Diogenes' Quest

Paul starts his beautiful letter to the Phillipians with a greeting "To all the saints [holy ones] in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi . . ."

I read that rather than thinking of a saint or holy one in terms of "a destination to which a person of moral perfection arrived," Paul says, 'No, Sainthood is not a destination. It's a journey. You were called to be saints.' . . . [A saint is] a baptized person with a vocation." Karl Barth comments: "'Holy' people are unholy people, who nevertheless as such have been singled out, claimed and requisitioned by God for his control, for his use, for himself who is holy. Their holiness is and remains in Christ Jesus." Both from Dwelling With Phillipians, p.8.

I saw the 1973 movie Serpico yesterday, and it reminded me of this definition of holiness. Serpico is the true story of Frank Serpico, a NY City cop who refused to take bribes, refused to work corruptly in a corrupt "system." He was a "little guy" who tried to survive but wanted even more to live a morally correct life. It almost did cost him his life, but in the end his struggles helped clean up the corrupt NY police culture. (For more information about the movie, go here: Serpico.)

That a life of holiness (the only "meaningful" life) is not an "outcome," "not something realized only after history, time, and human experience have run their course," is a central idea of Levinas. He says that our "call" to holiness, involves a 'perpetual duty of vigilance and effort that can never slumber . . . the incessant watching over the other.'" In other words, the "call" to holiness comes, as Christ's call comes, not in the future, but now, and is lived now. Christ's coming, his call, "is a matter of living every moment of life in a certain way, with compassion and concern for others." From"Time, History, and Messianism," in The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanual Levinas, by Michael Morgan, p. 170.

The holy ones, the saints are found in the present, in the struggle despite setback to find righteousness, to help bring it about for others, to hear and try to respond to a calling nobler (greater, higher) than me, myself and I. When making the movie, Al Pacino asked Frank Serpico why he did what he did. He answered, "Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?" This is our "call," our responsibility, and only here is meaning in life found. For more on Frank Serpico's life, click here.

So for me, Frank Serpico is a saint, a "holy one" like Thomas More, and others, who day by day choose to struggle to live a life of integrity in a world whose common denominator is low, where the m.o. is graft and compromise; a person who responds to an inner (transcendent) call to be just, to treat others right, not counting cost to himself. I commend his story and movie as an image of this calling, and a tribute to its importance for each of us and for our world.

If the Incarnation means anything, it is the ever re-birthing of the call of the perfect God to each of us to be part of a holy people, to be perfect as he is perfect, in Christ: ("Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. "Mt. 5:48.) It is to be called and "claimed" by God, "set apart" like the prophets of old, to accomplish God's will. It is Jesus' "gentle yoke," his cross. And, judging from my own experience, it requires every particle of our ongoing attention to answer this call.

Listen to the lovely, elevating theme from Serpico, composed by Mikis Theodorakis

Listen to Same with shots from the movie.

Listen to "I'd love to Change the World" by Ten Years After with scenes from Serpico.

Listen to Mikis Theodorakis' "Adagio for Solo Flute"

Vaulted Cathedrals

I attended a friend's mother's funeral yesterday at St. Wenceslaus' Church on the west side of Chicago, just south and west of the Kennedy as it arcs into the loop. The church commemorates King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia.

The church was awesome in the word's proper sense: large, vaulted, with arches lifting one's gaze to the great crucifix at the center, amid gold patterns interlaced with wood, and many stylized symbols of the workmen and culture of pre and post-war Polish life. The church was quiet and reverent, formal and stolid -- a fixture in a now-changed neighborhood, its catholic school rented to the City of Chicago, its long aisles empty and silent on this funeral morning Tuesday, its pews polished and shiny, with Polish-language missals neatly stored. The left-hand altar boldly proclaims, "Cor Jesu sanctissimus miserere nobis," and atop the crucifix, "Introibo ad altare Dei".

I thought, why would anyone want to leave this church, and move to the the suburbs!

This, I thought, is how a church integrates a culture, how it draws the city into a meaning larger than the city, into a City of God! (see attached photo by Scott Mutter, Church Aisle from his Surrational Images.) The microcosm united with the macrocosm.

