Wisdom's Cry

I read a couple posts this morning about Vatican reforms of the Mass.  Most of which sound good:

Communion on the tongue, Consecration celebrated ad orientem (facing east) and renewed use of Latin could all be re-introduced to ordinary Sunday Masses as part of proposals put forward by the Congregation for Divine Worship (Catholic Herald Online).

I can understand the symbolic meaning of receiving the Eucharist on the tongue like the prophet Isaiah received the burning coal from the altar of heaven.  I hope they don’t make this mandatory.  There should be room in the liturgy to accommodate the varieties of Catholic Spiritualities.

Facing East

I have long lamented the idea the Priest should address the congregation rather than the altar.

Having the priest face the congregation focuses their attention on the priest rather than on God or the sacrament.  I hope the Church at least allows the option to correct the orientation of the Mass.

The Latin

I have attended several Latin Masses.  For me, the use of Latin heightened the Sacred experience of the Sacrament.

I often pray in Latin.  The use of a sacred language takes us out of our daily life, and surrounds us with a fresh experience of world.  I would love to see the Latin return as an option.

Well, maybe not all

The American Catholic News Service (CNS) quoted anonymous Vatican sources as denying that proposals had been voted on at the plenary meeting. Rather, the congregation had forwarded its suggestions on the subject of Eucharistic Adoration – which had been the theme of the plenary session – to the Pope. The subject of ad orientem had never been discussed, according to the CNS source (Catholic Herald Online).

O… so they may not have recommended any of this…  Well, here’s to hoping they will.

Pentecost has always been an hard Holy Day for me.  I grew up baptist in a family of ministers.  Like them, I felt the call to ministry early.

When I was 6, the Sunday school teacher gave the call to salvation, and I knew more clearly than I ever knew anything before or since that I had to accept Christ into my life.  The call to ministry was so strong.  I would grow up and be a Baptist minister like my grandfather and great-grandfather.

Divine Intervention

My plan never included my conversion to Catholicism.  When it happened, I assumed that I would take up Holy Orders and join the priesthood.

The longer I spent in the the Roman Church, the more alienated I felt from the hierarchy and the deeper the traditions, liturgy, and theology appealed to me.  I am not going to go into all of the details regarding why I left the Roman Church, but I will simply say that I have not been able to even contemplate entering a Roman church since the death of John Paul II, of blessed memory.

Now I am in a strange place:

The Wilderness

It is difficult to be a non-Roman but still Catholic on any given Sunday.  The Holidays are harder, and Pentecost is the most difficult.

• My protestant upbringing tells me that I do not need a Priest or the Magisterium to celebrate Mass or the Sacraments.
• My catholic side sees the importance of the ordained and consecrated priesthood.

Pentecost exacerbates the problem.

The Anointing of the Holy Spirit

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.  And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, “Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?  And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?  Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”

And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:1-12)?

My protestant education taught me that this was the Baptism of the Holy Spirit for all believers.  My Roman Catholic instruction says that this is the chrism imparted on the Apostles passed through the priesthood.

Peter’s sermon seems to validate the Protestant reading:

But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:  And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:  And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke: The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord come: And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Acts 2:16-21).

It is clear that this passage is about all believers.  Pentecost is for all of us.  The office of the Apostles was to shepherd the flock as guides on the journey.  The old priesthood died when the temple veil ripped at the Crucifixion.  But this leads me into a strange and interesting path:

What does lay lead Catholicism look like?

That is the the heart of the question.  In the last reformation, the protestants left behind most of the Catholicism, and replaced it with new traditions, practices and confessions.

Matthew Fox has called for a new reformation, and I hear that call loudly.  The challenge is for people like me, who hear the call for reformation this time, to keep what is best about the tradition, and build on that historical foundation a new home for those called to this path.

I am not sure what that will look like, but I am committed to seeking it out.  Hopefully, some of you will come along on the journey.

Prayer

Come, Holy Spirit!  As we remember the day you broke into the world to fill the Church with your new life, guide us in the path of righteousness as we follow the path toward reformation.  Illuminate our minds and take up residence in our hearts as we seek to find our way through wilderness like the Israelites of old.  Lead us to the mountain where we might leave behind our golden calves and learn the ways of God.

Amen.

It is hard for me to talk about my faith. Not because I don’t want to, but because so often when I do, my family, and my friends assail me with their infectious doubts. Doubt is a poison to faith. It is a poison to the soul, but it can also be a spur to keep us from ever confusing our faith with certainty.

