Momma Mary and Birthday Parties

"Happy Birthday!"

It's something we have all exclaimed at one point or another. Most of us have also joined into a sung chorus of "Happy Birthday to you!" many times throughout the years. It's simply a normal thing we do for one another. We celebrate that our friends and family have spent another year with us. We celebrate them as persons who are irreplaceably unique and precious to us. Singing to or about our loved ones is a rare but precious tribute to all that they mean to us. It is a pearl necklace, brought out on special occasions, when normally we just adorn our relationships with scattered photographs and idle conversation.

Perhaps it is our readiness to sing to and about Mary that leaves so many people ill-at-ease with our love for her. I imagine that if I went to a friend's home and found him singing to his mother about how wonderful she is, I do believe that I might find it off-putting. But even more that that, we speak about our Mother Mary in supernaturally glowing tones and turn to her so readily in times of trial that a Catholic man must be a momma's boy indeed!

What might be my response to all of this perfectly understandable discomfort and unease? "Y'all just don't understand." If you understood how wonderful my Momma is, you would know why I can't stop talking about her. When I think of my Momma Mary and how she gave me my Savior the Lord Jesus, how can I not want to sing to her? When I think about my Momma Mary and how she lived her whole life chaste and pure, how can I not want to sit and talk with her? When I think about my Momma Mary and how she had to watch her most beloved Son die but never left Him, how can I not talk about her nobility and grace to everyone I meet?

More than all of the wonders of Mary's holiness and loveliness that we know from times past, the reason that we hold her in the highest of regards even today is that she never ceased to be that preternaturally loving mother. "Never was it know that anyone who fled to [her] protection, implored [her] help, or sought [her] intercession was left unaided." (Memorare) Our Momma Mary brings additional light to our lives, not a light that replaces or competes with that of her Son, but one that nonetheless adds something to counteract that darkness which always sits ready to invade our hearts. Our Lord said to us truly that He "came that [we] might have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) I have to believe that part of His plan from the beginning was to give us so wonderful a Mother, who gave us so great a Redeemer.

20110416 New (Nicene Creed 3)

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day, He rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.

Even though He was betrayed, tried, convicted, and executed by earthly authorities (the Romans, Pontius Pilate specifically, King Herod, the Jews of Jerusalem in general, and the Sanhedrin and Judas Iscariot in particular), these parties are not the only ones involved in the death of Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus freely offered Himself. Jesus had within Himself the power to escape, but He chose to endure His sufferings so that He might redeem us. It is in this that the awesome power of God becoming man is shown. As a man, Jesus is able to be truly obedient and sinless but is able to suffer the evil and die the death that all of us sinners are due. As God, His self-sacrifice is an infinite gift: to all men in all places at all times.

If sacrifice is the main principle of worship, then the main principle of priesthood is offering the sacrifice for the people and sharing the grace of the sacrifice with them. Jesus is our great highpriest. He is our greatest teacher, He is our greatest king, and He offered the greatest sacrifice, His own life, and continues to share with us the grace of that sacrifice.

When Jesus appointed His twelve disciples (Apostles) to continue His ministry on Earth, He did so at the Last Supper. In blessing the bread, He said that it was now His Body, given up for us. In blessing the wine, He said that it was now His Blood of a new covenant. He then told His disciples to do the same. Jesus sacrificed His Body and Blood to make a new covenant with us. The Eucharist that we celebrate at Mass is that sacrifice brought into our lives, to each one of us in churches throughout the world for the last two thousand years and on into the future.

Even despite all the miracles Jesus worked, we might still doubt Him if not for one thing. Jesus rose from the dead. He showed us that He is truly from God, and, then, at His Ascension into Heaven, He showed us where He is going. Remembering that Jesus is man, we see as well that if we accept that He died in our place, we can rise to new life with Him and find our destiny in Heaven as well.

We must commit ourselves to Him and to righteousness, however. We all have some guilt for His death because He died for all our sins. As such, our lives are His alone to judge.

20100723 New (Nicene Creed 2)

"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man."

Jesus is both God the Son and the Son of God. That is to say that He is both God and man. This is one of the most central and most difficult aspects of Christian faith. Many years of conflict led to the Church adopting this part of the Creed to express this idea.

Jesus being truly a man means that He shares fully in our human nature but without sin. He has both a human body and a human soul. He has a human mind and human free will. He lived a truly extraordinary life in that with everything He did, He united His human will with the Divine Will.

Given that Jesus shared fully in our human nature except that He was sinless, we have to deal with the question of how His humanity was sinless. Jesus received His human nature from His mother, Mary, by the work of the Holy Spirit. For this reason and others, knowing that God had created and prepared Mary specifically to be His mother, we believe that Mary was also created without sin. The fact that Mary was conceived without Original Sin is what we refer to as the Immaculate Conception.

Because Mary was so important to God that He preserved her from sin and chose her to be His mother, we hold Mary in a special place in our hearts. We take her for our own because we take Jesus as our own.

Jesus’ life was mostly hidden from public view. He grew up in much the same way as every other boy. He lived out His teenage years much the same as others. He lived a fully human life, but His obedient sinless example stands as a challenge to us to follow in His footsteps.

When Jesus began His public ministry, He worked miracles to show that He was from God. He preached our relationship with God in a new way that focused on having a real relationship with God above simply following rules. Following the rules is great, but only if it is done with love. Jesus said that the greatest Commandment of God was to love God with all our heart, mind, body, and soul, and then to love our neighbor as ourselves.

