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.

Church history explained through the Holy Family: Part I

Among the things I have been trying to figure out lately is just how the different branches of Christianity - principally the threesome of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism - form a single integrated unit. It is now my belief that these three ecclesial domains of the Christian church - Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant - are the embodiment and reflective mirrors of the three members of the Holy Family, namely St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, respectively, in the common Christian era.

Just as Christ came into the world through the Holy Family in order to actualize the promise of salvation for His people Israel in the Holy Land while opening that same door to God the Father to the Gentiles, so has He also collaborated in the ensuing two millennia with St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary to establish a new Israel - His church - in the form of European Christendom, which itself would continue to ultimate completion the task of bringing all peoples of the earth under the Kingdom of Heaven as inaugurated through the acts of Christ and His Apostles in the Gospels and the New Testament.

Indeed, the earthly life of Jesus can be demonstrated as having five phases, each with their exact later parallels in the 2,000-year history of His body, the church:

1. Conception to Birth
2. Infancy
3. Childhood
4. Adulthood
5. Public Ministry

This first of a multi-part series will treat of the first three phases - Christ's conception through His infancy and childhood, which ended with His debate with the Jewish teachers of the Law in the Temple at the age of twelve; future parts will treat of His subsequent adulthood (including young adulthood, i.e. adolescence) and public ministry - and the parallel roles played by Joseph and Mary in His more mature years.

1. Conception to Birth

Jesus - Conception to birth:

Conceived in the womb of Mary in Nazareth of Galilee, Christ's very existence was hidden from the world for the first three months, as His mother kept it secret from Joseph, to whom she was already espoused but not yet consummated with. This initial period was spent at the home of Mary's cousin Elizabeth, to prepare for the birth of the latter's son, John the Baptist - the prophet who was to herald the arrival of the Messiah. Upon return to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary settled to prepare for her child's own birth, but just prior to her expected delivery they were forced to migrate to Bethlehem, near Jerusalem, in order to register properly for a Roman census (as Joseph was a member of the House of David from Bethlehem). When the moment came, Jesus entered the world in a manger next to a nomadic shepherd's field - far from the gaze of the high and mighty of the kingdom whose eternal throne He had come to claim.

Church - 30-33 AD:

Conceived on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with Christ's calling of the Twelve Apostles, the church was also very much hidden from the world in its first gestation, during which time it also toiled in proximity with John the Baptist, given that he was the template of the future ordained priesthood of the church (beginning with the Apostles themselves) - that is, the commissioned heralds of Christ in what would be a renewed people of God (Israel). As the hour approached for Christ's Passion and death, so too did the hour approach for the birth of His church into the world: the Paschal mystery of His Passion, death, and resurrection was promptly followed by the final labor pangs of His body, which was finally delivered of His mother Mary's watchful intercession on Pentecost day - the birthday of the church. Just as Christ Himself was born among lowly nomadic herders, so His church got its start among the scattered Jews from all over the ancient world who had gathered in Jerusalem for the preceding Passover observances.

2. Infancy

Jesus - Birth to 2-3 years old:

Shortly after being presented at the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents according to the Mosaic Law, the infant Jesus was targeted for execution by the fearful and jealous King Herod of the Jews, and the Holy Family had to flee into exile in Egypt - already the traditional destination for fugitives in the history of Israel. Thus was Simeon's prophecy to Mary begun: the Christ would cause a great reversal in Israel, whereby those of power and status among God's chosen race would reject him, whilst the lowliest of commoners and even those not part of Israel would accept him. Only after Herod's death two to three years later did Joseph see fit to take Mary and a still very young Jesus back to Israel, and even then they returned to Nazareth in order to be as far from Jerusalem as possible.

