I like the way psalms say it all. “Rejoice in the Lord, you just!” one psalm says. No need to make a prayer up on your own or think hard about saying something to God. Let the psalms help you. “Rejoice in the Lord, you just!”
“Let the earth rejoice in God, our king.” Why not join the earth praying? The “many isles are glad.” Be glad with them. The psalms call you to creation. They’re good prayers for the Season of Creation.
The psalms still our souls and draw them into the quiet grace of God’s presence. We think everything depends on us. No, it doesn’t. God “melts the mountains like wax” and “guards the lives of his faithful ones.” We think we have to know everything. No, we don’t. But God does.
The psalms draw us closer to God. They feed our minds and hearts, little by little. Their special grace is their simplicity as they tell us, for example, “rest in God as a child in a mother’s arms.”
Most of the psalms in our liturgy are songs of praise. “Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good.” Other psalms cry for help. Cry to the Lord, they say. “I cry to the Lord that he may hear me.”
The psalms call to a simple, deep prayer. Keep your eye on them in the liturgy of the Mass, Use them in your daily prayer. They’re wonderful basic prayers for everyone.
“Although the whole of Scripture breathes God’s grace upon us, this is especially true of that delightful book, the book of the psalms.” (St. Ambrose)
Every day the church meets the morning praying the psalms; every evening we end the day with these great prayers. A good way to pray always, as Jesus asks us to do.
Today the church celebrates two early saints and martyrs, Cornelius, a pope who died in 253, and Cyprian, a bishop who was martyred in Roman Africa shortly after in 258.
At the time barbarian tribes in the west and the Persians in the east were invading Roman territory; the Roman emperors Decius and Valerian called for absolute loyalty from their people. The empire was imperiled.
To prove their loyalty, Roman citizens lined to offer sacrifice in honor of the emperor. Christians refused, and so at first church leaders were executed or imprisoned, wealthy, influential Christians lost their property, their positions and possibly their lives. Finally, all Christians could expect punishment for not performing the rites of sacrifice.
Not every Christian remained loyal to the faith at the time. Many offered sacrifice, betraying their faith, then afterwards sought to return to the church. Hard liners called for them to be banned for life for their lack of loyalty. Let God judge them when they die, they said. Others, like Cornelius and Cyprian, called to reconcile them after a time of penance, since God is all merciful.
Mercy and justice are always hard to reconcile. The gospels come down on the side of mercy. So should we.
In the persecution, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, was executed first, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in Africa, was executed a few years later. The two men were from different social backgrounds and not always on good terms, historians say, but they found support in their common faith, as this letter of Cyprian to Cornelius, written shortly before Cornelius’ death, reveals:
“Cyprian to my brother Cornelius,
Dearest brother, bright and shining is the faith which the blessed Apostle praised in your community. He foresaw in spirit the praise your courage deserves and the strength that can not be broken; he was heralding the future when he testified to your achievements; his praise of the fathers was a challenge to the sons.
Your unity, your strength have become shining examples of these virtues to the rest of us. Divine providence has now prepared us. God’s merciful design has warned us that the day of our own struggle, our own contest, is at hand. By that shared love which binds us close together, we are doing all we can to exhort our congregation, to give ourselves unceasingly to fastings, vigils and prayers in common. These are the heavenly weapons which give us the strength to stand firm and endure; they are the spiritual defences, the God-given armaments that protect us.
Let us then remember one another, united in mind and heart. Let us pray without ceasing, you for us, we for you; by the love we share we shall thus relieve the strain of these great trials.”
As far as I remember there are three miracles in which Jesus raises someone from the dead. The most famous is the raising of Lazarus, his friend. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were also well known to him. Jesus stayed with them at Bethany, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. That miracle led his enemies to plot to put him to death.
Earlier, in Capernaum, Jesus raised the little daughter of Jairus, an official of the synagogue, from the dead. The official pleaded with him. Jesus goes to his house, where the mourning had already begun, and took the little girl by the hand and raised her up and told her parents to give her something to eat.
