The Day Called Good

Ecce lignum crucis,
in quo salus mundi pependit.

Venite adoremus!

Behold the wood of the cross
on which the salvation of the world was suspended.

Come, let us adore!

Today, our Lord dies. He is put to death by the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Roman Governor, and Our Sins.

Today, we enter the tomb.

Today, consummatum est.

Good Friday is the only day of the year on which Mass is not said. Our reflection, more so than usual, is upon a cruel instrument of torture, a gracious instrument of salvation.

For Christians, it's all about Easter, the Resurrection. But the resurrection is in some ways the most normal thing that happens in the Triduum. Of course God rises from the dead, didn't He say He could take up His life again? The mystery, the moment, is today.

The mystery is that God dies.

We stand at the foot of the cross tonight with Mary, his mother - our mother now. We gaze upon Him whom they have pierced - whom we have pierced. We flinch at the awful reality of the price of our sins - the price of our salvation.

Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

Cum ergo accepisset Iesus acetum dixit
consummatum est
et inclinato capite tradidit spiritum.

The Eternity of Mystery

Tonight, all over the world, Catholics will experience a profound paradox. The same one we've been experiencing all Lent, in fact.

For 40 days, we have been waiting for our Lord. Tonight begins the sacred Triduum, the grand Three Days which are the culmination of the liturgical year. Tonight begins three days of mystery which culminates in the holiest night of the year: the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday.

Tonight is celebrated the Last Supper, the Institution of the Eucharist and of the Priesthood. Tonight we hear these words from 1 Cor. 11:23-26:

Brothers and sisters: I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.

Tonight we do...

...what we do every Sunday, every day even, at Mass.

What is it that we do? When the priest celebrates the Mass, he is actually going through the Triduum. He begins with the last supper, "This is my body, this is my blood..." From there we experience the crucifixion and death, the breaking of the body, until we are brought at last to the "Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi." Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world, in which the priest reunites the fractured host, elevating it with the Chalice, reuniting the Body and the Blood as we are brought again to the Resurrection.

All through Lent, we have been celebrating that for which we have been waiting.

Tonight, we shall celebrate that mystery into which we are entering.

That night, Our Lord's sacrifice at table was unified to the suffering which he was yet to begin, and they partook of His glorified body, which in time He had not yet attained. Every moment is the Lord's, present to Him simultaneously in eternity which is reflected in the way that even in the penitential season of Lent, we celebrate the feast of victory.

May this Triduum help us to experience more deeply the Mass, that every time we attend it may be for us another Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.

On Speaking

I had a thought the other day (and by other day I mean other week, back when it was cold) that I have been meaning to share.

I have been participating in the local 40 Days for Life campaign, with an earlier-morning shift before my classes and work start. Being ostensibly winter in Iowa, there were a few days in which it was in fact a bit chilly. I may be a native (more or less), but that doesn't mean I don't bundle up when there's snow on the ground!

It's amazing how much less
scared of you people are when
you are carrying a child...

So there I was, praying my rosary as I walked back and forth in the "L" that comprises the public sidewalks in front of our local Planned Parenthood, with my scarf and the collar of my middle layer up to keep my neck and face warm. It was actually rather pleasant, as I am half-German and therefore exothermic to a high degree. But the thing was, I couldn't see anything.

As you will have no doubt noticed from my profile picture, I am indeed a four-eyes. As those of less-than-stellar ocular capacity can attest to, condensation is the enemy of a good time when one is wearing glasses. One stray moisture-laden breath, and your cold glasses also just became 95% opaque. Fantastic.

The funny thing is, that doesn't happen when you're not trapping your breath close to your face. My glasses were only fogged over when I was speaking down, worried about warmth. When I raised my head, my glasses cleared, and I could see.

Our own voice, muttering to ourselves, clouds our sight, even if we're saying the right things.

The Word of God, spoken in charity to the world and seeing the people around you is sight.

Muttering to ourselves just builds up our sense of worth. I'm just so right, why can't they see it? Well, maybe they'd see it if it wasn't about you being right, but rather it was about you making the truth plain and manifest to their reasons.

Or maybe the truth they need to see is someone who is joyful about their vigil. Someone who is in awe at the beautiful day, grateful for his freedom and his life, smiling and genuinely joyful in greeting to everyone he passes, whether they smile or frown, wave or shake their head, acknowledge him or avoid eye contact.