Church - 33-313 AD:

Upon establishing a foothold in the Greco-Roman world of the mid-first century AD, the fledgling church was targeted for systematic persecution by the Jews, who first drove the followers of their own Messiah out of Jerusalem and Israel and subsequently secured a Roman crackdown on Christians as an unlawful sect of Judaism throughout their empire - even after Jerusalem was itself destroyed along with the Second Temple in 70 AD. In the following two and a half centuries, the church grew and flourished as an underground society and institution throughout the Mediterranean world with ever less linkage to the hereditary Jews of Israel - to such an extent that the Emperor Constantine saw fit to legalize Christianity in the Roman empire in 313 AD. By then, the remaining Jews had also completely migrated out of the Holy Land, and thus for the first time the church was able to lay claim to the physical territory of Israel as a special place of pilgrimage; with this, the young body of Christ had truly become the new Israel, as the Gentiles had truly supplanted the Jews as foretold by Simeon.

Notably, although Constantine had been emperor of the Western Roman empire when he legitimized the church, he soon realized that the church was more mature both in terms of governance and also in doctrine not in the Latin-speaking Western empire, but in the Greek-speaking Eastern empire, based in the fast-growing city of Byzantium at the junction of Europe and Asia, to which he then moved the capital of his unified empire - hence it being renamed Constantinople later in the 4th century. Thus, Christendom was born in the West through the Western, Latin-rite Catholic Church, but its political center of gravity was in the East with its Eastern, Greek-rite Orthodox Church. The Pope in Rome, being the acknowledged successor to Peter, was titular head of the whole universal church - which at this time also included the other Eastern Apostolic Sees of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria - but in practice the Eastern churches were very autonomous, and over time the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople was seen to supplant not merely the other Eastern Sees but even the Pope himself in overall spiritual and temporal influence in the empire. Over the course of the remainder of the first millennium, this East-West duality came to effectively embody the disparate roles of the Virgin Mary (the West) and her husband Joseph (the East) in raising Christ (i.e. His body, the church): whilst the former continued to nurture the young Christ in the freer and more open sociopolitical climate of the West, the latter shouldered responsibility for protecting both Mary and Jesus with a strong centralized imperial authority - including military power - in the East.

3. Childhood

Jesus - 3 to 12 years old:

In Nazareth, the child Jesus was reared by Joseph and Mary to obey both the Law of God and the authority of man (starting with themselves); despite the standard strict Hebrew upbringing in the commandments of Moses and the lineage of the Prophets, the child Jesus, being Grace and Truth Himself, inevitably introduced an entirely new dimension of divine life into the word and liturgy of the Second Temple Judaism that His family practiced, and this pointed to His future mission of likewise introducing the unprecedented fulfillment of all the promises of the Law and the Prophets of old. As would have been customary for a Jewish family of ancient Palestine, Jesus' father Joseph was responsible for his pedagogical training and instruction in the Torah and in learning and following the rites and customs of both the local synagogue and the Temple in Jerusalem - to which the family would have gone with extended relatives on an annual Passover pilgrimage - whereas His mother Mary was primarily responsible for nurturing His life of private prayer and devotion in the home and the finer instincts of tenderness, compassion, and mercy associated with such piety.

Christ's childhood effectively came to an end in his thirteenth year - that which would have been His bar-mitzvah as a boy coming of age in the Hebrew tradition. During the spring Passover pilgrimage that year, twelve-year-old Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem to debate with the teachers of the Law in the Temple - without His parents' knowledge. Other than the revolutionary nature of an adolescent talking on equal terms with learned scholars multiple times His age, there was a deeper and more substantive tension in play: this brush with the Temple hierarchy was the opening skirmish between the Old Law of Moses which the Pharisees and other sects of late Second Temple Judaism were twisting to ever greater degrees of complexity and rigidity on the one hand, and the radical New Law of Grace which Jesus was bringing to Israel and the world at large in His own Person.

Church - 313 to circa 1100 AD:

After its legalization by Rome in the fourth century, the church grew in doctrinal and organizational stature for most of the remainder of the first millennium - through a constant stream of internal struggles that typically took the form of theological errors mushrooming into widespread heresies which then had to be stamped out. Over time, an ossification developed between the Latin-rite Western Catholic Church led by the Roman Pope and the Greek-rite Eastern Orthodox Church led by the Patriarch of Constantinople: the latter still recognized the universal ecclesial headship of the former on the throne of Peter, but the fact that its own spiritual authority was still merged with the temporal power of the Roman empire - which survived in the East in the form of the Byzantine empire for centuries after it fell in the West in 476 AD - meant that in practical terms it could often be taken as the more senior body. More significantly, the decentralized state structure of feudal Western Europe gave the Catholic Church more leeway for liturgical and devotional flexibility in its evolving practices and traditions - notably in the highly dynamic monastic realm - as compared to the Orthodox Church alongside the centralized structure of imperial Byzantium. By the ninth and tenth centuries, this dichotomy became increasingly untenable for East-West unity, as the relatively rigidly conformist East found itself less and less willing to acknowledge the titular primacy of the more loosely disciplined West: the two churches finally officially split in the Great Schism of 1054, by which point both had reached essential maturity in their integration with the sociopolitical domains under their purview.

Thus, whereas the Eastern Orthodox Church came to embody the conservatism and discipline of the Law, be it though the Law of Christ through the sacraments, the Roman Catholic Church came to embody the evangelical fluidity of Christian grace and humanism - anchored though it still was in the same aforementioned governance of the sacraments. In cultural and linguistic terms, this meant that the great classics of Hellenic philosophy of classic antiquity, despite being of Greek origin, would ultimately be augmented and modernized by the great Latin writers of the middle ages. By the eleventh century, Christendom as a whole had truly become thus bifurcated: its Western Catholic wing corresponding to the Virgin Mary, nurturing as it did the Mystical Body of Christ the Child in Western Europe into an adolescent that would grow eventually into the adulthood of modern Western civilization; and its Eastern Orthodox wing to St. Joseph, protecting as it did its Western kin from the threat of Islamic and other Asiatic invaders from deeper within the Orient.

At this juncture, however, the religion of the God of Israel had once more reverted to the rigidity of legalism in its original home territory of the Holy Land: the Muslims had occupied it from the receding Byzantine empire and had banned Christian pilgrims from entering; they were also at this point in history relatively tolerant towards the Jews, who themselves had emerged with a deeper identity rooted in the Mosaic covenant based on the Diaspora-inspired Talmud, and found themselves more at home in Islamic lands in the Mediterranean rim than in Christendom. As such, the latter took deep affront in the closure of Jerusalem to its pilgrims by peoples who were perceived to belong to a retrograde, graceless version of the revealed Truth. And so, with the swagger and excitement that the young Jesus had taken on the scholars of the Law in the Temple, the increasingly confident, even brash Mystical Body of Christ - the Western church - set out at the close of the 11th century to retake the Holy Land and the Holy City from the reactionary infidels who would not acknowledge the Grace and Truth which superseded the Law.

Why we should pray all 15 decades of the Rosary, not just five

The Holy Rosary, that favorite Marian devotion of meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has traditionally been prayed by reciting all three sets of mysteries - five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious - all at once, for a total of 15 decades in one sitting, or a seemingly whopping 15 Our Fathers, 150 Hail Marys, and 15 Glory Be's. Needless to say, this is quite a chore: beginners and even somewhat more experienced devotees of the Rosary may typically find themselves struggling to stay awake even through just one set of five mysteries - for some, the mere thought of saying all 15 together could be a daunting prospect.

So unsurprisingly, in more recent times it has been quite customary to refer to "the Rosary" as only one of the sets of mysteries - i.e. one of the "chaplets" - to be recited depending on what day of the week it is: Joyful on Mondays and Saturdays, Sorrowful on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Glorious on Wednesdays and Sundays; the new Luminous Mysteries (or "mysteries of light") which were introduced by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002 are ascribed to Thursdays.

Ideally, however, we should still think of "the Rosary" as the 15 original mysteries as a single unit, with the five new Luminous Mysteries optionally tacked on (preferably preceding or following the Sorrowful). The reason for this is self-explanatory to anyone who's delved deeper into the devotion over a period of time, irrespective of the well-established fact that the saints throughout church history have practically universally said the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries in single succession as at least their first preference - and more typically as sheer necessity.

For starters, as one of the concluding prayers recounts, it is God's only-begotten Son Who "by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life"; the unmistakable emphasis here is on the three successive elements of Christ's saving work, namely that 1) He came to the world in human flesh as none other than the Eternal God incarnate; 2) that He did so in order to suffer and die in His Passion to save sinners and restore humanity's relationship with the Father; and 3) that He was rewarded for this Sacrifice by rising again into eternal glory. So there you have it - the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries of the Holy Rosary as a coherent whole sequence.