Today’s reading at Mass recalling the miracle in which Jesus raises the widow’s son as they carry him through the gates of the town of Naim seems somewhat different. The mother and son are strangers to him. We don’t know their names; they have no claim of friendship or position that may influence him. It’s the very opposite. The mother is a widow. Her son was the last asset she had and now he’s dead. She has nothing. Absolutely poor.
Our reading from Luke (Luke 7,11-17) provides the answer Jesus will give to John’s disciples as they approach him after this incident and ask “Are you he who is to come?” Tell John, Jesus says, “the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
“The poor have the gospel preached to them.” Those who have nothing and who know they have nothing, like the widow, are given the greatest gifts. God notices them. God’s heart goes out to them.
That was an important teaching of St. Paul of the Cross, the founder of the Passionists. “Go to God in your nothingness,” he said to people looking for guidance. Learn from the poor widow. Go to God with nothing.
In the years Paul of the Cross founded the Passionists, a lot of men left his community for one reason or another, and Paul respected them, but he reacted when someone left for the wrong reasons.
St Vincent Strambi, his biographer, tells about a priest who left the Passionists to make a career for himself in the church. He wanted to be a success so he got a string of degrees and began to climb the church bureaucracy. He wrote Paul a very self-congratulatory letter informing him how much better he was now for leaving the Passionists. At the end he signed his name, noting all his new degrees and honors after it.
Paul answered his letter, thanking him for letting him know how he was making out and wishing him well. But at the end of the letter he simply signed his name: “Paolo, n,n.n”– “Paul, a nobody, no one, having nothing.”
Our first reading today is all about bishops and deacons. (1 Timothy 3,1-13) Our gospel is about a widow. Who’s more important?
The Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows is celebrated the day after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14). Eight days after Mary’s birth (September 7) her sorrows are recalled, her lifelong sorrows.
The old man Simeon spoke of her lifelong sorrows when hetold Mary a sword would pierce her heart when Jesus was born. Her greatest sorrow, of course, came when she stood beneath the Cross of her Son.
What, then, were her lifelong sorrows? The gospels indicate some of them, but perhaps more important was Mary’s experience of the sorrow every human being experiences. An infant cries as it enters this world. “Our life is over like a sigh. Our span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain.” (Psalm 90) Everyone experiences the human sorrow the psalms describes. Mary experienced that human sorrow.
The sword of sorrow struck Mary most deeply at the death of her Son. Some of Jesus followers stood at a distance when he was crucified. But John’s gospel describes Mary as the first of those standing close by, beneath the cross itself. “Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.”
Mary stands by the Cross of Jesus, close by, not at a distance. She’s not absorbed in her own suffering, not afraid to see. Her closeness to the Cross is significant. She enters the mystery of her Son’s suffering through compassion.
She stood by him. Compassion doesn’t experience another’s suffering exactly, and it may not take another’s suffering away. Compassion enters suffering to break the isolation suffering causes. It helps someone bear their burden. The sword, the spear, the sorrow, pierces both hearts, in different ways.
Our prayer for today’s feast says that when her Son “was lifted high on the Cross” his mother stood by and shared his suffering. “Grant that your Church, participating with the Virgin Mary in the Passion of Christ, may merit a share in his Resurrection.
Pilgims enteing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem
This ancient ecumenical feast, celebrated by Christian churches throughout the world, commemorates the dedication of a great church in Jerusalem at the place where Jesus died and rose again. Called the Anastasis ( Resurrection) or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, it was built by the Emperor Constantine and dedicated on September 13, 325. It’s one of Christianity’s holiest places.
Liturgies celebrated in this church, especially its Holy Week liturgy, influenced churches throughout the world. Devotional practices like the Stations of the Cross grew up around this church. Christian pilgrims brought relics and memories from here to every part of the world. Christian mystics were drawn to this church and this feast.
