Apostolic Authority and Baptism…

Given some of the discussions between Protestants and Catholics on the forum I frequent, I found the Mass readings for tomorrow (heard at Vigil this evening) to be very interesting. So often the Catholics are told that the sacrament of baptism is only symbolic and imparts no grace, does not forgive sin, etc.  We are also criticized for saying that baptism only in the name of Jesus is not enough, but must be done with water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy  Spirit. Not only that, but apostolic authority is always an issue in such discussions… and even that is supported in this reading.  So much in such a small reading.

The first reading from Cycle A, the 6th Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2008.

Acts 8:5-8, 14-17

5 Thus Philip went down to (the) city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them.

6 With one accord, the crowds paid attention to what was said by Philip when they heard it and saw the signs he was doing.

7 For unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed and crippled people were cured.

8 There was great joy in that city.

14 Now when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent them Peter and John,

15 who went down and prayed for them, that they might receive the holy Spirit,

16 for it had not yet fallen upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. ⁵

17 Then they laid hands on them and they received the holy Spirit.

Scripture continues to live and breathe since my conversion to Catholicism.  It makes so much sense.  I find that instead of my scripture readings leaving me with more questions than answers, I’m finding that connections leap off the page and I walk away with more illumination, understanding, and meaning from much smaller portions than I had ever seen before.  Awesome.

 

The Third Hour of Prayer…

 So I was quite willing when said friend turned to me (as we left the Adoration Chapel at 4 am) and asked if I was up for ‘the third hour’ of prayer as her husband calls it.  You. Betcha.  During a recent natural disaster, a local church refused to accept supplies from my friend’s Catholic parish simply because they were from Catholics.  Since it can be difficult to fall asleep after Adoration anyway, my friend has taken to spending an hour in prayer for this Church.  We piled into the car, swung through Whataburger for a breakfast sandwich to eat on the way, and headed for the third hour.

In the quiet of the car, we took out our rosaries and began to pray the Luminous mysteries.  The rosary is a meditation on the life of Christ, luminous mysteries being specifically the major events in our Lord’s ministry.

So these were a particularly appropriate meditation to pray for unity in service to our Lord with these, our brothers and sisters in Christ. As the street lights formed pools of clarity in the early morning darkness, our voices rose into the silence with the rhythm of prayer.  I meditated upon each event in the life of Our Lord, praying the words of the Angelic Salutation and asking God to accept her fiat as mine, that intimate communion with God returning.  The prayerful chorus of our voices invited our Lord into our midst and He came, and listened, and taught…

My memories are imperfect… and incomplete… some insight is not given for us… to be scribbled on the back of stray bits of paper, meditated on and shared, but to assist us in prayer… as our Lord participates and guides our prayer, bringing it into line with His will.  This was that sort but I wanted to save what I do remember as everything He gives is precious.

Luminous Mysteries

1. The Baptism of the Lord

As I meditated upon the Baptism, I realized yet again what being ‘Christ-like’ means.  It means that God came and LIVED as our example. He showed us HOW to respond by HIS response. He was baptised not because He needed to be cleansed of sin, but to fulfill all righteousness… and that is an example to us.  We need to respond in such a way as to fulfill all righteousness…   He humbled Himself and walked among those who were weak, needy, sinful… an imperfect reflection of Himself.  How can we refuse to do likewise?

2. The Wedding of Cana

In the Wedding at Cana, a need was brought to Jesus attention by His mother.  The wine was gone and the wedding feast far from over.  He asked what she would have Him to do… it was not yet His time.  She turned and gave instructions, her very entrusting of the servants to Him an act of faith, belief, and persistence.  What did He tell them? I told her no? He honored the request of His mother. He was humble. He saw the need and met it, even though the timing was not the best.  How often to I let convenience determine my willingness to serve?

3. The Proclamation of the Kingdom

4. The Transfiguration

5. The Institution of the Eucharist.

Bread. Wine. Simple food. Brought by sinful men, held in imperfect hands, shared even by a traitorous friend.  What did our Lord do? He took it, blessed it, broke it, perfected it, shared it… and in doing  so, gave Life. The bread and wine, like the prefiguring loaves and fishes, was useful to our Lord… not because of the perfect hearts and right belief of those who brought it, not because it was an adequate offering… the apostles themselves thought it insignificant and unworthy… but because of the perfect heart and holiness of He to whom it was given by faith. Our Lord repeatedly took imperfect gifts and sanctified them, made them holy, multiplying them, and using them to bless… to give Life.  Who then are we to refuse the gift of another made in our Lords name and to our Lords sheep, no matter how blemished, imperfect, unclean the heart of the giver in our eyes? Is it not a lack of faith on our part? Just as the apostles lacked faith that God could do anything worthwhile with a few simple loaves and fish?