My mother is primary voice of doubt. She raised me to be a Baptist. When I converted to Catholicism, she lost that common frame of reference we used to share to discuss matters of faith.

I pray the rosary. She cannot understand why.
I pray to the saints. She cannot understand why.
I pray for the souls in purgatory. She cannot understand why.
My house is full of icons, statues, and books by people she never heard of before. She cannot understand why.

The reason I say she “cannot understand” instead of “does not understand” is because we are no longer speaking the same language. Joseph Campbell once compared religion to a computer’s operating system. Programs written for Windows will not run in OS X. That is why she cannot understand. Her operating system is Baptist, mine is Catholic.

These problems are even further exacerbated by my discovery of Creation Spirituality. She follows a fall/redemption path.

I do not think it is my job to convert her, but she feels it is her duty to convert me.

She asks me probing questions. She cannot understand why I went through so much to become Catholic, going so far that I nearly became a priest, then monk. Now, I no longer attend a Roman Catholic Church, but I still consider my self catholic.

That is the source of my doubt. I consider myself a Seraphic Christian. I live (to the best of my ability) according to the Rule of St Francis. I recite it once a month, and draw inspiration from his writings. I live my catholic faith to the best of my ability in the Seraphic Father’s path, guided by what I have learned about Creation Spirituality and through the practice of Deep Ecumenism. I feel the loss of the community. I miss the liturgy, but more than anything, I feel the loss of Holy Orders.

As a child, I wanted to be a preacher. After I converted to Catholicism, I wanted to be a priest or a monk. I pray the hours daily, and to this day, I live a very monastic life.

What do I think Holy Orders would have given me?

Authority? No, it would have given me a communion of believers who walked the same path, practiced the same rituals, and prayed the same prayers. It would have given me people to share this journey with who spoke the same language, and ran on the same operating system.

This sense of community is one of the things I miss more than anything, and it is the very thing that feeds my doubt, and makes me less likely to share my faith with others.

I have dreamed for years that I would find a community of people who believed in and practiced Creation Spirituality. Now I have found the Creation Spirituality Communities, and I hope I have found such a home.

I am going to start sharing my faith, and listening as others share theirs in hopes that I can find a community to belong to. I have read the forums for some time, and I feel like this is the time for me to open up and start participating. We are close to the start of a new year, and it is time to share with others who seek out the path Matthew Fox laid out before us. I look forward to the journey, and thank you for giving me the courage to share my voice again.

(commentary on the Regula Bullata, The Latter Rule of St Francsis of Assisi)

Loyalty
As a believer in exile. The first chapter of the Regula bullata is the hardest for me to read. The Seraphic Father swears his loyalty, and all of his successors’ loyalty to the Pope and his successors. As a catholic, this used to be an easy chapter, but after the election of the current Pope, I thought this chapter was impossible to follow.

I do not take this stance lightly. I do not want to look at the rule and say these chapters I will follow, but these I will not. If we are going to apply this line item veto to the rule, then we might as well not even have one. I think our modern circumstances are different, and our embrace of this monastic model for the rebuilding of the church through the new reformation means that we have to read this chapter carefully.

The Seraphic Father swears his and his successors’ loyalty to the Pope and his canonically elected successors. That last phrase is the problem: Who is the canonically elected successor to the Pope. Prior to the reformation, this was an easy question to answer (if we set aside the anti-popes for a moment), but after the reformation, the answer is muddy.

The Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, congregationalist, and Quakers have all answered this question differently and the same. In one way or another, they have all sworn their allegiance to the Holy Spirit and each has crafted their own method to try to discern the will of the Spirit, but if you believe that any or all of these groups are guided by the Holy Spirit, then the charism of the Apostles has been passed to them. So I too swear loyalty to the guidance of the Spirit of Truth and seek to find the best method for discerning the will of the spirit.

The vow to live the Gospel by living in obedience, without anything of our own, and in chastity means something altogether different to a lay movement than they would to a Friar.

Obedience
For a Seraphic Christian to live in obedience is not a matter of bowing the knee to an earthly authority. Humans are always prone to mistakes, no matter how well intentioned they may be. To follow any person or institution blindly is dangerous and likely to cause pain and suffering.

I vow my obedience to Jesus Christ, our heavenly High Priest who stands before the mercy seat of God. All any Christian can be asked to do is to like in good conscience with their own understanding of the will of God, and to collectively try to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in the same fashion as the Religious Society of Friends.