Tomb of Jesus
Calvary
Pilgrims still visit the church and the tomb of Jesus, recently renovated after sixteen centuries of wars, earthquakes, fires and natural disasters. They venerate the rock of Calvary where Jesus died on a cross. The building today is smaller and shabbier than the resplendent church Constantine built, because the original structure was largely destroyed in the 1009 by the mad Moslem caliph al-Hakim. Half of the church was hastily rebuilt by the Crusaders; the present building still bears the scars of time.
Scars of a divided Christendom can also be seen here. Various Christian groups, representing churches of the east and the west, claim age-old rights and warily guard their separate domains. One understands here why Jesus prayed that ” All may be one.”
Egyptian Coptic Christians
Seventeenth century Enlightenment scholars expressed doubts about the authenticity of Jesus’ tomb and the place where he died, Calvary. Is this really it? Alternative spots were proposed, but scientific opinion today favors this site as the place where Jesus suffered, died and was buried.
Saint John Chrysostom was born around 340 into a military family in Antioch, in modern Turkey. He studied under Libanius, the great rhetorician of the day and afterwards lived with monks in Syria for a few years, but poor health made him return to Antioch, where he served the church for five years as a deacon, taking care of the poor.
Ordained a priest in 386, John became a bishop of Constantinople, then the seat of Roman power. John was an outstanding preacher: his “golden mouth” (Chrysostom) delighted ordinary hearers with sermons on the gospels and the letters of Paul, but they got him into trouble with the city’s rulers and churchmen whom he attacked for their wealth and high living. The Empress Eudoxia exiled him briefly from the city in 402 AD.
John returned and resumed his fearless preaching against the city’s powerful political and church elite. Eudoxia finally sent him into exile on the Black Sea after John gave a sermon that began “Again Herodias is raging, again she is perturbed, again she wants to receive the head of John on a dish.” Not a way to win friends in high places.
“ Glory be to God for everything. Amen” John said as he made his way to exile and death. “If Christ is with me, whom shall I fear. Though the waves and the sea and the anger of princes are against me, they’re as weak as a spider’s web.”
He died on September 14, 407, the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, which we celebrate tomorrow.
Like other bishops of the time– Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen– John faced a Roman government no longer intent on destroying the church but rather having it under its thumb. Like them, John suffered exile, yet still spoke out to power. In our prayer for his feast, we thank God for a bishop made “illustrious by his wonderful eloquence and his example of suffering.” We ask for brave church leaders like John. We need them now to lead a church that speaks to power.
Notice too that John spent some years as a deacon, taking care of the poor. His preaching was nourished by that experience. Here’s an example:
The waters are up; storms are on us, but we’re not afraid of drowning; we’re standing on a rock. The raging sea won’t break the rock. The rising waves won’t sink the boat of Jesus. What are we afraid of? Death? Life to me means Christ, and death is gain. Exile? The earth and its fullness belong to the Lord. Goods taken away? We brought nothing into this world, and we shall surely take nothing from it. I have only contempt for the world’s threats, I find its blessings laughable. I have no fear of poverty, no desire for wealth. I am not afraid of death nor do I long to live, except for your good.
I concentrate therefore on the present situation, and I urge you, my friends, to have confidence. Do you not hear the Lord saying: Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst? Will he be absent, then, when so many people united in love are gathered together? I have his promise; I am surely not going to rely on my own strength! I have what he has written; that is my staff, my security, my peaceful harbour. Let the world be in upheaval. I hold to his promise and read his message; that is my protecting wall and garrison. What message? Know that I am with you always, until the end of the world! If Christ is with me, whom shall I fear?
Today is the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attach on the World Trade Center in New York City, September 11, 2001. Like many others I remember where I was then. I watched the towers fall from a rooftop in Union City, New Jersey, just across the river. Many from that area died that day and as the days went on their bodies were recovered and they were buried in nearby churches. A frightful time.
