The Strawberry-Picker Church

The newly plowed rows flicker by, looking like a fan from the car window; the miles of strawberry fields are carefully tented in white awnings, catching the strong California sun, like sails full of wind. There is a richness in the air, air full of fertilizer and chlorophyll, and the wealth of the ocean. The valley is like an oyster, framed in by low, eucalyptus-laden mountains, and the Pacific Ocean just over one side of the crown. In the middle, a pearl rises; not towering over the valley like a sentry, but planted in it, like the people and the plants who have grown here for so many years. The pinkish brightness of the stucco walls, the tiled roof and tower, the softly arched windows filled with small jewels of glass all present a still and majestic presence in the middle of the well-used land and hard-earned families of the farm valley, like Our Lady sitting at her distaff, the Mother of God in a small Galilean town.

As the Pearl-Church comes closer, it is apparent that there is a small estate, a conglomeration of monuments, school, small chapel, rectory, and houses of the dead all clustered around the skirt folds of the Mother-church. Rustic trucks, driven and used in their true capacities, patiently await their masters in the parking lot, like the horses outside in times long past.

The steps leading to the main church fan out like an apron, bleached and warm in the strong sun, afforded no shade among the fields; and the three sets of great doors are similarly bleached, and strong. Inside, the church is resplendent in her painting of Our Lady above the high altar; the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue, Our Lady of Fatima; windows of the saints given by groups and families, like “The Society of the Holy Ghost”. St. Philomena stands quietly in the back.

This church, this pearl of the valley, has not been wreckovated. The rows of pews still stand facing the altar in humility and not circled around (making the parishioners stare at each other during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass). The focus still remains the priest and the altar- largely due to the efforts and resistance to changes by some of the parishioners.

They come, now, the parishioners. They enter quietly and reverently, for the most part, covering their foreheads in Holy Water. There are Portuguese families here, ergo the important place near the altar of Our Lady of Fatima, the Portuguese who came escaping poverty and religious persecution of early 20^th century Portugal; there are the descendants of those who ran from the sand-winds of middle American depression in the 1930’s. If one has ever read John Steinbeck’s novels, one can grasp a little of the great suffering that these people faced in their forced immigration. They came here, to this valley and others like it along the Central Coast, and found some relief. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren cling to this valley now, and to their memory, buried next to this church in the tombs.

Their faces are brown, and wrinkled, and they stand in the pews like sheep, next to the many Hispanic folk who’ve come, also escaping poverty in their home countries. The Hispanic, though, are really claiming what was settled here by their race first: the Indian who lived here, the Spanish priests who evangelized and built the missions, and the cowboys and field workers.

Sadly, though, because of the vernacular allowed in the Mass after the sixties, the division between Hispanic, Portuguese and eclectic Caucasian is deeper now, not less: it is lingual division, which cuts more cleanly because language is the mother of understanding. Sadly, now, many people come in to Mass, not knowing truly the reverence due to the Sacrifice: the wearing of jeans and casual clothes is less common here than in other Novus Ordo churches but still is an indication of the intrusion of secular culture. Sadly, it seems the Society of the Holy Ghost has disbanded; the altar rails are gone and the priests often make sermons that instill doubt into the minds of their flock.

This church, the Pearl of the Valley, bright as it appears, is under the clouds of Satanic battle. It is a good place, a Holy Place, and a sign of Christ for the hard-working, the strawberry picker and the flower-grower, for the immigrant stranger and the generational families. Therefore, like so many other Holy Places like it, it is under attack- a soft, sick, subtle attack, a cultural and dogmatic attack.

But the sky is blue; the children slide on the railings down the wide staircase in the sun; where are the bombs? Where are the clouds and the acid rain?

The wreckovaters came, bombing: and were stopped, by the grace of God. The ill-formed priests come and go, with their clouds of confused faith; some good priests have come, too. The acid-rain of a self-oriented and blasphemous culture rain all around; and the wet of it sometimes is brought into the very sanctuary of the church. The parishioners themselves have lost some of their edge, their understanding of the stakes involved in the keeping or losing of their faith. But they are there, most it seems, in good faith, at the mercy of their shepherds (as Our Lord said it would be). So it is the shepherds who stand on the knife edge in these times, and many of them were themselves lost in the wake of a modernist revolution, in the ambiguities of these times.

Yet, yet. The Strawberry-Picker Church lives on: in the eyes and folded hands of the old man in the front; the quiet man who suffers and prays at the drops of Christ’s blood left in the carpet on the floor; the choir that sings chant and the priest who looks around, looks for places to heal and bind up in his flock; in the children who are living to see the rotten fruits of the revolutionary times and perhaps, will look for Tradition as a refuge; in the silent witness of the dead in their tombs, so close to the place where people gather to talk after Mass, sharing their joys, sorrows, new babies and marriages. You see, the Strawberry-Picker Church has not left Tradition completely, even with the best efforts of the liturgical bombers and the modernists- she carries Tradition with her, she is built on the many lives of those who now lay asleep on their stone beds; she is built in part, on the history of the work, suffering and lives of those who have escaped to this valley by the ocean. She is besieged, but not dead, not invalid, not lost- I cannot think it, being there on a bright Sunday at Mass, with the sounds of Gregorian chant swirling gently out the open window, to join the fertile air outside.

Pilgrimage for Advent

Today, under the cerulean California sky, we marked the first day of Advent: and it seemed perfect, a very peculiar kind of perfect. Our donkey was a Volvo, a rather temperamental motorized donkey of a car. It doesn’t like me; won’t start for me when its owner is in the passenger seat (so he has to get out and start it for me). We were setting out on a pilgrimage, and I hadn’t been to my hometown in fifteen years- a farming town in the San Joaquin (“Joachim”?) Valley of California- and it was sort of on the way to our object, a small Vietnamese Catholic church in Sacramento (“Sacrament”), where it is said a statue of Our Lady is weeping.

We began our pilgrimage at the Mass, in St. Joseph’s Shrine of Santa Cruz (“Holy Cross”), and drove our donkey/ Volvo through the mountains; one hundred miles later, I saw the town where I’d suffered into adulthood. It had been such a prison to me, even though there were people there I’d loved. Everything was there, but changed, and it seemed broken down and sad, a trashed and empty sort of place. The only spot of beauty was St. Mary’s Church, and I was so happy to come back there with my new Catholic eyes, and see the shrine to Fatima and the small Catholic ecclesial estate nestled into that sad little town. I also remembered with new force my sinful and desperate existence there, those ten or so years. Seeing old places like that can bring anew the state one was in when last there- and my memories, although full of the angst of a young person searching for love and comfort, were of a sinful life.

Leaving there, we traveled on to Sacramento. On our way, we saw a sign for a new housing development: “Anatolia”, it said, in large, curly letters. We looked at each other in some wonder, because our daughter’s name is Anatolia. What are the chances? So we thought perhaps this was a glimmer of a star for us and we kept on in the gathering dusk.

Finally, the midnight blue donkey got a rest as we stood in front of the large, white, cement statue of Our Lady. It was cold in that parking lot, in the rural darkness south of Sacramento. Suburbans full of Hispanic families and Cadillacs with Vietnamese families pulled in behind us, to join the small crowd in front of the statue. The many-belled sounds of the “Hail Mary” in Vietnamese blended in strangely with the sounds of Spanish. I waited by the car for awhile, and stared at the statue, and wept for the life I’d led, and for all those who were still enslaved in lives like that: desperate, alone, submerged in shadows of guilt and anger that can’t be waved away except in the great grace of repentance and conversion. I just wept for my sins while the back of my mind wondered why a statue would be weeping tears of blood at a Vietnamese church in Sacramento, out in the fields. Why not St. Patrick’s on Fifth Ave? And I wondered if it were true. But from a distance, I could not see the tears of blood, I could only see the crowd of people, looking and praying and holding candles in the air. I could only see the white figure of Our Lady, not looking cement-and-paintlike, but ethereal and simple; and I lived that sadness for sin, my own mostly- how many people had I hurt or helped to lose-and for the blindness of the world.

I went closer and saw the rivulets of dried blood, where the tears had come down. It seemed so-so earthy. But the dried blood brought me, brought us, brought all these people, to pray. And I didn’t worry too much about gawkers- after all, there is so much else to gawk at, why would you choose a statue and The Church of Catholic Martyrs, a Vietnamese parish? And I didn’t worry too much about fanatical sign-seekers: aren’t we all that, really? And I didn’t worry too much about the blood and whether it was a hoax or not, because I remembered Fatima, and Lourdes, and La Salette: that the Lord is sad, and offended- and asks us to do reparation for others and ourselves.