Mine is the joyful endurance. Mine is the calm assurance. Mine is the peaceful certainty. Mine is contentment in Him who wins all victories for His beloved.

All it took was for me to stop muttering to myself, and to raise my head in prayer.

The Second Luminous Mystery

He Who revealed Himself at the wedding feast of Cana
The Wedding of Cana

John 2:1-11

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.

When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." (And) Jesus said to her, "Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come."

His mother said to the servers, "Do whatever he tells you."

Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told them, "Fill the jars with water." So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, "Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter." So they took it.

And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from (although the servers who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now."

Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.

Typical of John, there are many different things going on here, such as the way that to the Greeks (this gospel was written in Greek), water connotes humanity, while wine connotes divinity. There is also of course the blessing of marriages here by the fact that not only is Christ present, but He is in a sense "the life of the party," and of course this passage pretty much trashes any claim that drinking is un-Christian. How much bigger of an endorsement for drinking (in the proper place and time - i.e. together in celebration) could there be?

What really strikes me when I read this, though, is the special focus given to Mary. This is the last time she speaks in the Gospel of John, but how profound is this? Mary is seemingly ignoring her Son (whom she knows to be the Messiah, the Son of God), and riding roughshod over His objection. What audacity in a mere mortal!

This should be a wake up call to the extreme importance that Mary holds in the life of Jesus. Recall that in Matthew 5:17f, He clearly states that He has come, "not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it," and assures us that "not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place." Recalling the 4^th commandment and that Mary is indeed His mother, then by His own law the eternal 2^nd Person of God honors His mother.

By giving Mary the gift of His Only-Begotten Son, the Father shares His Fatherhood with Mary, gives her a unique relationship - no one else will physically give birth to God, to literally be His mother. In leading her to initiate Christ's earthly ministry, God shows us the profound love He has for this woman. Let us be clear, God did not need Mary, Jesus could very easily have started His earthly mission on His own - He is GOD. However, Mary is allowed to exercise her motherhood, and gives us one of the simplest and yet most difficult instructions to living the Christian life:

Do whatsoever He tells you.

War is not the answer!

Axiomatically, my dear Watson!

Time for my own version of shock and awe: I agree wholeheartedly and without reservation with the title of the post.

...though probably not for the reasons you are expecting.

Yep, I said it, war is awful. I hate it, it is an abomination, and is quite simply not the answer.

And that's the problem.

Bumper stickers are great for sloganeering, but not so much on actual thought, and this particularly popular bumper sticker suffers from that lack. Specifically, no rational person disagrees with this statement!

Whoa whoa whoa, Jeremiah, are you saying that the Pope was not rational in calling the first Crusade to defend Christians in the Holy Land? Are you saying that the U.S. had no rational minds involved in the prosecution of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan?

No. Because most of them didn't think war was the answer either.

Pretty much...

Okay, enough beating around the bush, let me talk plainly as bumper stickers cannot.

The problem: ∫Log(7)*7^x dx_1≤x≤2

The answer: 42

The solution:

• ∫Log(7)*7^x dx_1≤x≤2
• = 7^x_1≤x≤2
• = 7² - 7¹
• = 49-7
• = 42

Yes, Jeremiah, we all know you're brilliant and an engineer and had to take Calculus I, II, & III, as well as Differential Equations, we're all awfully impressed.

Good, you should be.

But my point is if I was assigned that as homework and all I turned in was "42" (unless by some miracle the professor forgot to write "show all work" on the assignment... HA!), I would get precisely 0 on the assignment, because I gave an answer, but what was required was a solution.

The answer is like the goal, or the destination, while the solution is the map that tells us how to get there. Which is of course why only the foolish think that war is the answer, because only the foolish and evil desire war for its own sake.

What is not addressed in the bumper sticker philosophy is quite simply that sometimes that map leads through a dark valley, even the valley of the shadow of death, if you will. Because of our fallen nature, there are times when the only way to reach peace is by waging war against those who will not allow it. There are times when the only solution that does more good than harm involves incapacitating the belligerents, and someone has to do that pacifying.

This is why the Church in her wisdom gives us the Just War Doctrine. Catholic Answers has a writeup up that goes to some depth both in scripture and catechism to explain what the Church teaches, why, and how it is to be applied. It is a good read, and frank if brief regarding America's failures.

