading Scripture, Eerdman’s, 2003, 89-108. From Chesterton’s biography of the great Saint, St. Francis of Assisi, Image, 1957,117-118.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Anne Husted Burleigh

If I were to list my favorite saints, Saint Thomas Aquinas would be close to the top. Why do I, who am not a student of theology, have such affection for this great boulder of a man with the mighty mind to produce the Summa theologiae and the giant heart to write my favorite hymn, Adoro Te, also known as “Godhead Here in Hiding”?

Undeterred by the swirling chaos of a broken world, Saint Thomas looks straight into the order of God’s creation, the reality that sin cannot destroy. So utterly certain is Saint Thomas of the reasonableness of God’s mind that he knows God’s creation is therefore undeniably orderly and intelligible, a creation imprinted through and through with the Creator’s own intellect. Certain that divine reason undergirds the nature of everything, including man, Thomas sets his sights on studying this intelligible creation. With reverence and humility, without a trace of cocksure arrogance, he looks at what IS—at God and all that God has made. 

And when Thomas looks at the beauty of this divine intellect and all the order that It has made, he contemplates Being itself, the Logos, the Creating Mind that spoke and came and dwelt among us. And when Thomas looks and contemplates this God who loves him, he himself falls in love. He can but say, Adoro Te. 

Who can resist a saint who so resolutely, hugely, unflinchingly unites reason and faith, who studies, looks, contemplates, and loves his Lord so humbly that his study spills over into the most beautiful Eucharistic hymns ever written for the Church? 

God: Adoro Te.

Anne Husted Burleigh is a long-time writer for Catholic journals. She and her husband live in Cincinnati near their children and grandchildren. They are members of the Dominican laity.

I only recently discovered that I could document these images! LES

Essay on the Lord’s Prayer, Anthony Esolen

The Poetry of Praise

The Lord’s Poem

Anthony Esolen

When we pray, Jesus says, we are not to heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. It’s as if sheer volume could batter down the walls of a god who does not want to hear. What we want instead is a prayer that encompasses all that a human being may need or should ask for—a universal prayer. New wine should be stored in new wine-skins, says Jesus, but he also says that every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

And that makes me wonder. What if the Lord’s Prayer does more than tower above the old prayers of the Jews, the psalms. What if it is itself a psalm, a poem—the psalm of psalms?

Imagine Jesus, sitting upon the hilltop, teaching the people who have come to hear him by the thousands. He wants to do more than teach them about God. He wants to bring them into a personal relationship with the Father. That means he must teach them how to speak to the Father—how to pray. That will require more than advice about prayer. Advice, we know well, goes in one ear, rattles about the brain a bit, seems agreeable enough, then goes out the other ear, and we go on doing what we were doing already. We need not just the advice, but the prayer.

But what kind of prayer? Again, imagine the thousands. Many are hungry. Some are women with small children tugging at their skirts. The birds are twittering, the flies are buzzing, the wind rustles in the grass. If the prayer is long, no one will remember it. If the prayer is too short, no one may notice it. It must be short, but it must be all the more powerful for being short, and it must be easy to learn by heart.

So our Lord gives them a poem.

The music of Hebrew

We are probably the least poetic people in the history of the world, and that is much to our harm; it’s as if we have denied ourselves a fundamental vitamin for the human heart. Eskimos living in the frozen north had no marble to sculpt or clay to mold, but they had minds and voices, so they had poetry—they had songs. The Guarani of the Amazon jungles had no canvas for paint, but they had minds and voices—and songs, to pass along from one generation to the next.

The Hebrews had their songs too, their beloved poetry of worship. Now, the songs of one language aren’t going to be just like the songs of another, just as paintings with watercolors aren’t just like paintings in oil, and a composition for the flute is not going to be just like one for the cello. Hebrew is extraordinarily terse. The Lord is my shepherd, we say in English, there is nothing I shall want. That’s eleven words; in Hebrew it is four. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, we say, for his mercy endures forever. That’s fourteen words; in Hebrew, seven, and two of the seven don’t count in the poetry.

Think of Hebrew as made up of big stark blocks of meaning. The poet sets two blocks—two words—on one side, then two on the other, that correspond to the first two, or that explain them, or that contradict them. Sometimes it is three and three, sometimes three and two, sometimes two and two and two. The “rhymes,” so to speak, are in the parallels. The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty. Or Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. Are there rhymes such as we in English expect? Oh, yes, sometimes, and other ways of playing with sound. You see, in Hebrew, possessive pronouns are attached to the end of a noun, as suffixes, so that thy face will rhyme with thy love and thy glory. It’s the same with pronouns that are direct objects; they are attached to the end of the verb. What in English sounds redundant, as in “all creeping things that creep upon the ground,” in Hebrew involves a playful change in the vowels of a word, as if we said in English, in a jaunty way, “the singer sang a song.”