Advent: coming: the coming of the Lord in mercy, as a babe in a small-town stable. Joseph and Mary, beginning their journey to Bethlehem, traveling on a non-descript donkey back to that small town, that sort-of hometown to Joseph. The darkness of the rural roads, the small houses and huts and the smell of dung; the Holy Family picking their way through the crowds of Bethlehem: a Savior has come into the world, to this dark and sad place. Advent is a time for penance, and gratitude, for He wishes to be born in the sad and small places that are our hearts without Him.

A Meditation on Silence

St. Pio at Consecration

The Faces of Silence

There is the Empty Silence: 

when the little hands waving out the car window disappear down the road 

and suddenly the home seems a loosely-knit box of nothingness 

and it must be filled by music or the washing of dishes; 

when the streets are empty at three am 

and there is still a long way to go; 

when train times come and the station is suddenly bereft of its purpose; 

the long winter months in age and illness.

There is the Full Silence: 

when last note of the piano has dissipated 

on a particularly beautiful piece 

and before the applause begins; 

the silence around the dying person’s bedside, 

just as the soul leaves the pupils lax; 

in a crowd when everyone is waiting in solidarity 

for the TV to flicker 

and for the talking head to explain what has happened; 

the longer the silence, the more profound the moment.

The Full Silence is essentially the Silence of Prayer. 

The Holy Spirit revolves in a circle around the Full Silence, 

as the Logos descends, the Silence increases. 

The priest bends low over the bread and wine, 

his voice lowers into the Secrets, 

and the altar servers carefully take the books back and forth, 

the water and wine, 

and their very attempts at quiet movement tell us 

that the centrifugal is closing in 

on the spot on the altar over which the priest is bowing, 

becoming the naval of the universe. 

The bells ring out,

 like a best man tapping his wine glass with a knife.

This is a moment of grace, 

when we can match the air of our inner self 

to all those around us, and to  the Silent Lord;

for those who have cultivated the silence of the heart, 

which is to listen to God,

recognize immediately that it is the same silence,

the same atmosphere of the Full Silence 

They can put their hearts there too, on that altar,

know they are in the presence of fullness of being.

A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching

By Michael Turner

My Friend,

Glad to help out a little with cash flow - please don't make a big deal out of it.

In my cultural milieu, this open sharing of our needs and the ability to open up a little bit with the cash represents a closeness and brotherhood I want to be a part of. From my own messed up family background, I am more open (and needy) for Catholic family. Our baptism has made us closer then my own blood brothers and we don't even know each other that well!

A little sharing of cash represents for me a way to put flesh on my deep belief that we are supposed to share more with each other as Catholics. Part of the problem with nominal Catholics is that they fall into the '“worship of nothing' culture and one aspect of this in the Wild West is a very lonely rugged individualism. Every one of us is supposed to be on our own outside of some head-trip of "community" in Church. It has been very disappointing for me to experience in the last couple of years people who I had expected to be my brothers or sisters when every thing was going good and "charismatic", walk away from our "friendship" when times got tough for me.

It is a dance for me between yearning for Heaven where we will all be sharing everything and recognizing the righteous limits and separateness of our families here. In an ideal context, which has been glimpsed a few times in history, I believe we should share everything in common. Nobody wants to go there, but I still think it has to be the ideal we strive for. If one is broken, we should all come alongside and help him out until he is made whole. When your barn burns down- that is, when, not if, because hard times come to each of us- I want to be in a position to come over right away and help you rebuild. Who thinks like this in the Catholic world?

It is a radical Gospel call I hear, so hard to live out in practical ways, but a clarion Gospel call for me. How can I get myself into a position where my life is well-organized enough- as in the Amish concept of Ordnung -"0rder"- that I can respond freely when others need my help?

We had a big flood here in Santa Cruz in 1982. Mennonite farmers from the plains of Canada heard about the flood and drove their tractors and trailers down here to help dig out mud-filled homes. I have always wanted to have it so together that I could do something like that for Jesus.

So...we "Catholics" make a lot of money on each other and live these superficial lives in "Catholic Communities" with each other but there is no teeth to our Gospel. The worship of the nothingness has held most of the field amongst us. We are very weak and self-serving and frankly quite useless in the hands of Almighty God. If He called would we hear? If we could hear, are we ready to respond?

Come Lord Jesus,
Pierce our selfness,
Blow away our worship of nothingness
Fill the temple of our souls,
With the glory of your Presence.
Come to fill our houses of worship
With the Splendor of your Truth.
Have Mercy on us
Return us again to our first love.
As you crack us open,
Make permanent our new relationship of dependence on You
In your great mercy,
Allow us not back into the seclusion of our own ways.

In Christ,

Your Catholic Brother

Narnia and "Mere Christianity"

Are the Chronicles of Narnia good reading for Catholic youth? Some might look at this askance: “What? With all the other junk out there? If my child wants to read these, of course!”

Can we take a step back from judging everything based on the reality that the culture is so bad? Relative judging has its place, but perhaps when we do this, we miss the reality of the thing itself that we are judging- and we accept more than we should. Therefore, we look at these books for the good that they offer, the richness of awakening faith; the beauty of a majestic Christ-figure- and for the weaknesses they hold; which, I think are important for Catholic parents to be aware of in reading the books with their children, and in going to the movie coming out 9 December.

The Chronicles of Narnia do not portray the fullness of the faith, because in large part, their author never, as his friend JRR Tolkien lamented, “…came all the way into the Church.” C.S. Lewis was born into a Protestant Irish family in 1898. Culturally, and religiously, this means that he grew up in a milieu of Christian hating Christian, in an era when people walked on the other side of the street from the local Catholic Church so as not to ‘get too near the idolatry’.

Lewis himself lost his faith as a young man; perhaps it was largely a cultural faith and not imbedded in his soul. But as Tolkien said later, “It seemed that he never quite lost the Ulster Protestant in him, and could not get past seeing anything but the negative from a priest” (my paraphrase). Yet perhaps the memory of the battling between Catholic and Protestant in the neighborhoods of Ireland lay buried in his memory, awakening later with his own awakening in faith. Lewis was a middle-aged bachelor and Professor of Literature at Oxford or Cambridge (honestly- I can never remember this tidbit!) when he met Tolkien. Among other things, it was their literary group and a late-night conversation about the reality of ‘mythos’ with Tolkien that changed Lewis’ soul. He suddenly saw everything as spiraling outward from the Great Myth, the True Myth of Christ; everything suddenly only made sense in the Light of the Lamb.

Lewis, passionate, supremely intelligent and of strong will and purpose, went on a Crusade of his own: like St. Francis of Assisi, he wanted to go and preach peace: especially among Christian folk. He crafted an idea of Christianity called “Mere Christianity”. He preached this on radio, book and lecture- and became quite famous in the process. Tolkien, meanwhile, Catholic genius that he was, describes both the genius of Mere Christianity and its weaknesses in one great play on one of Lewis’ own images. “Mere Christianity”, he said, “like the hallway running the length of a great house, does not encompass the rooms off itself. Instead of attempting to open those doors- to the Orthodox, Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, etc- it prides itself on being too simple for those conflicts of ‘complicated doctrine’. Yet, it remains in the hallway, missing perhaps the fullness and richness of Truth and Faith behind one of those doors.” I would extrapolate further to say that Lewis’ ultimate understanding of 'Mere Christianity' is what St. Paul calls "the milk of infants". The Apostle further calls us to grow beyond that simple milk, to eat the Food of Christ: the Eucharist, the Traditions and fullness of the Church: these being proper food for the maturity of Faith- the Faith of the Saints.

Thus, the Chronicles of Narnia are beautiful, but as milk for infants in the Faith. That is to say that the books are real tools for a child’s understanding of Christianity- the use of allegory (using symbolic figures to stand for real events and people) and the inclusion of cultural things like “Father Christmas” in the first book make the basic message of the Faith understandable to baby Christians (adults included).

Thus, there are many important things missing that will produce a stunt-growth effect, if the reader is not moved past Narnia. The idea of a Church, or priesthood continuing the Sacrifice of Christ are missing; the notion of intercessory prayer; the Mother of God; if one starts thinking of all the things not contained in the books, even symbolically, it is easy to understand the weaknesses of the Chronicles.

But do not, I think, underestimate the beauty, and the majestic presentation of Christ. Also, Lewis knows how to portray evil in its selfishness and banality, even so that children can be disgusted without being scandalized. My weakened faith kept its small spark alive, in large part, because Narnia had been a real place to me as a child; and I was in love with Aslan, and yet understood whom the lion was meant to portray. So whilst critiquing Lewis, I remain indebted to him and he has my prayers- prayers that he finally understood Tolkien when they met again- hopefully both in the right place!

Read the books, go to see the movies (if they are faithful renditions without any Disney Funny Business). But point yourselves and your children out of the hallway and into the door of Fullness: The Catholic Faith, by graduation to the great Catholic novels, the stories of the saints, and the spiritual classics.

