The true meaning of Easter

It crossed my mind for the first time today to look up the origin of the word "Easter", especially whether it has any relation to "east"; I was right - and this supports my developing thesis that Christianity is ultimately meant to be an East-West synthesis of balance and harmony between the two opposite directions, which in fact represent two opposite philosophical worldviews and outlooks.

The term "Easter" derives from the same root in the proto-Indo-European (i.e. Caucasian) language family that gives us "ost" in modern German and its equivalent "east" in modern English - a term that means "to shine", as in the rising sun in the east; the Anglo-Saxon goddess "Eostre" is apparently most widely believed to be the direct etymology of "Easter" into present-day English, as first used by the famous monk St. Bede in the early 8th century whilst evangelizing the Germanic barbarian conquerors of the British Isles.

(One doesn't even have to do any particular research to draw the connection between a shining goddess of the East and the Resurrection: after all, Jesus arose from the dead just before daybreak and was first seen by two women, St. Mary Magdalene and one of the "other Marys" in the Gospels; indeed there are Church Fathers who believe that in fact it was Mary, the Mother of Jesus, who was actually first to meet her risen Son even though this is - apparently deliberately - omitted from the resurrection accounts.)

So why is the reference to "east" in the language of an explicitly White European culture so crucial in our understanding of the mainstream Christian faith, given that the very holiest day of the creed is so Eurocentric, yet literally points towards Asia? Think of it this way: Christianity is essentially a Western, even European religion, yet one that orients (pun intended) its entire focus eastward - towards Jerusalem, of course, but in a more general sense towards the ancient wisdom believed to be found in the East, not the West.

And therein lies the crux of the Divine revelation embedded within all Scripture as borne out by both Tradition and actual history of Holy Mother Church: the West represents the freedom of the unearned and unmerited Mercy and Grace of God in Jesus Christ, but this liberty's ultimate expression is in the willing offering of itself as a sacrifice to the Law and Truth of God the Father as represented by the rigid patriarchy and hierarchy of the East - all, of course, in the loving unity of the Holy Spirit.

So what is Easter, then - just what makes it the holiest of holy days? It is literally the once-for-all passage from Death to Life: the bright Sun of the Son of God rising anew from the East in such a way, having lifted the veil separating Law from Grace - that is, East from West - that humanity can at last serve God unshackled by the bondage of sin, liberated by said Sun of the Son to march all the way into the glorious Western dusk by returning an oblation of thanksgiving every moment of the way back to the Easter(n) dawn.

Stunning addendum to the "1990 prophecy" describes the post-truth era

[Note: I originally wrote this blog post a year ago, March 23, 2017 - but the intervening 12 months have confirmed to me in a deeper way its fundamental truth.]

There has just emerged, on the recently passed Feast of St. Joseph (March 19), a stunning addendum to the so-called "1990 prophecy", apparently given to the same anonymous mystic and locutionist who received that revelation of a generation ago:

"A new and great evil has now come and settled and will be there for the duration. It was a choice by man, including My people, who find deception in rancor and rancor where was ordained love. Not for years will an interior light return for those whose god is gold and whose love is cold. Not since times in history deep ago have My children so been skewed in what they perceive with eyes that distort and minds that form reality in a way that has no true destiny. Flee to Saint Joseph, and the Blessed Mother of the holm oak who tells us that brightness can be found only by those who practice the diligence of prayer amid consternation. Those who framed the future in accordance with their own time tables now find disbelief in prophecies though they unfold around you." 

-From Anonymous, March 19, 2017

The accompanying note on the Spirit Daily webpage concludes with an admonition that this has been disclosed strictly "for your personal discernment." So let me take a stab at it here on this blog (I would've shared this on Facebook but judged it was too sensitive and too long to do it there anyway.)

It was a choice by man, including My people, who find deception in rancor and rancor where was ordained love.

The fundamental underlying aspect of our fake news-driven, post-truth era - the bedrock upon which the entire tangled web of confused bits of nonstop information and data is built - is a deeply corrupted interior condition of the human heart on a widespread societal level.

Because man - even Christian man - no longer truly believes that his own sin is the cause of his unhappiness, but rather the sin of others, the world at large has become a free-for-all of exchanging every manner of insults, threats, and general irreverence towards one's fellow man.