Listen to "Good King Wenceslaus"

The lyrics of "Good King Wenceslaus" show how Christianity embraces the city in its care.

Valuables

A common prejudice is that facts trump values. "The fact is . . ." The reason is that value is commonly placed in the world of opinion, and fact in the "real" world. But it doesn't take too much imagination to realize that values are "facts" in the "real" world too. But are they just opinions?

It seems we all can agree that we choose the higher value item if we can identify it. When shopping for a flat screen TV, we try to get the largest screen, the most vivid, crisp colors for the money we spend. We can usually tell why the $5,000 item is priced more than the $500 item.

I think it is fair to say that a higher value item is more truly real. To dis-value something is to treat it as other than it is, as less real. Plenty of us choose fools gold rather than real gold because we can't tell the difference. How do we get into such a pickle? Because value often is not on the surface. Diamonds have to be mined. The homely girl may make the best wife. Goodness is usually seen in time, not immediately. To experience value we need to listen better, to see better, to live better. Often our tangled lives, sinfulness in other words, hobble us.

Some philosophers have pointed out that values are more primary, more elementary, than knowledge. Nicholas Rescher, for example, has proposed that value may play a crucial role in the world, not as an "efficient cause" like the principle of cause and effect, but as a filter, letting more optimal values emerge and preventing less valuable outcomes. One might wonder which is the better way to explain the fact of man's appearance in this world, the blind outcome of genetic mutation, or the realization of great value?

To Christians, fact and highest value are found together in Christ's incarnation, an event or "fact" in the world, laden with value for all. Christians believe that Christ is the best and final revelation of God to man, and that living as he lived, we experience, as real, the highest value. What is that value? Ultimately, I think, it is the joy of living, of being created, of having a Father, and brother, and mother, and children, and friends. To experience these we must strive to love, and to be loved.

As valuable as these insights are, better yet is the fact of living them!

Listen to Enya "Fairytale"

Listen to Enya "Listen to the Rain"

Here we Come a Caroling!

A few days ago a group from our company visited the local nursing home to sing Christmas carols, an annual ritual we have been following for a number of years. The experience was wonderful for us and for our hearers, many of whom mouthed the words to the songs along with us. I reflected that Christmas carols in this Christian country of ours are our folk songs, a common possession that helps to bring us together as a Christian community, no matter how much our intellectual betters deny it.

Christmas carols date from the early days of the church. My memory of caroling goes back to childhood, and I enjoy taking part in caroling today, as I did with our Burmese friends last week. In our company's caroling, we sang in english, german and spanish. I recommended to our Laotian Mung employees that they prepare some Mung songs for us to sing next year. They informed me that Christianity among the Mung tribes in Laos dates from the French missionaries of the 1950's, and that their Christmas songs are the same as ours.

The creche, caroling, all the trappings of Christmas celebration, are the center of our national experience, no matter how secular they have become. Intrepid atheists have only "negative ads" to offer, and so their "gifts" fall on deaf ears. I and, I think, all of us, will keep coming back to the rich, lovely music that celebrates God's gift of his Son, in love, to us, living in this hurting world, longing for hope.

Have a Merry, a happy, hopeful, joyful, prayerful, Christmas!

Listen to Sinead O'Connor sing "Silent Night."

Listen to John Denver singing "Little Drummer Boy"

Listen to "O Little Town of Bethlehem."

Listen to Celtic Woman sing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful."

Listen to Vienna Choir Boys' Adeste Fidelis.

Listen to Celine Dion "O Holy Night"

Another version of "O Holy Night" by a seven year old!

Another version of "O Holy Night" by Susan Boyle.

Listen to "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night."

Comfort Ye!

Handel's Messiah puts to music Isaiah Ch. 40, which begins "Comfort, give comfort to my people."

And so the meaning of the birth of Jesus is brought home to a people burdened, oppressed in sin and darkness.

As Giussani observes in "How We Become Christian," the word "comfort" comes from "con" "forto" or with strength, and united in strength. Comfort comes to us because God joins with us, in his Son, to give us strength in our desolation, to offer "comfort" and consolation in his strength. So, let us joyfully "unite" with Him in this Christmas celebration of His incarnation, his love and mercy for us, who need his comfort, his strength, and the goodness, truth, and justice he brings, as an "echo of eternity" in our world of today.