Finally, talk about what is missing with your seven-year-olds and older. This will elicit their first experience in Catholic apologetics!

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part Four

It was 1969, and the rain pelted the little car as it sped through the Brazilian countryside. It was night, black as it only gets out in the country on a rainy night. In the little car there was a bishop, driving erratically. He was weeping with great sobs hacking at his chest, and with that and the rain and the dark, he was having trouble finding his way to the seminary. Finally the headlamps caught the edge of a simple stone building, and the weeping bishop tried to wipe his face fruitlessly in the rain as he parked the car and hurried into the foyer of the building. There, in the gaze of astonished professors and seminarians, he sank into a chair. They had never seen him like this, and they rushed to him in one movement. "Senor- Padre- Que-"

Bishop Castro del Mayer, a true and firm, loving Shepherd of the Brazilian diocese of Campos, raised his wet cheeks to them and asked for a glass of water. In the ensuing busy fluttering of cassocks, the head of the seminary sat down next to the Bishop. "Que ha pasado?" he asked softly. The Bishop, who for years now since the Council, had tried to maintain stability and faith in his poor diocese, who had endured ridicule and contempt at the Brazilian Bishops Council for his cautions on the new developments coming out of the documents of Vatican II, looked back sadly at his old friend. "The Holy Father has promulgated a New Order of Mass. How could this be done to the Holy Sacrifice?"

The Second Vatican Council, ecumenical and pastoral, had produced many documents relating to the directive of Pope John XXIII, the directive of "aggiornomento". It is this which I think is now called "The Spirit of Vatican II". What is it? An opening to the world: the Catholic Church had, especially since the days of Martin Luther's 99 theses, been seen as a fortress, a Mother with her arms crossed tightly to her breast, in defense of doctrine and Tradition alike. But the modern world, in the 1950's, had drifted away from a frontal attack and in the West was complacently buying everything it could get its hands on, and in the East, constructing its own fortresses, satanic ones. Perhaps one could say that Catholics in that era might have been a bit institutionalized- perhaps not. There are differing opinions.

At any rate, Pope John XXIII was an optimistic man and he wanted the Church to reach out to the world. There are, though, two senses of aggiornomento- one is to come out of your fortress and invite people in, to show the joy of Christ as it flows within what is peculiarly Catholic- the other way is to begin to tear down the walls of the fortress in hopes that the world will welcome you as "leaven".

How can I, a sort-of educated laywoman, judge which is the better? So I take the example of another layman, Mr. Davies and I look at the Spirit of Vatican II in light of Tradition. What we see then, is that no council was ever called for pastoral reasons in a time where there was no crisis to be attended to; and that the manner of rejecting the schemata and then writing creatively in committees was also never done before. It seems that although the Council was a true Council, it was an occasion perhaps, for devilry.

Mr. Davies calls this devilry "time bombs"- and as I understand him, he meant that the documents, although containing no heresy in terms of Faith and Morals, contained loose ends- or ambiguities which could later be exploited. By whom? Those who, although within the fortress, were bent on rebuilding the Church in their own images. Thus, although the Council may have been called with much hope and potential for mission work to a secularized West, the type of "aggiornomento" which was adopted was the tearing down of the walls, obstensibly to help Catholics become leaven and open the inner rooms of God's Church to those who did not understand Her. The danger of course, which has come to pass, is that Her identity would become actually hidden, that She would begin to appear like everything else around Her.

Thus began a process of making all the aspects of the Church more palpatable to the world- and most importantly, the centerpiece of Catholic life, the Mass. Protestant advisors were brought in to make suggestions on how the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice could be edited to be more agreeable to ecumenical services with Protestants, and so the ensuing directive from the Council for the Novus Ordo Missae was in effect, a banishing of the Traditional Latin rite. Within the document, therefore, was a rather ambiguous directive that the Novus Ordo should itself contain options which would make the rite more specific to the culture and to the occasional Protestant who might stop in.

Pope Paul VI was following the ambiguously stated directives buried in the official documents of the Vatican II when he promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae. It contained no error, or heresy: Mr. Davies makes it abundantly clear that the Novus Ordo is indeed a valid Mass, and legally promulgated by a Pope. Even further, if one goes to a Novus Ordo Mass done as Pope Paul VI promulgated it, it is hard for the casual observer to see the difference between this and the Traditional Latin Rite. But there are some tragic differences, like the loss of the Last Gospel and the prayers at the foot of the altar, and it is the novelty and the sweeping away of the divinely-crafted Traditional rite, this novelty introduced into the very fabric of the Novus Ordo through the instructions and 'options', that is the fundamental problem. Also, there have been many, many abuses and heretical practices that have been illicitly introduced into the liturgies: Altar girls, communion in the hand, changes of the prayers, and worse-much worse: most of which have gone without reform and disciplinary action from the proper hierarchy.

Why did Bishop Castro del Mayer weep?

It was the reasons for the Novus Ordo, it was the Spirit of Vatican II mentality that had begun to take hold everywhere in the Church by 1969; and the intelligent Bishop saw the handwriting on the wall when he saw the options and the open doors contained within the instructions for the Mass. He saw, in the future, priests and liturgists crafting the clothes of Christ to fit their liking.

In 1969, the promulgation of the New Mass was like a lit match dropped on dry tinder, and the education of future Catholics of the true nature of their faith was the wood. This fire signaled a fracturing within the Church, and now we have a landscape of different kinds of Catholics, each not sure whether the other is still Catholic; there are many who've fallen off Peter's barque altogether for various reasons, mostly grounded in confusion and bitterness, in a sense of abandonment akin to despair. And of course, there are those who have simply become indistnguishable from the secular culture around them. They think they are Catholic, but they are not in form or essence. This seems to me to be the greater tragedy.

It is a tragic landscape; and yet Pope John Paul II used to talk about a new springtime in the Church. But I think that there was more to what he was saying than what appears to be a statement totally out of touch: once again, we look at both his statement and at the landscape of the Church in the light of Tradition. In Christian history, in the Tradition of the Church, God brings a new springtime out of hardship and loss. The new flowers of spring, the uncountable blades of new and sweet grass grow from a soil watered by the blood of martyrs. It has always been thus. Resurrection is born out of Crucifixion.

I have read somewhere, perhaps in the writings of St. John Bosco, that the Church has a life in the world as did Christ. It had its infancy and childhood, it's flowering of teaching and spreading- and perhaps now, we are witnissing the Crucifixion. The Church was left open to enemies by Her own, is now not known by Her own. Her apostles are fleeing, the devastation and ignomy is too great to bear: but Mary is there, still, and the Apostle of Love. A Catholic has to see the Blood of Our Lord poured out from a pitcher into cups; and another Catholic has to wonder if his chapel is really part of the Church; priests have to suffer the loss of their rightful place, their sacrificial role which defines them: and Our Lord has to wait patiently in a Tabernacle that no one can find, in a Eucharist in which eighty percent of His children have no faith or real understanding- mainly because the liturgies tell them nothing about Him there, Body and Blood.

But Resurrection comes out of Crucifixion, in the Right-side up Kingdom of Christ, hope is ever born anew even in the wreckage. St. Joseph is there, Guardian of the Church, Guardian of the Faithful. Our Lady is there, in the surety of the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart. "But those days will be shortened, lest even the elect be deceived, if that were possible." And what, Traditionally, marks the elect(they are called saints, too)? Look back in the Tradition to learn from the saints: Dependence on Our Lord, the intercession of His Mother, and above all: humility. Never to presume to pass judgment on Christ's Vicar, but to have the courage to speak out humbly to defend and to protect the vulnerable. To reach out to the people in the world, indeed, but with the "aggiornomento" of the peculiarly Catholic. To love the Tradition and to suffer for even the smallest thing which is Our Lord's.

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part Three

What part of the living Christ is the Mass? As each Sacrament is a point at which divine grace flows into human life, the Mass is the juxtaposition wherein the Eternal meets the external, where Divinity meets ordinary matter. “The Bread I give you is life for the world” – here Our Lord was talking about the inimitable role of the Eucharist. The Mass is like a spring, life flowing up and spreading throughout the whole Body. Its importance and centrality to the Church cannot be overestimated. As the great Jewish scholar Levinas once described the Sanhedrin as the the navel of the universe, so Christ fulfills and supersedes the Sanhedrin, Himself becoming and remaining the Divine and human navel of the universe. It is the renewal of Christ’s life-giving sacrifice on Calvary; and I use the word renewal, or remembrance, as the Hebrews used it in relation to the Passover: that participation in this mystery places the participant within the eternal now, so that we are all present at Christ’s sacrifice; and not only that, He Himself nourishes us, body and soul, with Himself: as He promised His disciples. The sacrifice on Calvary is thus historically, mystically and truly, the center point of creation.

