Corrigere delinquentem magis ad severitatem

Today was the last RCIA session of the year, and I finally achieved my goal of not saying anything. (Or at least nothing that anyone could think was intended to be instructive. After the presenter joked about not being sure whether a turn of phrase she used came from our pastor or the Pope, I said, "The Pope is less busy. He'll return your email." And when the RCIA director asked if I had any parting comments, I said, "See you next week." (You know, Mass.) Other than that, silence.) The closest I came to having an audible thought was while looking at the list of the spiritual works of mercy:

• To instruct the ignorant 
• To counsel the doubtful 
• To admonish sinners 
• To patiently bear with those who annoy us 
• To forgive offenses willingly 
• To comfort the afflicted 
• To pray for the living and the dead

This middle one is more often expressed as, "To bear wrongs patiently."  The presenter went with this version as being more concrete -- and besides, St. Thomas renders it "to bear with those who trouble and annoy us" (portare onerosos et graves).

Another catechist offered a variation on the old joke that admonishing sinners seems to come naturally to people, and I imagined an amended list:

• To admonish the ignorant 
• To admonish the doubtful 
• To admonish sinners 
• To admonish those who annoy us
• To admonish prior to forgiving offenses
• To admonish the afflicted 
• To admonish the living and the dead

In an uncharacteristic moment of prudence, I kept this to myself. This particular crew of baby Catholics doesn't strike me as likely to weaponize the catechism. But let me try this here:

One item on the second list is merciful. At first glance, though, it looks like the other six items, none of which is merciful. It may similarly be difficult to be altogether sure whether a particular instance of admonishment is merciful.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

30 minute lesson plan on the Dogma of the Trinity

• 18 minutes saying how difficult and mysterious a subject this is
• 9 minutes saying how hard it is to see what difference the dogma makes in your day-to-day life
• 3 minutes reading CCC 253-255 out loud

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Lending a hand

At RCIA last week, it was observed that it's kind of hard to know how to get to know Jesus, when He's not here physically to see and hear and touch. I proposed this allegory (it's too convoluted to be a metaphor):

Suppose you fall into a deep ditch in the dark. (I didn't say why you might be wandering around deep ditches in the dark; you either recognize that as the human condition in a nutshell, or you don't.) It's too muddy and slippery to pull yourself out. Then a voice says, "Here, take my hand," and you see the hand reaching down to grasp yours and pull you out.

At that moment, you don't know the person who's helping you. You don't have any idea of what they're like, except that they're willing to pull you out of a deep ditch in the dark. Once you're out of the ditch, though, you hope to get to know them quite well.

For the person who doesn't yet know Jesus, the Church -- the Body of Christ -- is like the hand and the voice, we are here physically and can be seen and heard and touched. ("Is like"? Wait, is this a simile?) We are supposed to draw others to Christ, so they can know Him and love Him themselves.

For the person still in that ditch, it may not yet quite be faith by which they're willing to listen to us and to come and see what we say we have, Who we say we have to show them. It might be trust or curiosity (those old thresholds of conversion). But our Incarnate God did leave an incarnate Church, and the more we in the Church live in a way we would only live if we believe what we preach, the more that person might suspect we really do have Someone they should meet.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 1 comments | Tweet

---

Is rocky road ice cream paved with gold in Heaven?

A good question was asked this week at RCIA (good in the sense that I've asked it myself):

Doesn't Jesus try to bribe us to be good by promising that those who are good and believe in Him go to heaven?

The answer, of course, is, come back and talk after you've raised some kids. Say what you want about bribery, properly employed it works.

I jest, but there's some truth to it. Young children don't understand the goodness of virtue in the abstract, but they sure do get the hang of going out for ice cream afterwards. Since, as Bl. John Henry Newman observed, "too many, or rather the majority, remain boys all their lives," it's little wonder Jesus points out to the crowds the rewards of believing in Him.

Moreover, the rewards of believing in Jesus may attract people, but they aren't really a bribe properly speaking. The rewards are (by God's grace) the result of believing in Jesus. When you follow Jesus, you wind up in His Father's home, because that's where He's gone. Eternal life isn't accidentally associated with faith in Christ, like ice cream if you behave in the shoe store. It's like ice cream if you don't jump out of the car while Dad drives to the ice cream store.