Listen to Handel "Comfort Ye"

Listen to Handel "Unto Us a Child is Given"

That Sheep May Safely Graze

The Fourth Sunday in Advent's first reading from Samuel recounts God's promise to David that He will remember this shepherd whom He "took [] from the the pasture and from the care of the flock to be commander of my people Israel." 2 Sam. 7:8.

Geoff Wood (Living the Lectionary, Cycle B, p. 10) points out that Israel was concerned from the crime of Cain (Cain the city maker killed Abel the herder of sheep) and from Abraham, a nomad and keeper of sheeps and goats, that the spirit of the shepherd be maintained in a nation that had moved into cities. For that reason "Israel's holy men . . . insisted that, if the Israelite tribes must unite into a kingdom under a monarch, that monarch should be a shepherd."

"Shepherding was symbolic of freedom, mobility, flexibility, a hankering after wide-open spaces and starry skies where one felt closer to God. It also said something about gentleness, concern for things vulnerable, a willingness to protect the weak and confront the ravenous elements of this universe. These were qualities worth remembering and maintaining, especially when the pressures of urban life and royal politics might tempt Israel to become like so many other nations: hard, polarized, aggressive, even lethal like Cain." When Israel's monarchy failed, its prophets naturally looked to Bethlehem, birthplace of David, for a pastoral king to renew its prospects as a nation. (Cf. Micah 5:2 "But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel.")

We are close to our anniversary of remembering that our longed for promise has been kept, that our shepherd has come and is here, a "good shepherd" whose yoke is light" (Mt.11:29), who "leadeth me beside still waters," who "restoreth my soul" (Ps. 23). Our shepherd shows us all the way to a nation of peace, a nation concerned with the "rest" of its citizens, a nation happy in its role to bring about happiness in the world.

May this remembrance, renewed as real in our life today and on Christmas Day, bring us joy and comfort!

Listen to Bach "Sheep May Safely Graze"

Another version (Stokowski).

Sheep may safely graze
where a good shepherd watches.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

Text (German):
Schafe können sicher weiden,
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.
Wo Regenten wohl regieren,
Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren
Und was Länder glücklich macht.

"It's All about Agape Love"

In his book, Knowing Christ Today, Dallas Willard describes behaviors that he believes will bring us closer to knowing Christ: humility, inward rightness, obedience, solitude and silence, fellowship. He concludes, "It's all about agape love."

"Love means that we humbly and simply devote ourselves under God to the promotion of the goods of human life that come under our influence. We live to serve. We do this expecting God to intervene with us to produce an outcome that is beyond all human ability, and we it do it knowing that God is the one 'watching our back.' We cast all our 'care' on him, knowing he is the one who takes care of us (Ps.55:22; 1 Pet.5:5-7)." Knowing Christ Today, 155.

As we await Christmas, traveling with the Holy Family to Bethlehem, we try to imagine Mary and Joseph's anxieties and their expectations, and we try to imitate them in building a "holy family" of our own.

If the Holy Family is the example par excellence of agape love, the following tragic counter-example serves to underscore the crucial importance of agape love, which is "of service," self-sacrificing and life-giving.

A Gift

The boy comes to the back door of the parish,
bearing he says, "A gift."
A crib, its mattress, and a baby bearish
quilt. "I hear you people stand for life."
What came between them, what could cleave a rift
and birth such sorrow?
Girlfriend or wife,
she gave her child no chance for a tomorrow
but left a young man sobbing in despair
on the chipped flagstones of my pastor's stair.
--Timothy Murphy

From First Things, Jan. 2012, p.32.

We, sinful and sorrowful, can learn from the Lord of Love what love means.

Listen to Chrissie Hynde sing (with the Pretenders) "I'll Stand By You"

Same, live performance.

Prayer - The Role of the Son

This is a continuation of the December 9th post, following the thread of von Balthasar's meditation on the role of Christ in prayer.

