The background for Zechariah’s song is birth of his son, John the Baptist (Luke 1:57), and the presentation of John for circumcision (1:59-63). John’s conception had, of course, been miraculous—given Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s advanced age (1:5-25).

Yet Zechariah’s song does not only celebrate his son’s birth, but Our Lord’s. For The Blessed Virgin Mary visited Elizabeth after the angel Gabriel announced Christ would be born to her by the power of the Holy Spirit (1:26-38). When Mary arrived at the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah,  John leapt within the womb of Elizabeth (1:39-41). Elizabeth then acknowledged this recognition of the unborn Christ Child (1:42-45). Mary responded with the Magnificat, acknowledging “the Mighty One has done great things for me” (1:46-55).

All of this is background to Zechariah’s song and St. Joseph’s role in Our Lord’s life. From the Benedictus:

Luke 1:69: ”. . . born of the house of His servant David” (Joseph’s line is the fulfillment of the prophecy that the Redeemer would come from the house of David, Jeremiah 23:4-6 and Matthew 1:1-17)

Luke 1:71: ”. . .  [God] promised to save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us” (Joseph protected the Christ Child and the Blessed Virgin Mary from Herod’s wrath, taking them into Egypt, Matthew 2:13-15)

Luke 1:75: ”. . . holy and righteous in His sight all the days of our life” (God the Holy Spirit said of St. Joseph in scripture, that he was “a just (righteous) man,” Matthew 1:19a, just as God has given us the marvelous promise that we shall be holy and blameless before Him in Christ, Ephesians 1:4)

May we celebrate with joy the Solemnity of Our Lord’s foster father, Saint Joseph, giving thanks for his God-given role in our Savior’s life.  St. Joseph, pray for us!

Why does this question occupy our thoughts? It does so because—if we are not alone in the universe; if we are not simply the evolutionary product of time and chance—then we want to know what expectations of us exist; how to guide the conduct of our lives. And if we are not alone, but belong to an Other, how shall we know that Other?

Psalm 24 is a great help. Perhaps that is why it is among the Invitatory Psalms (Psalms 95, 100, 24) that open The Liturgy of the Hours. After acknowledging God as Creator, the psalm goes directly to the question “How shall we know You? And how shall we live?”

Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?
Who shall stand in his holy place?
The man with clean hands and pure heart,
who desires not worthless things,
who has not sworn so as to deceive his neighbor.
He shall receive blessings from the Lord
and reward from the God who saves him.
Such are the men who seek him,
seek the face of the God of Jacob.

Consider “How Should We Then Live?” as a fruitful theme for Lenten meditation. Read and pray over Psalm 24. Consider the four cardinal and three theological virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, and faith, hope, and love). And give thanks to God that, in the riches of His grace, we are not without instruction. We have His revelation in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition to guide our paths. That is Christianity Richly!

So it was this morning: “Before They throne, O God, we kneel; give us a conscience quick to feel.”¹ End my coldness, O Lord. Speak, for your servant is listening—or trying to.

What then? What did God say? And how? My mind wandered back to a recent journey, during which I knew in advance I would be tempted to be judgmental and unloving. “Don’t judge. Just do. Just love.” By God’s grace, during that trip, I believe I did. Yet how quickly we drift! How have I done lately?

Not well, apparently. For I was reminded of a meditation, also in Magnificat, that I had dog-eared to remind myself to return and read more carefully. “Jesus loves as pure gift . . . He makes others better by loving them. Not only does he not accuse their mediocrity . . . but He takes up their defense . . . He defends Mary Magdalene, as he defended the Samaritan woman and Zacchaeus.“²

“Experience has shown me too late that we cannot judge people by their vices, but on the contrary by what they hold intact and pure, by the childlike qualities that remain in them, however deeply one must search for them.”³

Well, there we have it! My marching orders for the day. Let’s get to it. “Don’t judge. Just love. Just do.”

¹ From Magnificat, the hymn beginning Prayer for Morning, March 6.