And eternal life as the result of faith in Jesus is a key part of His revelation to us. It completes what He has to teach us about who God is, why He created us, and what our relationship with Him is supposed to be. Virtue may be its own reward, but saying so doesn't tell us about the Father.

Finally, just what is the reward Jesus promises? "Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ." God isn't just the host in Heaven, keeping the chip bowls full while we hang out with friends, Mozart, and our childhood pets. God is what heaven is all about; everything else comes through, and after, our knowing, seeing, and loving our Father, and His Son, and their Holy Spirit. Anyone who's banking on Pascal's Wager paying out in skittles and beer is going to be disappointed, either in this life or the next.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

The three languages of catechesis

Yes, it is important that catechesis not be purely theoretical. That won’t do.

Catechesis is about giving them doctrine for life and, therefore, it has to include three languages: The language of the mind, the language of the heart and the language of the hands.

Catechesis has to include those three: that the young person might think and know what faith is, but, at the same time, feel with his heart what faith is and, on the other hand, get things done. If the catechesis is missing one of these three languages, it stagnates.

Three languages: thinking about how you feel and what you do, feeling what you think and what you do, doing what you feel and what you think.

-- Pope Francis

This was in reference to catechizing the young, but it seems applicable when catechizing anyone.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 2 comments | Tweet

---

Class of 2015

At the Easter Vigil in my parish, four adults received baptism and five other adults entered into the full communion of the Catholic Church. A tenth joined them for First Holy Communion. All ten, plus another four adults and two teenagers, were confirmed.


Yay, Church!

Labels: RCIA

Link | 2 comments | Tweet

---

The teacher appears

We're going through the parts of the Mass in RCIA class now. Participation in the work of God, dual character as sacrifice and meal, proper disposition for fruitful reception of a sacrament, foreshadowing in the Old Testament, looking forward to the Eternal Wedding Banquet, all that sort of thing.

I can't quite shake the sense that, if we could break the respectful silence with which most of this is received, we'd get to the real question: "When do we sit? After Communion, we're kneeling, but some people sit right away, and others wait for the priest to sit, and others wait for the deacon to sit, but when are we supposed to sit?"

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Five thoughts about the Incarnation

Adapted from a presentation I gave the RCIA class.

1. The Incarnation is part of a love story.
It's the oldest story in the book: God meets man, God loses man, God gets man back. The Incarnation is the beginning of the climax of the story. It's that moment when the hero suddenly appears in the doorway, and there's no doubting why he's there. Sure, he still needs to pay the rent and shower his true love's upturned face with kisses, and the villain isn't going away quietly, but this grand crazy gesture of love will be completed and will not go unrequited.

We ourselves are living in the denouement of this great story, tying up the loose ends until we all get to "and they lived happily ever after." There's plenty of drama, but there shouldn't be much suspense; we know how the story ends -- and we know our own story ends the same way, as long as we join ourselves to the yes of the beloved and pattern our own lives after the Lover and his grand crazy gesture that began when He became what He loved.

2. The Incarnation is unique.

Having described the Incarnation as an event in a well-known and oft-repeated story, I will point out that the story of the Incarnation is not just the Christian version of a dying-and-rising-god archetype.

Quite apart from the fact that the dying-and-rising-god archetype is hokum, the story of the Incarnation is not a "once upon a time" story. It happened in the days of King Herod (died 4 BC) -- or possibly when Quirinius was governor of Syria (~ AD 6). Before you argue that apparent inconsistencies between the written Gospels -- or even within one, as with Luke having Quirinius governor of Syria in the days of King Herod -- show that the history is made up, consider that the existence of even a confusing or conflated history means that this is not a story of a god, this is the story of this God. The Christians alive when the Gospels were written weren't taught allegories and myths by educated scribes, they were told stories of historical events by the people who claimed to have witnessed them.

The New Testament gives us genealogies, historical markers, names, places -- all things that fix the Incarnation to a specific time and place. This historical concreteness means that we can't abstract Jesus' life into some generic category of theophany, nor His teaching and sacrifice into some generic category of benevolence. Maybe a god can flit through time under different names and appearances, or do his work only in the abstract past. A man has to start somewhere, and we are told where and when Jesus started.