"... the apex on which everything converges is no longer the Son on earth but the Father in heaven.  Ascending to the Father, the Son draws all things with him and orients them to the Father.  Moreover, the Son not only takes the boundless wealth of created things to the Father and polarizes them in this way, making them transparent; there is also the entire, infinitely greater wealth which the Son has brought from heaven and spread out before men, treasures of eternity. The contemplative who thirsts for unity, recollection and deep immersion in prayer may well be offended at this dazzling multiplicity, and his alienation may intensify as he finds it expanding into the multifarious aspects of the Church and its history, its dogmas and institutions, definitions and paragraphs.  For the contemplative all this is like so much barbed wire; he finds it difficult to penetrate it and reach God.  This is because nowhere except in the Catholic Church is there such absolute insistence on the formula as such and its binding nature; nowhere else is it so hard to render the mundane and finite form transparent, so that God's infinity, which the contemplative seeks in and through all things, can be perceived." Prayer, p. 53

Breath of Heavan

The Dresden Madonna, by Raphael, considered one of the greatest works of art, prompted the following reflections by Vasily Grossman when he saw it displayed in Moscow 10 years after being confiscated by the Soviets:

"The Madonna's beauty is closely tied to earthly life. It is a democratic, human and humane beauty. It is a beauty that lives in every woman . . . It is a universal beauty. This Madonna is the soul and mirror of all human beings, and everyone who looks at her can see her humanity. She is the image of the maternal soul.

. . .

"The child in the Madonna's arms seems more earthly still. His face is more adult than that of his mother.

"His gaze is sad and serious, focused both ahead and within. It is the kind of gaze that allows one to glimpse one's fate.

"Both faces are calm and sad. Perhaps they can see Golgotha, and the dusty rocky road up the hill, and the hideous short, heavy, rough-hewn cross lying on a shoulder that is now only little and that now feels only the warmth of the maternal breast.

. . .

"I saw her in 1930, in Konotop, at the station. Swarthy from hunger and illness, she walked towards the express train, looked up at me with her wonderful eyes and said with her lips, without any voice, 'Bread. . .'

"I saw her son, already thirty years old. He was wearing wornout soldiers' boots -- so completely worn out that no-one would even take the trouble to remove them from the feet of the corpse -- and a padded jacket with a large hold exposing his milk-white shoulder. He was walking along a path through a bog. A huge cloud of midges was hanging above him, but he was unable to drive them away; he was unable to remove this living, flickering halo because he needed both his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder. At one moment he raised his bowed head. I saw his fair curly beard, covering the whole of his face. I saw his half-open lips. I saw his eyes -- and I knew them at once. They were the eyes that look out from Raphael's painting."

From "The Sistene Madonna", by Vasily Grossman, The Road, at pp. 172-73, 177-78.

Listen to Amy Grant singing "Breath of Heaven."

Listen to Kenny Rogers and Wynonna Judd sing "Mary Did You Know?"

A Story of the Holy Family

I would like to offer the story related below as an Advent meditation on the question asked in the Conclusion section of Ch. 11 of Giussani's The Religious Sense:

"What is the formula for the journey to the ultimate meaning of reality? Living the real. There is an experience, hidden yet implied, of that arcane, mysterious presence to be found within the opening of the eye, within the attraction reawakened by things, within the beauty of things, within an amazement, full of gratitude, comfort, and hope."

One could characterize this sad story from Everything Flows (by Vasily Grossman), whose background is the tragedy and horror of the "Great Famine" in the Ukraine in 1932-33, in many ways: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (Mt. 5:5). "Guilt before the holiness of the other" (Levinas). An "icon" in words. A story of the holy family. However characterized, the story shows that an intense aliveness is found in the "reality" of human relationships of love. This, it seems to me, is near to Giussani's central message.

I hope you find this brief story as moving and poignant as I do, and of help in our Advent (and lifetime's) preparation to make love's gift a reality in our lives:

Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman, chapter 15:

"Vasily Timofeyevich had a quiet voice and a hesitant way of moving. And when someone talked to Ganna, she would look down at the ground with her brown eyes and reply almost inaudibly.