Hence, we have the interesting paradoxical phenomenon of professed believers finding enemies of their faith in every nook and cranny of an admittedly hyper-secularized world out to destroy it, yet increasingly completely blind to the evil that resides much closer to home: indeed, within their very homes. The contemporary Christian has collectively fallen into a dangerous trap: focusing so much of his spiritual attention and strength in an existential battle against external foes, he not only loses sight of the commandment to love the enemy instead of hate him, but becomes woefully unprepared for the snares that the Devil lays for him in his own family, among his own loved ones.

Statement of a Chinese-American Catholic on the Vatican's accord with China

My brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His universal Church,

I address you on a matter of great importance for our present time and potentially for all eternity - and also one that is near and dear to my mind and heart as a Catholic American of Chinese ancestry. This is the matter of the reported deal between the Vatican and the communist government of the People's Republic of China concerning the appointment of bishops on the mainland.

I understand why some of you are incensed that this apparent capitulation to the most central demands of the authoritarian atheist regime in Beijing is now close to fruition, with Pope Francis himself edging close to marking his papal seal of approval on it. I realize your concern for the long-suffering underground Catholic Church in China, which has endured with great courage and perseverance over nearly seven decades of unchallenged communist rule to pass on the torch of the faith to present and future generations of Chinese Catholics.

But my Chinese ancestry and heritage and my unique background and history as an immigrant to the United States, this great bastion of individual liberty and religious freedom, where in turn I was blessed to find what I believe to be the only ultimate authentic freedom - that of willful submission to Christ Jesus via His ordained Vicar on earth -  compels me to admonish and exhort you to avoid jumping to such immediate and definitive conclusions, especially if it leads you to suspicion as to the personal spiritual and moral integrity of our Supreme Pontiff, Francis; or even if it undermines your trust in his judgment.

Remember first and foremost that you are Catholic - not merely Christian, but Catholic. Your loyalty and obedience to the Pope does not require that you agree with everything he says or does; it does not require that you have a high or even particularly positive opinion either of his moral character or of the soundness of his teaching; it certainly does not require that you keep your dissenting opinions to yourself, as if these aren't invaluable in contributing to a deeper and broader understanding of our common holy faith.

But that faith should ever challenge and remind us of the words of the Eternal Word Himself to Simon in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, by which the unshakable Petrine office was established: "Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell will not overcome it."

These words have ever been the sanctuary of the countless holy men and women that have paved the way before our present time into the Kingdom of Light promised by Our Lord and actualized in the earthly pilgrimage by the Real Presence of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist through the most sublime intercession of Our Blessed Lady; they must likewise now be our own mighty and invincible fortress against all internal and internalized doubts we may find ourselves harboring - however uncomfortably or even unwillingly - against the hierarchy of the Vatican going up to the very Throne of Peter itself.

For Our Lord has always known that the mere specter of what the faithful themselves may perceive or fear to be self-betrayal - a self-denial of the Truth of His very Word - is a far graver menace to His flock and the untold masses of souls therein than can be all the violent powers of physical and material persecution that all the enemies of the Church over two millennia combined can ever muster. Were this not so, would He have gone to such lengths to state the superlative degree of trial by fire that His beloved Church would be expected to endure and finally prevail over - all while ever firmly planted on the Rock of Peter?

Our glorious Catholic and Apostolic Church has survived through internal schisms and heresies since its earliest days; it has prevailed over numerous and repeated instances of temporal authorities attempting to usurp its spiritual prerogatives, even if this was sometimes a long, hard attrition in which some battles appeared irretrievably lost at times; and perhaps most important of all, the Barque of Peter has even persisted and emerged stronger through the tempestuous adversity of very great - even overt - sinners occupying the helm's post and staffing its command crew.

Through none of this are we to succumb to the temptation of doubt as to where the final victory will be and to whom it will belong: it will not belong to those for whom the world seems more powerful than the Word, but to those to whom even a Church seemingly gone astray can only be cause for purer sacrifice of thanksgiving producing deeper joy; it will not be with those who curse our holy Church, but with those who bless it; it will not be borne and celebrated by those whose scandal at the denial of Jesus is so great that they resign it to being a mistake in the mysterious Providence of the Most Holy Trinity, but by those who with indomitable assurance can hope with certainty that the greater the betrayal, the greater will be the mercy of redemption that Peter himself experienced when he was finally able to accept the Lord's offer of complete forgiveness with the simple admission, "Lord, you know everything; you know I love you."