The Rosary, then, is nothing less - or more, really - than the entirety of the salvation story of our Lord Jesus Christ, seen, of course, through the lens of the person closest to Him, that is His most holy Virgin Mother. For those of us who realize - even in fits and starts - that the whole purpose of our faith is ultimately the imitation of this entire human experience of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, nothing should click more to us than the notion that, yes, we too must undergo the entire sequence of content packed into the 15 original mysteries as a coherent whole.

Such has been my own experience in the nearly eight years since I converted to Catholicism: the Rosary has accompanied me in all my most critical and intensive periods of spiritual growth or personal crisis - the two often being intermingled, as they tend to be - and I have noticed the distinct advantage of saying all 15 decades, not just five, on a daily basis or even more than once daily.

The plain fact is, every day we are called to the following succession of willful acts, which correspond to the traditional three sets of mysteries of the Rosary:

1. Invite Jesus into our hearts just as the Blessed Mother invited Him into her womb, nurture Him within our souls, and offer sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father through that presence of Him within (Joyful Mysteries)
2. Completely immolate the life of Jesus within our souls as a (figurative) holocaust (e.g. totally consumed burnt offering, with no leftovers) such that we partake of His Passion and death (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. Freely receive the grace of the Risen Christ, Who takes hold of and elevates our cruciform souls with Him such that even now, in the flesh, we have a foretaste of eternal life before the Father in the unity of the Spirit (Glorious Mysteries)

If there's something else that's fishily familiar here in this threefold movement, it should quite obviously be the holy Sacrifice of the Mass: it is only through the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament, after all, that the three-prong activity of welcoming and receiving Jesus, offering Him up to the Father, and being raised to new life in communion with Him is actualized in one fell swoop of adoration of His most precious Body and Blood.

As a related aside, consider the concluding prayer of the Angelus, which since medieval times has customarily been said at the opening of Mass (even if not noon): Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Again - the three elements in succession one after the other. Again - through the lens of Our Lady who personally saw it all in the flesh while her Divine Son was Himself in the flesh.

What makes the Rosary such a singularly powerful prayer, then - especially all 15 traditional mysteries said together - is that it truly is Our Lady's blessed meditative and contemplative complement to the Mass and Eucharist itself. In a very real sense, the five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious mysteries contain within them the hidden spiritual realities of both the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament.

So next time you find yourself at adoration, why not make an effort to say all 15 decades of the Rosary and not just the five prescribed for the day? Do this often enough, and you'll easily see why Catholics pre-Vatican II didn't even need the priest to face them during Mass: their own Rosary beads were enough to attune them to what was going on in the sanctuary and altar - on top of being the very best liturgy of the Word (i.e. the Scriptures) that one could ever come up with.

In fact, as an ex-evangelical, I'd dare say that by learning and truly understanding the Rosary, a Catholic is more deeply immersed in Sacred Scripture - that is to say, in the fundamental stuff that truly counts for the salvation of one's soul - than even the most well-versed Reformed Christian can ever become. For as John so clearly reiterates the words of our Savior Himself in the Bread of Life discourse of the sixth chapter of his Gospel: Without me you can do nothing. The "me" in the "without me" being, of course, His True Body and Blood. And just what is it that makes that True Body and Blood truly true (i.e. not just a wafer as it is to your average Sunday Catholic)? Only the faith of Mary, whose fiat two millennia ago was alone found worthy to bring that Body and Blood into actual being in space and time...and whose intercession in the epoch since has alone been found effective to sustain a Real Presence of Christ in the Catholic and Apostolic Church through every possible assault of error, heresy, persecution, and even indifference.

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary - the only perfect adorer of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, being after all the very source and origin of Its Eucharistic graces - truly triumph in this turn of the third millennium. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Exorcising the demon of claptrap

It's not often that one discovers what one's demons are actually named - and yes, they do have names, as the Bible itself attests.