Protestants and protestantized Catholics have an inherent distaste for the particular-ness of the Sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist. “Christ, Body and Soul, in a piece of bread? How-how primitive!” they will think. This is the same reaction many of Christ’s followers among the Jews had when He gave his sermon on the Bread of Life. Yet He didn’t explain their “confusion” away: instead, He repeated Himself more explicitly: “My flesh is flesh indeed”. Yet the particular-ness of an Incarnate God, the particular-ness of the Holy Eucharist made present at the Holy Mass are one and the same. Our Lord does not become a piece of bread: rather, the piece of bread, its substance, is changed into Christ Himself, only under the appearance of bread and wine. For sure, this scandal of particularity is a stumbling block for many, as Christ said He would be; but think, for a minute, how great a God would have to be to be so particular, so close to every detail of every life, close enough to know how many hairs are on your head at a given moment, to know each joy and sorrow of each soul, and yet be over and above everything: a Creator who is constantly creative, so large that He can be so small as to tickle a baby’s feet in the womb. The scandal of particularity is not really a scandal when one realizes how great and large one must be to be truly small for each person.

Such is Christ: and such is He most visibly, most especially, in the Eucharist. There He is at His most humble and vulnerable: and so there we must give Him the most honor, reverence, attention and tenderness. And yet, in God’s kingdom, there is He the greatest and most powerful: for He enters into each of us who partake of Him in a very real physical way, miraculously juxtaposed perfectly with the eternal. All of us: our soul, body, mind, heart: all are involved intimately with the Lord at the moment of communion. In this moment everything should help us in the endeavor to see the Lord: the liturgy, music, the symbolism present in each action of the Mass.

How then, can the method and mode, the music and appearance, all the symbolism imbibed almost subconsciously, surrounding this spring of life for God’s Church-how can all these be undervalued or thought as mere accoutrements to be changed like the changing of an outfit?

No. Like all Tradition, the parts of Christ’s continued presence on earth grew organically, carefully, beautifully, as a pearl is covered carefully in layers of oyster’s riches. These growths, from the Holy Scriptures to the Sacraments, to the lives of the saints, the martyrdoms and the marriages, the vestments, the music of Pope St. Gregory, and most importantly, the liturgy of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass- were carefully tended and pruned, fertilized with the blood of martyrs and the life work of the priests.

Until Henry the VII wanted a divorce. This was the first real stone rolling from the battlements surrounding the Traditions of the Church. Mr. Davies writes eloquently of the process of a Novus Ordo “mass” promulgated not by the Pope, but by Cranmer, the man who was dressing up in the Archbishop of Canterbury's clothes at the time of Henry VII and Elizabeth I. Cranmer formulated a “new order of service” that would “divest the English people of their errors and papistry”- in other words, would change their beliefs. He crafted a series of changes in the service which was once the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, changes like making the altar “The Lord’s Table” and emphasizing the meal aspect of the service. It was crafted to break the people away from Rome and the Pope, and whether inadvertently or not, it began to destroy the people’s belief in the Real Presence. In Mr. Davies’ book, Cranmer’s Godly Order: The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, the author shows how the liturgy of England’s Anglican faith (pretending to be Catholic) was used as a weapon to destroy the faith of the people. The most important victory for these revolutionaries was won in the destruction of the mass by the destruction of its liturgy. Effectively then, the destruction flowed outward, and the Catholic England that St. Edmund of Canterbury knew was dead.

But Catholic England did not die quietly. Yesterday, October 25, is the commemoration of the English Martyrs: St. Edmund Campion, St. Margaret Clitherow, among many others, died in the defense of Catholic orthopraxis and orthodoxy: but they did not die for dry “ortho” words. They would not have died for the right vestments or an altar, but that these were the vestments worn by Christ’s priests, and for Christ’s altar, those small but eternally significant proofs of His living Presence among us still. They died for Christ in the Eucharist, which is only made possible in the Mass of the Church.

For the Church, England was lost in the wake of the Protestants out in the Channel; hope lied buried there until the flowering of the Oxford Movement at the turn of the 19^th-20^th centuries- that which gave us Chesterton and Knox, Belloc and Sayers. But in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the Counter-Reformation burst out in Europe and the Church, wounded but still strong, rallied to Her Traditions- and the Jesuits were but an example of what was born out of that time. The next time Our Lord’s Church would be seriously wounded, it would be from within the very conclaves of Her citadel.

In 1962, Cardinals, bishops, priests, peritti and even some Protestants marched eagerly into the Vatican for the Second Vatican Council. It was a council called like never before in the history of the Church: not as a council called as a necessary response to a specific threat to faith and morals, but a progressive movement from within the Church Herself, a movement outward to make Herself more understandable to the modern world. But was it a missionary movement? To this question, the answer seems vague. And this is the first sign of danger. However, the traditional schemata were drawn up, documents of clarity and good explanation of the Tradition. As Mr. Davies relates, there was a strange movement among some of the bishops to simply scrap these schemata (which had taken many months to write), and to, in my words, “Go with the flow”. I use this slang because it comes from that time, the optimistic and dreamy early sixties, when the girdles guarding tradition in every sphere were being loosened everywhere and in every institution.

For the Council, then, everything was suddenly out of the traditional ways of handling such a large undertaking, and there was a lot of room for creative action and writing. All of this sounds kind of refreshing and even good to my modern ears, my ears trained in the seventies and eighties in open classrooms. However, within a Tradition: when that which is handed down is part of Christ Himself in the world, creative action and “go with the flow” sounds akin to remaking Christ in one’s own image.

What would happen? Would the Council Fathers work together to protect Tradition whilst becoming missionaries to the world? Would there be a “new springtime”? What would happen if ambiguities and as Mr. Davies puts it “liturgical time bombs” were allowed into the documents approved by the Council Fathers? Was the “smoke of Satan” entering the Church? What would this mean, especially for the jewel in the crown of Tradition, the Holy Mass?

..to be continued

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part Two

Imagine the Roman Catholic Church not as a building, not as a group of people, but as one of those fancy dessert and sandwich plates one finds only in the Ritz or Plaza Hotels during teatime. Imagine it: a beautiful bone-china plate, delicate, suspended by a decorative metal stand, a rod, bored through the middle of the fine plate. The rod holds the plate aloft, and straight, and the little cucumber sandwiches and miniature pastries are artfully arranged on the surface of the plate. If the rod is defective, the plate will be slanted and defective as an upper-crust tea service: all the cakes and sandwiches will slide off, into the oblivion of the waiter’s table scraper and napkin.

Imagine, though, the rod cannot be, will not be, defective. It is the axis built by God to hold the plate, the visible Church, aloft as a foundation of faith for the members, but also by example, for the world. Now the paint and gilt on the plate may become faded, there may be chips and cracks, but the rod holds it straight and level at the essentials.

What is this rod? It is the Deposit of Faith, it is the Tradition of the Church founded by Our Lord, centered in the person of Peter, or the Papacy. “Where Peter is, there is the Church”. The Papacy is the lodestone of Tradition- it does not encompass it, but rather is its head. As Christ is Head of the Church, His Vicar is Head of Tradition.

So I see that rod, holding that plate, as visibly the purview of the Papacy: not the individual man alone, but that man as holding the Office and with the graces that Office gives him. The farther one is out on that plate, the farther is one from Tradition, from the Papacy as Holder of that Tradition. Thus, there may be people, even the Pope himself (in his private actions, his non-ex-cathedra, non-infallible teaching), who are right at the edge of the plate, leaning toward this or that excess or error, yet still within the confines of still being Catholic and not heretical or apostate. To fall off the plate is to forsake the Papacy and the Tradition the Office guards: and to forsake the Vicar of Christ is to forsake Christ.

But why? It sounds all so medieval, so crafted, so un-abstract, so, so- carnal! How can an office that is necessarily held by a man, how can a bunch of writings and practices and art and whatnot carry the sublime truths of Almighty God? Surely because God is Spirit, He would just go to each individual spiritually, enlightening them, letting the visibilities and practices: the art, the hierarchies of churchmen, the archaic sacraments and sacramentals- be more about the needs of the surrounding culture- that is, a matter of choice?

These questions hit right at the nature of Tradition as it is understood in the Catholic sense- and indeed, hit at the Incarnation of God Himself: for one can level the same criticisms that one levels at a particular-bound Church, to the Person of Christ as He appeared in history.