² Fr. Bernard Bro, O.P., quoted in Magnificat, “How We Can Love Our Enemies,” March 3, 2012.

³ George Bernanos, quoted in the same Magnificat meditation, by Fr. Bernard Bro.

But, two words:  Don’t. Ever.

“The door to the confessional is our door of hope”—Fr. Jay Scott Newman. Forgiveness and healing are offered to all. Even if our failures seem overwhelming, Christ waits for us at the confessional door. Look to the richness of God’s mercy in Christ.

The new English liturgy says, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,¹ but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” This morning I thought, “That is folly, Lord, that you would enter under my roof given my faults, repeated failings, and mixed motives.”

But no! Remember Jesus was asked how He could eat with tax collectors and sinners? Our Lord responded, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:12-13). God runs toward us with super-abundant, overwhelming love (Luke 15:20). The story of the prodigal son who fell into sin is actually a story of prodigal love—God’s prodigal love for us, without limits (1 John 4:10).

Are you troubled? Are you ashamed? Do you feel like you are alone in the darkness? Have you thought of taking your life? Don’t. The very fact you are troubled is confirmation that mercy is available. “The judgment of conscience remains a pledge of hope and mercy.”² Read the Old Testament prophet Hosea. Even in the valley of Achor (trouble),³ God opens a door of hope.

How I wish my friend had just re-read Matthew 9, once more, to see Christ healing longstanding problems: the paralytic, the woman with a hemorrhage, the two blind men, and the mute man. What are your problems and mine? Debt? Professional failure? Grave sin? None are beyond our Lord’s mercy. Christ even brought the official’s dead daughter back to life! God delights to heal and restore. (Amos 9:11) What was the only question Jesus asked the man who had been ill for 38 years?  ”Do you want to be well?” (John 5:6)

Christ waits for you, and for me, in the person of His priest in the confessional. “The door to the confessional is our door of hope.” Meanwhile, I can only pray for my friend . . . “May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”

¹ The humility shown by the centurion in Matthew 8:8 and Luke 7:6-7.

² Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1781.

³ Hosea 2:17 (in protestant translations, 2:15).

During the time since that post, I have often meditated on the richest line of her text:

O changing wheaten wafer, that veils the changeless One!

Think, if you will, how often—and in how many ways—our Savior is veiled.  I was reminded this morning, while reading Fr. William Barry’s, Finding God in All Things, that our Lord was literally veiled within the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Imagine . . . sending the Second Person of the Trinity to become a fetus, how tiny and frail the vessel of our salvation is at this point in time.”¹

Then imagine our Savior—The Changeless One of Eternity—veiled as a newborn in swaddling clothes. God in the flesh? Then imagine Him, veiled as a child, remarkable and seemingly precocious (Luke 2:41-50), but a child Who caused His parents to worry nonetheless. Our Lord and our God? Then imagine His glory, veiled during the years of His public ministry, standing in the temple declaring, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:22-31). One with the eternal I AM? “Blasphemy!” the religious elite declared. Then imagine His power, veiled, as He died on the cross in apparent defeat. This man was God? “If you are the Son of God, come down and we will believe!” (Matthew 27:40-42) Then imagine Him today—veiled in His Church, the mystical Body of Christ—at times frail, faltering, and even sinful. Really? This Church is really your mystical Body, continuing your work on earth, Lord?

Having pondered these things, is it so hard to accept that the true body, blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord is present in the Eucharist—the substance of the bread and wine transformed, as it was during the Last Supper and First Eucharist?

Thus we may pray as we approach the Altar, “O changing wheaten wafer, that veils the Changeless One!”

Jesus Christ. Christianity Richly!

¹ William Barry, SJ, Finding God in All Things (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1991), p. 81.

