An Essential Distinction: Tellin' It Like It Is

“I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”--Sister Joan Chittester, OSB 

Back When God Was A Lady

There is a lovely antiphon for the Benedictus at Morning Prayer for Trinity Sunday:

O Holy and Undivided Trinity, Creator and Ruler of all that exists, may all praise be yours now, forever, and for ages unending. 

I am well familiar with it.  Just read it yesterday morning.  But alas, I am lazy, I confess it,  and pray in English; little did I know the theological bombshell the English text was concealing.  That is the trouble with English, or rather with the imprecise, translations pushed by those Liturgiam Authenticam folk who are responsible for the current Liturgical texts and who use the liturgy to push their own sexist ideology.  I should have listened to Archbishop Lefebvre after all and kept to the lingua materna of the Church.  Well no, not actually, as that would be Greek.  But the wicked stepmother tongue.  Latin.

After my posting yesterday about the Maryland Maven rallying the torch and pitchfork crowd against Father Dan Fitzpatrick of Durham in England and his “heresy” of referring to the Holy Spirit in the feminine, a reader sent me an extraordinary comment pointing out that the Benedictus Antiphon for Trinity Sunday Lauds—in the pre-conciliar breviary (and of which our previously cited novus ordo vernacular antiphon is a translation, and a poor and misleading one at that)—is a truly remarkable exposition of the femininity not only of the Holy Spirit, but the Godhead Hims—whoops, Herself.  Get a load o’ this!

Benedícta sit creátrix et gubernátrix ómnium, sancta et indivídua Trínitas, et nunc et semper et per infiníta sæculórum sæcula.

I don’t even know where to begin!  Trust me on this, the Latin text is infinitely superior to the English Translation just on the literary level.  I mean, as Latin goes, it is exquisite. It just cries out to be melodiously chanted by virginal monastics who have been made eunuchs for the sake of the liturgy.  But, that aside, let’s unpack it theologically for a moment.

Trinitas in Latin is feminine.  I knew that.  But I presumed like nauta (sailor) and agricola (farmer) it is a feminine noun referring to a male being and therefore taking adjectives in the masculine form.  All languages have their idiosyncrasies.  But no, I should have remembered that it is a sancta et individua, that is to say, feminine Trinitas. Moreover, whoever composed this antiphon way “back in the day” went way overboard to push the feminine theme using the feminine creatrix rather than the masculine creator and the feminine gubernatrix rather than the masculine gubernator.  This antiphon then refers to God, Creator and Ruler of All –as a lady creator and a lady ruler.  I mean it is just incredible!!!  And Sister Joan Chittester had nothing to do with it!!!!  Neither did Elizabeth Johnson!!!!  In fact, almost certainly it was some guy who did it.   The Krazies will assure me that he was almost certainly gay.  Damn gender-benders!

Pope John XXII established the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity for the universal Church in the 14^th century, but the feast itself and the proper office to it is much older, having been composed by Stephen of Liege in the early 10^th century.  I don’t know that this particular antiphon referring to the Creator and Ruler of the universe in the feminine goes back that far—though as it appears in the Rite of York as well as in the Liege ceremonial, an indication that it is pretty ancient, undoubtedly long before Quo Primum and Pius V— it is certainly pre-12^th century.  Ol’ Steve of Liege and his buddies were way ahead of their time.  Can you imagine if they were to be members of the upcoming Synod???  Why those ol’ battle axes from Les Femmes and Restore DC Catholicism would be joining up with the ladies in lavender  from Rorate Caeli and New Liturgical Movement to bar access to the Synod Hall to these heretics.  Creatrix indeed!!!  I bet ol’God is going to hitch up the coleos divinos and smite a few of these liberal pansies who called him a creatrix et gubernatorix.  

Tying Up This Tiger on An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life, or, The Issue Is Not The Veil

I was on a long car trip the day before yesterday and while I drove along through the snowy Appalachians I was listening to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on my iPod.   And of course I came to one of my favorite passages in that classic, the scene in Stave 3 where Bob Cratchit has just returned with Tiny Tim from Christmas morning church services:  

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

There is a lot of whining among the Katholic Krazies that what few nuns are left these days are overly involved in “social action” instead of teaching second grade or knitting scarves for tuberculosis patients.  Dickens’ remarks—indeed his entire career—is a reminder that there is nothing new about Christians seeing the intimate connection between the disadvantaged (we might actually choose to say “oppressed”) in our society and the Lord whom we claim—somewhat falsely I fear for some—to worship. 

