The Feast of the Sacred Heart is celebrated 19 days after Pentecost each year. This year we celebrate it today, May 30.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart began to develop in the Middle Ages, but it was considered a private devotion, not a specific feast day. Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque  (1647-1690), a French nun and mystic, promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart in its current form and over time it was adopted as a formal feast. This devotion also includes Mass and Communion on the first Friday of each month.

A friend of mine was raised Catholic in an Irish family in Rhode Island. One day we were talking and laughing about some of the funny things that had happened when we were girls. She told of the time a non-Catholic friend of hers was visiting her family for the first time. The friend, a young man, commented that he was always shocked when he went into Catholic homes and was immediately confronted with a statue or picture of Jesus, with his heart showing - pierced and bleeding. He said something about how glad he was not to find that image in her parents’ home. He had begun to think that all Catholics were somehow off balance with this insistence on having the image around them. Then they went around the corner into the living room, and there was the picture on the wall, where it couldn’t be missed by anyone!

My friend and I were working together at the time. As we went around the corner into my home office, what was on the wall, but a picture of the Sacred Heart - more modern than the traditional one in her home, but unmistakably still, the Sacred Heart. We just laughed and knew again how much we had in common!

So what is it about the Sacred Heart? First, it’s important to remember that it’s not really about worshipping a physical human heart. The Feast of the Sacred Heart reminds us of the overwhelming love of God for us, as seen in the love of Jesus for us. As the Son of God, second person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus became one of us, lived as one of us, died as one of us. God’s overflowing love poured through Jesus to us. It still does. Symbolically, Jesus’ pierced heart is a reminder that love is not always easy. It can be costly. Love flows out of the heart of God as the water flowed out of the heart of Jesus when pierced by the centurion’s sword. Nothing can stop that love’s flow but our refusal to accept it.

The Sacred Heart also reminds us that Jesus always forgives. God always forgives. Nothing we can do will keep God from loving us and forgiving us. We can turn away, but God is always there calling us back. Hoping we will once again accept love and mercy. Because God’s mercy is unfailing, all we need do is ask and accept it.

In celebrating the Feast of the Sacred Heart, we are called to love as Jesus loves, forgive as Jesus forgives and be compassionate and merciful as Jesus is compassionate and merciful. A tall order for our human hearts, but one to which, with the help of Our Lord, we are called.

Fides Quaerens Intellectum - Faith Seeking Understanding - is the theme of the philosophy and theology of St. Anselm (1033 - 1109). His feast day is April 21.  St. Anselm is regarded as the greatest philosopher of the 11th century and set the tone for the scholastic thinking of the early Middle Ages. Anselm represents a new beginning of a new civilization that ends the Dark Ages. His thinking is very much in line with the Neo-Platonism of St. Augustine.

St. Anselm’s writing on the nature of God and his proof for the existence of God emphasize the role of reason in understanding and shaping faith. His proof for the existence of God is meant to show that we can come to a knowledge that God exists from our own reason. Belief in God and His revelation is a gift of faith. However, faith is a reasonable course to take and of itself enlightens and encourages understanding.

It is often fashionable to dismiss the Middle Ages as a pre-rational time before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, this overlooks the importance of reason and the intertwining of faith and reason since the origins of Christianity. Although many of its concepts and their cultural context are foreign to us, the content and style of Anselm’s reasoning demonstrates a critical, analytical, and logical approach to dealing with questions of faith and living the Christian life.

Anselm’s notion of atonement, the redemption of the human race brought about by the death of Christ, is based on a concept of justice that seems - well - Medieval, and that is what it is. While it might strike some of us as portraying a vindictive God, St. Anselm presents it as arising out of the will of the Father and the Son to restore the human race. While we as post-moderns might see echoes of European tribal notions of compensation for injury or damage, St. Anselm is following the lead of many preceding philosophers and theologians to place the witness of scripture in a rational context.