But what language did Jesus use for his poem? I can’t be absolutely certain, of course. I wasn’t there. But the most obvious choice is Hebrew, the sacred language, not Aramaic, the language of the streets and the fields and the firesides. When Jesus read the words of Isaiah in the synagogue, they were in Hebrew. If you sang the psalms, you sang them in Hebrew. More: the Hebrew of the psalms and of the prophets was itself a poetic Hebrew, and not the ordinary language of that older time. Think of an Italian singing a Latin poem. 

What was it like?

All right, but then we had better keep the words simple, so that everybody can understand them. And Jesus does just that. When you think of how much the poem has to do, how easy it must be, how it must echo all the old sacred poetry, and yet be as new in the world of prayer as Jesus was new in the world of man—new, and unique—then it seems that the Lord’s Poem was his greatest miracle before he rose from the dead, a miracle as quiet as a still small voice, and as mighty as thunder.

Here’s how I think the poem works. I’ll link with hyphens what would be a single word, and put the elements in the order we’d find them in, in Hebrew. The brackets are for little words, sometimes but a single consonant, that don’t “count” in the poet’s numeration:

Father-our in-heaven, be-hallowed name-thy,
Let-come kingdom-thy, be-done will-thy, on-earth [as] in-heaven.
Give-us today bread-our of-day,
[And] forgive-us debts-our, [as] forgive-we debtors-our,
[Nor] lead-us into-temptation, [but] deliver-us from-evil.

That’s twenty-two words. The three words ending in “our” rhyme. The three words ending in “thy” rhyme. The three words ending in “us” rhyme. “Heaven” is the same as “heaven,” and “day” is the same as “day.” Can a child remember it? Why, how can anyone not remember it?

So much for the form. What about the words? They too are simple. They appeal straight to the heart. Jesus does not lead us into thickets. Abenu: Our Father. A child could hear it and say it. What it means, that God is our Father, not like a Father, but Father himself—that is an inexhaustible mystery. So too is the Gospel: humble and small on the outside, but inside, it’s a temple wider than the universe. And God’s kingdom? It has long struck me that it is easy to explain to a child what a king is; it’s the president or prime minister whose role is a muddle. That God is our king, the child will know. But to pray that his kingdom will come, that too is like the humble door. A child can approach and enter, but not the wisest man in the world can exhaust its meaning.

Then there is the bread. The first time we hear the word in Scripture, it is in the curse of Adam, the curse that conceals a great blessing: In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Bread is the fundamental food, the staff of life. The children of Israel remembered not so much the quail they captured in the desert as the manna, the “what-is-this?,” that they boiled to make wafers. Jesus asks us to pray for our bread of the day, and that is like what he says about letting tomorrow be anxious for itself. When we pray for the kingdom of God to come, we are not praying for some specific future event, something that might make the newspapers, for the kingdom of God is both among us now and stands above the world of time and change. So when we think of our daily bread, and about the kingdom of God, we should remember that Jesus himself gives us the true bread of life, which is for this day, right now, and is for the kingdom, for the wedding feast of the Lamb, beyond all time.

Who taught Jesus the art?

We’ve all seen those tender paintings of the home life of Jesus when he was a boy, learning the craft of the carpenter from Joseph. From whom might he have learned his first poems? No doubt from both Joseph and Mary, because, as I’ve said, sacred songs are part of the heritage of all mankind. But we know for a fact that Mary did compose a wonderful poem, what we know as the Magnificat. 

Imagine then the Blessed Mother, singing in the home in Nazareth while she was about her daily work, with the small boy Jesus at her side, listening and sometimes singing along. A beautiful picture; and like the Lord’s poem, humble in appearance, and boundless in import; just the place for a little child. So also is the kingdom of heaven.

Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House)…

[Obviously, a writer I consider worth reading. The essay comes from the Magnificat app. Also a book by Anthony Esolen that is excellent. I’m just saying…. LES]

MISCELLANEOUS MISCONCEPTIONS

Meteors light the midnight sky,

Streaking the darksome night,

Piercing the constellations,

In their swift celestial flight.

Beware the Bengal Tiger,

Orange and black and quick;

Hidden in the thicket dense,

Where leaves are wet and slick.

See the tree-bound rabbit,

Sitting on the pine tree limb;

He only moves in the dark of night,

Subtle, gray and grim.

No hunter ever saw him;

No owl could sink his claws;

For he’s the mystery creature,

Obeying mystery’s laws.

Morning finds him back in place,

Sitting on his pine tree bough,

Solid as a frozen duck,

No one quite knows how!

Nameless creatures live below,

Under the shifting earth;

In the dark they wriggle up,

Biting with ceaseless mirth!

Life is full of pain and sorrow,

Or so mine often seems;

At other times I find it filled,

With rich Shakespearean dreams!