There is no authentic Christianity that is not rooted in a passionate commitment to work for a just social order.  What I mean by a “just social order” is a society in which each of God’s children has access to the resources that God—who is Father of all—has intended for each of his children.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children go without food sufficient for the day when others of us can afford to waste so much excess.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can have multiple homes while others sleep on the streets.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can waste the opportunity for a good education that prepares them to make contributions to the common good of society while others have no escape from a life of drudgery—or even poverty—for no other reason that despite their intelligence, finances have closed the opportunities for learning.  There is much about the way our society is ordered that is fundamentally evil and we need the prophetic voice of Religious men and women to snap open our eyes and see beyond the blinders that the social order has fixed on us from the day we were first able to see.  Religious who shun the role of social prophecy make Religious Life redundant.  But the problem is that Religious today either tend uncritically to buy into the social order, living the lie that charity is sufficient and pursuit of justice is for those in the “secular world” of politics and economics, or they—as Sister Joan Chittester put it so well in her book The Fire in The Ashes endorse “postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now.”  To go back to where this series began and Sister Sara Marks: good heavens, gal, would you put down the latte and stop talking about the cute Calvin Klein dress you found at Good Will and get serious about something.  Nobody says you can’t go to the beach or even stop in at Starbucks—but are you so shallow that that is how you want to describe yourself?  Don’t be trendy—that is the last thing that gives credibility to Religious Life.  Be a pot-stirer.  Point out the turd in the punch bowl.  I don’t care if you wear a veil or not but I do want you to be authentic.

I spend a lot of time with a Religious priest I know who lives in a sufficiently comfortable parish his Order staffs.  Nice guys.  But they should call themselves the Order of Martha Stewart.  Do you really need to drink your single barrel Bourbon out of a Waterford tumbler?  Or if you do, do you have to point it out?    How many sets of dishes do you really need?  Yeah, yeah, yeah—your parishioners live this sort of a lifestyle.  I know the song.  But no, they don’t.  They normally eat in the kitchen, not the dining room.  A lot of nights they grab a bowl of soup or a couple of slices of pizza—shellfish or prime meats are not the everyday event.  I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat healthy, or even well: just be as invested in visiting the sick as you are in doing the shopping. 

On the other hand, for those who criticize the Religious for being too secular: get your own house in order first.  We all have the same call to holiness though we may live it out with some legitimate differences of style.  But God is no more impressed by superficiality in the laity than he is among the Religious. The Martha Stewart/latte bar/trendy life-style is just as vacuous for the lay disciple as it is for the Religious.  No matter who we are in the Church or in Society, in the eyes of God we are each only stewards of the gifts given us to build his kingdom here on earth during our lifetime. 

And as for those newbie Religious Orders who think that it is “evangelical poverty” or “discipleship” to keep their members from having the tools and resources with which to do God’s work—whether it be cars or computers or a good education—stop lying to yourselves and be honest that you are simply playing a manipulative game of control over the lives of your members.  Not everyone needs a car or a doctorate or his own room to achieve the work that God has set out for him or her to do—but there are those who do need things that sometimes cost money if they are to achieve their divinely-called potential.  The virtue lies not in not having but in not having more than we need to do the work that God has called us to. 

And if Religious are the first and foremost the People of Prayer whom they have been called to be by their vocation to the Religious Life they will come to a love for the poor, for the sick, for the disadvantaged in whose face they see the face of Him who became poor for our sake.  And they will not be satisfied with the false piety of a phony charity that thinks it is sufficient to alleviate today’s pangs of poverty by throwing some crumb or other to “comfort” the poor or the sick.  True charity realizes that while we must minister to the immediate need before us, we must also work to eradicate the evils that cause the poverty and suffering.  I can only think of Dom Helder Camara, the saint-Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, who challenged his critics with the words: “When I feed the poor you call me a Saint; when I ask you why they are poor, you call me a Communist.”   No,  Religious belong in the forefront of Social Justice, armed with the Gospel of Christ and with the Word God spoke through the Prophets.  If they don’t do that we really don’t need them in the Church today.  