Most of St. Anselm’s life was spent as a scholar and abbot. As Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm had the unenviable position of being subject to two kings who attempted to exercise control over the church and plunder its treasury. St. Anselm spent years in exile.

Western critical thought and reasoning owes a debt to St. Anselm. As much as we might be inclined to relegate faith to the psychology of religious experience, St. Anselm reminds us that while the heart might claim our allegiance, our mind and reason challenge us to understand and live the faith of our hearts with the best of our minds enlightened by grace.

St. Thomas the Apostle is better known for his doubt than his faith. The story takes place after Jesus has appeared to the Apostles and shown them the wounds in His hands, feet, and side. The resurrected, glorified Christ still has his wounds. Why wasn’t He restored to His original whole state? Was it the way for His disciples to recognize Him, or is His passion and death such a part of Him that His very wounds have become part of His identity? It all sounds a little too good to St. Thomas when the others tell him of the Lord’s visit. The message to Thomas, and the rest of us, when he encounters Christ, is “blessed are those who have not seen and believe.” (John 20:29)

Faith.. Blessed are those with faith.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,
kept in heaven for you
who by the power of God are safeguarded through faith,
to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time.
In this you rejoice, although now for a little while
you may have to suffer through various trials,
so that the genuineness of your faith,
more precious than gold that is perishable even though tested by fire,
may prove to be for praise, glory, and honor
at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Although you have not seen him you love him;
even though you do not see him now yet believe in him,
you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,
as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1Peter1:3-9)

Christ died for all, but salvation comes to us through faith? Why? Stay tuned…

For those who love Christ, remembering His passion and death is always an occasion for sorrow. However, such human acts as compassion are never simple. The pain of the impending loss of a loved one - anticipatory grief - can be worse than the actual loss. In fact, when death finally comes, we often feel guilty about experiencing relief. My friend Jim lost his father when Jim was in eighth grade, after a protracted two year battle with cancer. When we talked about it a couple of years later, Jim confessed that he still felt more relief than grief.

Of course, we couldn’t experience compassion without a close identification with the other. This becomes very complex in the person of the Christ. He did not fight his enemies. He did not curse. He did not condemn. He forgave. He blessed. This human-divine reaction to an injustice that is almost as inconceivable as it is enraging provides no adequate psychological outlet for the post-Freudian soul. How can we proclaim and fight for justice if God Himself did not? Tragically, the consolation in the Gospels and the wider testimony of the New Testament - that no evil, no matter how overwhelming, how senseless, can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus - escapes us. (Romans 8:38-39) Instead of experiencing this Passover of the Lord - the Blood of the Lamb on the door posts and lintel of our home that spares us from the Angel of Death - we run out into that night of despair by focusing on the ways we have been complicit with that evil.

When we hear that we are saved from a life defined by suffering and pain without meaning and no exit, we can think that we were saved from something we deserved. “Evil as you are … who among you would give his son a scorpion when he asked for bread?” (Loosely taken from Luke 11: 11-13) is a stark reminder to the disciples that Jesus could not conceive of His Father wanting anything less than we ourselves would want for our own children. Just as our children are all too much in our own image and likeness, we are in God’s. The teaching and life of Jesus in this regard is at odds with the vengeful patriarch of the Old Testament who punishes and chastises. (Lest we be tempted to think that Jews hold or held onto to this concept, we should remember that Jesus was not the only Jew who presented a view that had grown beyond it. The are interesting similarities between Jesus and his contemporary, Hillel the Elder.)

Enter God’s protectors:

“Ah hah! Now he has said it on his very own blog! Your own words condemn you. God doesn’t care about sin, you say. There are no consequences, no punishment, no reckoning. You present a God who is merciful, but not just. If Christ did not die for our sins how was the Father appeased? How is he the sacrificial victim?”