It's kind of a hard read when you realize how often our nation has violated those tenants, going to war without good reason, or persecuting the war in an evil manner. Even when our cause is just, there are still many many ways in which we betray justice in the war. If America really wants that place as the shining city on a hill, if she really wants to say that her way is better than Nazism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, Imperialism, and Terrorism, then she better be acting like it. That our foes have been more vile in war does not justify our injustice.

The long and short of it is that whether it is an accurate quotation or not, war is indeed hell. It should be avoided at great cost, and all other legitimate options exhausted. However, peace is our aim, and not just peace which is the absence of violence, but peace with is the presence of justice. Sometimes the only way to achieve that peace is to remove the ability to wage war from those who would do evil.

War. Never the answer. Unfortunately, sometimes a part of the solution.

Into the desert... alone?

Everyone knows the hymn "Lonesome Valley."

Jesus walked this lonesome valley.
He had to walk it by Himself;
O, nobody else could walk it for Him,
He had to walk it by Himself.

We must walk this lonesome valley,
We have to walk it by ourselves;
O, nobody else can walk it for us,
We have to walk it by ourselves.

v You must go and stand your trial,
You have to stand it by yourself,
O, nobody else can stand it for you,
You have to stand it by yourself.

Now, I'm not denying that the end of the day, you must stand before your maker, and that you yourself are responsible to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul says. But the path to judgement is not one we walk alone.

No, no one else can walk our path for us, but is not the point of the Church, is not the point of salvation itself that we are not walking alone? Take my yoke, for it is easy, and my burden is light. The yoke binds a team of oxen together, and the Yoke of Christ binds us to Him, and bound to Him we are bound to each other.

Jesus Christ, being God, was always in the beatific vision. He was with the Father and the Spirit through the entire course of His earthly life - He does not say, "I and the Father were one," but "I and the Father are one."

We must make this Lenten journey for ourselves, but we are not by ourselves. The 2,600+ people at all the Masses in my parish yesterday should make that clear. But more than that, even when we flee to the solace of quiet and solitude, God is there! We are not alone in this journey, we are strengthened by our brothers and sisters, by our mother the Church, and most importantly by Our Lord Himself.

For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me.

The Elegance of Symmetry

There are three descriptors of God typically used, especially when one is about to bring up the argument against God from evil. While I argue that the list is non-exhaustive, it is widely accepted that these are sine qua non for the traditionally understood "god":

• All Good - Omnibenevolent
• All Knowing - Omniscient
• All Powerful - Omnipotent

All knowing gets flack as being apparently opposed to free will (which is is not), and all powerful gets thrown the sophomoric questions such as, "could God create a rock so heavy He couldn't lift it?" But that is nothing compared to the confusion that surrounds the nature of Good.

There is an (incorrect) notion floating around that good and evil are just words, just terms. They are not absolute indicators, but relative statements of opinion, conditioned by society et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. There are a number of problems with this, but for the time being I want to instead state a positive case in support of the traditional Catholic understanding of evil as a privation of good.

This point comes from symmetry, specifically the symmetry between these three descriptions of God.

First, Power, or Potency. From Latin potens - the ability to do something. The opposite of potency is not anti-potency. It's not like there's some mysterious condition where you perform negative work on a situation such that what happens is in direct opposition to what was intended. This isn't anti-potency, but rather misdirected potency. The opposite of capability is incapability, a lack of potency, impotence.

Second, Knowledge. Again, the opposite of knowing a thing is not to know the wrong thing, but to know nothing. There is no anti-knowledge, but lack of knowledge masquerading as knowledge. You either know or you don't - "knowing" a falsehood means that you don't actually know.

Before I go into good vs. evil, take a look at the thermometer, and keep it in mind as a descriptor while I go into a physical analogy. Temperature is referred to as hot vs. cold, but they're generally considered to be completely relative. However, it is similarly a zero-to-infinity scale - there is such a things as the coldest possible, though the same is not true on the upper end.

So it is with good. Evil is not "anti-good," but a lack of good. It is defect or lack, not something in itself. Tolkien knew this when he wrote the Lord of the Rings - the Orcs were deformed Elves, for evil can create nothing. Evil can only distort and destroy, because it is fundamentally absence.

This set of definitions of course glosses other very important characteristics of which God possesses/is the source of - being, love, presence, mercy, justice, the list could go on and on. There are more and better proofs for why this is a good way to understand reality (some of which will likely show their head on this blog at a later date). I am just struck by the beauty of the symmetry, and the way in which it points to a convergent source - God.