About a year later, I went to an exhibit about the attack called “Recovery,” at the New York Historical Society. The exhibition rooms were filled with debris from the tragedy: parts of smashed police cars and fire engines–I remember a little child’s doll, parts of one of the planes that crashed into the buildings. A black and white film of the disaster played silently in one section of the exhibit. Grim reminders of that awful day.
It was the exhibit’s opening day and media people were there. One of them came up to me with a notebook in hand. “What do you think of this?” he said. I had my clerical collar on so he knew who I was.
I told him I really couldn’t put into words what I thought. It was an overwhelming picture of evil.
He wrote what I had to say in his notebook and then put it in his pocket and said, “You know I don’t believe in evil.” That began a conversation that lasted for a hour or so.
I asked him first of all why he didn’t believe in evil, so evident here.
“Yes, this is bad,” he said, “ but we can change the way people behave. We can rinse out the evil in them by giving them a better world.” How? “Science and technology can change the world,” he said, “we can give people what they want and give them all they need.” Later I found out that he was a writer specializing in science and technology
“Do you believe in God?” “No, I don’t,” he said. “In fact, it would be better to get rid of God altogether. And that goes for religion too. Get rid of it. The fanaticism of religion was responsible for this.”
At the end of our conversation, it seemed to me his hope about creating a better world through science and technology seemed naïve and unreal. Even if everyone in the world were given a new iPhone, his kind of thinking doesn’t seem to be the answer. Evil is hard to rinse out of our world.
In a post-modern world, optimism about science and the rationalism that came with the Enlightenment seems on the decline and nothing is taking its place. Post modernism is against everything from the past, including religion and religious truth.
After consulting local traditions, the Emperor Constantine and his successors built churches over important biblical sites in Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the 4th century. One of the churches, built near the ancient pool of Bethesda, just north of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, was associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
It was built on a spot pointed out in John’s gospel: “Now there was in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate, a pool in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes. In these lay a large number of the blind, lame and crippled,” (John 5,2) Jesus healed a paralyzed man at this healing place, where pagan gods like Asclepius and Serapis were honored.
Third century traditions concerning Mary, the Mother of Jesus, were associated with the church built over the ancient healing site. The traditions claimed that Mary’s birth and early life took place in this area. By the 5th century, Mary’s birth was celebrated here September 8. Christian pilgrims, returning home, began ti celebrate the feast of her birth on this day.
Ruins of Bethesda and ancient church
In the last century archeologists uncovered the ancient healing pool with its porticoes, parts of an ancient church and ruins of a temple of Asclepius (2nd-4th century) ..
Ruins of the Temple of Serapis
The early traditions said that Mary’s mother was Anne and her father Joachim. He provided sheep for the temple sacrifices. They were looked down upon as old and childless, but angels came and told them they were to conceive a daughter. Like Abraham and Sarah, their faith was rewarded.
Stories of Mary’s birth and her childhood strongly influenced the spirituality and devotional life of the early Christian churches of east and west. The feast of her birth is still celebrated by all the ancient churches on September 8 . Her parents are honored September 9 by the Greek Church. The Roman Church celebrates their feast July 26th.
When the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land in the 11th century they rebuilt the small church over the healing pool, which had fallen into ruins, and also built a new, larger church honoring St. Anne, the mother of Mary, southeast of the pool.
The present Church of St. Anne is one of the most beautiful of Jerusalem’s churches today. A favorite destination for pilgrims, it stands overlooking the remains of the old church and the ancient healing pool.