What's in the heart of the Trinity? A consuming holocaust

Today was the centennial of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, and I will take this occasion to introduce what I speculate to be perhaps one of the most sublime (if not even the most sublime) secrets of the Most Holy Trinity:

The eternal three-in-one Godhead has as its human reflection the Holy Family, and when the two are juxtaposed the result is two interlocking equilateral triangles - a top-pointing one comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit joined to a bottom-pointing one comprised of the Virgin Mary, the Lord Jesus Christ, and St. Joseph - which form the Star of David; additionally, the very center of both triangles is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is a consuming holocaust of complete and utter abandonment of the Divine Essence to Itself in the depths of the soul of the Virgin Mother of God.

Accordingly, the symbolic representation of this is the above flag of the State of Israel with the addition of a Nazi swastika at the center of the Star of David; the top and bottom blue stripes represent the waters above and the waters below - i.e. the waters of the heavens and the waters of earth as initially mentioned in the Book of Genesis - and this is itself a reflection of the death-to-life and life-through-death duality of holy baptism. Taken together with the interlocking triangles, one facing up and the other down, this composite symbol is also a visualization of the binary nature of Jacob's ladder: ascent and descent between heaven and earth with the eternal burnt offering of the holocaust as the fulcrum upon which the bidirectional transition repeats itself in an endless, infinite loop.

I was at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception this evening for a general consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the Fatima centenary (by Cardinal Donald Wuerl) when I determined that I should commit this theological surmising to writing today; in particular, what moved me was my recollection of my earlier attendance of noon Mass at Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart (famous for being in the classic horror movie The Exorcist; in fact I went to the chapel and returned via the "exorcist steps" off the Potomac river).

Receiving the Precious Blood of Christ during communion, I fell into one of those disorderly operations brought about by mental distraction, causing me to take a smaller, merely token sip of the consecrated wine than I was subconsciously intending to; this triggered my scrupulous retracing of everything that could (and in my mind, should) have gone better according to my will, which consumed me for the following hour and a half almost as I walked back to work and struggled to start my afternoon tasks once in the office again. I tried to cling desperately to the Real Presence I sensed in the wine I had just taken, and then afterwards I clutched at straws to recollect the Real Presence in the bread I had eaten as well (since I'd totally forgotten about that to exclusively focus on the wine); but truly it could only have been Jesus clinging on to me for this whole time as I was unable to cling to him with my unruly mental passion of perfectionism.

This was my day's holocaust, I later ascertained at the Shrine during the Fatima centenary ceremony...a consuming fire of purification by God's love - by the Most Holy Trinity - which I increasingly sense must become my daily experience of self-immolation in my heart and soul.

For like Jacob - whom God renamed Israel as a result of that inaugural encounter - I have no will whatsoever to submit to the will of God, and my resistance causes me great suffering and even a hell itself (after all, willful resistance to the will of God is the very definition of hell); but also like Jacob, I come to realize that in fighting with God, I prevail because God can only prevail in the end over me.

He is God and I am not; he will ultimately wear down even my strongest resistance, because that is as a mere nothing in the face of his Divine Providence. I will be consumed in my very nature of being by him whether I like it or not - I will be a burnt offering in his perfect love's purging flames whether I like it or not. May the holocaust become my daily, even constant reality of immersion in his unfathomably pure and indescribably purifying mercy. Amen.

(A more detailed technical explanation of the symbology I've introduced in this post will come later.)

Columbus was crazy because he challenged reason, not superstition

On this quarter-century anniversary of the 500-year mark of the Discovery of America, it's interesting to note just how much the legacy of Christopher Columbus has been put up for grabs even in this preceding generation.

As a kid in elementary school in the late eighties, I still remember how we were taught the standard Rip Van Winkle urban legend about Columbus being such a bold and daring shatterer of conventional medieval ignorance - pushed by the backwards, Inquisition-peddling Catholic Church - of the earth being a flat wafer with an edge somewhere out there on the water that you'd fall clear off of. In hindsight, I may have been the last generation in the public school system of this country in large urban areas to get such a positive - if still badly skewed - accounting of the great mariner who "found" America centuries after the Vikings already came here.

By the late nineties, Columbus Day was no longer celebrated by many Americans, but all the bad press that Old Christopher was by then getting about being a genocidal imperialist megalomaniac was only further obscuring what should have been an even bigger scandal all along: contrary to popular belief, Columbus went against scholarly wisdom based on the highly accurate scientific knowledge of his day, and not crude religious superstition, in venturing to sail westward and not eastward to reach the coveted riches of the Orient.

