Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Today we observe the end of this short Christmas season. Since next year Christmas falls on a Sunday it will be shorter yet! So much has happened this Christmas, so many beautiful, joyful gatherings and celebrations, so much goodwill and kindness. I want to offer my words of gratitude to all our ministers who, by their art or their service, have made this season so remarkable. To our decorators, our musicians, our singers and servers, our greeters and ministers of Word and Sacrament, staff and volunteers, thank you!

Baptism is the perfect culmination of all that has gone before this Christmas season—incarnation, family, announcement of God’s plan of salvation—because in Baptism we become sharers of all these Mysteries. Not just so that we can claim them, but that they can now live in us. Baptism is at once the high point of our life, the greatest gift we can receive (I sometimes tell parents of babies being baptized that it is all downhill from here…), a new identity as members of God’s family and heirs to heaven, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit—but it is also the doorway to life, full initiation in the Church, the beginning of a new reality that we are in Jesus. Life starts here, for saints.

I was surprised to hear a protestant pastor friend of mine tell me recently that he only recently realized that we Catholics would not rebaptize any of his people if they were to become Catholic. He had not been aware that our Church recognizes any Baptism as valid that uses the flowing of water, the name of the Father, Son and Spirit, and has the intention of the Church for the gift of salvation. Most Christian churches still would rebaptize Catholics if they were to go there.

It points to a fundamental misunderstanding we might have of Baptism. Baptism isn’t a function of Canon Law (although its proper administration is guaranteed by Church law requirements) or even an invention of the Church. It is an utterly free gift of God, his desire to share his life, his intervention in the time and space of creation to call us back by the sharing of his Spirit. There is no way we could limit it or control it, claim it for our own. We don’t deserve it any more than anyone else. The gift of faith is given to all who ask.

So to realize that all the Baptized are equally baptized—equally sharing in the life of God as brothers and sisters in one family, called to holiness and new life—well, it might change the way you look at other Christians who are outside the self-defined limits of churches. The unity of Baptism is the greatest and undeniable reality of who we are as one Body, even before we come to the inevitable controversies of governance, orders, Eucharist, marriage issues and the like. It is true that what unites is far greater than the things that might still divide.

I was privileged to be present a few years back as an agreement on Common Baptism was signed by the Catholic Church and the Reformed Churches (Presbyterian Church USA, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ, Reformed Church in America). For the first time there was a public, ratified document that said that we observed the validity of each others’ Baptism so long as the proper form was followed and the intention was there. Up until that point, we had recognized their Baptism, but they had not recognized ours.

Small accomplishments like this can help us to see that God’s hand is still active in varied ways in the lives of the Church. At every Mass, you would be surprised if you actually counted the number of times that we acknowledge the mercy of God and ask for his gift of Unity for his people. Baptism is the richest and most compelling topic of conversation that we can have with our Christian brothers and sisters in learning more about each other and finding opportunities to come together in prayer and service.

With Baptism, of course, comes the treasures of faith, hope and love that shape us according to the heart of Jesus. Without these supernatural virtues we would not understand God’s will for us—even as much as we do. To grow in our faith, to live in hope and to be guided by the love of God is something that can’t happen until we
gain a healthy and profound understanding of the power of the Baptism that we have received. The whole idea of an event of being “born again” is not familiar to us as with some other churches, because the Baptism we have already received is something we must seek to live out in every moment of life, not just once-for-all, as Sanctifying Grace continues to form us and shape us to know and love God and each other more each day.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Having witnessed the miracle of the birth of the Son of God at Christmas, at least through the witness of Sacred Scripture and the lens of liturgy, and having reflected on Jesus as a member of the Holy Family, a model for all of what we might hope to be, today is the day we consider that Jesus, in his kingship, his priesthood and foretold death is the fullness of God’s revelation: the visible form of the invisible God.

To look at Jesus today is to look again. And every time we look again, we will find more. After all, the definition of Mystery isn’t something that we can’t understand. Mystery is  something about which we can always understand something more, but can never exhaust the infinite reality of what we behold. So many people throughout history have spent their lives explaining, solving and expressing the Mystery of God, and finally arrive at the realization that, no matter how much we can discover and know, we have only scratched the surface of the depths of God.

The Epiphany of Jesus is the ageless manifestation of God himself in time and space. We can spend our entire lives unpacking the Mystery.

What we can celebrate immediately is that we are changed. His presence in our humanity, because we are so intimately connected with one another, is something that touches each and every one of us, regardless of time and space, because for God there is no time and space. God is everywhere and in all times at once. Suddenly our humanity is charged with a new divine Presence. Even before we get to the sacraments and our understanding of how God orders and shapes our lives through the grace of the sacraments we can understand how our humanity is different. He reveals it himself today, and in his love.