The Blogger Offers a Parable:

Once upon a time, there was a wonderful teacher who healed by word and touch and saved people from all kinds of physical, psychological, and social maladies. He made the mistake of speaking truth to power and telling religious and civil leaders that outward observance only made them into whitened sepulchers. They waited for the right time and got a close friend to betray him, and they took him off to Guantanamo, and then transferred him to a third world country, where he was tortured to death by specialists trained at the School of the Americas. Like so many thousands of his time, he was supposed to have become one of the disappeared. Fortunately for us, He didn’t stay dead and he didn’t stay hidden. Strangely though, he left again, said he would return, and in the meantime the were supposed to wait for a Holy Wind to make everything clear.

Yet His disciples wanted an explanation. If He was truly God’s Son, how could this have happened to Him? If he really was the Messiah, how could he have failed? He was just as maddening as those parables he used to tell them. Where are the answers? It was like one of those Eastern religions. “The question is the answer.” And that other junk the Beatles found in India, under the influence of something other than the great American mystic, Jack Daniels.

God finally sent them someone they could understand - sort of. “Like, well, yuh see, dude- God don’t need sacafices, ” The voice of the aging surfer was hoarse with too many years of funny cigarettes, his faced etched with too much salt and sun, his eyes opaque while he waited for the waves to rise. “It’s like, all ’bout love. All God wants is love. The torture and sufferin’ part, that’s what we do to us and each other. Man, like the Teacher Dude, the Guru Guy, like he couldn’t hang out forever. ‘Cause like, you guys were all brain dead on a kind a gnarly bad trip. Like he let it happen. The tube was closin’. Like there was just the wipeout; like really bad at Mavericks. He did it to show y’all that if yah stay in the water and go for it, sooner or later it’s gonna happen if ya stay true to the search for the Big One.  Dude, got some extra change? My old lady’s on me for the rent, like ya know.”

The words of reproach, as the seeker turned away, were familiar. “That sucks man. What a waste. I came to hear some guy explain some @$#%?! blogger’s crappy parable. I could’a been watchin’ the game on my big screen.” So he zipped up his jacket and marched straight home, out of the saving mystery, ignoring the glory of the sky, the dazzle of the water, and the carpet of color and bird song all about him.

Holy Week on the California coast, from Pt. Mendocino above San Francisco to the Mexican border, is a place of spring time sun, deep blue skies, and blossoming flowers. At the Equinox, the ocean loses its grayness and picks up more yellows, subtle greens and muted turquoise. The salt air becomes more pungent, as the kelp forests put on new growth to accommodate the explosion of trillions upon trillions of sea plants and animals. The succulents and coastal chaparral burst out in purples, roses, and pinks, peppered with the bright yellow of sour grass blossoms. The Santa Cruz redwoods seem to stretch, fresh washed from the winter storms, looking forward to the morning and evening fog that gives them sustenance and flourishes their layered ecosystems that change every 20 feet upward, dancing in the dappled ray filled sunlight of the forest canopy.

It is a time of happiness and rejoicing. Sunglasses come out, flip flops slap the pavement, and shorts replace the winter denim, even though the day time temperatures are barely in the mid-60s. It is the coming of First Summer, before the Fog Season that begins on Memorial Day in late May and ends on Labor Day in early September. On the Central Coast, we host our first guests during Spring Break and settle in to enjoy the peaceful days before our June to August onslaught of shivering, fog-bitten visitors and their much welcome tourist dollars.

Aren’t we supposed to be down or at least subdued during Holy Week? How can we rejoice Saturday evening and Easter if we have somehow not rationed that joy? We should at least lament our unfaithful adherence to our Lenten resolutions - right? Christ’s terrible torture and death stayed the arm of a rightfully vengeful Father, so shouldn’t we show at least some token of fear for not being swept out into hellfire? If God’s Spring and Passover are any indication, maybe Cotton Mather had it wrong. Maybe we are a lot more than “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.”