Indeed, as a more balanced and nuanced view of Christopher Columbus begins to emerge, both sides of the debate over his place in history have much food for thought: those who choose to dwell on the negative aspects of the Spanish colonial legacy are being compelled to temper their particular focus on him as some kind of unique and singular bearer of evil to the Western Hemisphere, whilst those who prefer to emphasize the positives have no choice but to acknowledge that, yes, the man apparently did have a screw or two loose.

The salient fact that should strike us in the 21st century is that America was finally permanently settled by Europeans - as opposed to merely passed by as another foraging station - on essentially the romantic whim of a Genovese adventurer whose sheer obsession with the idea of doing something out of the ordinary turned that whim into an actual enterprise. To reach that point in his own personal journey, Columbus had to be at least a wee bit loony, if you want to be realistic about it.

In the first place, he was pretty amazingly persistent. By the time Queen Isabella of Castille finally approved his first voyage of 1492, he had already dealt with a whole decade of rejection in all the royal courts of Europe of consequence that could finance his aspirations. You have to be rather thick-skinned - one might even say shameless - to still stick with such a horribly bad idea.

Now it'd be one thing if it was ignorance that was at the root of all that rejection; but the exact opposite was the case: the European monarchs at the time were Renaissance-enlightened sophisticates, not peasant bumpkins with no conception of ancient Greek mathematics and astronomy, which had long since established not merely the rough shape of the earth, but very well near its actual size as well. Surely, then, what in the blazes could Christopher have been thinking?

Apparently, he put all his faith in an outdated and inaccurate map which underestimated the circumference of the earth by at least several thousand miles - conveniently, one might add, the breadth of the Americas - and this is what ultimately led to his doom and disgrace at final failure to reach the Far East. But considering the weight of expert opinion against him, it's hard to imagine how he could have not wavered to the point of finally abandoning the westward expedition.

You might here interject that by 1492, he was such a desperate man - and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain were so desperate to somehow dent the massive Portuguese lead on the high seas along all the eastward routes round Africa to find India - that the initial foray to the West Indies was literally a Hail Mary. But despite the undeniable element of truth to this, it hardly suffices to explain both his and the Spanish crown's eventual gamble: such ventures are in the end undertaken not out of pure desperation, but out of calculated risk.

Of course, the movies have done much to peddle the melodrama that Isabella was his lover - if not physically then at least emotionally - and that this was ultimately a kind of royal feminine self-indulgence. But this only shows how much of a deficit of logical explanation there is for the 1492 discovery there is whichever way you cut it for cerebral assessment.

What, then, are we left with? Columbus was crazy indeed - because he went against reason, not superstition, in persevering to secure his Occidental flirtation. When you look back at it over half a millennium later, you can only marvel at how God delights to use even the silliness of quixotic fantasy to fulfill His own inscrutable designs...because at least such puerile imaginings have a tendency of stretching the limits of human narrow-mindedness in a way that logic alone never could. Being all-knowing already, God needs idiots to help Him - not wise men.

All you can say, after all, is that America was indeed opened up for European colonization - and thus the religion of Christianity - in 1492 by an eccentric Italian dabbler in Mediterranean commerce, who turned a plan as outlandish in its literal end-of-the-world character as going through a fabled backdoor waterway to convince the Emperor of China to join a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, into an epoch-changing event; and that this was the Divine Providence in action. Who else but a crucified Lord of Hosts could have even thunk it?

The Rosary is the best Bible study of all time - period

On this Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (October 7) in the centennial year of Our Lady's celebrated apparitions under that title at Fatima (1917), it's worth recounting not just how powerful a prayer the Rosary has been since it was introduced to the church in the middle ages, but more to the point, perhaps, just why. To put it quite succinctly and bluntly: the Rosary is the best Bible study of all time, period.

Unfortunately, not only have many Protestant congregations traditionally viewed veneration of Mary as inherently idolatrous and thus reflexively speak negatively of the Rosary, but even Catholics tend to see it as a "grandma devotion" for old women with nothing better left to do in life but say Hail Marys endlessly day in and day out.

The ironic thing with this, of course, is that the only purpose of the Rosary is to conform one's own life challenges and trials with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself. Or in other words, the Rosary brings into sharp focus our only real business on this earth from the moment we're born all the way up to our return to the dust.

