Until

 

Are we there yet?

It is the classic question of any kid who travels and anyone who traveled as a kid.  Eagerness and anticipation, longing and desperation, all combine into the perfect expression of the unbearability of the present moment.  We find a richer expression of the same sentiment in Psalm 13: 

How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me for ever?
    How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
² How long must I bear pain in my soul,
    and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
    lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
⁴ lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him”;
    lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵ But I have trusted in thy steadfast love;
    my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
⁶ I will sing to the Lord,
    because he has dealt bountifully with me.

How long, O Lord? is the prayer equivalent of, Are we there yet? The present circumstances are unbearable, and like restless children in the back seat, we pester the driver.  Will that change anything besides the driver’s disposition? Will our waiting end sooner, or simply be punctuated by a rebuke?

But the Psalmist moves beyond his petulance and arrives at consolation.  How?  He recalls the past, what the Lord has already done for him.  This makes the present bearable and fills it with meaning.  We can bear waiting for things to get better now when we remember the goodness we received in the past.

Advent teaches us how to wait.  Waiting with confidence is such a part of our faith that we dedicate a season to it every year.  Advent is more-or-less four weeks of focused waiting for the great good that is the coming of the Lord at Christmas.  Our days are filled with remembering the good God has given in the past, the benefits that came to those who waited, and how He provides the best to those who wait in confidence for Him. 

To see what we need to see, look to the children, who wait in restless anticipation.  We mark the passing of the weeks along the way to show how far we have come, and how far remains yet to go.  The Advent wreath with its four colored candles is the kid’s odometer of Advent.  Though we grownups might not fight to light the candles or blow them out, we also enjoy its beauty in tracking the time.

Advent teaches us that waiting is good.  Kids’ Advent calendars dispense a treat for each day that passes toward the goal, reminding them that there is goodness even in the waiting, the waiting itself has it good points.   In fact, those good things cease when we arrive at the destination.  In case there be any doubt about our adult patience, there are grownup Advent calendars too, dispensing grownup treats.

We claim to be so much more mature about it than they are, and perhaps we are less frenzied in our anticipation of the good things of our Christmas celebrations.  But are we that much calmer and more confident when we wait for what we need from the Lord?  My guess is: no.  

Advent teaches us what we are waiting for – and for Whom we are waiting.  We are ever restless, dissatisfied with the present moment and eager to pester anyone we think should be making it better for us.  How many people resort to petulance when circumstances are not what they want, when genuine difficulties define the time?   How many people blame God, accuse Him of not acting, not caring, and being deaf to their just demands?  These souls are more miserable than backseat drivers.  Even we who know the living God can be miserable.  Come!  O come.  How long the night?  How long, O Lord?  

The worship of the Church rescues us from this misery by walking us each year through the darkness to the light, much as Psalm 13 described.  To calm our unease, Advent moves toward its consummation with reminders of all the invisible, unknown works by God in preparation for His great manifestation in the Nativity of Jesus Christ.  In the great antiphon for four days before Christmas, we open our liturgical ‘Advent calendar’ and receive this gift:  O Dawn of the East, Brightness of the Light Eternal, and Sun of Justice, come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.  

We ourselves do not control the sun that gives us light and life.  But we do have a light in the darkness: knowledge of the works of God who comes to save us.  We must wait for Him, though; for Him to come, for Him to act.  We have to remind one another that He is coming, coming to help us, coming to give us all we need.  All is dark, save the light of four candles.  The candles are beautiful, but – are we there yet?

Monsignor Smith

 

 

 

 

Buy time back

The Time We Have

Before the ubiquity of smartphones or even pocket watches, before most towns had a single clock in a tower or steeple, in the days when the church might ring the hour but more likely only the Angelus and Mass, people kept time by prayer.  Medieval and pre-modern books of cookery use units of measure that strike us as something else entirely: two walnut-sized gobs of butter; and stir with vigor for four Aves.  Cups and teaspoons, minutes and seconds were abstract or unknown, but everybody knew a walnut and the Hail Mary.  

Marking amounts and distances by prayer was practical and intelligible.  If someone’s house was just over a rosary’s walk away, anyone could understand how far.  It seems that more people than not prayed then as they walked or worked, not to replace the ticking clock but rather finding in prayer’s rhythms the measure of their days.