As the temple became a car once again and the harmony of our voices died away, I realized a few things… First, that voices risen in prayer, glorifying our Lord, was something precious… it was as though I’d been given a very veiled glimpse of what it must be like to raise one’s voice in the throne room continuously in the Holy, Holy, Holy… never tiring, just being renewed and filled with joy and never ending love… not boring as it always sounded to me as a child… and that it would be a wondrous thing to be able to do that one day in heaven.  Secondly, that I was praying not only for that church, but for all Christians… for myself… knowing myself guilty and praying that I would be given grace to not be found lacking in faith, doubting God’s ability  to transform even the simplest things given by the most corrupt appearing heart, incapable of judging rightly the heart of another before our Lord… but trusting that God can use even the Samaritans of our acquaintance… to do His work.

Arriving back at the house, I climbed the stairs with a silly grin on my face to climb back in bed … a third hour… who knew… I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Not Enough Time…

As I mentioned in my last post, I am visiting my best friend and had the opportunity to spend several hours in prayer with her during her usual weekly 2-4 am Adoration slot. She’s the one who introduced me to Adoration in the first place and it had become a very precious part of my prayer life by the time I moved to a new state and new parish with no real Adoration to speak of.  Anytime I come to visit that coincides with Adoration, I am able to join her and it was particularly precious this visit as it has been more than six months since I had such an opportunity for Adoration, much less one with her.

I have not slept well these last months and was particularly tired last night due to little sleep the night before.  So I slept through both the cell phone alarms I set and had to be woken by my friend asking if I was sure I wanted to go. One might think that going to pray for two hours on such little sleep in the quiet of a private chapel would be difficult.  There was a time when I could not pray for five minutes together without serious boredom and attention loss.  I frankly was a bit concerned that, despite previous experiences in Adoration, I might be tempted to join the apostles in their example of ‘midnight prayer’.

Silly me.  Time had passed for me, but not for God.  My location had changed, but His remained the same.  He was there waiting for me.  I had so much to pray for, petition and thanksgiving, so much I wanted to meditate on… so I got right to it.  After praying the dedication of the hours, I paused to switch out my Magnificat’s in their little cover as the month was changing that night and I wanted to go ahead and do Morning Prayer before I hit the more intense, specific prayer. There is usually an editorial, some articles and prayers before the daily stuff starts and I began with those once morning prayer was over.  As my previous post suggests, I got seriously sidetracked there with all kinds of intense illumination going on. 

 As I mentioned to my friend, as a Protestant I dutifully showed up for services with my Bible and a notepad, studiously listening for the ‘points’ in the sermon to make notes.  As a Catholic, I show up with so much to pray and meditate on in Adoration that it never occurs to me to bring paper… and repeatedly I’ve found myself learning so much, so inspired by repeated somethings that click as I meditate, that I’m scrabbling for pen and paper… holding my hand up to heaven saying ‘WAIT! Hold that thought! You’re going too fast!  I have to write this down so I won’t forget it!’

 This was true this time as well.  In fact, something unusual happened last night. Normally, our Adorations are a blessed, pregnant silence. Ours being the type of friendship where no words are necessary and hours of silent prayer spent together  in our Lord’s Presence with rarely a spoken word are an easy and familiar thing.  This time, it was happening to us both, though reading and meditating on different things but being given some really interesting illumination that spoke to the same or similar topics.  We kept interrupting each other to share as they struck us… sometimes one writing furiously, trying to capture the latest insight while the other was enthusing over something as well… both in close, intense communion with the Holy Spirit… but with each other at the same time… as the insights given complemented and shone light upon the others.

At last, we both leaned back in our chairs, silently absorbing the wonder of the moment.  After some moments had passed, my friend asked what time it was… I reached for my cell phone to check the time, thinking it could only have been about 20 minutes and why was she, of all people, so time conscious all of a sudden… (stupid anne)… Imagine my astonishment to find that it was 3:48 in the morning, a mere 12 minutes remained in our two hours and I was nowhere near ‘done’.  Yet again I found myself packing up my Adoration materials and reaching for my shoes feeling both profound joy and somewhat bemused disappointment as I realized that not even TWO hours is enough dedicated time for prayer…

What is Belief?

On the forums I frequent, the issue of what belief is came up on a thread about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary.  What exactly is required of a Catholic when we are asked to ‘believe’. 

 One of the other Catholic posters quoted a good definition:

Belief: (be and lyian, to hold dear). That state of the mind by which it assents to propositions, not by reason of their intrinsic evidence, but because of authority.