Indeed, if Sacred Scripture is ultimately about only one subject - namely the Word made flesh Himself - then it must behoove any student of such a rich and massive compendium of texts from two to three thousand years ago to zero in on a single unifying theme that ties all of Scripture together. In the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we have precisely this one great strand of revelation that binds all the rest together: that God took human flesh in the Incarnation for the express purpose of suffering and dying on the Cross to expiate sin and thus join sinful humanity to Himself in the life of Heaven even while still on earth.

If you could come up with a better summary for what Christianity is all about in the most practical everyday terms, I'd give you my whole fortune if I had one and go into massive debt just to give you more.

If we pray the Rosary daily - especially all 15 traditional decades and not just the day's prescribed five - then daily we are confronted with these three fundamental questions:

1. How did we humble ourselves today to receive Christ into our hearts? (Joyful Mysteries)
2. How did we suffer and die with Christ (not literally but ontologically) today? (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. How did this suffering and death bring us to a new peace and joy today that we know can only come through such a union with the crucified Christ? (Glorious Mysteries)

That's our faith in a nutshell...period. Which makes the Rosary the best Bible study of all time...period.

Church history explained through the Holy Family: Part II

The Silent Martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary

In this second part of a series in which I attempt to explain church history through the Holy Family, I will have to devote my entire attention to the silent martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary on behalf of Christ their Son during their earthly lives and thus ultimately on behalf of His Mystical Body, the church. Because this is a topic not directly treated of in Scripture, it is not well known or understood by the faithful, especially in our increasingly unmoored and individualistic (even within the church) modern and postmodern times; but it is absolutely essential and foundational to any subsequent explanation and understanding of the history of the church in the two millennia since the Holy Family lived its earthly life in Nazareth.

I start where I left off in my first part: the loss and finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus by His parents in the Temple in the Gospel of Luke.

The young Christ's adulthood effectively began in this celebrated episode in which He was lost to Joseph and Mary for three days in Jerusalem to debate with the Jewish teachers of the Law in the Second Temple. St. Luke apparently determined that this single event said so much about what kind of life Jesus would subsequently have with Joseph and Mary that he saw fit to then skip right to the start of His public ministry some two decades later - after mentioning only that the adolescent Son of God was again subject to His earthly parents upon returning to Nazareth and that the Blessed Mother stored up more ponderings of Him in her heart. Indeed, the key aspects of not only the future Sacrifice of the Cross of Christ Himself, but also the sufferings of reparation for sinners that would be borne by Joseph and Mary in their remaining earthly lives - which would ultimately amount to martyrdom - were collectively made present in this drastic coming-of-age incident.

For in the end, Christ's Passion and death would be the free choice of Joseph and Mary to cooperate with the Father's plan to offer up the Son - their own Son - as an oblation to satisfy the debt incurred by the entire species on account of Original Sin. It was Christ alone Who in His own body would destroy the dividing wall of hostility between the Law of God on the one hand and the Mercy of God on the other; it would be up to His parents, however, to offer the proper prayers and penances on behalf of their Son to pave the way for His ultimate Sacrifice, and this they did humbly and quietly in the remainder of his adolescence and adulthood until the death of Joseph and the start of Christ's public ministry shortly thereafter.

Mary's Martyrdom of Church Motherhood

For Mary, these two decades were a preparation and even preliminary experience of the "martyrdom of mercy" she was to later suffer in its supreme expression at the foot of the Cross: the painful witness of losing her Son according to her very own flesh and blood so that she could give spiritual birth to His many brothers and sisters, namely the church. On their journey back to Nazareth after finding Jesus in the Temple on the third day, it became clear to the Blessed Mother that never again could she have her Son for herself as before: He now truly belonged to His Father, and as such truly belonged to all Israel and all humankind. No longer could she lay any exclusive claim to Jesus, but instead she would have to open the chambers of her heart even wider to embrace the worst sufferings of the poorest sinners - in whose redemption by her Son's blood she was to herself undergo an entirely new maternity.