This is the problem I have with the Obedience and reverence to the Pope, who ever that might be at the time. I would say, if you are a Roman Catholic, then you have already made this pledge. I know I did when my heart remained within the Roman Church, but as the gulf between my spiritual home in Creation Spirituality and Rome widened, it became increasingly more difficult to do this.

The hardest thing I have ever done was leave the Roman Church. My faith was stretched to the breaking point to do so, but it was as necessary as the split during the Renaissance. The institution had overshadowed the spirit of the church. As with most denominations, political factions have replaced spiritual yearning and the desire to hear the voice of the Spirit.

The church has never been and should not be a democracy, but it should seek consensus of the faithful through prayer and study to discern the will of God. The Spirit’s voice has been heard to free the scriptures from the control of the clergy so everyone can read them. She has freed the slaves from the ecclesiastical blessing of slavery. She has revealed the injustice of racism, sexism, and colonialism. These were not easy words for the church to hear when the Word came to us, but eventually the clergy discerned the will of God on these issues.

The work of the church is to live the Gospel, not to enforce a set of particular beliefs that have evolved and changed over time and which will continue to do so. I hope that the time will come when the I can return home, but while I walk through this wasteland, I will pitch the tent of the Lord where I am.

Detachment
It is obviously unrealistic to ask a lay believer to live without anything of their own as the rule says, but it is imperative that all believers learn to live in a state of detachment from the the things in their life to help them cultivate an enlightened mind and a heart of compassion.

My possessions are not my own. They come and go as time passes. The same is true about my beliefs. Every time I read the scriptures, I see something that I didn’t see the last time through. I do not allow myself to become so attached to my preconceived notions that I cannot hear the Spirit speak in Lectio Divina. I can read the same passage three times and see it three different ways. That is the power and the glory of faith.

When have to remember the Four Noble Truths of Practice:

1. All life is unsatisfying. (we always want more)
2. The cause of this is attachment and aversion.
3. There is freedom from this unsatisfactory nature of all thins.
4. The cause of enlightenment is the Noble Eightfold Path.

This is the heart of the second vow, the vow of detachment.

Chastity
I am not a Shaker, and do not expect believers to live a life of celibacy. Chastity is a state of living morally pure. Do not use others.

St Valentine’s Day has to be one of the Holiest Saint’s Day of the year.

Holy St Valentine is the writer of the Gospel of Truth, the founder of a school of Christian doctrine that would later be condemned after he was nearly elected Pope. St Valentine was later exiled to Cyprus.

The reason he is associated with love and romance is a vestigial memory of his theology. St Valentine taught that a train of angels flowed from the risen Christ, each one made to minister to us on God’s behalf and to minister to God on ours. Baptism, he taught, was the marriage ceremony where we (the bride of Christ) are wedded to our ministering angel. He further taught that unity with with heavenly being will awaken us to the reality of God and the universe.

The memory of the great holy man and his enlightened theology may have been driven from the church, but the people held onto his memory giving rise to the St Valentine’s Day we know today.

`I will celebrate as I always do, by reading the Gospel of Truth, and the few fragments of his other writings that survive.

Throughout my life, I have always had a special devotion to St Anthony the Abbot. I often suffer from terrible nightmares and fierce doubts. I am a living testament to the fact that the dark night of the soul is not always a once in a lifetime experience.

When I have these dark moments, it has always helped me to remember the example of St Anthony in the desert. He found faith in the darkness and his life has inspired me to do the same.

Holy St Anthony, help us in our times doubt, trial, and temptation to weather the storms that assail our spirits. Help us to endure, and cleanse ourselves so we might find God through prayer as you did. Teach us to pray. Amen.

Why did Jesus have to die? Was Jesus’ death a sacrifice to an angry God, or was it something else?

Whether or not Jesus died as a human sacrifice to a God of Wrath all blood boils down to the answer to one question very important to the answer to a single question: If there was no sin, would Jesus have been crucified?

The Orthodox answer is yes. On the Cross, Jesus stood on the threshold to mediate between us and God. Now follow me closely. On the cross, he stands between live and death, faith and doubt, hope and fear, pain and release, God and humanity. In this singular act, he mediates between all these opposites and shows the way to Life. The cross is the gate to the sheepfold.

Christ is the Word of God, nailed up as an edict from the Eternal Father for us to read and therein find the Son of Man and the Son of God pointing us to our true Humanity and the true Divinity.