When I was a young priest, I read The Way of the Pilgrim, a Russian book from the nineteenth century that describes the journey of a soul seeking to fulfill the injunction of Saint Paul to pray without ceasing (1 Thes 5:17).  His recurring prayer is known as the Jesus Prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  This prayer was short enough that not only could I memorize it but also it came to my lips readily and often in the weeks after I finished the book.  I hardly managed to pray without ceasing, though, and after a while I very nearly ceased praying it. 

When it comes to prayer, there is so little time.  We all say this, and we all know this, though there is no more nor less time now than any “then.”  There simply is so much more that takes our time.  Our labor-saving devices have turned on us and become time-consuming devices that demand not physical effort but attention.  But we ourselves are the thieves:  how often when we find ourselves waiting even for a few moments do we reflexively open some window on a screen?   Once the devouring is done, there is little time left to give attention where it is most merited: friends, family, beauty – and God.

Our appetite for entertainment has called forth a deluge of demanding distraction, leaving us wondering whether silence even exists anymore.   These diversions are not innocent, but rather designed to take from us our attention and intention and bestow it on a paying customer who will turn it to his own purpose.  It is easy to forget that on the internet, you (we) are what is for sale, and our life and freedom are taken from us in digital units of time and attention.  

As often as we tell ourselves we should look less at our screens or spend less time on the infotainment that gnaws away our human freedom, we are helpless simply to do it less.  To reduce what we do of one thing, we need to do more of something else; we must increase our gracious works to be able to reduce profane pastimes.   

Meanwhile, I am no longer a young priest, and as any older person will freely explain, there is less time, not more.  So perhaps I am more careful with mine.  Watering the flowers and plants in pots around the rectory every day through the summer, I noticed that I no longer simply counted as the water flowed, but instead offered prayers of predictable lengths.  The geraniums take two acts of contrition; the begonias, three Sub tuum presidium.  Similarly, on my walks I know how far a rosary is, and how much farther another set of mysteries.  

This is not profound contemplation, nor is it earnest attentiveness to the will and mind of God.  But these simple, memorized prayers fill a need that we all have to open ourselves to the Holy, Mighty, and Immortal One.  Filling, marking, or at least elaborating our task-time with prayer accomplishes something that no tune nor podcast can, and that is, it redeems the time – literally buying it back from the demands of the world for the things of heaven and eternity.  They rescue us from the soul-sucking destruction of the screens and its repeating replay before our mind’s eye.

Once we have developed this habit, we can begin to tithe our time – offering the proper percentage to God of this most precious gift He Himself has given us.   Part of every day should be for Him; part of every hour.  Without looking at your watch or smartphone, you will know what time it is: time for prayer.

Monsignor Smith

Holy the Day

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

When I was in high school in Birmingham, Alabama, I was aware that I was a Catholic, and that made me different from all but one other person in my class.  But the nuts and bolts of religious difference emerged only over time, as with mostly Baptist and Methodist friends I went about the daily business of being a teenager.  At my Baptist friend’s church, I encountered the ‘lock-in,’ passing the whole night in youth activities in the church complex.  I received a quizzical look when I made some reference to people who would be “showing up for early Mass.”  Alright, I was clueless about many things.

One thing that left me gaping with astonishment was when my Baptist friends all admitted that not only did they not go to church on Christmas, their churches did not even have services then.  They went to church on Sunday only, had poinsettias and other decorations in the church and sang Christmas songs all through December, then moved on after the day itself.  That this schedule was echoed at home would explain the desiccated and denuded Christmas trees dragged to the end of driveways by the evening of the 25^th.

The first act of God’s creation resulted in the first day.  And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:3-5).   Rooted in that same creation is the week of seven days, and the sabbath of divine rest.  The Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it, (Exodus 20:11b) which resulted in the obligation to keep it holy.

If that were where it all ended, it would be simple enough.  But God did not stop then, but rather he announced his intention to make holy another day: On that day, … his dwelling will be glorious (Isaiah11:10)  This refrain recurs during Advent.  Our lives unfold in days and weeks, and God’s action in our lives happens on specific days and makes those days holy.  

We keep Christmas because the nativity of the Lord changed the day’s significance in the lives of all mankind, just as on a more personal or local scale we remember the birthdays of people important to us.  Because God took flesh and dwelt among us, His life and work also unfolded in weeks and days, and we keep the significance of those days as our lives unfold by the same measure and the same marking.  