When God made us as humans, he gave us a nature that includes several good habits, or virtues, which order us and make us uniquely human. Philosophers have long called these good  habits (as a virtue is the opposite of a vice and a vice is a bad habit) Natural Virtues, or Cardinal Virtues. They are four: Justice, or the intuition of doing right from wrong; temperance, the middle road avoiding any extreme behavior as all things are meant to be used in balance; fortitude, a kind of ability to finish the job set before you; and prudence, or what I would call common sense (which isn’t common). Prudence, a kind of natural or primal wisdom, is the glue that brings the other three into harmony in life situations and allows us to make choices and live our lives according to our human dignity. All according to our nature.

Yet, God had to give us a free will in order to make these choices, and so he allowed sin to enter the world. The Cardinal Virtues, though present in every human person (they are  arguably the attributes that actually make us human), through sin became disordered, so order had to be reestablished. Not a kind of enforced order, but a chance for each and every one of us in perfect freedom to make the right decision from moment to moment. Humanity had to be transformed from within. God chose to send his Son to make this happen, by the “putting on” of a new mind and a new heart that has divine, not human origin, so that our intellect and will might be informed, guided, by divine love. His divine Presence, because we are so interconnected, touched each of us, in all times and in all places.

What happened in Jesus (and Mary, by God’s mercy) happens for us in Baptism, as we become adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus, he, the “first fruits.” Mary was created before the  order of Baptism to be able to say “yes” freely to God, as we are now able to do, free from the slavery of sin through Baptism by water and Spirit. We are given to put on the mind and heart of Jesus with a new set of good habits, called Supernatural Virtues, or Theological Virtues, the gifts of Baptism: Faith, Hope and Love. These are the new paradigms, or measures, by which we order our acts and “put on” the mind of Christ. To love enemies, to hope in the midst of great doubt and difficulty, to offer our lives through our belief, because we accept and seek God. These are activities in today’s world that seem to be anything but “natural,” yet they form the center of our spirituality and life in God’s family.

All this is revealed today: Christ is made known to the nations—to those who are “outside” the chosen circle of believers. This is us, who celebrate that identity of Christ which we have received, and by which we have been changed. May this image of Christ be strong and generous in all of us as we go from this season of joy into mission, in the ordinary time of daily life.

God bless you,

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Back in the summer of 2007 we decided to add a beautiful stained glass window to the gym / worship space at Holy Cross Academy. The architect who designed the space had incorporated a beautiful round window above the stage / sanctuary for Mass and we sought a design that would incorporate the Paschal Mystery—the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus—as well as the role of Mary the Mother of God in God’s plan. Since the Holy Cross has two elements, the vertical and horizontal, we decided to design a catechism in stained glass to tell the story.

From left to right we see the story of Jesus: his birth in Bethlehem, his crucifixion at Calvary, after rising from the dead, his sending of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and Mary. Notice, Mary is present for all of these events as the Church is born. From bottom to top is another catechesis about Mary herself, first at the Annunciation when Gabriel announces to her that she is to be the Mother of God, then, again at Calvary when that Incarnation of Jesus finds its greatest expression of love, emptying himself of life on the Cross, and at top, Mary being crowned Queen of heaven and earth after her Assumption into heaven. Her queenship echoes the account in  revelation of her surrounded with a corona of stars and about to give birth now in eternity, as Jesus continues to become present to us through the Church’s  sacraments. The shape that surrounds her is a Romanesque form called a mandorla: it is the shape made by the intersection of two circles which symbolizes Christ—one circle is his humanity, the other is his divinity. The mandorla was part of a visual catechism that was used in the church since the 11th century.

I was looking at this window again the other day realizing how often I walk in and out of the gym and never even give it an extra thought—how much more interesting it might be to remind people of it, especially those who might be new to the parish and have never actually studied it.

The four “corners” of the Cross, of course, are the symbols of the four Evangelists. The top left figure of the lion represents Saint Mark; the upper right ox represents Saint Luke, then on the bottom the human figure is the symbol of Saint Matthew, and the eagle, Saint John.

But the design element that unites all of these images is light. The Oblate Sisters of Saint Francis de Sales have a special devotion to Our Lady of Light, depicted in the Stations of the Cross in their motherhouse in Troyes, France, where Mary holds an oil lamp lighting the way for the funeral procession as they carry the Body of Jesus to the tomb after the Crucifixion. We chose to incorporate this use of light in all images: the star at Bethlehem, Mary’s oil lamp at the darkness of the Crucifixion, the rays of light and flames coming from the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as well as the light of the Holy Spirit coming from outside the image at the Annunciation, and the rays of light revealing Mary in her glorified humanity in heaven, a glorified body which we will all be able to share one day in heaven because of her generosity in saying “yes” to God.

Don’t forget Mary’s feast day—and holy day of obligation, Mary, Mother of God—this Thursday and Friday, also New Year’s Eve and new year’s day. Let’s start the new year with a celebration.

God bless you, and Merry Christmas!