"After their marriage, they both became still more timid. He was fifty years old, and the neighbors' children called him 'Grandad'; he was gray-haired, balding, and wrinkled -- and he felt embarrassed to have married someone so young. He felt ashamed to be so happy in his love, to find himself whispering 'My darling, my sweetheart' as he looked at his wife. As for her, when she was a little girl, she had tried to imagine her future husband. He was going to be a Civil War hero like Shchors; he was going to be the best accordion player in the village; and he was going to be a writer of heartfelt poems like Taras Shevchenko. Nevertheless, even though Vasily Timofeyevich was no longer young; even though he was poor, timid, and generally unlucky; even though he had always lived through others rather than living a life of his own, her meek heart understood the strength of the love he felt for her. And he understood how she, so young, had hoped for more, how she had dreamed of a village knight who would ride up and bear her away from her stepfather's cramped hut -- instead of which he had come along in his old boots, with his big brown peasant hands, coughing apologetically and clearing his throat. And now here he was, looking at her happily, adoringly, guiltily and with grief. And she, for her part, felt guilty before him and was meek and silent.

"They had a son Grisha, a quiet little baby who never cried. His mother, now once again looking like a skinny little girl, sometimes went up to his cradle at night. Seeing the boy lying there with open eyes, she would say to him, 'Try crying a bit, little Grishenka. Why are you always so silent?'

"Even when they were in their own hut, both husband and wife always talked in soft voices. 'Why do you always speak so quietly?' neighbors would ask in astonishment.

"It was strange that the young woman and her plain, elderly husband should be so alike, equally timid, equally meek in their hearts.

"They both worked without a word of complaint. They did not even dare let out a sigh when the brigade leader was unjust, when he sent them out into the fields even if it was not their turn.

"Once, Vasily Timofeyevich was sent to the district center on an errand for the collective-farm stables; he went with the farm chairman. While the chairman was going about his business in the land and finance offices, he tied the horses to a post, went into the shop, and bought his wife a treat: some poppy-seek cakes, some candies, some bread rings, some nuts. Not a lot, just 150 grams of each. When he got back home and untied his white kerchief, his wife flung her hands up in the air with joy and cried out, 'Oh, Mama!' In his embarrassment, Vasily Timofeyevich went off into the storeroom, so that she would not see the tears of happiness in his eyes.

"For Christmas she embroidered a shirt for her husband. Never did she learn that, after she had given it to him, Vasily Timofeyevich Karpenko was hardly able to sleep. All through the night he kept getting up and walking across, in his bare feet, to the little chest of drawers on top of which he had put the shirt. He kept stroking it with the palm of his hand, feeling the simple cross-stitch design. . . And when he was taking his wife home from the maternity ward of the district hospital, when he saw her holding their child in her arms, he felt that he would never forget this day -- even if he were to live a thousand years.

"Sometimes he felt frightened. How was it possible for such happiness to have come into his life? How was it possible that he could wake in the middle of the night and find himself listening to the breathing of a wife and a son?

"Whoever he was with, Vasily Timofeyevich felt shy and timid. How could he have the right to something like this?

"But that was how it was. He came home from work and saw smoke coming out of the chimney and a baby's nappy drying on the fence. He would see his wife bending down over the cradle or smiling about something as she put a bowl of borsch on the table. He would look at her hands, at her hair peeping out from beneath her kerchief. He would listen to her talking about their little one or about the neighbor's ewe. Sometimes she would go out into the storeroom and he would miss her and even feel lonely. As soon as she came back, he would feel happy again. Catching his eye, she would give him a sad, meek smile.

"Vasily Timofeyevich died first, two days ahead of little Grisha. He had been giving almost every crumb to his wife and child, and so he died before them. Probably there has been no self-sacrifice in the world greater than this -- and no despair greater than his despair as he looked at his wife, already disfigured by the dropsy of death, and at his dying son.

"Even during his last hour he felt no indignation, no anger with regard to the great and senseless thing that had been accomplished by the State and Stalin. He did not even ask, 'Why?' he did not once ask why the torment of death by starvation had been allotted to him and his wife -- meek, obedient, and hardworking as they were -- and to their quiet little one-year-old boy.

"Still in their rotten rags, the skeletons spent the winter together. The husband, his young wife, and their little son went on smiling whitely, not separated even by death.

"The next spring, after the first starlings had arrived, the representative from the district land office entered the hut, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He looked at the paraffin lamp with no glass, at the icon in the corner, at the little chest of drawers, and the cold cast-iron pots, and at the bed.

"'Two and a child,' he called out.