What is Tradition? It is this question that those who would answer to the (mis) nomer “Traditionalist” are really fighting about: and it is this same question that those who would call themselves “Progressive Catholics” are fighting about. Those ‘middlemen’ who are called now, “Neo-Con Catholic”- I think these find the point of least struggle and go about trying to run the show. But it is interesting that these, the "Neos", who I think believe themselves the most moderate, in the plate image, the closest to the rod of the Papacy in the center, are perhaps closer to the edge because they are focused not on the Papacy, nor Tradition, but rather on the individual man’s idiosyncrasies who holds the office, or perhaps on the political and material advantages in their own nation-states. A hard judgement but I wonder if it is accurate nonetheless.

What is Tradition? What is this rod, this essential foundation? I borrow here from Mr. Davies, and from Father Ripperger’s articles on Tradition in The Latin Mass magazine.

Tradition comes from a Latin word meaning, "what is handed down". This is a general meaning of the word, and can mean anything from family tradition to company policy. These human forms of tradition are what form us in varying ways, they help us to form habits of action and thinking, informing and strengthening the will, which in turn grow the character and virtues (or vices) of a person. A person is not separate completely from the traditions he has been formed within: the concept of radical individuality is really a lie. The differing modes of tradition have different impacts upon a person: that is, familial traditions will be much more powerful than company policy (depending on the company, I suppose). However, it is hubris on our part to think that we are self-made men and women: we are, like candles, formed by the structures and people around us: we always retain our free will, but everything else about us: our temperaments, character, personality, intellect: are unique products of the traditions we have received from others.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Our Lord brought a new entity into existence. It was the extension of His Body, the physical reality of “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”. It was the birth of Our Lady’s Son renewed, with the sending of God’s Spirit to Mary and the Apostles on Pentecost. Our Lord gave to this new entity Himself, it was meant to spread the reality of God’s Incarnation across all time and space. One has to let this shocking reality set in. God came in a physical Body, and left a physical Body, imbued with the Holy Spirit, in the reality of the Eucharist, but also just as real, in the reality of a Church.

Thus, His Church is not a religious community, nor is it a culture: although it encompasses those characteristics by its nature of having many people within it. The Church is like no other organization in the world, past, present or future: it is the Creator Himself, growing and forming His Incarnation through His children, children of the Church, children of His Mother (“Behold, here is thy Mother”). When we Catholics talk blithely about “The Body of Christ”, we forget that this is a living reality, and not just a symbolic term.

Therefore, anything a part of this Body becomes charged with organic and living meaning: Sacrament, sacramental, liturgy, art and architecture: each is an extension of Christ Himself, as we baptized are. This lays great meaning on each person, each act sanctioned by the Church. God chose these means, able to be grasped by both the senses, the soul and the intellect, because that is how we are made; and as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, it is through these means that the will is moved and the person is formed.

We are again talking about tradition, what Christ handed down and wished the Apostles to hand down: namely, Himself as a living reality in Scripture, the Magisterial teachings of the Church: the Sacraments, sacramentals; the art, architecture and liturgy; the music and the martyrs and saints- that is, the riches and deposit of Faith as expressed in what has been handed down: Tradition, with a capital “T’. It has a capital “T” because it is part of the living Body of Christ.

Our Lord, therefore, forms us through this extension of His Incarnation. To be a Catholic in the living Tradition of the Church is to be with Christ as Our Lady, St. Joseph and the Apostles were with Christ. This Tradition is the means by which He forms us: as was stated before, none of us becomes what we are with an absence of traditions given us by others. The “nature state” of Hobbes and Locke is pure nonsense. We are born into society, culture, and traditions that form us. The Catholic Church is the culture and tradition of Christ, and is Christ Himself extended over space and time, and encompassing the members of His Body- and founded on another person, the person of Peter and his successors. It is as if Christ handed Himself to Peter, but as an Infant, for Peter to hold- and the Successors of Peter are charged still to guard and care for this Church, these Traditions.

How can anyone, then, take that Tradition into his own hands, even attempt it, in order to remake Christ’s Body into his own image? It is sacrilege. Christ’s Tradition is a beautiful organism flowering and winding its way through the tragedies of human history, using them as stakes on which to grow; changing those very tragedies into triumphs for the salvation of the world. It is the vine to which we must remain attached; for Tradition is the knowable and visible witness for Christ in the world.

Thus is the majestic music, the lives and relics of the saints and martyrs, the soaring testimonials of architecture, the erudite teaching, the missions and missionaries throughout the history of the Church; the billions of Confessions, millions of Holy Orders, Vows and Marriages, and the liturgy as a setting for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: thus are these witnesses and realities making present the ineffable Person of Our Savior to the world that needs Him.

Here we must grasp the serious fact that what we do as Catholics, what the hierarchy does, with this Deposit of Faith, this Tradition in its varying and living forms, what the Pope does or does not do- we are in a very real sense, doing to Christ Himself. The rod in the plate on which the very souls and bodies of the faithful rest is a living rod, and we must strive to look to the rod for our reality, our stability: it is the foundation of Faith, reaching through our plane of existence to the beyond.

The next part will discuss the jewel in the crown of Tradition: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Part One

I base my definition of “traditionalist” on Michael Davies. I would guess that he would like simply to be called “Roman Catholic” –I think, to him, “Traditional Roman Catholic” would be an oxymoronic term- or just moronic, for short. Nonetheless, in these days, with so much deep pluralism amongst people calling themselves Catholic, it has become necessary to differentiate with nomers, even if they are missing something of the truth.

After the aggiornomento, or opening up to the world, of the Second Vatican Council, when Mr. Davies was a young man, the winds came into the Church and blew all the furniture about. He came into a Church that was rife with confusion and the rapidity of change, a Church ill equipped to deal with the half-life meltdown that was the Seventies. I saw a video recently of Mr. Davies from this time, on a talk show with the chameleon-like Malachi Martin as host, opposite a high-ranking American prelate. Pope John Paul II had just been elected Pope, and Mr. Davies was arguing in hope and defense of the Pope, who was considered at the least, an unknown, at the best, a ‘traditionalist’. Mr. Davies was arguing also with the American prelate about the promulgation of the Novus Ordae Missae and the perennial nature of the traditional Masses, most notably the Mass which was in use just prior to the Novus Ordae, the Tridentine Mass.

There was great hope in Mr. Davies, his young face serious yet detached, somehow, from the fray. He was unfailingly charitable in his statements, but tough- tough because he argued about present events not from his own light, but in the light of Tradition. That is, he was immersed in the Magisterial teachings, and the history of the Church he loved. It was as if he breathed in the air of Catholic culture and life, from ages past, on many different levels. He had the sensuum Catholicus, the “Catholic Sense”- it is better translated as “ a nose for things truly Catholic”- Mr. Davies was a Catholic Beagle, and I mean that seriously. How many people he alerted to the crisis in the Faith! Even then, in the late seventies, he saw the directions things would take- and I believe he was driven to study history and the Traditions to make sense of it all, and to keep his Faith. In the wake of that drive, he pulled many others to safer waters.

When I met Mr. Davies, in July 1998, he was in his late fifties, and writing his passionate book on the rising of the Vendee in revolutionary France. He was giving lectures to us, and he was in full form, great jokes, the largesse of joy one gets only from real faith in Our Lord; he was likening the rising of the Vendee, against the blasphemous proclamations of the Revolution, to those who would hold to the doctrines and traditions of the Faith in the present darkness. It was my first experience of the war taking place inside the walls of the Church, but I’d sensed it before. Mr. Davies simply cleared it up for me.

I also heard lots of discussions from his corner on a group called SSPX- I thought it sounded like some weird military term from the WWII lessons I’d not paid any attention to in high school. Then I heard the term “Sede Vacantist”- I thought they were talking about some hotel in Italian. Finally, I got curious when I noticed that there was a young seminarian who seemed anxious to talk to Mr. Davies about where to pursue his journey into the priesthood. I sensed that Mr. Davies was like a lighthouse, who not only shed light on things, but also knew the terrain like an old sea captain. Yet he was not conspiratorial or critical of the Pope, the Vatican or anyone else, in a self-serving way. He was not skeptical or critical by nature, but only in necessity, and never out of fear- rather it seemed out of genuine love for the Church. He held to the Church like a beagle to a fox, even if She were hard to find- and encouraged others to do the same.

I began to read his books, starting with I Am With You Always, an explanation of how and in what ways the Lord stays with His Church, how She remains indefectible. It was a lesson from a master teacher in the Traditional Magisterial teachings of the Church: no more, no less. It was not polemic nor a Whiner’s Handbook. It was Catholic teaching, pure and simple.

As a new Catholic, I was-and am- determined that I not become Catholic to become Protestant again, which I feared many so-called “Traditionalists” and “Liberals” had become. So I set myself, in the footsteps of Dr. William Marra, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and mainly Mr. Davies, to understand both the history and teachings of the perennial Church, and the landscape of Her present domain, from end to end. I decided that I loved the Church, like a mother (I love the term “Holy Mother Church”): for She is the ark wherein our souls are formed, where we “work out our salvation in fear and trembling”; and that to love Her is to know Her children, all of them, and then to ask the Lord to show us where He wants us to be His agents.