Christ is the manifest book of Life in which the Mind of God is made know. “This is the book which no one found possible to take, since it was reserved for him who will take it and be slain. No one was able to be manifest from those who believed in salvation as long as that book had not appeared. For this reason, the compassionate, faithful Jesus was patient in his sufferings until he took that book, since he knew that his death meant life for many. Just as in the case of a will which has not yet been opened, for the fortune of the deceased master of the house is hidden, so also in the case of the All which had been hidden as long as the Father of the All was invisible and unique in himself, in whom every space has its source. For this reason Jesus appeared. He took that book as his own. He was nailed to a cross. He affixed the edict of the Father to the cross (The Gospel of Truth).”

This is the glory of God, that in seeing Christ crucified, all of our fears and doubts are brought out of us. We fear death, yet we look upon the one who died and yet lived. We fear pain, yet we look upon one who was nailed to a cross. We fear that God will forsake us, yet we hear God cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” All of our fears become clear at the cross.

In the Round Dance of the Cross, we see Jesus after the last supper signing a hymn of praise and dancing with his disciples. In the Hymn he sings, he declares the pairs of opposites that he mediates between. It is in these paradoxes that we find the mystery of the Cross. From death, many are born.

Jesus on the the cross, returns the Tree of Life to those who will eat its fruit. This is the tree of unity, where the pairs of opposites are knit together.

The idea of Christ sacrificed for moral outrages that offend God is not an idea found in the gospels. Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, not the sins of the world (John 1:29). The sin of the world is that we forget God.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shewed it unto them.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened (Rom 1: 16-21).

These verse are often taken out of their context to make a moralistic argument that Paul was not. The point of the text is that through Christ crucified, the knowledge of God is given through faith to those who believe. Those who do not have darkened their hearts to the light of God.

Behold, Jesus hung on the Tree of Life as its first fruit.

The Crucifixion offends our senses in every way. We like things to make sense. Why did Christ have to die? To show us the way to the Father by demonstrating the way between all of the pairs of opposites that frighten us and distract us from God.

In the Crucifixion, we see our lives and our deaths. We see all of our hopes and fear coexisting as they do in life. Peace, ground luminance, basic goodness, what ever you want to call it exists at the same time as the horror of our life.

Suddenly, we realize that when Christ called out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He was singing the twenty-second Psalm. He was praising the God that would lift him up.

Once we see the way through the pairs of opposites, we sing:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain (Gal 2:20-21).

On the cross he unfurled the edict of the Eternal Father, so the invisible, unknown God may now be known.

Now, none can say that they have found God, for it is through Christ that God is made manifest to us all. None can boast that they have found the truth, and they agree with the apostle:

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world (Gal 6:14).

We have been talking a lot about the nature of God and the most fundamental beliefs of the the faith of the prophets and mystics. Of the hundreds if not thousands of ways we could take the discussion of the nature of the Deity, I have decided to continue my posts inspired by Brian McLaren’s a Generous Orthodoxy.

In the book, McLaren describes the God he sees in creation in a simple yet profound way.

God is a:

a unified, eternal, mysterious, relational community/family/society/entity of saving Love (a Generous Orthodoxy, 85).

This is a phrase for meditation and quiet contemplation in the night. We have already talked about Rabbi David A Cooper’s image of God as a Verb (see this post). This notion of God is very close to the glimpses of Providence we get in our everyday life, but McLaren has found a way to describe our encounter with the Divine.

Unified

The testimony of the Prophets reveals to us a God that is One. On the night before he was crucified, our Lord prayed:

That they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:21).

It is our mission to reconcile all to God and to spread the word that we are one in Christ, and one in God. We are one human family, in fact, we are one terrestrial family. This is where our impulse for peacemaking and conservation arise.

Many people confuse the unity of God is one of the most misunderstood ideas in the history in monotheism. There is but one God, called by many names. There are no other Gods. Once we realize this, our tribalism melts away and we realize the commonality of all faiths.

Eternal

As Joseph Campbell said:

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. ‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.

Moyers: That’s a pessimistic note.

Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it’s great this way. It’s the way God intended it (Power of Myth).

Eternity is a present reality that we tend to ignore. Through prayer and meditation we learn to reside in this eternal now, and through mindfulness we learn to live with in it. In so doing, we are learning to practice the presence of God.

Relational Community/Family/Society/Entity

God is most clearly seen in the relations of things to one another. We see God in the heart of all living. We find God as Father/Protector, Mother/Nurturer, Sibling/Believer, and Child/Actions.

The God we see through providence is the Unknowable Father, the one whose name has never been soiled by human language.

In nature and times of trouble, we rest in the nurturing Spirit as our Divine Mother.

In every believer, we see Christ in them as our Brother and Sister in the Lord.