Believe the Gospel or not, Jesus is no more a fairy tale character than is Herod the Great.

3. The Incarnation is scandalous.

"Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming, " some scribes once said of Jesus. "Who but God alone can forgive sins?"

They were right on the doctrine, but wrong on its application, because they didn't know Who this man was. Even after Jesus cured the paralytic, they couldn't put "only God can forgive sins" and "the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins" together and come up with the right conclusion.

My guess is that the Jews who saw but did not perceive simply couldn't overcome a cognitive bias against the Incarnation. The God of Abraham was too holy to become human. You couldn't even speak His Name, much less look upon His face and live. How could such a God become bound in time and flesh?

What's more, even if God were to become man, how could He become this man, this Galilean from Nazareth? Sure, he's clever, or at least glib, and he's got a knack for what the unlearned might consider to be miracles, but ... well, just look at him! Does he look anything like God would look like? And the awful things he says about us! If the LORD were truly here, do you really think He's berate us for our faithfulness to His law?

The bias wasn't limited to the scribes and Pharisees, either. When Jesus appeared to His disciples after His resurrection, "they worshiped, but they doubted." It was of the pagan centurion that Jesus said, "I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith."

Which isn't to say pagans don't generally find the Incarnation scandalous too, they just have different reasons. For one, it would mean the Jews were right about their God being the only God. Also, when a god comes down from his abode to walk among the humans, he doesn't actually become a human; that would be silly, if not philosophically impossible. Even if a god could become human in some real sense, why in heaven's name would he?

At a greater distance, we find the scandal of particularity, a particularity that is inescapable if God becomes man. This man, and no other; this place, and no other; this time, and no other. Christians would have the world believe that all contrary claims about theophanies just happen to be false, while their claims about Jesus of Nazareth just happen to be true. What a coincidence! What rare good luck for Christians! What are the odds?

Rather than doing something sensible, like appearing to everyone in every place at every time, God decides to save the world when nobody's watching, and now everybody has to believe what a handful of people say another handful of people believed -- but only this handful of people; the other handfuls of people, who say different things, are wrong.What a way to run a universe!

I'll add that even Christians can find the Incarnation scandalous. They may downplay or simply avoid thinking much or at all about the dogma, out of disregard or even disdain for the created physical world we incarnate human beings inhabit. They may also be embarrassed by the Incarnation, in effect accepting the arguments of the faithless.

Being a faithful Christian is simple, but not easy.

4. The Incarnation is a partially revealed mystery.

We know a few basic truths about the Incarnation. Chief, I suppose, is that, in the Person of Jesus, God became man. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

Thus, contrary opinions aren't true. Jesus wasn't just pretending to be human, He wasn't a man who became joined to the Godhead somehow at His baptism or resurrection, He wasn't the incarnation of some created spirit or demi-god, and He's certainly not a merely human teacher more or less wise in the ways of God.

Given that Jesus is true God and true Man -- "a man like us in all things but sin" -- additional truths follow. As a human, He was capable of learning, growing, changing. He felt emotions, He got hungry and thirsty and tired; He ate and drank and slept. He had -- He has -- a human intellect and will, a human soul.

But He is one Person, a Divine Person, united to a human nature. This means the whole of His human life -- the parts recorded in Scripture, along with every other moment -- is divine revelation focused through a human lens. His whole life has value and meaning to us. I think we can apply the traditional four senses of Scripture -- literal, analogical, moral, and anagogical -- to Jesus' every action.

And we can certainly make use of acceptable communication of idioms, and say that Jesus is Lord, or that God was crucified, or (a perennial favorite) that Mary is the Mother of God.

And yet, the Incarnation remains a mystery. There's a lot we just don't know -- about Jesus' conception at the biological level, for instance, but also exactly how His human and divine natures interacted in time. But a mystery isn't just a matter of ignorance, it's something that we can contemplate forever without exhausting. The total love of the Father for the Son's human nature, the Son's total human love for the Father, how those both overflow onto all of creation and in an exceptional way onto those predestined to be adopted children of the Father and participants in that love: all this and more is part of what we mean, whether we realize it or not, when we speak of the Incarnation.

5. The Incarnation changes everything.

The Incarnation happened. God became man... and now man can become God.