As a convert of only eight years, I am still a relative outsider, still learning the inexhaustible history and richness of the Church, still learning the depths in the deceptively simple term “Where is Peter, there is the Church”. Yet we must seek, in these days, to know who are those who have submitted to Christ in His Church, and those who have not; and as Michael Davies knew, as a student of history, specifically the history of the Church he loved, we shall know them by their fruits. And we shall only be able to recognize the fruits “in the light of Tradition”.

To be continued-

The Landscape of Traditionalism: Introduction

Michael Davies was-and is- one of my heroes. A great Catholic thinker, writer, and activist- all in the package of a humble Welsh schoolteacher. He was full of jokes, good-natured sarcasm and a love of Holy Mother Church and Our Lord.

I have the distinctly odd but happy memory of my husband and I having Mr. Davies with us on our honeymoon- along with many other fine Catholics at the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute in Italy. Unfortunately, many people have not heard of Mr. Davies, nor read his books on the Faith and the crisis in the Church.

He was a master, and his books are honest, interesting, and humble explanations of both the glories and the modern failures of the institutional Church. He had obviously drunk deeply of the magical British waters, nectar which has produced such great writers; yet he was a real person, he was alive, not like the loads of wax-like figures who are interested primarily in the Church and Her traditions as aesthetic museum pieces. He was a teacher of little children who loved young people; like Our Lord, he surrounded himself with the young and the questioning. He was full of hope and optimism-in God's providence for the Church-not in churchmen. Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, knew Mr. Davies and respected his thought and work in service of the Church.

Yet, again, not many have heard of Michael Davies outside the rather small group included in the larger Catholic world, a group whose focus is the great traditions of the Church with the Latin Mass as a centerpiece. I would like to introduce the landscape of traditional Catholics, but not through my eyes. I hope to do it through the better eyes of Michael Davies- from such sources as my own experiences listening to him, his books, and some of the people who knew him.

The story of traditionalism is fraught with misconceptions, bitterness, and joy.

I hope I can shed light on it in honor of one of my heroes, Mr. Davies.

The Mission of Padre Pio: In honor of his Feast Day

On New Year’s Day, 1903, St. Pio was thinking about his vocation to the Capuchin cloistered life and was feeling apprehensive about leaving the world, his family, and his beloved countryside. Suddenly, he was favored with a vision, not of the imagination, but of the intellect.

We can see things in different ways, and it is said that we can know the angels like we know ideas, although they are persons; they are like living ideas. This is a part of our seeing that we do not exercise enough; we rely too heavily on the physical sense of sight, “Seeing is believing.” But this vision was presented to St. Pio through his intellect: he knew what he saw. And it gave him the answer to his apprehension about his vocation. It was a mandate, a warning, and a promise of aid. This vision was the mean and mode of St. Pio’s life as a priest and monk of God—and his immense suffering. He was permitted a part in protecting and helping weaker souls to attain salvation in Christ.

This vision, which the icon depicts in visual form, was the meaning and the goal that Our Lord planned for Padre Pio, and St. Pio accepted it. It is his acceptance, and the mode and depth of his acceptance, which is one of the great hallmarks in the life of this beloved saint. The Padre’s life was suffused with obedience, for he knew that all obedience, in its proper form, was directed ultimately towards Christ. “If my superior asked me to, I would jump out that window,” he was heard to say. Does this sound like folly? Yes, the Padre was a fool for Christ, and his way of showing that folly was love, to be obedient, obedient when no other would be, to show his love of Our Lord.

From his earliest days, Padre Pio was a docile servant to Our Lord. He did not place his will in any place where it would ever conflict with the Lord’s; therefore, he was freer than the rest of us. It is interesting to note, that he was often charged with disobedience, especially as a young friar, when he was too ill to be at the friary and could only survive, it seemed, in his home area. This was a suffering the Lord allowed him, perhaps to test and strengthen his obedience to the Lord’s will, even at the cost of his superiors accusing him of disobedience. He simply continued to follow orders where it was in his power to do so. And later, when the Holy Office censured him, and even took his spiritual director from him, he expressed sadness but not complaint. This did not mean that he did not see injustice and mistakes; he simply accepted them as from the hand of the Lord, as part of his mission as expressed in the vision.

Obedience is an integral part of the meaning of the vision, because Padre Pio had developed it and been given the virtue in such high degree that his will was malleable for great things by the Lord. For most, the devil we fight is primarily our own wayward will, the desire to put ourselves above what others want for us, primarily the Lord. We will not accept the mysterious will of God because we cannot understand it for ourselves. Padre Pio seemed to forego the need to understand for himself, and he just obeyed. Therefore, the Lord was able to use him to fight Satan himself in order to save other souls.

Obedience was Padre Pio’s crown, which he wears now: obedience and docility to the Lord’s hand, and great love of poor, little souls. Here is the description of his intellectual vision in his own words:

At his side he beheld a majestic man of rare beauty, resplendent as the sun. This man took his hand and said, “Come with me for you must fight a doughty warrior.” He then led him to a vast field where there was a vast multitude. The multitude was divided into two groups. On the one side he saw men of the most beautiful countenance, clad in snow-white garments. On the other. . . he saw men of hideous aspect, dressed in black raiment like so many dark shadows.

Between these two groups of people was a great space in which that soul was placed by his guide. As he gazed intently and with wonder . . . in the midst of the space that divided the two groups, a man appeared, advancing so tall that his very forehead seemed to touch the heavens, while his face seemed to be that of an Ethiopian, so black and horrible it was.

At this point the poor soul was so completely disconcerted that he felt that his life was suspended. This strange personage approached nearer and nearer, and the guide who was beside the soul informed him that he would have to fight with that creature. At these words the poor little soul turned pale, trembled all over and was about to fall to the ground in a faint, so great was his terror.

The guide supported him with one arm until he recovered somewhat from his fright. The soul then turned to his guide and begged him to spare him from the fury of that eerie personage, because he said that the man was so strong that the strength of all men combined would not be sufficient to fell him.

“Your every resistance in vain. You must fight with this man. Take heart. Enter the combat with confidence. Go forth courageously. I shall be with you. In reward for your victory over him I will give you a shining crown to adorn your brow.”

The poor little soul took heart. He entered into combat with the formidable and mysterious being. The attack was ferocious, but with the help of his guide, who never left his side, the soul finally overcame his adversary, threw him to the ground, and forced him to flee.

Then his guide, faithful to his promise, took from beneath his robes a crown of rarest beauty, a beauty that words cannot describe, and placed it on his head. But then he withdrew it again, saying, “I will reserve for you crown even more beautiful if you fight that good fight with the being whom you have just fought. He will continually renew the assault to regain his lost honor. Fight valiantly and do not doubt my aid. Keep your eyes wide open, for that mysterious personage will try to take you by surprise. Do not dear his formidable might, but remember what I have promised you: that I will always be close at hand. And I will always help you so that you will always succeed in conquering him”.

When that mysterious man had been vanquished, all the multitude of men of horrible countenance took to flight with shrieks, curses and deafening cries, while from the other multitude of men came the sound of applause and praise for the splendid man, more radiant than the sun, who had assisted the poor soul so splendidly in the first battle. And so the vision ended.

The Search For Solace

We met, once a month, for a year and a half, timidly sipping various coffees at a Borders Café, somewhere inconspicuous, common hairdos in a common strip mall. We were all moms, we never thought of anything more creative to call it than “Mom’s Group”; no one ever looked twice at us, except perhaps when we prayed or when more than one of us came in pregnant, easing into her seat like a ship at dock, heavy with child.

We were surrounded by students with laptops and morbid T-shirts; lonely and obnoxious teenagers and lost young adults. There was no beauty, but there I found solace, and each face around the table became more and more luminescent as the months passed. The beauty came from within, from the laughter, listening, and the occasional outburst and sympathetic tears. Each life, each common mom with common kids, became a mirror for the face of Christ for me; and the light spread around that coffee shop until the ceiling reflected a glow. We had topics, we searched for truth, we talked about the Cross-and the little crosses of each day; we told horror stories of days beyond repair and the eternal meaning encased in each day.

I remember one of us talking about being in heaven, and that we will somehow share a special place with those people we loved especially. We didn’t think of each other at the time, but now, after a year and a half of loving each other, we would now. I was on a search for solace, and the Lord gave me four friends, four common moms, with uncommon souls.