Readings for today’s feast see Mary’s birth awaited by all her ancestors. The gospel, St.Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, begins with Abraham whose hopes and the hopes of generations before him were fulfilled when Mary brought Jesus Christ into the world. “We commemorate the birth of the blessed Virgin Mary, a descendant of Abraham, born of the tribe of Judah and of David’s seed,” (Antiphon, 1st Vespers, Roman rite)
“This feast of the birth of the Mother of God is the prelude, while the final act is the foreordained union of the Word with flesh. Today, the Virgin is born, tended and formed and prepared for her role as Mother of God, who is the universal King of the ages…
Today the created world is raised to the dignity of a holy place for him who made all things. The creature is newly prepared to be a divine dwelling place for the Creator.”
(St. Andrew of Crete, bishop, Office of Readings, Roman rite)
The Birth of Mary is the first great feast in the Orthodox Church calendar which begins in September. Their calendar ends with the feast of Mary’s Dormition, on August 15th.
The Orthodox liturgy sees Mary as the mysterious ladder that Jacob saw in a dream reaching from earth to heaven. (Genesis 28,10-17) She is the way the Word came down to earth’s lowest point, death itself, and returns to heaven having redeemed humanity. The Orthodox liturgy also associates Mary with the miracle of the paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda. She has a role in healing our paralyzed humanity.
May your Church rejoice, O Lord, for you have renewed her with these sacred mysteries, as she rejoices in the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the hope and the daybreak of salvation for all the world. Through Christ our Lord.
The Lord’s Prayer is the norm for every prayer. That’s true, especially, for the Eucharistic Prayer in which we thank God, our Father, for blessing us “always and everywhere.” The Eucharistic Prayer is the Lord’s Prayer in another form.
As we do in the Lord’s Prayer, we call God “Our Father” at Mass and thank him for the blessings we receive as his children.
God’s blessings are symbolized in bread and wine. At Mass bread has the same manifold meaning it has in the Lord’s Prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Daily Bread stands for the whole of creation, the bread of everything, It also stands for “the True Bread come down from heaven,” Jesus Christ.
Bread and wine are signs of God’s past and present blessings. They also promise of a new creation and new life to come.
In bread and wine, we bring to the Father everything that’s given to us. At Mass, Jesus Christ, our priest, takes them in his hands as he did at the Last Supper and gives them new meaning. Giving thanks to his Father he gives himself to us as God’s supreme Gift. “Take, eat and drink, this is my body; this is my blood.”
He gives us all the gifts of creation as well as the promise of a new creation surpassing this one. “God’s kingdom is coming,” he said and he himself is the way to it.
“Your will be done.” Jesus fulfilled God’s will when he came as God’s love “poured out” for the forgiveness of sins. In his death and resurrection we’re promised a way to a kingdom to come.
The Lord’s Prayer is at the heart of the Eucharistic Prayer. With Jesus we pray to Our Father in heaven, whose gifts are without measure. With Jesus we ask to do his will and work that his kingdom come. We receive Jesus Christ as our daily bread, our food and drink, our teacher and Lord. He is the shepherd who leads us through the temptations of this life.
After the Eucharistic Prayer said by the priest, we pray the Lord’s Prayer together, to prepare for receiving the Bread of Life.
St. Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 to Patricius, a pagan, and Monica, a fervent Christian. Monica, venerated as a saint, raised Augustine as a Christian, but he drifted away from that faith and practice, finding no wisdom in the Christian scriptures.
Intelligent, ambitious, and interested in everything the world had to offer, he found prestigious teaching positions in Rome and later in Milan, constantly searching for meaning in the philosophies of the day. For some years he lived with a woman with whom he had a son, Adeodatus.
In Milan, his mother Monica encouraged him to listen to the bishop Ambrose, who introduced him to the beauty and truth of the scriptures. Augustine was baptized and for more than 35 year was bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa, where he died on August 28, 430, as Vandal armies prepared to lay siege to the city.
Augustine’s many writings are treasured in the church. The classic account of his life, his Confessions, describes his discovery of how God was with him from life’s beginning till the present. He was thirsting for God and only God brings true happiness, he said. Augustine came to know God in an intimate way:
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
“O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me’”
Here’s a biography of Augustine by Pope Benedict XVI
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