His saving passion, death, resurrection, and ascension all occurred on specific days with their own date and relation one to another that allows us to keep their measure every year.  This Paschal mystery brings about a new creation.  The sabbath of the seventh day was fulfilled when God rested again, this time in the tomb, then is supplanted by the glorious Lord’s Day, the eighth day, when Christ rose from that sleep of death and in His glorified flesh makes all things new.  This is the day of the week we now keep.

Some sects have not got this message and reject the practice of Christians who have kept the Lord’s Day from the very beginning, so too do other sects cling to the insistence of keeping only Sunday.  One way the inventors of protestantism attracted powerful adherents was by abolishing the many holy days in the Catholic calendar, which meant kings and lords could require their subjects to work on all those days that had been given over to resting and feasting.  When Ebenezer Scrooge denied Bob Cratchit a holiday at Christmas, he wasn’t demonstrating any particular character flaw besides being a staunch Calvinist, an affliction that only in the mid-nineteenth century began to lose its 300-year grip on England. 

July 4^th, November 11^th, December 7^th, and September 11^th all have lasting significance in our nation because of what occurred on those dates, and it is a sorry citizen who does not keep them.  Universal and perduring significance has been imputed to the days of Our Lord’s actions in our behalf, and it is we who are sorry if we fail to observe those days with right intention and solemnity.  

The sacred liturgy of the Church orders our worship in awareness of and gratitude for these divine actions that changed our lives on specific, identifiable days.  Our lives as children of the one God, living and true, unfold to the recurring resonances of these days.  Even as the season of Advent awakens our yearning to see God made visible, certain days within Advent remind us of the invisible work He does to make possible that manifestation. 

The feasts and fasts of the Church are rooted in creation and redemption, days that root us in this great and holy reality.  If we fail to cling to this gift that both accompanies and delivers our Catholic faith, we will remain clueless about many things.

Monsignor Smith

Time sanctified

October 29, 2015

Looking through my photos on the computer, I came across a picture of me standing with my friend Fr. Christopher Murphy atop Old Rag Mountain.  Is it nine years ago already?  And we looked like THAT? My, my.

It doesn’t feel like that long ago, because I still see Fr. Murphy several times a year, and we are both the same friends we were then, as for decades before that.  But the date is marked on the photo so nine years must have passed.  Some things are so much the same; some, visibly, have changed.

Here at the parish, we know another year has passed because we are doing what we do every year at this time, awaiting the arrival of the truck that will bring our lot’s Christmas trees from Canada.  It seems late, though, because Thanksgiving fell on its last possible date in November.  On the Sunday after that, the day to open our lot, suddenly it is December already.  Same as every year, but different.  

This year the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is five days shorter than it was last year, but Advent is two days longer.  Both civic and liturgical calendars mark the time allotted for different types of preparation for the different aspects of the same event, Christmas.  These are actions and experiences we anticipate and enjoy every year. 

Though a turn of the year marks our planet’s circuit of the sun, time does not run in circles, nor do our lives, nor history.  In every revolution, the recurring point, the same time is different because we are different, and much in our lives and in the world around us is different as well.  Yet for all this time, its passage does not necessarily bring progress in any category, much less every category, as forgetting and remembering, growing in wisdom and strength and diminishment in faculties all occur side by side.  The samenesses and the differences reveal a more organic reality, like the growth of wheat:  First the blade, then the ear, then the grain in the ear.   All is contained within the single living reality, and the differences manifest over time.  

The recurring rites of our seasons, both civic and religious, make time intelligible to us, and give us occasion to survey what has been, and what is now beginning.  As the seasons change and the calendar and clock march along, we change too.  We feel every one of those differences: taller smarter stronger?  Grayer heavier slower?  The differences are revealed not only in our physical and mental capacities, but also in all our human relationships as well as our disposition and relations with the Lord.  We march too, for we cannot pause nor stop, yet we remain the same individuals, the selfsame beings in the divine image.  We feel so much the same, until we are startled to awareness.  Has it been a year already?   Has it been nine years already?  

Unlike the civic feasts, our liturgical life reveals the purpose of time, of our time, by laying it out alongside eternity, the everlasting unchanging love that called us into being.  The mystery of our salvation is open before us every day, and every day we encounter and benefit from the constancy of the Lord.  But over the course of a year, the different aspects of this saving reality unfold before us in the holy liturgy.  We are not merely spectators, but participants, and we experience those elements and those aspects in ourselves as well.  Divine grace nurtures in us the very life we engage and accompany.   