You can become God. So, not to pry, but... are you? Or is becoming God something you haven't quite gotten around to yet? Maybe you've got a few more important things to cross off your list, or maybe becoming God simply isn't worth the trouble. A lot of us make God a counter-offer, like the man whose doctor told him the best thing for him would be to stop drinking, and he replied, "I don't need the best, doc. What's second best?"

Note too what the Incarnation means for everything around you as you work out your salvation in fear and trembling. God became flesh, a Divine Person assumed a material body, which is a spectacular honor for matter. It means that matter matters. We think small, we think of a manger containing the infinite Word, but step back and look: all of creation has contained the infinite Word. In its own way, creation is capable of God too, and as St. Paul tells us, "creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God."

Everything -- everything -- comes from God, is ordered to God, and returns to God. The exitus-reditus of the Fall and Redemption, of the Incarnation and the Ascension, is a movement everything around us joins in. We can, and should, take up these things in our worship of God and our mercy and justice toward each other. It is human nature, and it is perfected by the Divine in the person of Jesus Christ.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

A tough act to follow

The afternoon agenda for today's RCIA retreat:

1. A religious brother
2. Our parish priest
3. Eucharistic adoration
4. Me

Note to self: Never follow Jesus.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 2 comments | Tweet

---

Lesson for the catechist

Someone in RCIA mentioned the common misconception of Jesus as someone who simply loves everyone uncritically. One of the catechists replied that, while the Gospels do tell of Jesus spending time with sinners, in no case does He leave a sinner thinking the sin was okay.

Another catechist then mentioned one of the reasons -- less often mentioned than moral cowardice -- fraternal correction in charity is so often left undone: If I point out your sins, you just might point out mine.

As he described the unspoken conspiracy, I thought of St. Thomas's observation that, "There can be concord in evil between wicked men." This is the start of his sed contra against the proposition that peace is the same as concord; he goes on to write:

But "there is no peace to the wicked." Therefore peace is not the same as concord.

The question comes up in the context of peace considered as one of the interior acts of charity (the others are joy and mercy).

Which brings me back to the distinction between Divine love and humanistic love I wrote briefly about a couple of weeks ago. In a relativistic society, the god of love loves that you love whatever it is that you happen to love, and he'd love it if his devotees also loved that. In such a society, the Christian has to teach -- starting, perhaps, with himself -- that correction-free concord is not an act of love, it is an act of convenience.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

The name of "Jesus"

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

There's no such thing as a Copernican evolution

At this morning's RCIA class meeting, we watched the first video of ChristLife's "Discovering Christ" series. In the video, the presenter compares the difference between living for yourself rather than for God to the difference between the Ptolemaic Model and the Copernican Model. The question is, who is at the center of your universe?

Our RCIA leader pulled on that thread, pointing out how complicated an earth-centered model gets when you use it to account for all the observable motions of the stars and planets.

And yet, that's what everyone did.
It occurred to me that there is no way for a geocentric model to evolve into a heliocentric model. You don't keep adding epicycles until one day, presto, that's the Sun in the middle of your chart. You keep adding epicycles until one day, presto, you toss your Spirograph aside and say, "There must be a better way!"

A similar thing happens when people living according to a self-centered model examines their lives. It just doesn't really work, and you can't get it to work by adding incremental refinements and corrections to your self-centeredness. You have to toss aside yourself and say, "There must be a better way!"

Now, truth cannot contradict truth, so I don't mean to contradict the empirical fact that plenty of people living a self-centered life are altogether content with the way it works. Even people who know it's no way to go through life find it tempting.

Of course, the mere fact that people are content doesn't mean their contentment is well-founded. If your ideas about how to live are well suited to achieving your idea of what life is for, then you'll likely be content if you're following your ideas about how to live. And yet, if your idea of what life is for is wrong (or more likely incomplete), then your ideas about how to live are going to be wrong also.

What I think this means to Christian evangelists -- which is to say, to Christians -- is that we'll find people in two very different states. Some people will be, in one way or another, dissatisfied with what they've tried to put in the center of their lives; these people are waiting to be introduced to Jesus. Others, though, are satisfied, and they need to be introduced to the idea of Jesus, so to speak, to the idea of the true happiness, which we are not only capable of but for which we were created by a God willing to die in order for us to achieve it.