More On The Renewal of Religious Life or It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in a few days but the combination of an impending Christmas and a wicked winter head cold has conspired to keep me from doing only the bare necessities and then heading for life under the covers.  I do want to tie up this matter of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and then move onto topics old (Church of England) and new (Pope Francis’ remarks to the Curia and his role in the shift of American policy towards Cuba.) 

Perhaps spending so much time on the renewal of Religious Life strikes readers as an undue amount of time and energy spent on a topic of concern to a small—and increasingly elderly—audience.  But I think that the renewal of Religious Life is crucial for the Renewal of our entire Catholic Church for several reasons. 

1.    Religious Life represents a facet of the Church that is both institutional and charismatic and could well model ways in which the institutional aspects of the Church could be renewed and reformed in radically fresh and innovative ways.

2.    Religious, while having ties to the clerical institution and even having ordained among the members of their communities, are essentially part of a lay movement in the Church and can pioneer paths of spiritual revival for all of us in the Church

3.    The great spiritual traditions of the Catholic Church—Ignatian, Carmelite, Benedictine, Franciscan, Salesian, are in the custody of the Religious and Religious provide the resources for a process of spiritual maturation.  How much is the new energy and vision which Pope Francis brings to the Church rooted in his Jesuit spirituality?

4.    Religious communities have the luxury of being spiritual laboratories where new models of community, prayer, apostolate and evangelical lifestyle can be explored and developed.

  According to the schema we have been working on in looking at what an evangelical renewal of Religious Life looks like, the penultimate key to an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is a friendship with Christ rooted in a life of deep personal prayer.  To a certain extent I have covered this in the two previous postings—the one on an immersion in the scriptures and the other as a life that draws on the riches of our Catholic Sacramental and Liturgical heritage.  But perhaps there is a need to explicitly unpack the idea of personal prayer beyond what was said under those two topics, though I stand firm in my claim that all Christian spirituality is essentially a Scriptural spirituality as one cannot be sure of the authenticity of one’s encounter with God except as we encounter God in his Word. 

I want to go back to my quote from Sister Joan Chittester: “The only reason to come to Religious Life is to find God.”  I agree with her that the search for God is the very Raison d'être for religious life.  Indeed, as I believe that the Religious Life is actually the model or what I earlier referred to as the pace-setter for all Christian life, I believe that as we mature in the faith, the search for God becomes the primary characteristic of human life. 

Now when I talk about prayer, at this state I am referring to contemplative prayer.  Devotional prayers and pieties have their place and even as we mature in the spiritual life they continue to have a place.  But as we mature in the spiritual life we also learn that there is a world of unsurpassable intimacy with God that opens up to us as we learn to let the devotions slide into the background of our prayer and let God take us by the hand and lead us to ever deeper and more secret places in our own soul where God communicates God’s Self to us in a solitary silence. 

Such prayer, if authentic, is not an exercise in spiritual self-pleasuring.  To the contrary, like all maturing, the spiritual journey  requires that we strip ourselves of so much of our religious childishness and come to the maturity that God’s Spirit awakens in us—a transformative maturity in which we wordlessly learn that we are here for purposes great than our own personal agenda.  Like Christ himself we undergo that kenosis, that self-emptying that allows us to be refashioned in Christ, so that Christ may live in us, so that we may participate in his divinity even as he has shared in our human nature. 

This transformation is a life long process.  It can’t be rushed.  For most of us it is years before we come to even see the journey ahead much less to make significant progress on the road.  But it takes long and solitary time with God in Christ and we must make that time a priority.

I am not sure that I see this spirituality in many of the new communities that are emerging in the Church in an attempt to re-invent religious life.  I see devotional prayer.  I see a certain amount of liturgical prayer, or at times a liturgical formulaicism.  (By formulaicism I mean a focusing on precise formulas and rituals that often reduces the actual prayer to somewhat of a minimal amount).  On the other hand, I continue to be saddened by how any focus on genuine contemplative prayer seems to have been bypassed in some of the long-established communities.  I have heard too many Sisters from the various Apostolic Communities told that they should go off to the Carmelites or the Trappistines if they “want to pray.”  

I believe that it is the baptismal call of all Christians to grow in contemplative prayer.  Karl Rahner’s famous dictum that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be anything at all is spot on.  Among the ravages of a post-Christian culture, it will only be being rooted in an intense personal friendship with Christ that can give a compass to our existence.  As in so many ways, I believe that Religious need to pioneer the way.