 I am fortunate enough to be spending a few days with my best friend who lives several states away from me.  She has a two hour Adoration slot from 2-4 am at her parish each Monday night… or is it Tuesday morning?  I digress… Anyway, I am able to go with her when I visit and as my current parish has no real Adoration to speak of, it is a great blessing.  As I spent time in meditation and prayer, I came across an article which really addressed this line of dscussion and the Holy Spirit brought to mind some recent things which all tied together neatly with her definition.  I shared that on the forum and wanted to ’store’ it here for future reference.

There is a fabulous editorial at the beginning of the April 2008 Magnificat, written by Peter John Cameron, O.P., that speaks to what it is to believe (his words and clips are in green so as to differentiate them from my own thoughts). 

Cameron discusses belief not only as faith in God, but rather reminds the reader of the tie between that ‘mature’ or ‘advanced’ belief in God etc and the smaller ones we engage in every day without recognizing them for what they are.  Such examples include “a husband [waking]  up in the morning believing that his wife still loves him; the food that a waiter puts in front of us we eat believing it not to be poison; we believe that the 7:19 train scheduled for Baltimore will actually take us there and not to Sheboygan.” 

Cameron goes on to say “Without “belief” our life would be an endless process of interrogating, examining, second-guessing, and proofing.  Saint Thomas Aquinas in a Lenten sermon once said, “How would anyone be able to live unless they put belief in someone?  How would they even believe who their own father might be?  And therefore it is necessary that human beings believe someone about those things which they cannot know perfectly by themselves.”  Believing launches our humanity and enables us to go forward in life.”  

The Catechism says believing “is an authentically human act” (CCC 154).  We ‘believe’ because we are human – it is our nature.  To refuse to believe is to refuse to be human – to refuse to hope and to wonder – to refuse to be teachable and malleable.  To refuse to believe hardens our heart because in doing so we deny a part of ourselves – the very heart/essence of who and what we are.  

Cameron quotes Benedict, “The act of saying “I believe” is “an act in which the will and the understanding, the teaching and the guidance I have been given, are all cooperatively involved.  This act transcends my own limits.” (Pope Benedict XVI)” 

To refuse to believe anything but what we ‘know’ by our own ability, exclusive of any other human being, is to refuse knowledge entirely. It is to refuse to engage in the communal process of human thought.  Even scientists ‘believe’ in what has been studied and learned before.  They did not find it out themselves, but trusted in the ‘belief’ and work of those who came before… even if they were able to ‘prove’ by their own experimentation the ‘truth’ of previous minds, they are standing on the shoulders of such men… on the ‘foundation’ that those scientists ‘belief’ which existed even BEFORE they could ‘prove’ what they intuited to be ‘true’ has given. 

Indeed, it is often the way that science, beginning with a hypothesis, BELIEVES before it can PROVE… many times continuing to believe in the face of great opposition.  Pope Benedict XVI said that “for the believing Christian the words ‘I believe’ articulate a kind of certainty that is in many respects a higher degree of certainty than that of science… We live faith, not as a hypothesis, but as the certainty on which our life is based.” 

Cameron continues “To say “I believe” means that I refuse to live by my own ideas, my constructs, my preconceptions, my self-imposed measure.  In the words of Pope Benedict, “To believe means that we become like angels. We can fly, because we no longer weigh so heavily in our own estimation.  To become a believer means to escape our own gravity… Someone who believes has found in the truth the pearl for which he is ready to give everything, even himself.” 

To refuse to believe is to CHOOSE to limit ourselves and to CHOOSE to limit God.  It is to say “No – The mental construct I have of You is big enough for me – wondrous enough – I don’t want a God I can’t understand and comprehend.”   To refuse to believe is to become a black hole (RNW dropped that idea in conversation and I’ve taken it and run wild) and, overwhelmed by our own gravity, consume not only ourselves but all that is good and light within our grasp.  In the end that becomes too much for us and instead of the apparent destroying of all that which we have consumed, we are destroyed.  (Hawking radiation analogy here, though I realize that all analogies break down in the end – some in more stellar fashion than others… pun intended…) We become not larger, but smaller, until at last, overwhelmed by our efforts to deny and annihilate all that is light and good, we cease to exist entirely. 

Cameron again… “Belief in God changes us. Faith is a way of knowing….  As St. Augustine expressed it, “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe” (see CCC 158).” The Catechism says that “what moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe ‘because of the authority of God himself who reveals them’” (CCC 156, citing Dei Filius 3) just as our reason for believing our husband, the waiter, and the train schedule come from the authority of those in a position to know who reveal them to us.