And the people we might meet in these two states may well be Christians themselves.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Lesson for the catechist

The topics today were the Sacrament of Matrimony, the Sixth Commandment, and the Ninth Commandment.

I sat in the back and kept my yap shut most of the morning, which is what I try to do when I don't have anything particularly insightful to add. On these topics, my insights don't run much deeper than, "Love your spouse sacrificially. Don't mess around. Don't even think about messing around."

Sure, marriage is a mystery, but it ain't rocket science.

I did, though, open my yap three times that I recall. The first time, in response to a comment that our fallen race doesn't properly value each other as persons, I said something like, "If you don't know what a thing is, you can't properly value it. It so happens that we can't know what a human person is apart from our intended relationship with God. And if you don't believe in God... you get cable television."

My second comment was some get-off-my-lawn gruff about how the "today's society" out of step with which the Catholic Church is, is intentionally misshaped by people who make money out of having society misshaped the way it is.

My final yap was just a prestatement of something the presenter was about to say, one of those stunningly obvious things I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed before. The presenter was making the point that the culture of death operates by dividing the human soul and the human body, pitting them against each other. I interrupted with, "Separating the soul from the body is 'dying.'"

It's not a culture of death merely per effectum, as a result of the acts of intentional killing the culture countenances or celebrates. The Manichean spirit that animates the culture is essentially a spirit of death and disintegration, separating the soul from the body, disposing of the former and despising the latter.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

A material sign of a material reality

Could there have been a more perfect conclusion to the (Combined) Celebration of the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens and the Rite of Welcoming Baptized but Previously Uncatechized Adults Who are Preparing for Reception into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church than -- literally before the candidates and catechumen had all sat back down -- for an usher to stick a collection basket into the pew at them?

Labels: RCIA

Link | 4 comments | Tweet

---

I've got a good feeling about this

Obviously, I'm procrastinating in finishing up my brief presentation on the Sacraments for tomorrow morning's RCIA class. But, though I say it who shouldn't, explaining the Sacraments with koalas seems like a can't-fail proposition.

Ceci n'est pas un koala, but you get the idea.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 2 comments | Tweet

---

The Shield of Faith

Today's RCIA topic was the Trinity. The deacon who led the discussion -- a transitional deacon in the Marians of the Immaculate Conception -- did an excellent job (though he did speak almost the whole of St. Patrick's part in "Saint Patrick's Bad Analogies").

He started with the Scutum Fidei, which he called the "nun model," since most American Catholics who know the model learned it from a nun.


As the discussion went on, I started to think that this is actually quite a useful visual aid -- not just as an arrangement of major Trinitarian predications, but also simply to keep pointing to the vertices of the triangle.

The Father...

The Son....

The Holy Spirit...

Let's be inescapably and explicitly Trinitarian out there.

The Shield of the Trinity is also something of a family tree, which in the fecundity of God's love branches out:

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

The scandal of Jesus, as spoken of in Mark

One of the things I did for the RCIA class I led today -- subject: "Jesus" -- was to list and categorize the things said to, about, and finally by Jesus, in St. Mark's Gospel. It wound up looking like this:

What did Jesus’ enemies say?

WORDS OF INDIGNATION

• Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins? 
• Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? 
• He is out of his mind. He is possessed by Beelzebul. 
• Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands? 
• By what authority are you doing these things? Or who gave you this authority to do them? 
• Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil? It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages and the money given to the poor. 

WORDS OF TRICKERY

• Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife? 
• Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion. You do not regard a person’s status but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?

WORDS OF CONDEMNATION

• Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you? 
• What further need have we of witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think? 
• Are you the king of the Jews? … Have you no answer? See how many things they accuse you of. 
• Crucify him… Crucify him. 
• He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.

What did Jesus’ disciples say?

LACK OF FAITH

• Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? 
• Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey? 
• Are we to buy two hundred days’ wages worth of food and give it to them to eat? 
• Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place? 
• Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? 

QUESTIONS FOR THEIR TEACHER

• Then who can be saved? 
• Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first? 
• Tell us, when will this happen, and what sign will there be when all these things are about to come to an end? 