If we, and all creation, are the overflowing love of the Trinity, are we the products of a God who can somehow demand the death of the the Eternal Word Made Flesh, God’s very immediate recognition and instantaneous self-acceptance, who shares the eternal dance of the Three in the joy of the Holy Spirit? Yes, much of the language that shapes our souls is a reflection of the fallen world where the Word “pitched his tent” - the actual Greek expression we use in the Creed. Yes, Jesus died and saved us in his rising from the dead. Yes, Jesus is the Lamb of God. Yes, we are the reason, we are his motivation for sharing our lives and submitting to the capital punishment of being tortured to death by an occupying superpower. Perhaps, the gravest sin of pride is to even think that we were the cause. Yes, God as Love couldn’t bear to leave us to the fate of hatred, despair, and alienation.

Why should people celebrating their rescue be glum, depressed, lost in narcissistic guilt? Why is this night different from any other night? It is the Passover of the Lord. If we are not washed in joyful Spring, can we share the Passover meal? Can we have any part in Him?

On Shrove Tuesday, while much of the world was at Mardi Gras, I was praying and sharing scripture with a small group of inmates at the county jail. Our scripture was the Temptation of Christ (Luke 4:1-19). One thing that emerged in our prayer and reflection was Christ’s acceptance of the Father’s way of rejecting power and advantage in the announcement of the Kingdom.

Why take the hard way? God could have redeemed us in many different ways. Why such a horrible death? Why did the Spirit drive Jesus into the wilderness after his baptism by John? Why was the Son of God fasting and praying for 40 days?

One of our group restated a common view that the offenses of humanity had become so severe that God demanded the most severe appeasement. I suggested that maybe the answer was in the persistence of evil in our lives. For so many of the men I was praying with, their lives had been damaged by forces beyond their control - poverty, addiction, and mental illness. (Hardened criminals generally don’t come to a prayer meeting in our jail. The faith of those who do come is something, I am sure that Jesus did not find in Israel and does not find in most respectable Christians.)

Christ, who was like us in all things but sin, chose to identify with the powerless and to put his faith in the Father through non-violence. Utter foolishness - according to St. Paul. In our suffering and defeat how could we be one with a God who was not defeated - a God who was not an utter failure? Did the Father exact this humiliation out of a some perverse pleasure unworthy of a human father?

That community of Divine love - Father, Son, Holy Spirit - Creator, Redeemer, Breath of Life come to the heart as love. Love can never be forced. True love can never come through power, glamour, or glitz. As we reflected and prayed it became more obvious to us that God can only come to us in compassion and that is how we come to him. Yet compassion is not compatible with power, wealth, and success - like a camel passing through the eye of the needle.

God with us. God like us. Powerless in love.

According to Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican teaching, the communion of saints is made up of the faithful on earth (the church militant), the saints in purgatory (the church penitent) and the saints in heaven (the church triumphant). November 2, All Souls day, is the day on which prayers are offered for the dead, in keeping with this belief in the communion of all Christians in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Purgatory was a belief rejected by many of the Protestant groups during the Reformation. In part, this rejection was a reaction to the sale of indulgences which induced believers to part with money in exchange for the release of their loved ones from Purgatory. The Catholic Church responded by asserting that nothing had been sold and that free will offerings and alms, along with prayer and fasting were traditional ways in which the faithful on earth interceded for the deceased in their state of transformation. Jimmy Akin, a Catholic apologist (defender) and former Protestant, presents a detailed defense of Purgatory in his paper, “How to Explain Purgatory to Protestants.”

Tertulian, in the third century, taught that Purgatory was a physical place hidden deep in the bowels of the earth. It was a place where Christians who were not martyrs went after death and waited to be released at the final judgment. This view was quickly rejected by the Church.  Purgatory was seen to be a condition of the soul, not a physical place. More recently, Pope John Paul II stated that purgatory is a condition of existence outside of the passage of events we call time. According to the Pope and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, purgatory is not necessarily a place of physical suffering, but a place of transformation. Jimmy Akin, in his defense of Purgatory, says that it is implied in certain schools of Protestant belief, since man only stops sinning at the time of death and cannot sin in Heaven. Therefore, there has to be a point of purgation.