Through our actions and the actions of the faithful, we see God as Child, the one who is conceived in us upon conversion, and who through our lives we bring into the world.

Corporately, we as the church are the body of Christ. We see God in the hearts of all people.

This is the Living God who is with his people and frees them from fear and torment through his marvelous grace.

Saving Love

The power of God is intimate love and peace we find as we rest in the arms of the Godhead in liturgy and meditation. This Saving Love is the power of Christ to deliver us from Satan’s power.

In all things, we worship the Living God.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain`also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commands all men every where to repent:

Because he has appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained; whereof he has given assurance unto all men, in that he has raised him from the dead (Acts 17:28-31)

We have followed the star to the new born Christ, and behold the one in whom God is made manifest to the world. We stand by the river Jordan and watch the skies open as the dove descends upon our Lord. We drink the wine at the wedding at Cana and marvel at the one who produced it. We celebrate the revelation of the Lord.

This is the day when we remember the revelation of God to humankind, but how can we celebrate the revelation the one who:

Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne (PS 97:2).

This is the God of whom Solomon says:

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter (Pr 25:2).

While I do not believe that anyone can every describe or define God in any great detail, I believe that God can be found be those who seek him out. All religion is an attempt for us to put these experiences in words. God is hidden from us by the minutia of our lives. Anyone can find God by relaxing, and coming to the present moment fully aware. This is the glory of mindfulness.

Creation Spirituality talks about the four paths to encountering God. As Matthew Fox answers the question, “Where can God be found?”

In the Via Positiva. In awe, wonder, and mystery of nature and all beings, each of whom is a ‘word of God,’ a ‘mirror of God that glistens and glitters,’ as Hildegard of Bingen put it. This is Path One (Creation Spirituality 18)

This is the path most people find to God. Sitting in the awe of nature, we feel our interconnectedness with all things. This interbeing is the purest connection we have with the Divine.

We can find God in music, art, or anything that instills within us a deep sense of Awe.

Where else can God be found?

“In the Via Negativa. In darkness and nothingness, in the silence and emptying, in the letting go and letting be, and in the pain and suffering that constitute an equally real part of our spiritual journey. This is Path Two (Creation Spirituality 18).”

This is the path of the Buddha- the path of silence meditation. Most of us what to reject this aspect of life, but it is an equal part of existence, and the most universal.

The Buddha himself reminds us of the only things we can ever know for sure, that we exist and that we are interconnected with all things. There is not an atom in our body that did not come from another creature, plant, or long lost star. It is in this lack of separate self that we find the Ground of All Being.

Where else can God be found?

“In the Via Creativa. In our generativity we co-create with God; in our imaginative output, we trust our images enough to birth them and ride them into existence. This is Path Three (Creation Spirituality 18).”

This is the path of Rumi- the path of art and co-creation. The Via Creativa is the very beating heart of the sacrament of Art as Meditation. In trusting our own creativity, we come closer to God. We learn how to be bearers of Christ into the world like those who came before us.

“My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you (Gal 4:19),” as the apostle said, we find God through trusting our generatively.

Where else can God be found?

“In the Via Transformativa. In the relief of suffering, in the combating of injustice, in the struggle for homeostasis, for balance in society and history, and in the celebration that happens when persons struggling for justice and trying to live in mutuality come together to praise and give thanks for the gift of being and being together. This is Path Four (Creation Spirituality 18).”

This is the path of Gandhi and Dr King, the path of satyagraha. In community and common cause, when find God. As David prayed, “Yours, O LORD is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all (1Chr 29:11).” Wherever we see greatness, we see God. Wherever we see glory, power, victory, or majesty, we see God. When ever we see love, charity, grace, mercy or any of the Divine attributes, we see God.

These are the paths to God we have learned, the paths that we walk every day. They are as natural as breathing. There is nothing more simple than our experiences of God and learning to trust them.

Blessed Mother Seton is very close to my heart. When I lived in Maryland, I would visit her Shrine at least once a week. I am also the custodian of a First Class Relic of this most holy saint. Reading her Journals and other writings touches me in a very special way.

As an adult convert to Catholicism, her insights are in some ways deeper than those who grew up within the religion. He compassion and tender heart is a model to us all, and her intercession and loving protection of those who have called upon her as our spiritual mother. She is the first native born American Saint, and her family was involve in the establishment of this republic.

Holy Mother Seton look over this land and pray to the Father for us that we will live God to the world and learn to be humble and meek. Pray for us that we might become the peacemakers that Christ has called up all to be. Amen.