Now I am headed into the sunset, quite literally, to California. So what? Lots of people move. But I know that the Lord sees every life, every event in that life, as quite special. This I know for sure, now, and am glad to have lived long enough to really understand that existentially. And so I know He knows both the gratitude I have for each of those moms, for their husbands and children; for no person gives a gift from solitude- it is always with the foundation provided by others- most fundamentally, Our Lord. And He knows the tears I have on my face now because the daily minutiae matter in a friendship, and I will miss those now. I won’t be on a speakerphone on the Borders table: like a river, life will flow on. But sitting on a grave, as I did on a hot day in July in the middle of a Long Island suburb (my father-in-law’s new grave), will teach you quite forcefully that even in the silence and separation, love goes on. It goes on in a torrent, reaching ever back to its source in God, in eternity.

Am I overdoing it? This is friendship after all: friends come and go. No, I am not overdoing it, as C.S. Lewis bemoaned, friendship is heavily undervalued in modern life. Friends are the solace God gives us in this valley of tears, and the love of friendship, philia, is, like the other loves, meant to be baptized and thus super-naturalized into a higher level, an eternal level. The loves work together: the development of one kind of love is meant to help the growth of the others. In Christian friendship, friendship itself is baptized and begins to draw the other loves in a person’s life into the supernatural, the eternal.

So the common moms at the franchised Borders Café were aiding me in super-naturalizing my whole life. My God bless each person with at least one friend like that. I have been blessed quadrice.

The Economy of Suffering and Love

I was standing in the vestible of the sanctuary at Immaculate Conception Church. I was annoyed, as is often the case; my blood was pounding in my neck and I was waging an inner war, to offer up the mental suffering and not to be angry at my three-year-old. I had just lost a battle on the inside to anger and on the outside to her will-pushings, and swatted her on the backside. I was going into combat mode, and the Holy Sacrifice about to commence beyond the green padded doors was suddenly in the background, like memory of a green meadow.

Quite suddenly, a woman was beside me, and the battle lifted. She could barely talk; I could see the open hole in her tracheal tube , like a gaping fissure, underneath a clear plastic bandage, all packaged neatly and bravely under the buttoned-up collar of a purple silk blouse. As she gasped and whispered, making my own throat feel sore, I tried to pick out the strong Irish brogue to which I’d been accustomed.

She used to sit behind us in Mass, always alone, but not fearful: a wide-shouldered, rough-toothed, kind-eyed, straight-forward lady. She was the one who said of my little one, “She keeps you running, eh?” And I remember turning round, expecting to see an expression of disdain and annoyance, but instead to find myself folded in life-hardened, but kind peat-green eyes, full of humor. She made me laugh. She made the three-year-old more precious, even if just a tiny bit.

Now here she was, making the tears stream down my face, as her story of surgeries and months in the hospital gushed out. “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and I wondered why-at least, my mind idly wondered, while that deeper part of me, the part which doesn’t use words, understood perfectly. “I almost died three times”, she said. “And I’ll tell you, too, that I saw myself, I was on the cross.” And she put her wide, now bony shoulders forward a bit, and her arms straight out either side. Her purple blouse rippled in response. “ Jesus was holding me, his arms around me; and I could look down and see Mary. ‘See’, says Jesus, ‘you are suffering for Me’.” And she looked up again, and I, with that strange fright of visions, said in a hurry, in order to come back to earth, “ So, you were dreaming?”

She looked at me with those iron eyes. “No, I was in a coma.”

There was something in me that I’m not sure I understand. I felt strange, the strangeness of an Other. Yet I doubted her story, I felt that condescension in me, the kind that says, “oh wow” and “I’m sorry” and then moves on to the next person-that fear of the ‘weird’ the ‘self-deluded’. But I couldn’t turn away, there was something else in me that didn’t care about the strangeness; besides, I was out of energy to respond to the insistence of inhibitions. The tears streamed down my face, because she was in the hospital, suffering on the cross, alone in a coma, and alone in so many other ways. Were there flowers at her bedside? “Oh,” she said, “I hope I didn’t make you cry; because, God is so good. He is so merciful.”

And I and she looked at each other, distant acquaintances, and we conversed without words. So I knew that she came to me, to somehow tell me not to be so angry at my little daughter, that she’d suffered for me in the hospital in a way, and that this was such a great and noble act only because God accepted it- and this meant that He was merciful to her. He accepted her suffering, He was good and kind because her suffering was useful to Him. It wasn’t wasted, or just left as a punishment for her sins: it was transformed. She told me in her humility that none of us escape suffering, because we all deserve it. But God, in His mercy, deigns to use it- for others, even the angry and struggling mother in the vestibule. And I wonder now: are those daily battles, even the ones with three-year-olds, are they such temptations; is my anger and resentment offensive enough to God that they required all this lady’s suffering? “Surely not!” I say, but after all, who am I to be angry? Am I not putting myself in a Judge’s place? Am I not saying, “I don’t like this situation, Lord, You must have put me in the wrong place!” Am I not committing type of sin that Adam and Eve committed?

Who knows how much suffering is required to expiate one act of petty rebellion? Our Lady understood. If I understand, too, how can I stand to sin? Yet, if I also understand my weaknesses, how can I even stand on my feet? Yet as I remember the Irish lady’s eyes, I saw love there. And I remember, too, in that place without words, how, when we are truly immersed in Love, we want to suffer for the beloved. It is a fire, a self-immolation for the sake of the lover: that eros from which is born courage and the forgetting of self. So, perhaps, I, like the choir of angels St. Thomas Aquinas elucidates, the angels who are made solely to receive love, I receive her offering- or rather, I receive the mercy God deigns to give me, out of the Irish lady’s gift of herself.

So let me rejoice with my Irish lady, let me rejoice in God’s mercy to her and to me, let me let the rejoicing stand side by side with the sobered sinner in me, the one who is learning the enormity of each offense. Let me love the traitor in me, the part I keep asking to be burned away. Let me love in truth, let me have clear sight and have the courage to see myself as God sees me, and then let me repent truly and have the gift then not to see myself at all, only You. Like my Irish lady, who is being transformed into You, grant me freedom from fear. And freedom to love. It is a gift. Words are so heavy: no part of me completely understands the economy of love and suffering, but the part without words understands better- like Job, who just put his arms out, threw back his head, and did worship to the Whirlwind- and it ravished him.

Finding Our Lady of Walsingham

"But love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never dead, never cold,
From itself never turning." …from a ballad about Our Lady of Walsingham

I go there, to Walsingham, in my mind; you are there with me, walking slowly in your shoes. I have the wheelchair ready just in case you can’t make it more than the forty or so steps you can usually do. You do not know where you are, I have brought you down this road in hopes you will awake, for I stepped into your dreams and I am trying to bring you out. Yours isn't the senility of age, but of darkness. You walk along, slowly, bowed by the many weights of your brokenness, the fear of pain, the carrying of those deeper wounds of the heart: the anger, the loss. The rain is falling but you do not feel it, my friend, heart of my heart. I can’t even speak of it, only to tell you gently that you might feel wet, and a little cold.

Will my Lady warm you? Will you feel her radiant, humble love? Will you see the tiny house, will you know that she has the Lord of the Universe in her lap who will look at you again, at His Mother’s request? She is who will, with her prayers and yours, renew your flesh and your mind. May I be the doormat that allows you to shuffle over and into the Holy House, for I have no more power to heal your hordish suffering than the pebbles we crunch on the road.

I come to Walsingham, in my mind, as it was before the first licks of fire touched the vulnerable wood of the statue and the house, before the gold and Henry’s father’s gifts were taken back by the lesser royalty of later years; before the ancient Priory was chimera-ed into a forlorn, vacant, eyeless, tombstone. I come, seeking that Lady who lives in the little house at Nazareth. I come seeking a woman who had the greatest grace of all: to say "Fiat" to the greatest suffering and the greatest love ever known by humankind, who gave her womb, her womanhood, her dreams, her pain, to God. I come to be present, with you, my friend, to that "Fiat".

As we walk, and you talk about moving on with your life and your plans, not really feeling the drops settling like tears on your middle-aged cheeks, I no longer feel the pebbles and the rain, but rather the fine dust and the heat of a Galilean sunset. I cross over the river in Walsingham, but I see the ancient city wall of Nazareth, traveling the same route as the English river. Up the road, the same road circling under the city and meeting the same main road. You are now riding in the wheelchair, talking about eating more protein and perhaps some fish. I weep anew as I observe your hunched back, the lines etched out from the edges of your eyes by pain’s razor. We turn right, and I see the same main artery of humble human and animal traffic in double vision: one in the blues and browns muted by the desert, the other in the bright blues and browns of a rainy climate. As we travel up through the middle of town, you remark that it seems noisy today and you’d like some quiet. I smile and say, “Why don’t we go in here?” The wheelchair bumps and rocks a bit on the well-used path to the Holy House, and you wince. I put my hand on your shoulder. I look into your eyes, and I say, “I’m so sorry to see you suffer. I love you”. You look at me. I hold your head to my side and you say, with that intensity of yours, “Forever.”