"The brigade leader, standing on this most holy threshold of love and meekness, nodded his head and made a mark on a scrap of paper.

"Back in the fresh air, the representative looked at the white huts and the green orchards and said, 'Take the corpses away -- but don't bother about this ruin. It's not worth trying to repair it.

"Once again the brigade leader nodded."

Saving Ritual

Why do we do it over and over again? Go to mass over and over again? Go to confession over and over again? Say our prayers over and over again? Sing this song over and over again? Fast over and over again? Praise God over and over again . . .

Ritual is our discipline, our training for the spiritual life.

"In order to be free for obedience and service one has to be free with regard to the forces through which nature steers our actions and [free with regard to] one's own spontaneous and 'natural' egoism. Without discipline we are not able to be entirely dedicated to God and justice. The elan of passion and pathos must be simultaneously broken and maintained to concentrate conscientiously on the main task. This discipline is procured by the ritual structuring of daily life." "Judaism According to Levinas" in Beyond, Adriaan Peperzak, p. 30.

The truth is, we must call to God "over and over" in prayer and in praise in order to realize His merciful grace and the freedom it brings.

Listen to Mozart's Laudate Dominum sung by Cecilia Bartoli.

Same by Carolina Ulrich.

Latin text	English translation
Laudate Dominum omnes gentes Laudate eum, omnes populi Quoniam confirmata est Super nos misericordia eius, Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum. Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper. Et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.	Praise the Lord, all nations; Praise Him, all people. For He has bestowed His mercy upon us, And the truth of the Lord endures forever. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever, and for generations of generations. Amen.

Laudate Dominum are the opening words of Psalm 116 (Greek numbering) or 117 (Hebrew numbering) in Latin. As with the other Psalms, "Laudate Dominum" is concluded with a trinitarian doxology (Gloria Patri) when used in Roman rite.^[1] In Catholic churches, the Psalm may be sung after the blessing at the devotional service called Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.^[2]

Prayer - The Role of the Son

von Balthasar continues the thread of the role of the Son in prayer:

In the Son, therefore, heaven Is open to the world.  He has opened the way from the one to the other and made exchange between the two possible, first and foremost through his Incarnation.... God's immense richness is concentrated and focused at this one spot, the humanity of Jesus Christ, so that here, in this single Person, "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge", here "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily", here stands the Eternally Beloved Son....  This is the meeting place where all the roads from heaven come together at the one “gate" through which every one who wishes to go to the Father must pass.  It is a meeting place, too, of all the roads which crisscross the world's history....  Man... can feel … this immense, ineluctable convergence of all paths toward God, this channeling of all human relationships to God toward the one Mediator....  The contemplative [must grasp] the fact that the Mediator’s uniqueness has been established by God himself as the counterpart of God the Father's own uniqueness.  Everything that radiates from this one Mediator, therefore, necessarily bears the stamp of their unity, a unity which always points to the Father but is at the same time universal and integrating, and hence catholic: "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all" (Eph 4:4-6) Prayer, p.52-53

Bread for the World

It is our good fortune, our grace, to be invited into the mystery of "the one, eternal Child, who, from the beginning of the world, intervenes as sponsor for his alienated creatures." (prev. post)

Advent helps us to prepare for this Incarnation, and its renewal in the Eucharist, "as we wait in hope for the coming of our Savior, Lord Jesus Christ."

"The spiritual vocation of human individuals is not primarily a concern for one's own salvation or eternal happiness. That would still be a sublime form of egoism: "The soul is not a demand of immortality, but a [moral] impossibility of murdering. . .; the spirit is the very concern for a just society." Peperzak, Beyond, p. 27 (quoting Levinas).

I read that to mean that our "vocation", and the meaning of our faith, is our call to see all, and treat all, in terms of the hoped for realization of the kingdom of God for all.

According to Levinas, incarnation is in the other. "The Divine cannot manifest itself except through the neighbor. For a Jew, incarnation is neither possible, nor necessary. After all, Jeremiah himself said it: "To judge the case of the poor and miserable, is not that to know me? says the Eternal?" Jer. 22:16.

If we believe in Incarnation, its meaning must be the same: Christ as entering between the murderer and the victim. The "bread" of God is what in the here and now symbolizes and graces us to act like Christ, our brother, in this, our role as persons in this world.