The Church’s worship, our worship, marks time and is marked by time.  The new year for us begins with Advent, and the tones and colors change dramatically, even though the prayers and Scriptures bridge that stark change with a continuing, almost unvarying focus on being watchful and ready for the Lord who comes – again, both the same and different.  The Lord who comes in judgement is the same Lord who comes to dwell among us, though the effect on our attitudes and expectation can and should be greatly different.  It is the same Lord who dies to save us who is the same Lord who rises and returns to the Father’s house to prepare a place for us.  Yet it is the differences that resonate in our lives and make us recognize His life in ours.  

Our worship of the living God rescues us from both futility and hubris.  The futility would be life lived in endlessly recurring circles, and the hubris the false notion of progress toward perfection, every day in every way getting better and better.  Each of our lives is unique and unrepeatable, absolutely different and a marvel in its own right.  Yet we share the same origin and yearn for the same goal: intimate union with our God and with one another.  

Like a birthday party for our children or our parents, marking the same annually recurring day with the same person we have known lifelong reveals how much changes in the same relationship of love.   Marking the same annually recurring day with the outpoured life of the Divine Communion, Father, Son, and Spirit, reveals how His gifts seem to vary to meet our changing needs while He stays ever the same.

Looking at an old photo of anyone we love gives us the opportunity to see what was different then, and to delight to know that the person was the same.  So too is the sacred liturgy our opportunity to look at our own lives next to the life of our constant Lord, and to delight to know what love changes, and what love treasures ever the same. 

Monsignor Smith

Who's in charge here?

So, about your rebellion....

Everything belongs to the King.

This arrangement is not the one to which we are accustomed.  The principle of private property holds that what is mine is mine, yours is yours, and so on unto his, hers, theirs, ours, and pending litigation.  Government property is a different matter.  Our nation holds to this principle, mostly.

But a King is different; the whole Kingdom is his, and everybody else just lives there.  This was the standard arrangement of human governance for millennia, even though now it has passed from practice, mostly.

The arrangement sounds like an enormous benefit for the King, but as any young first-time car owner discovers, with ownership come responsibility, obligations, and costs.  Not least among these is security, that is, protecting what is yours from them who would take it away.  Even a King can ignore these only at his peril.   The more that is owned, the greater the burden.  The King’s burden is enormous, because everything belongs to the King.

For you and me and everyone who is Not The King, this seems an enormous penalty.  The house where we sleep is not ours, and the King can turn us out at any time; the produce from our labors is not our own, and the King can take whatever of its bounty appeals to him.  Even our families and our very lives are not ours, as the King can claim anyone he wishes to serve him.  

Yet there is an upside.  For us who are Not The King, the burdens, responsibilities, and obligations are not ours either.  In fact, our needs and even our happiness fall squarely into the category of responsibilities of the King.  He can ignore any responsibilities he chooses, but recall, it is at his peril.  People deprived of basic needs have ways of arranging for a new King.

Here in the Land of the Free, we sit back and imagine such an existence, if we can take a minute from the duties, labors, and obligations attendant on what we have, what we need, and what we desire.  Yes, we say, we are better off this way; and perhaps it is true.

Being Pastor is in some ways like, and in some ways unlike, being King.  For many practical purposes here at the parish, I am the Property Owner with many powers.  This is a convenient fiction, however, that makes it possible for me to pay bills and oversee who does what, and who is forbidden.  In reality, the Archbishop owns it all.  What he demands, I relinquish.  At the flick of his pen, and possibly just his eyebrow, I can be deprived of both privileges and responsibilities.  

This is because the Church is the earthly manifestation of the Kingdom of God.  Everything she has belongs to the King.  Her earthly governance falls to the Vicar of Christ, the Successor of Peter.  Vicar is like viceroy, or vice-king; he is not himself the King, but is the King’s place-holder, or lieu-tenant.  The King cannot be represented by a committee or a council, but only by an individual.  Talk about burdens and responsibilities!

The burden of all that is, was, and ever shall be falls on the King of the Universe.  He is sovereign of all creation and all time, and you and I just live here.   The bodies in which we live are not ours, and the King can turn us out at any time; the produce from our labors is not our own, and the King can take whatever of its bounty appeals to him.  Even our families and our very lives are not ours, as the King can claim anyone he wishes to serve him.  

For all this, we owe the King our gratitude, and grateful worship.  For the burdens, responsibilities, and obligations are not ours either.  In fact, our needs and even our happiness fall squarely into the category of responsibilities of the King.  He can ignore any responsibilities he chooses, but ignores no need and no needful person, though there be no threat of arranging for a new King.