Those of us who grew up Catholic in the 1950’s remember that indulgences had certain time values assigned to them. Certain prayers or devotional acts remitted the temporal punishment of so many days or years. When I asked priests about it as a boy, they tended to roll their eyes and say that it didn’t make much sense to them - there is no time in eternity. Some tried to explain that the time was somehow equivalent to the benefit that so many days of penance would have had on the departed soul. The assignment of days and years of spiritual benefit has now been erased from our concept of prayers and devotional acts. The view today is one of solidarity with the deceased, as living members of the community. Consequently, Catholic observances tend to be less anxious and mournful than during my childhood.

The Mexican Día de Los Muertos - The Day of the Dead - a joyful celebration which actually lasts from October 31 to November 2, celebrates those in heaven and purgatory. Preparation for this celebration begins in mid-October. Death and the afterlife have a very different sensibility among less industrialized segments of Mexican society. The reality of the afterlife is not doubted but is instead celebrated. There are fewer effects of secularization in this population, so the images and concepts that result may seem bizarre to industrialized sophisticates. Pageants of saints and devils, candy in the form of skulls, and even a mock funeral procession with a live person in the casket are part and parcel of a lively festival. Altars with votive offerings bring to mind those of pre-Christian shamans and an ongoing connection with ancient indigenous traditions as well.

Life, death, and new life is also a persistent belief outside of Christianity and a mystery that can never be understood but only celebrated. What happens at that moment of transition between two worlds and modes of existence? Something terrible and something wonderful. All Souls Day is a day to stop and ponder the mystery.

Sunset September 21, to Sunset September 22, 2007 is the Jewish Day of Atonement.

This is the day set aside for asking for forgiveness of God and those against whom we have sinned. The “virtual” Talmud - an adaptation of the Jewish tradition of teaching and commentary has an excellent post for today. A key point is that one’s individual wrongdoings are more than a personal matter. They have consequences for our loved ones, communities, and society overall.

Confession of sins, repentance, and turning around appear to the theme of the day not only for Jews.  They also appear to be making a comeback among Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals. The Wall Street Journal today has an interesting feature on the return of repentance - specifically confessing one’s sins. “Confession Makes a Comeback” (page W1).

Even some Lutherans, whose founder Martin Luther opposed the sale of indulgences (the ability to get one’s time in Purgatory reduced or eliminated), are restoring a sacrament that they say they neglected for too long.

Take some time, tune up your conscience, make that phone call, send that card, forgive and ask to be forgiven. You might get a dose of your own medicine - we all do. Get straight with God and your neighbor. Find peace.

Sr. Rose Thering’s research came to the attention of Cardinal Augustin Bea at the beginning of Council in 1962. Cardinal Bea was a major force in ecumenical relations. According to Fr. Eugene Fisher, the issue of anti-semitism came up early in the deliberations of the Council and was one of the last to be resolved. Anti-semitic tracts were submitted to the bishops (the Council fathers) and debunked. Diplomatic pressure came from Arab governments. Finally the issue was addressed in 15 sentences comprising section 4 of Nostra Aetate (In Our Time).

These two sentences strike down any biblical notion of the culpability of the Jewish people:

Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (see Jn 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion. It is true that the church is the new people of God, yet the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy scripture. Consequently, all must take care, lest in catechizing or in preaching the word of God, they teach anything which is not in accord with the truth of the Gospel message or the spirit of Christ.

It is telling that this passage refers to the Gospel of St. John 19:6, since this Gospel casts Jews in a very negative light ,as do many other parts of the New Testament. This acrimony toward the Jews is part of a larger conflict between the two groups in the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. In fact, the tension with the Christian movement regarding observance of Mosaic law and Jewish practice was also intense. Over time, the Hellenistic segment prevailed by sheer force of numbers and their ability to assimilate into the broader Graeco-Roman culture.