Lest you think of this a theoretical enterprise (since "killing is far from my thoughts"), think about this article in yesterday's Chgo. Tribune.

Listen to Elina Garanca sing Panis Angelicus

Latin text	An English translation
Panis angelicus fit panis hominum; Dat panis coelicus figuris terminum: O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum Pauper, servus et humilis. Te trina Deitas unaque poscimus: Sic nos tu visita, sicut te colimus; Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus, Ad lucem quam inhabitas. Amen.	The angelic bread (The bread of angels) becomes the bread of men; The heavenly bread ends all prefigurations: What wonder! The Lord is eaten by a poor and humble servant. Triune God, We beg of you: visit us, just as we worship you. By your ways, lead us where we are heading, to the light in which you dwell. Amen.

Hans Urs von Balthasar on Prayer

From  Prayer, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, p. 51:

What empowers us to embrace a contemplative faith which listens, which beholds, is fundamentally grace; grace as our calling and justification by God the Father, and the resultant faculty and liberty to gaze openly into his truth made manifest.

But the manifest truth of the Father is the Son. In the Son, the Father contemplates us from before all time, and is well pleased. It is in the Son that the Father can predestine and chose us to be his children, fellow children with the one, eternal Child, who, from the beginning of the world, intervenes as sponsor for his alienated creatures. It is in him that the Father justifies us, viewing and valuing us in the context of the Son’s righteousness which pays all our debts; he ascribes the Son’s righteousness to us; he gives it to us as our very own. Finally, it is in the Son that the Father glorifies us, by permitting us to participate in the Son’s resurrection and finally, by grace, setting us at his right hand, the Son’s rightful place.

Ave Maria

In this "Advent" of waiting, a time of preparing for Christ's coming, isn't it appropriate to contemplate Mary's meditation, her "holding these things close to her heart" while awaiting the coming of her special one? For one so close to God's spirit that she could say "be it done unto me according to Thy word," would not the passion of her (and God's) son be near to her heart? And is that not why we are close to Mary, our Mother, who accompanies us in life's perils and pains? And how better expressed than in this lovely aria by Pietro Mascagni.

Listen to Ave Maria, sung by Elina Garanca.

Ave Maria, madre Santa,
Sorreggi il piè del misero che t'implora,
In sul cammin del rio dolor
E fede, e speme gl'infondi in cor.

(Hail Mary, holy Mother,
Guide the feet of the wretched one who implores thee
Along the path of bitter grief
And fill the hearts with faith and hope.)

O pietosa, tu che soffristi tanto,
Vedi, ah! Vedi il mio penar.
Nelle crudeli ambasce d'un infinito pianto,
Deh! Non m'abbandonar.

(O merciful Mother, thou who suffered so greatly,
See, ah! See my anguish.
In the cruel torment of endless weeping,
Ah! Do not abandon me.)

Ave Maria! In preda al duol,
Non mi lasciar, o madre mia, pietà!
O madre mia, pietà! In preda al duol,
Non mi lasciar, non mi lasciar.

(Hail mary! Oppressed by grief,
Do not leave me, O Mother, have mercy!
O Mother, have mercy! Oppressed by grief,
Do not leave me.)

Listen to Ave Maria sung by Angela Gheorghiu

Same sung by Kathleen Battle

Here is some information about this piece and the and the man who wrote it.

In this song I am with all who, like Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem, wait in hope on Christ, whom we experience in the love of those who love Him.

The Glory of the Lord

The following quote Is taken from an essay by Louis Dupre'. In this essay Dupre' provides an overview of von Balthasar's work entitled "The Glory of the Lord".  On the topic of nature and grace the following insight is provided.

"If the modern world has closed itself to redemption, it is not because of its greater respect for nature, but because of its systematic destruction of the natural order,the very soil of grace. Reducing the natural"rightness" of things to mathematical equation, modern culture has equalized, quantified, depersonalized, and formalized human life.The full embodiment of the Christ event requires not only that it be solidly attached to the cultures that preceded and followed it, but, even more, that it plunge its roots deep in the historical soil in which it has been planted."

Our understanding of our history is essential to our Faith.