There are numerous texts of the Exercises, but I would encourage you to get this edition, which has a wonderfully helpful Preface and Introduction. From this morning’s readings, later in the book, the following notes appear in my daily prayer journal (summarizing pages 235 and top of 236):

I am made to know, love, serve, and possess God:

1. To know God, in the created order of the world (Psalm 24:1)
2. To love God, because it is from his bounty He has given to me even the creatures; it is His love that serves me in each one.
3. To serve God. Consider how all the creatures obey? Shall I be the only one to refuse to serve God? Shall I be the least faithful?
4. To merit the possession of God. There is nothing created or ordained by God that cannot be the occasion of prompting some virtue:
• Things we need and may enjoy offer occasions for practicing temperance and detachment.
• Things to which we must submit (labor, illness, poverty) offer occasions for patience and humility.
• Things that lead to God offer occasions to practice piety and faith.
• Things that lead away from God offer occasions to practice sacrifice.

At the top of the altar window, the risen, ascended Christ is pictured holding a white flag or banner, with a red cross superimposed on the white field. “Normal,” one might think. “Kings and armies carried banners. That’s typical of the historical period, in centuries before and since.”

Ah, but to imagine that is to miss the biblical richness of the Gospel in Glass! For Song of Songs 2:4 says:

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.

Most Bible translations use the word “banner,” although the NAB translates the Hebrew word as “emblem.” Even if the word were emblem, however, that would not change the meaning. What is Jesus Christ’s banner or emblem over us? Not an abstraction. Not hostility propitiated (as the NAB note on Romans 3:23-25 points out). Christ’s banner over us is Love!

In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins (1 John 4:10).

A banqueting house? Yes! Could there be a more perfect picture of His Church, within which Christ offers Himself in the Eucharist?

Take and eat; this is my body (Matthew 26:26).

May God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be praised on this glorious Easter Day for His love. May the richest possible blessings be granted to all the Catechumens and Candidates who entered the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church at Easter Vigil. And may we all look to our Savior, Whose banner over us is love!

On this holy day of quiet waiting, we give thanks “there was a garden”—a garden in which our Lord’s body could rest in anticipation of the Resurrection; a garden from which His casting-off of death promises the same to us!

I first heard the garden theme preached more than two decades ago, by a fundamentalist who had a love for literature, drama, and the arts. Those interests infused his message with a richness, confirming Hemingway’s observation that 90% of the power of good writing (and preaching) lies below the surface—giving it power and weight—like the invisible bulk of an iceberg below the sea. Yet this man lacked an understanding of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; its richness, indeed its fullness (Ephesians 1:18-23).

What a joy then, this Holy Saturday morning, to read our Holy Father’s book, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week from the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection and encounter the passage quoted below. It is a fitting and rich meditation for today.

Saint John . . . gives a theological interpretation to the place when he says: “across the Kidron valley, where there was a garden” (18:1). This same highly evocative word comes back at the end of the Passion narrative: “In the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid” (19:41). John’s use of the word “garden” is an unmistakable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here. It is in the “garden” that Jesus is betrayed, but the garden is also the place of the Resurrection. It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history.¹  [Italicized emphasis mine]

Amidst the grief of Good Friday and the Passion of our Savior, hope emerges from the unveiled altar at St. Mary’s.

Each year the altar is stripped. When the Maundy Thursday liturgy ends, the Pastor, Deacons, and altar servers remove the crosses and candles. The statuary have been veiled. The Eucharist is removed late Thursday after a period of Adoration (“Could you not watch with me one hour?” Matthew 26:40), and the Church becomes cold and bare.

Yet by God’s grace, what appears? Carved in the stone of the bare altar—visible only on this darkest of days—twelve birds surround a Chalice and Host. During my first Lent at St. Mary’s some years ago, I marveled, “What does this mean?”

Psalm 84 is the answer. Fly to the Lord! Find the only lasting home for yourself (and if called to marriage as your vocation, a nest for your young). But even more truth, goodness, and beauty is presented in the altar at St. Mary’s. The birds divide six by six on either side, looking to the Chalice and Host—a clear reference to the twelve Apostles and the authority of the Church through valid orders via Apostolic succession.

