Safe Haven

It takes awhile to understand that Jesus isn't just fire insurance. All that we know at the beginning is that we're helplessly tied up in the sins that trouble us. We have these amazing desires, especially if we have faith. We see clearly what God is offering, and we want it. The trouble is our sins, or more accurately, how we react to our sins. I think many of us take our awareness of our sin as an opportunity to tell Jesus that he made a mistake. This could go on a lifetime. But with the mystic vision, we begin to see our sin as the remnant of our unredeemed self. Temptation is closely related; it's a call to prayer. The sin in my members, as it were, is a siren call to dark places. We don't like to go there, but fear and selfishness call us there, like a compulsion or a sickness. When the Scriptures call us "double-minded," they mean that we both love and hate the siren call. We are like two people: the one who loves God, and the one who loves the carou...

Look at that first reading . I daresay I have never had an easier time placing myself in the scene. If my love does not grow now, it might be said rightly I have never believed. I watched a livestream of the Mass, and when the time for the usual reception of Holy Communion came, I had only tears. They have hardly stopped. I am wracked with waves of love and grief. It remains beyond my understanding why anyone would willingly choose to be away from the altar. Never have I felt more at home than in God's house, where it pleases Him to remain as "God with us" in the Eucharist. My only pain is the day when He leaves us at night into Good Friday. It's like he is bodily there, in every church, on His throne. He does not reign with terror, but presides in quiet. We are home and safe; we are family. Indeed, this is the true faith distilled: "And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Many people are afraid of God, which is to say they are gu...

I should warn you that I'm going to say "crazy" things. As the young people say, "It is what it is." It is good to tell people to follow the commandments. If it weren't good to follow the commandments, God would not give them to us. Still, we can easily imagine or we have seen laws become ends in themselves. Our Lord's opponents had made the Law an end in itself. A person who doesn't try to follow the commandments may not be malicious, but he is certainly blind. Sin blinds us, and we know this. Yet we are blinded in two ways: First, we cannot see God in His goodness; and second, we can only see ourselves. And yet, in the end, there's little profit in keeping the Law as an end. "All these I have kept since I was a boy," said the rich young man. There is no ladder to God. This is why it says, "It does not depend on him who strives, or him who runs, but upon God's mercy." I don't like to spend too much time talking ab...

This terrible coronavirus has clarified something important about the adoration of God: Mass still goes on. The one sacrifice God commands is that of Calvary, and it goes on. Strictly speaking, we don't need to be in attendance. Our obligation in normal times is truly a gift of thanks, that we can join the sacrifice of our lives to that Sacrifice. Made in a bloody manner once, and in an unbloody manner in the Mass thereafter until the end of time. It is crucial that we understand that when the priest refers to "my sacrifice and yours," there are two distinct sacrifices, and they are not the same. Quite honestly, when things go bad in Catholic thinking, it's right here. We lose the sense that the relationship is one of verticality firstly and primarily. I think we get envious of our Protestant brethren in some ways, and rightly so. They are generally better at loving each other than we are. I went to one parish 3 years, and I think only my small circle of friends kne...