The persistence of anti-semitism can be seen in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. The blockbuster movie followed the basic story line but contained a lot of materials that were the private revelations of a 19th century German nun. Somehow, Jesus, his family, and followers are no longer Jews but Aryans in the hands of alien hostile Jews. This reinforces something worse than a stereotype. It becomes an archetype of the Christian unconscious that structures dreams, perceptions, and ultimately - genocide.

The Jewish feast, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, comes every year as Summer gives way to Fall. As Yom Kippur approaches, Sr. Rose Thering provides an excellent example of going beyond guilt. She opens the door to a new and better day for everyone.

“She was a one-woman wrecking crew,” said Rabbi James Rudin, senior inter-religious adviser for the American Jewish Committee, and a friend of Thering’s for 36 years. “What she helped wreck was 2,000 years of the teaching of contempt which was built into so much of Christian teaching.”

For an in-depth report, see the section in the Anti-Defamation League site on the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) in October 2005.

Sister Rose’s Passion, a short documentary of Sr. Rose’s life and work, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. It is well worth seeing.

Grace is a heavy topic in systematic and historical theology. It has been the center of a longstanding dispute between Catholics and Protestants. In many respects, this dispute that dates to the Reformation is about how much credit we can take for the good we do or whether we have to credit everything to God.

I must say that when I picked up Mary Doria Russell’s, A Thread of Grace, I thought that the title was more of a poetic touch than a solid theological theme. I was attracted to the subject of the Holocaust in Italy. Since we are now between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the timing of this post seems appropriate.

When I picked up A Thread of Grace this summer for some “light” reading on vacation, I was unaware of Mary Doria Russell’s previous books, The Sparrow and Children of God, which are both works of science fiction with theological and philosophical themes. The Sparrow is the story of a Jesuit mission to an alien planet told by the sole survivor, Fr. Emilio Sandoz. In Children of God, Fr. Sandoz is called upon to return to Alpha Centauri.

Even though it is a work of historical fiction, A Thread of Grace reads like a thriller. Italy withdraws from World War II. Nazis come pouring in, along with refugee Jews from areas of southern France that had been controlled by Italy. Italians resist the Nazi extension of the Holocaust and 85% of resident and refugee Jews in Italy survive the 20 months of German occupation. The story takes place in northwestern Italy and presents the complexity and richness of the stories of the major characters. Who lives and who dies and how they die appears to be largely a matter of chance or fate.

The desperate situation of the region, caught between the collapse of their government and military, the German invasion, the relentless Allied bombing, and various partisan factions, provides a relentless cauldron in which the Jews are offered refuge and protection. The plot is very complicated but the characters reveal a great deal about simple truths. Werner Schramm, a Nazi doctor guilty of horrendous crimes, finds a measure of redemption after he is given a place and help to recover from tuberculosis. The man responsible for this help is the main character, Renzo Leoni, a Jewish aviator and veteran of the Abyssinian War, who has his own guilt about war crimes. Fr. Osvaldo Tomitz, who refuses to give absolution to Dr. Schramm, later receives his final Communion and last blessings from the Nazi doctor who is too late to rescue him. Iacopo Soncini, the local rabbi, comforts Fr. Tomitz when the priest comes to warn him and the Jewish community. People act to help others at an unbelievable cost - torture, the loss of their family, friends, and communities.

While this is certainly not a “feel good” book about the Holocaust, it is a resounding testament to people doing the right things in moments of grace. Are they responsible for these heroic actions or is God? The lives of these believers and unbelievers, these saints and sinners all wrapped up in the same complex person, render the academic quarrel over grace moot. God does not overpower free will and free will snatches hope from despair.

“There is a saying in Hebrew… No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there is always a thread of grace.”