Although it was this latter hope that would ascribe meaning to the ordeal of separation from Jesus, in practical terms it could only mean that from hereafter Mary must wholeheartedly immolate her beloved Son in the depths of her being on behalf of every single one of the countless lost souls who would not have any chance of knowing Him otherwise but through a mother's deepest tender sorrows; only through her pierced heart of mourning for her Son would she - and thereby He as well - be united to the tragically fatal condition of the human race, namely that of being cut off from the Father on account of Original Sin, utterly unable, ultimately, to fulfill the latter's commandments. In taking upon her own Sorrowful Immaculate Heart the penalty of that first transgression, Mary would thus redeem the misery of sinners through her Son's broken and crucified Mystical Body, to which her tears of blood (figurative as well as literal) on the spiritual Mount Calvary across the ages would, as the very substance of the Holy Spirit Himself, join those furthest from the Law to the very fulfillment of the Law. Her martyrdom of mercy was to be, in effect, a martyrdom of ongoing (and everlasting) ecclesial motherhood.

Joseph's Martyrdom of Church Fatherhood

For Joseph, these two decades before his foster Son's public ministry were a preparation and even preliminary experience of the "martyrdom of justice" which he would ultimately undergo as the last of the Patriarchs of Israel to fall asleep - and therefore their light and champion in the realm of the dead. Upon his own shoulders, Joseph would have to take and carry all the scrupulosity and legalism that God's chosen race had come to cling onto for dear life and identity in a world where rival nations with pagan beliefs were larger and stronger. Great as his love could only have been for Mary and Jesus, Joseph's charge was to love his people Israel - and the future Israel the church - with no less zeal to serve and protect; his personal affection in the former case must not hinder in the slightest way his dedication to the latter mission he had received as God the Father's earthly vicar.

Far from belittling or circumventing the holy Law of the Torah in any manner whatsoever, Joseph had to observe it - and impart it to no less than Christ Himself - with ever deepening care and attention, so that through its fulfillment in his own life he could lay the spiritual foundations for the New Law of Grace that his foster Son would introduce. This Joseph achieved through ever greater perfection in works of corporal and spiritual penance and mortification on behalf of the Jewish religious establishment which was utterly incapable of accepting the coming judgment of the Cross - and therefore especially needed his sacrifices, if not for conversion during Christ's life, then certainly for eternal life one day in the Kingdom of Heaven which, as Scripture attests, will never be revoked as a pledge from God to His people Israel.

In a yet deeper and more ultimate sense, however, Joseph's living sacrifice of his very self was on behalf of the eternal Patriarchy of the Law: with the Messiah having come into the world, this preexisting order of Moses would in every generation be challenged and eventually upended with the unstoppable, unceasing current of Grace that would flow out from the church to continually renew both the people of God themselves and the wider world through them. Especially in the later epochs of church and world history - as Christendom acquired the unprecedented practical knowledge of science and technology, thus enabling each successive generation to feel less imperative to respect its traditions than the preceding one - this self-abnegation of the guardians of the letter of eternal Truth would grow more acute. Joseph's martyrdom of justice was to be, in effect, a martyrdom of ongoing (and everlasting) ecclesial fatherhood.

The Martyrdom of Christ: A Reconciliation of the Martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary

From the silent martyrdom of both His parents, Jesus Himself would take his cues as He matured from adolescence into young adulthood, and then further as He spent the final years of His earthly life before the start of His public ministry. In a real sense, the mission of salvation that He had been born to undertake was at its core a mission of reconciling the opposing and contradictory martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary: the latter an oblation of complete submission to the Law of Truth, the former an oblation of complete submission to Mercy and Grace.

Long before His public ministry began - indeed, it can easily be seen to have started that very day when as a twelve-year-old prodigy in the Temple Jesus was abruptly compelled to return home with His parents - the Word made flesh had to live out this interior existential conflict within Himself. He had come into the world as Grace and Truth Itself, but such would be the ever-present tension of which His brush with the Jewish Temple hierarchy and its aftermath was a mere foretaste: ultimately it would be His own family - not merely His earthly parents, but ultimately His Father in Heaven Himself - that would crush and crucify Him, using, of course, first Joseph and Mary but then also sinful men as His mere instruments.

For beginning with His loss and finding in the Temple, Christ would be destined to continue shaking up the established powers-that-be in Israel with radically fresh revelations of Grace, only to be compelled - principally by His own parents in the flesh - to resubmit Himself to mere human authority, namely that of human parents at home and that of human teachers in the organized faith. In this, Christ experienced in His own body the conflict and thereby reconciliation of the two humanities which it was God's mysterious plan from before the beginning of the world to achieve through His only-begotten Son's incarnation: the final harmony between the Law of Truth and the seemingly incompatible (in human logic and conception) Law of Mercy and Grace. Or in other words, the mysterious communion of Christ's holy parents - Joseph and Mary.