Despite his awesome power, the King astonishingly insists that all his subjects be free to ignore what we owe to him.  Those subjects who refuse to tender this just portion tell themselves that yes, they are better off this way.  And in truth, those subjects who refuse are more numerous than we can imagine; those who refuse include every subject of the King, including us.

For in our poverty and in our abundance, we all cling to something we believe to be truly our own, and not his; some selected thing we refuse to relinquish for it would deprive us our lives, our very selves.  Oh, we might not cling to everything; we might not refuse everything we owe every day.  And yet.  We are unworthy servants who rarely manage to do what is required of us. 

We have so much; how can this be?  Is the King reckless with his treasures, or heedless of our disobedience?   Neither is true.

Everything indeed belongs to the King. And Jesus Christ, Who is King of the Universe, Who reigns from the Cross, bestows everything on us.

Monsignor Smith

Those who sow in tears

The ancient port city of Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Tunisia.  Prosperous and strong, it was for centuries a commercial and military rival of Rome.  When threatened with difficulty or defeat, its citizens practiced child sacrifice.  The Romans destroyed Carthage and famously sowed salt in its fields.

It caught me off guard, even though I saw the progress, step by step, that led to this state of affairs.  There were signs locally, but considering where we live, of course there were.  It shocked me how widespread it became, and how quickly it was taken as the new normal.  It is matter of fact now that people freely and openly advocate for abortion. 

It used to be about choice, so they said.  We knew what they meant, they knew what they meant, but it was a lofty euphemism that put a calico dress of all-American freedom on the death’s-head doll that made people coo and chuck it under the chin.  Now, it is the act itself that is advanced and advocated, embraced and asserted, and the dress-up words are discarded.  Their plan is clearly named for what it is, even while they still dissemble.  How savage!  How pagan!  How…inhuman.  

To rally around an act so violent that to see it done elicits instant revulsion in man, woman, and child; and to name it as a good, to demand it, recommend it, assert it as a rightful part of the program of governance and social order by that unequivocal name, is as breathtaking as would be crowds in the street demanding death for any other class of human being.  But you cannot draw the curtains and hide until this mob passes, for they patrol the avenues of information and the boulevards of entertainment.  They speak up at social gatherings and look for anyone who dare dissent, ready to punish.  All, all to promote and demand and assert …abortion.  

In these same past few weeks when people on rostrums and people at microphones, people with yard signs and people with clipboards, were afoot in our country asserting the Most Important Thing to require of our government is abortion, we here at our parish had a little funeral.  It was a gentle funeral with a tiny casket.  You may have heard one of our families lost an infant a few days after her birth.   She came early, yes, but in the ‘window of viability’.  Then she got sick and died, but not before she received divine life by Baptism into Christ.  And so our sadness was lit by hope; confidence that she enjoys already the fullness of everlasting and glorious life for which you and I and everybody who pauses to think about it desire for ourselves.

Other families came and cried, came and prayed, came and helped.  Other children came and did all that children do when at Mass in our church, but even they were sober, for they could read the room, and they had seen the little casket.  This is a great grief, the death of a tiny child.

And outside our doors, beyond our lawn and vibrant trees, the signs waved and the voices boomed and the votes were cast in favor of abortion.  How many have witnessed this horrific ‘remedy’ they are prescribing’?  How many know the great wounds it leaves on the ones who give themselves and their tiny ones into the clutches of this cult of child sacrifice?

For even if a great altar to Moloch that ravenous demon himself depicted a grim stone idol with fiery eyes were to be built in our midst, and lines of helpless and terrified women and men were to fling their tiny progeny onto its blood-soaked stone and consuming flames, in hopes of – what?  Another chance? A better time?  Deliverance from fear or sadness or want?  Even if that vile and terrifying abomination were to stand where every citizen could see, it would not be a more vivid horror than the angry, open, and teeth-clenched advocacy by fashionable, educated, popular and powerful people demanding asserting and imposing abortion.    

Meanwhile our own state, our neighbors and friends, the stiffly smiling Stepford citizens, took the time and took the effort to assure to insist on an abundant and unvexed flow of abortion, as if a limit or restriction would be a privation of life and goodness.  We live in upside-down land!  The election has come and gone like a knot in a line plumbing the depths of the deepest sea, but the clamor is undiminished.  And still the armies of advocates and activists bang their drums for more, like the relentless walking dead in a fiction film, neither mollified by advancement nor deterred by defeat, clamoring always for more victims.  Protests are planned and programs prepared; pyres will be kindled to light bloodthirsty vigils.  