Who does the Chalice and Host represent? Our living Savior! The boundary of the bas-relief in which the birds are carved is even bent heavenward by the Chalice and Host. Should we be surprised? No!

At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.²

Yet there is more. Above each bird is carved a sculpted point, aimed downward specifically and particularly, at each bird. Is this not a reminder of God’s knowledge of and care for each one of us?

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.³

Yet there is more. Recessed in the altar is the royal seal, the Alpha and the Omega of the eternal I AM (Revelation 1:8). This is interwoven with the chi rho—the Christogram represented by the first two letters of the Greek spelling of the name of Christ. Yet the rendering in stone of this seal makes it seem to emerge faintly, as if through a veil—where Heaven touches earth in the beauty and truth of the Sacred Liturgy.

There is more. But shall we go farther? One almost dares not! But so we do not exalt ourselves—God forbid—to anything akin to St. Paul’s vision (2 Corinthians 12:4), we must finish with our feet on earth, for the sake of the smallest child and for myself (Matthew 19:14). The immense solidity of this massive stone altar calls to mind C.S. Lewis’ allegorical picture of the sacrifice of Our Savior in The Lion The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

At last the rabble had had enough of this.  They began to drag the bound and muzzled Lion to the Stone Table . . . [saying] “Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor?”

Yes!  “Yes, yes, yes,” is the resounding answer. Yes, on this Stone Table our Redemption appears.

Aslan ended soul’s-winter in Narnia. But Aslan was simply Lewis’ picture of our glorious Savior. The Stone Table is stripped and bare today, but the victory is already won! We know how The Story ends—not just in Narnia, but in reality and truth.

For I know my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God!  (Job 19:25-26, John 11:25-26).

Christianity . . . so very richly!

¹ Psalm 84:4 (84:3, if using a protestant translation)

² Philippians 2:10-11

³ Luke 12:6-7

If you answered “yes,” your Lent has been better than mine. Why? Interior inattention? I pray that has not been true of me. External distraction? Perhaps. An increasing awareness of my sin without equivalent progress overcoming it? Certainly that is true. This has been a difficult Lent—following hard on the heels of a disappointing Advent (not in the sense of Christ’s coming, but rather, disappointing because of my failure to make abundant room for Him in the “inn” of my schedule).

What, then, are you and I to do, if you’ve had a difficult season of reflection and repentance leading up to Easter? This is Holy Week. Easter is upon us. In our most discouraged moments, we may even be tempted, with the people chronicled in Jeremiah 8:20, to despair, “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved,”¹ not from our sin; not from ourselves.

Benedict XVI’s recently published, Jesus of Nazareth—Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, has been a huge help in this respect. He points out that “if man is to enter God’s presence, to have fellowship with God, he must be ‘clean.’ Yet the more he moves into the light, the more he sense how defiled he is.”² He further stresses that we are never to give up; never stop believing in forgiveness, as Judas did; never lose certainty that the Light of Christ will overcome darkness.³ Unlike Judas, or the people of Jerusalem described by Jeremiah, when we fall we must get up and return to the Lord.

In John 8:12, forgiving and freeing the woman caught in adultery, and John 9:5, healing the man born blind, light overcomes the darkness! Never doubt Jesus Christ can, and will, and is doing the same thing for you. “Light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth,” Ephesians 5:9 reassures us. We are even told we are “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14).

How can this be? This is because, through the overwhelming goodness and power of God in Jesus Christ, we who were once darkness, now are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8). In the words of Benedict, “Faith takes flesh” in us. The Church becomes the Body of Christ. And in this we have the assurance, “No one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body” (Ephesians 5:29-30).

Take heart, brother and sister in the Lord. If this has been a difficult Lent, persevere. The light of Christ shines in the darkness—the darkness of this world; the darkness of our failures—yet the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5), and it shall not! That is Christianity Richly.

¹ Most translations say “saved,” but the NAB uses the word “safe”

² Page 57

³ Pages 69, 92