PROTESTATION OF FAITH

• We have given up everything and followed you. 
• Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you… Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left. 
• Surely it is not I? 
• Even though all should have their faith shaken, mine will not be… Even though I should have to die with you, I will not deny you. 

PROFESSION OF FAITH

• You are the Messiah.

What did the people say?

WORDS OF WONDER

• What is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him. 
• We have never seen anything like this. 
• Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him?

WORDS OF CURIOSITY

• John the Baptist has been raised from the dead; that is why mighty powers are at work in him. 
• He is Elijah. 
• He is a prophet like any of the prophets.

QUESTIONING

• Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? 
• Which is the first of all the commandments?

WORDS OF FAITH

• If you wish, you can make me clean. 
• If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured. 
• But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. 
• I do believe, help my unbelief! 
• Jesus, son of David, have pity on me… Son of David, have pity on me… Master, I want to see.

WORDS OF GLORY

• Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come! Hosanna in the highest! 
• Truly this man was the Son of God!

What did the demons say?

WORDS OF CONFESSION AND FEAR

• What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God! 
• You are the Son of God. 
• What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!

What did God the Father say?

WORDS OF FATHERHOOD

• You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased. 
• This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.

What did Jesus say?

WORDS OF PROPHECY

• This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel. 
• Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners. 

WORDS OF CALLING AND ENCOURAGEMENT

• Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men. 
• Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come. 
• Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith? 
• Do not be afraid; just have faith. 
• Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while. 
• Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid! 

WORDS OF HEALING AND FORGIVENESS

• Child, your sins are forgiven. 
• I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home. 
• Little girl, I say to you, arise! 
• Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction. 
• But who do you say that I am? 
• Go your way; your faith has saved you. 

WORDS OF REVELATION

• The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death he will rise. 
• For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. 
• My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

WORDS OF COMMAND

• Take it; this is my body. 
• This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. 
•  Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Of all the groups I've split the above into, Jesus' own disciples seemed to have the least understanding of who He was. When they did express faith in Him, it was usually by way of praising themselves. There's probably a lesson in that.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

"Can I ask you a favor?"

"Yes," I replied, waiting for a chance to get at the pastries the RCIA director was arranging on the table.

"Can you lead the RCIA discussion in two weeks?"

"Sure, what's the topic?"

"Jesus."



"No, no, just a sort of top-level overview. We'll go deeper in later classes."



So, yeah, that's what I'll be working on for the next couple of weeks. An hour-long presentation, to people interested in being received into full communion with the Catholic Church, on the topic, "Jesus."

Labels: RCIA

Link | 5 comments | Tweet

---

To grow in deepening their grasp of the paschal mystery

In case you were wondering, "mystagogy" is the period of formal instruction of the newly baptized Christians -- or, as likely these days, of the newly received-and-confirmed Catholics. It would be cruel toward those who, after months or more of RCIA, receive all the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter Vigil, to simply say, "Congratulations! Now you're Catholic! Go do good!," and shoo them out of the classroom.

Mystagogy, then, ensures that the neophytes (the "newly planted") have time to learn how to live as Catholics. It's not until their first Pentecost that they hear, "Congratulations! Go do good!," and are shooed out of the classroom.

And even though you most certainly weren't wondering, here's the outline (lightly edited) I used to blather at my poor, helpless, but polite brothers and sisters in Christ this morning:

An Introduction to Mystagogia

1. Why we are here

• Why are you here? (After receiving all the Sacraments of Initiation)
• “This is a time for the community and the neophytes together to grow in deepening their grasp of the paschal mystery and in making it part of their lives through meditation on the Gospel, sharing in the Eucharist, and in doing works of charity.” RCIA n. 244

2. Memories and experiences of the Sacraments of Initiation

• “Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence. Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe in your presence.”
• “For the one whom God sent speaks the words of God. He does not ration his gift of the Spirit.” John 3:34
• Drive your invisible car!
•  “Welcome aboard. Start bailing.”
• “Missionary disciples in communion.” (2007 Aparecida Document)

3. The Mountaintop: Go up, encounter God, return

• Scriptural movement
• Moses receiving the Law 
• The Transfiguration 
• The Crucifixion (St. John’s Gospel) 
• Christian life
  • The Mass 
  • Confession
  • Daily life (prayer and action), recapitulated daily
• The RETURN part is critical!
• “We priests tend to clericalize the laity…. And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path.” Cdl Bergoglio, 2011 interview
• GO! (last words of Mass)