I brought you to Nazareth, to the English Nazareth, because it would be more familiar to your Western eyes, even though you may not be able to see it at all- except, perhaps, in your heart at the end of your life. I brought you to see Our Lady, in the place where she said we would receive her help. I have nothing of my own to give that isn’t tarnished, or cheapened by bad use. But I can bring you to Nazareth, to Walsingham, in the power of love. And I hope you will see its beauty, Our Lady's beauty: for the closer beauty is to truth, the less subjective it is: and the gentle maiden of Nazareth holds Truth on her lap.

As we enter, me clumsy with the wheelchair to the point that you try walking again, as we enter the Holy House, you think you are entering someone’s cute little cottage. But you aren’t. What is inside that House is bigger than everything outside it, as the red lamp testifies.

O gracious Lady glory of Jerusalem
Cypress of Sion and joy of Israel
Rose of Jericho and star of Bethlehem
O glorious Lady our asking not repel
In mercy all women ever thou dost excel
Therefore blessed Lady grant thou thy great grace
To all that thee devoutly visit in this place. Amen.

Richard Pynson, from theBallad of Walsingham

Post Script: When Richeldis de Favereches was about to build the Holy House, she asked for a sign to show her where to start construction. In the morning, there were two dry spots amid the dew-covered ground, each exactly the dimensions of the Nazarene house Richeldis had seen in her dream. She picked one of the spots, but the builders could get nowhere. Richeldis then went back to prayer, for aid, and the next morning the Holy House was standing, finished on the other dry spot. This showed two things: Our Lady’s call to have recourse to prayer in each and every need, and the significance of the geography of the town in relation to Nazareth and the original Holy House of the Annunciation. If one looks carefully at the maps of each town, there are striking similarities. Walsingham is indeed a story in three dimensions.

St. Catherine of Alexandria: Holy Helper of Our Lady

Despites to Holy Deeds: Our Lady of Walsingham, Second Part:

The caravan moved slowly, as all caravans do when the desert wind blows in dry heaves and the light is red behind sand clouds. A young man, leaning his shoulder into the hot air, had just given up peering into the sand for any sign of the foothills and the monastery for which they were headed; but suddenly there was a singing sort of shout, a Bedouin sound, and the young man, Marcion, glanced up to see the walls of St. Catherine’s monastery rearing up in the distance, the massive walls appearing to be covered in blood, the huge sandstone blocks reflecting the dying sunlight; light which moved in slow waves, light filtered through the blowing sand.

Finally, Marcion could hear and see normally. Everything looked so clear inside the walls. He went immediately to the ancient chapel to kneel before the relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria, to help him on his quest to do homage at the places of God here at Mt. Sinai, at Bethlehem, Jerusalem and farthest north, Nazareth. Up above him, he saw the icon of St. Catherine. “She was beautiful”, he thought, and saw the image of the spiked wheel, the palm in her hand, and shuddered. He said outloud, “How could anyone murder such innocence and loveliness?” Marcion turned suddenly, thinking that he heard laughter, not derisive but happily amused, laughter tinkling like many small bells on the hem of a veil. He then remembered her story, and knew why she had laughed at his musings. A picture of her, before her conversion and espousal to Our Lord, came before his imagination. Beautiful, yes, young; heir to a throne and learned beyond many men; she was sought above all other women by the powerful, the wealthy for a bride. She harbored inside, however, a rough-sculptured desire, one, which made her desist from ideas of marriage. In the darkness of her unbaptized soul, she was not able to ascertain clearly why she felt she must find a man who was worthy of her. Finally, in desperation, her mother took her to a hermit high in the desert mountains, a man reputed wise beyond all. He told her of a man beyond her, like the stars are beyond the sands of the desert. She sat before him, yearning for this man to be her husband, caring not about her robes in the dust, receiving from him an icon: a small painting of a lady with a small child on her lap.

Going home, thoughtful, she prayed late into the night, until her head fell on the bed in sleep. She dreamed as if awake, she dreamed of the lady with the child. She recognized in the child’s face the man of whom she’d been told; but He would not look at her after the first quick glance. Stung, she looked pleadingly at His mother. The Mother pleaded with the Child, but He refused, saying, “She is darkness and ugliness. She must learn from My servant on the mountain and be baptized. Then I will accept her as My spouse.” Catherine woke, and as soon as she could, rushed to the hermit, receiving instruction and finally, baptism. She was then favored with another dream of the Lady and the Child, and He put a ring on her finger.

After this, St. Catherine witnessed far and wide to the infinite beauties of her Spouse, and was finally beheaded by the Emperor for her great faith and powers of persuasion regarding her heavenly Spouse. It is said that immediately after her execution, her body was found on Mt. Sinai, where a monastery was built in her honor.

Marcion’s knees were hurting from kneeling for hours on the stone floor of the chapel. He rose, bowed toward St. Catherine’s relics, and asked her intercession for a fruitful pilgrimage up the many steps of the great mountain. He went outside into the starlight. The next morning he rose at dawn; taking off his shoes at the gate leading to the stars, he ascended the mountain as Moses had done, shoeless as Moses had been before the burning bush.

Many months and hundreds of dusty leagues peeled away, and Marcion again found himself thinking of St. Catherine, his patroness; he thought again of the merry laugh, like the tinkling of bells- and a broad smile, full of the joy of a journey’s goal, spread itself across his swarthy pilgrim’s face. He was standing once again outside a place named in St. Catherine’s honor, an hour’s walk from the Church of the Annunciation, the great monastery and Church built over the site of Our Lady’s girlhood home and the place of the Conception of Our Lord. Strange, how the furthermost and last part of his trip should, by necessity, lead him to the place of the Lord’s beginning- in His humanity, that is. Marcion, reminded by the thoughts of St. Catherine and her monastery on the slopes of Mt. Sinai, the many-staired climb to the heights- with no shoes, in acknowledgement of Moses’ taking off of his shoes- he decided that in honor of Our Lord’s Humble Love, Love Who came to such a humble girl in a tiny house built in an insignificant Galilean town, in honor of this, he, Marcion, should do what he intuited that St. Catherine would do: take off his shoes again and walk barefoot the last thousand steps of his long journey. He knelt in front of the little chapel dedicated to his Helper, St. Catherine, and in the same movement downward, began to unlace his strong shoes. He wriggled his feet in the hot, tiny pebbles and fine dust. He smiled again and made his way to the humble house of Nazareth, encased in its great Church.

Ten centuries later, a group of Saxon pilgrims, joined by a growing number of Normans, reached the little chapel that stood about a mile out of Walsingham. It was elegant, and tiny, and built so that on the twenty-fifth of November, the sun would rise directly behind it, lighting the pilgrims’ faces in jewel colors who stood attending Mass. The twenty-fifth of that month was the feast-day of St. Catherine of Alexandria, to whom this little chapel was dedicated. The people, in that very English way of giving everything nicknames, had dubbed St. Catherine’s English chapel (sister to that one outside of Nazareth) “The Slipper Chapel”: in that other English ingenuity, the nickname had two levels: the Old English, Saxon word “Slype” had the connotation of “an in-between place, a stepping off into another world”. That is, The Slipper Chapel, St. Catherine’s, was the final station chapel on the way to Walsingham, and Walsingham, with its Holy House, was another world, another Nazareth, a remembering in the Jewish sense of the word remember: to re-call, to be actually, miraculously, transported to the place of the Annunciation, to learn its lessons afresh as if one were really present with Our Lady at the moment of her fiat; to participate in that humble and trusting “let it be done”; it was the same kind of real “remembering” as the Real Presence in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, although of differing degree in the way that only God understands. Thus the Saxon “Slype-er Chapel” was the place where St. Catherine, as a Holy Helper as she was in Nazareth and Mt. Sinai, interceded for the pilgrims to truly journey to Nazareth and to Humble Love, to help from Our Lady at Walsingham.

The more pedestrian meaning of the nickname, “Slipper Chapel” was quite a literal one: it was here that the pilgrims took off their slippers, or shoes, to walk the last mile into England’s Nazareth with bare feet. To feel each step, to feel the gritty and wet English road slowly transform into the pebbly and powder-dust-dry road into Nazareth, to remember our humility before the greatness of God, as Moses had done in taking off his shepherd’s sandals, to learn humility by seeing and knowing the Humility of God in coming to the tiny house as His place of Conception, to the gentle and unknown maiden who would be His Mother.

The pilgrims, like St. Catherine, would come seeking answers, come in need, and leave in love. Like St. Catherine, they would see a child in His Mother’s lap, slightly turned from them, His blessing elsewhere; but with a Mother who smiled and gazed at them, her very posture and gaze an intercession to the reluctant Child.