Our nation’s political working-out of embrace versus revulsion of this modern-day slaughter of the innocents is not within our power, but neither is it beyond our reach.  Equanimity demands, and pragmatism insists, that we who know Christ not be single-issue citizens, but we recognize in our midst the open portal of everlasting horror and disgrace (Daniel 12:2).  Unless we reject and refuse all who advocate and advance this grisly grinding of human flesh and lives, we ourselves will not escape the consequences of abortion.

Monsignor Smith

Along the way

Well now that was an exciting week, wasn’t it?  Who knew the turnout would be so huge.  I gave away every one of the 240 candy bars I bought and then some to the mobs of trick-or-treaters who came to my door on Halloween.  What a group!  What a delight.  I want to thank all the middle-school cool kids who admitted you knew me, and all the parents who loaded the van to bring your little ones a little bit out of their ordinary footprint so that I could see them and put Skittles in their bags.

Friday started early with the All Saints Holy Day Masses.  Perhaps not quite as encouraging a throng for that as for the candy, but God was glorified in His Saints and at the end of the day I was wore out like a hall carpet. 

That same day, great news came from Rome that our Holy Father Francis named Msgr. Fredrik Hansen as co-adjutor Bishop of Oslo, his home diocese in Norway.  Why is that Scandinavian event good news for us in Silver Spring?  Well, for the past two years, Msgr. Hansen has helped out here, most noticeably on weekends in August when help is much needed, but also at other times.  I met him in New York just as he was entering the Sulpicians and the faculty at St Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore.He became a friend to me and the other denizens of the Holy House over time, as he came just to visit for Saturday dinner, or help with weekend Masses too.  All of us who know him are thrilled for him and for Oslo, though it might make things hairy here come August.   

In grim news, also over the weekend people handed over to Fr. Wiktor several hosts they found on the ground in front of the church.  We carefully took them and disposed of them reverently and appropriately.  

If you ever wonder why the priest watches you or the person receiving Holy Communion next to you as you receive and consume the host, it is an expression of our care for Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament.  No, we do not expect many – or even any! – of you to make off with the host and fling it to the ground; more likely an accident happen that leave Our Lord on the floor rather than under your roof.  But every once in a while somebody does something genuinely bad.  It happened before, several years ago, when every week we would find a Sacred Host in the envelope holder on the back of one of the pews.  Now this. 

Care for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is one of the greatest gifts He gives us priests, from maintaining the security of the tabernacle to catching Him when he falls during Holy Communion.  It is rather as if Our Lady were to hand the Infant King to you, a shepherd, while she stepped away for a moment.  With time and age, I grow more aware of the saving presence and its precarious disposition.  So much that God bestows on us is precarious while it depends on our care!

In the few years we have been using the patens under chins and hands at Holy Communion time, I have been astonished by the accumulation of little tiny bits of the Body of the Lord when the paten returns to the altar for purification.  Once you have seen this, you cannot unsee it, as the saying goes, and my carefulness only increases.  

You too can join your care to the custody of Our Lord, Who makes Himself small so that we may offer Him our attention, care, and love.  Review your practice of receiving the Lord, which may have become a little too routine over the years, not to say slapdash.  Make certain that you are careful and attentive and still, your posture and disposition entirely focused on the great and fragile gift you are receiving.  Move slowly, pay attention, and remove all causes of collision or ejection from your moment of encounter and embrace.  Be grateful and careful.

I know some people think this week was exciting for some other reasons, but none of that is revealed or resolved as I write this.  We have bad news enough in the desecration of the Blessed Sacrament here, in our sacred precincts.  Yet even in this we are not helpless to right the grave wrong, as we can make reparation for the indignity thrust upon our Lord and be reminded of our responsibility to care for Him when He comes to us.

There is good news aplenty, too, for the Church is alive and thriving here in Four Corners with large numbers of children who have parents and teachers who bring them to Mass after they cavort for candy.  The universal Church is thriving and growing in a land from which she had long been excluded, and a successor to the Apostles arrives to his Norwegian flock by way of our distant parish.   The Faith is alive and at work here and now.

And that should put proportion to any other excitement you had this week.  Praise God!

Monsignor Smith