4. Eucharistic Mystagogy (Dr. Gerard F. Baumbach, Notre Dame, Catechetical Sunday 2011)

1. Accept Jesus’ invitation to love as He loves (GO UP)
   • We are “stewards of God’s love”; let us be wise stewards
   • “Imitate [St. Paul], I beg you, and you will be able to be called newly baptized not only for two, three, ten, or twenty days, but you will be able to deserve this greeting after ten, twenty, or thirty years have passed and, to tell the truth, through your whole life. If we shall be eager to make brighter by good deeds the light within us – I mean the grace of the Spirit – so that it is never quenched, we shall enjoy the title of newly baptized for all time. But just as the sober and vigilant man whose conduct is worthy can continue to be a neophyte, so it is possible after a single day for a man to relax his vigilance and become unworthy of that title.” – St. John Chrysostom, Fifth Baptismal Instruction 
2. The Paschal Mystery is the center of the sacramental experience (ENCOUNTER GOD)
   “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” 1 Cor. 11:26
3. Learn the language of the Liturgy (ENCOUNTER GOD) (Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis)
   • “Interpret the rites in the light of the events of our salvation”
   • Personal and historical
   • Understand that “signs and gestures…together with the word, make up the rite”
   • “Do the red, say the black”
   • What are the signs and gestures used?
   • See the significance of the rites for the Christian life (ENCOUNTER GOD influencing RETURN)
   • Progressive transformation of your whole life
   • Includes “the missionary responsibility of the faithful”
   • Necessarily so, because Divine love is fecund
4. The Great “Amen” (RETURN)
• ‘If you are the body and members of Christ, then it is your sacrament that is placed on the table of the Lord; it is your sacrament that you receive. To that which you are you respond "Amen" ("yes, it is true!") and by responding to it you assent to it. For you hear the words, "the Body of Christ" and respond "Amen." Be then a member of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true.’ St. Augustine (quoted in CCC 1396)
• Body of Christ for others – service (what people like about Catholics)
• Body of Christ to others – teaching (what people don't like about Catholics)
• Service and teaching become one in love

5. Outside of the Sacraments

• “Christians pray.” (Best 2 word sermon I've ever heard.)
• Scripture: read, study, pray 
• Virtue: 30 days to a holier thou

6. “Do not be afraid.”

• “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Hint: everyone who is against God, so be prepared.)

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Thirty Days to a Holier Thou

I had the phrase "Thirty Days to a Holier Thou" in my notes for today's RCIA class -- which, of course, has become a mystagogy class now that all the confirmandi have become neophytes. I wish I had spoken the phrase out loud; it's the sort of thing someone might remember an hour later, and it certainly couldn't have gone over any worse than the "invisible car" metaphor for the gifts of the Holy Spirit ("if you use it, you'll see that you're getting where you want to go, but you won't really be sure how"). (And let us not mention the traditional Catholic greeting to the newly received, "Welcome aboard, now start bailing," complete with visual aid of a milk jug cut out for use as a bailer.)

In any case, the purpose of this post is just to get "Thirty Days to a Holier Thou" into Internet search engines, so I can feel like I've contributed something to the world (if not to my parish's mystagogia class). I suppose I should explain the phrase, which may not be self-explanatory for those who aren't regular readers of Disputations (I believe we're down to about three now):

• A virtue is a good habit.
• A habit is a disposition to act in a certain way. Being disposed to act in a certain way makes it easier for you to choose to act that way.
• You acquire a habit by repeatedly choosing to act in the way the habit disposes you to act.
• Roughly speaking, if you repeatedly choose to act in the way a habit disposes you to act for thirty straight days, you will have acquired the habit.
• Therefore, you are, today -- and for any value of "today" -- only thirty days away from acquiring most any habit.
• Therefore, you are, at any time, thirty days away from acquiring most any virtue.
• If you do want to acquire a virtue, a good habit, don't neglect daily prayer to God to strengthen both the daily choosing of the acts and the growth of the virtue in you.

Labels: RCIA

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---