20100510 Question: Mary

10: Mary...

10. Concerns regarding the relationship between Catholics and Mary generally revolve around a few key issues: 1) Do Catholics worship Mary? 2) Why do Catholics believe that Mary never sinned? 3) Is it not better to give attention to Jesus rather than Mary?

These are all very good questions. With regards to the first question, the simple answer is "No."

1) Catholics do not worship Mary. All aspects of religion are not necessarily worship. Many Christians, for example, choose to abstain from work on Sunday in order to observe the Lord's command to keep the Sabbath holy. Also, studying Scripture and leading a moral life are aspects of Christian life that are not worship per se. For many Protestant communities, the meaning of worship has been distorted so as to be roughly equivalent to prayer, singing, or listening to a sermon. Catholics remember the history of our Salvation from the beginning of time and what Christ showed us upon the Cross: "worship" means "sacrifice." The word "prayer" bears the meaning "asking for a favor," which does not of itself entail worship, otherwise, we would be worshiping our neighbors whenever we are in need of a cup of sugar. Singing does not of itself entail worship; otherwise we would be worshiping every child to whom we ever sung "Happy Birthday." Study or listening to lectures certainly does not of itself entail worship; otherwise most of us would have spent a fair portion of our lives worshiping dinosaurs or ponies. We, as Catholic Christians, ask Mary to pray for us to God, to join us in worshiping Him, and to lead us into a deeper imitation of His Ways. We sing of the holiness and virtue of Mary because, as the first and most loyal disciple of Jesus, she provided for us such a great example. We study and seek to know more of Mary because, after all, it is from her that Our Lord drew His sacred humanity. For us Catholic Christians, no matter how much we may admire Mary, we offer spiritual sacrifice to one God alone--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2) God the Son received His human nature from Mary. That nature needed to be without stain of sin, Original or personal. We know that the merits of Christ's sacrifice (i.e. forgiveness of sin) could be applied to points earlier in history because we saw just such a thing with the prophets Isaiah, who was purified from sin by a heavenly ember, and Elijah, who was assumed into Heaven. Given the angel's greeting to Mary in the Gospel according to Luke, "Hail, she-who-has-been-graced," which is absent her name and wholly unique in all of Biblical history, we are led to see that she must have been blessed in some way that separates her from the rest of humanity. What might this singular grace have been that she had even before conceiving the Lord? Once we recognize that Mary was uniquely blessed among all humanity and remember that she is the source of Jesus' sinless human nature, it becomes obvious that the two are related and that that singular blessing is that the forgiveness won by Christ on the Cross was applied to Mary at her conception that she might be forever without sin, a new Eve who can remain sinless next to the new Adam who would die for our sins rather than sin Himself.

3) Lastly, of course, worshiping Jesus the Christ is better than speaking about Mary. The real question is, "Why do you have to choose?" Worshiping God is better than hugging your Grandma, but that doesn't mean it's not good to do both. Like it or not, if Christ is the head of the Church and we are members of His Body, Mary is also our mother. While she can never replace Our Lord, not by a long shot, she does deserve a great deal of respect and love, and we would be doing wrong by her and by Jesus to ignore her or speak ill of her.

20100426 Question: Blood of Christ

2: In Leviticus it says not to drink blood for church rituals and yet Catholics have Jesus's Body and Blood every mass. Why is it consumed if the Bible says it is wrong?

2. That's a really insightful question. I will answer it three ways: 1) The Hebrews believed that the life of the animal was in its blood, so it would lower the human that drank it ("so far as you drink of it, so far shall it separate you from the people" Lev. 17:10), but the life of God (typically referred to as "grace") is specifically what we desire to gain by worthily partaking of Communion (joining together with Jesus the Christ). 2) The Lord's Supper was a transformation of the Passover feast (Exodus 12), where in lieu of a yearling lamb, Jesus offered himself as the Lamb of God (John 1:29) that the Lord Himself shall provide (Gen. 22:8). The Passover necessarily entails the eating of unleavened bread and the drinking of wine, which Jesus says are His Body and His Blood and commands us to take and eat and drink. Given the approbation given later on to consuming what was previously considered unclean (Acts 10:9-16) we can accept the apparent contradiction to have been resolved by the command of the Lord at the Last Supper. 3) There is a difference between Communion and cannibalism. Cannibalism is eating the physical body or blood of someone, wherein each portion consumed reduces the physical quantity remaining. In Communion, we are partaking metaphysically of the Christ's body and blood, that is, it is not a portion of His physical body or blood, but rather, the bread and wine are substantially changed to also be His Body and Blood expressly for the Communion of the people of God.

20100426 Question: Shroud of Turin

1: Why is the Shroud of Turin still held as a religious artifact when it was proven to be formed hundreds of years after Jesus's death?
1. The Shroud of Turin is believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus because the wounds match the historical methods employed at the time with details unknown in the Middle Ages but later discovered through modern archaeology. The imprint is also inexplicable by modern science. Furthermore, the tests performed on the cloth have long been debunked because the main body of the cloth has been shown to be much older than originally believed and the previous tests included portions of cloth that appear to have been repaired at later dates in history. Lastly, the cloth matches the description of a relic known to have traveled throughout Byzantium in the early centuries AD and doesn't fit the typical anachronistic (according to current fashions instead of with historical accuracy) style of religious works in the Middle Ages.