My particular demon seems to be named "claptrap", and the two definitions that Dictionary.com provides are as follows:

1.

pretentious but insincere or empty language:

His speeches seem erudite but analysis reveals them to be mere claptrap.

2.

any artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

The Google dictionary is far more blunt:

absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas.

Indeed, "nonsense" or "bunk" are common synonyms.

So, what to make of these in my own case?

Well, upon analysis it would appear that the two-point definition from Dictionary.com hits the mark - if both are taken together. My language tends to be pretentious but insincere or empty because it's typically merely an artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

It is precisely because I care so much about looking good in front of others - i.e. admired for my superior knowledge and intellect - that even my accurate (or at least mostly accurate) statements carry little if any real substance.

In the first place, I tend to overly concern myself with topics - like nuclear superpower politics - which generate a good buzz and commotion, yet which ultimately matter little to the everyday life of your average Joe or Jane.

And when I do so, both the topic itself and the way I present it is for the express purpose of making myself seem to be obviously so much on top of matters which, even were it true that I were indeed on top of them (i.e. their outcome), wouldn't really be relevant in most cases anyway, either to my own life or to my audience's. The bottom line being that I puff up things for the sake of appearing important to have a grasp of them - and further beyond that puff up my grasp of them as well.

The only antidote to this is to stick to the time-honored adage: "Knowledge puffs up; love builds."

The world has always preferred knowledge to love - that is, God's unconditional love or agape - because the former is a lot flashier and showier about purporting to have the answers to the most vexing questions of human existence. On an individual level, we as creatures in God's all-knowing image are also naturally wired to have the answers right at our fingertips - it gives us a sense of power and control that we feel entitled to (or at least entitled to wholeheartedly seek) as bearers of a divine or quasi-divine imprint. Mostly though, it boils down to one thing in the end: impatience. And funnily enough, this itself is precisely what betrays just how pitifully limited we really are - no matter how hard or instinctively we try to pretend otherwise.

For it is only the unfathomable scope of eternity - the exclusive domain of God Himself which He has imparted to us in a relative and contingent manner - that can finally and ultimately disclose the full breadth and depth of Knowledge. Until that endpoint both in the history of the universe and also individually in our own lives, what we know must remain a mere minuscule shadow of what we are eventually meant to know.

This is why it is so essential in this brief earthly life to simply store what knowledge we gain from partaking of the Love that is the Most Blessed Trinity within our hearts - as the Virgin Mary so astutely did in her earthly pilgrimage with her Son. Rather than show it off or trumpet it before the world to demonstrate our own importance, it should be quietly employed to serve our neighbor and humanity at large without being uncovered to them - or even, to be honest, to ourselves (that is, once we've stored them away in the recesses of our soul, provided we attain the grace to do so even if it takes a while).

After all, for us creatures, it is revealed love that is the source of true knowledge, not the other way around. Only for God Himself are Love and Knowledge in perfect unity - for only He is God. This infinite Love that is the triune Godhead is an inexhaustible fount of treasures that we must always behold with such an awe that flushes away what little wisdom we do have of our own accord (even God-given as it may be) as an ocean wave does a few specks of sand; it is only in this genuine apprehension of God as being God alone - with no rival even worth giving a fleeting thought - that we become authentic bearers of His all-knowing image. For the creature, to know the Creator as the Creator indeed is the only final sum of all goodness, beauty, and truth.

And apart from rendering this service to our fellow man - pointing them not to the knowledge we have gained but rather to the Source of it, so that they can discover it for themselves in their own unique way - what else is there to do on this earth?

Holy Mary, Mother of God - you who alone among mortals were found worthy to receive the Divine Wisdom and Essence in its pure fullness, thus making you the bearer of Wisdom Himself - pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death, that we may like yourself subject our indescribably minute knowledge of the Trinity to the Love that is the Trinity.

What falling for a drug addict was like

Back to blogging for the first time since early this year, having just witnessed the half-anniversary mark of the Trump presidency and also undergoing a major personal crisis of faith, it is time to turn to my deep Eastern roots for a security and stability that is no longer available to the citizens of the West who continue to live by Western values.

I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.

Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.

And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.

So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.

Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.

Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.

I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.

I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.

So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.