I have not posted anything here in well over a year, but I'm thinking that since Lent is nearly upon us, that it might be time to start putting some of my thoughts down again.

I've been busy with life. Last fall we started doing a youth group at Holy Ghost, and we have done some great things. I expect I'll write a litte of that here as well.

Owing to all of the excitment over Rod Dreher's new book, Crunch Cons, I went out and bought it. Ouch! was it pricey! $25 at the local megabookstore. I haven't paid a sum like that for a paltry 260 pages in years.

I'll have to be sure to lend it out a few times to make it worth the price.

Here is a good post I missed a while back.

Today is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter.

It has been a long time since I have posted. A lot has been going on lately. Most importantly, for the month or so following the birth of our newest daughter, I was off of work. So I spent the time productively engaged in spending time with my children, doing household projects and doing some more in-depth reading than I typically have time for.

Durring my time off I read three books by the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure: The Soul's Journey to God; The Tree of Life; and The Life of St. Francis.

All three were excellent and have given me a lot to think about. I'm sure something bonaventurian will come up in a future post, but not today.

I've also begun to think about Lent in the last several days, so expect some posts on that.

Furthermore, I recieved some heavenly consolations durring Mass a couple of weeks ago in the form of spiritual insights. So I'll probably post on that too.

But nothing really today.

My newest daughter was born this afternoon. She will be born into Christ on Sunday.

Thanks be to God.

Today is the Memorial of Bl. Andre Bessette, who was largely responsible for the construction of St. Joesph’s Oratory in Montreal, and who, in concert with St. Joseph, obtained many cures for the sick during his earthly life. One of the things I find most interesting about Bl. Andre Bessette is that he is responsible for the common practice of praying to St. Joseph for help with real estate transactions, especially the need to sell a home. The story behind this practice comes from Bl. Andre’s lifelong desire to see a church dedicated to St. Joseph built on Mount Royal. The Holy Cross Brothers, the order to which he belonged, had also long wanted to build a chapel on Mount Royal, however the owners of the land refused to sell. Bl. Andre and some holy accomplices climbed the mountain and planted is with medals of St. Joseph. Shortly afterward, the owners yielded. Bl. Andre had to continue to depend on St. Joseph to provide both the funds and laborers to complete the oratory, which is now the largest church dedicated to St. Joseph in the world.

Since I am currently trying to sell a house, I’d like to ask for the prayers of both Bl. Andre and St. Joseph that it sell quickly and at a good price.

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In most of the rest of the world today is the Solemnity of the Epiphany, which we will celebrate on Sunday in the United States. The Epiphany takes on a special luster this year with our new Pope having so recently made a pilgrimage with hundreds of thousands of young people to the relics of the Magi in Cologne. The Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Nations. It is fitting therefore to recall that at Vespers on December 22nd the Church prayed:

O King of the Gentiles and their desired One, the Cornerstone that makes both one; Come, and deliver man, whom You formed out of the dust of the earth.

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

This is the penultimate “O” antiphon, prayed on the evening before we pray O Emmanuel, O Lord with us. In this prayer, looking forward to the birth of the Lord at Christmas, we contemplate the Love God shows by sending His Son to rule over all of us and bring His salvation to all of the Nations. The prayer for the Rex Gentium, the King of Nations to come and deliver us is celebrated with special majesty on the Epiphany. It is an important part of the Christmas Season. In a special way the Epiphany invites us to welcome the Savior in life by submitting ourselves to Him and subordinating ourselves to His Rule. Like the Solemnity of Christ the King it is an occasion to meditate on the Lordship of God and the nature of His Kingdom. Such thought brings us immediately to the call to Holy Poverty once again:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

The citizens of the Heavenly Kingdom, the Subjects of Christ the King are the poor. For only the truly poor, the spiritually poor, are capable of acknowledging the Lordship of Christ appropriately. For to truly acknowledge Him as Rex Gentium means simultaneously acknowledging that we are lords of nothing whatsoever; the power and the glory are all His.

The Roman Rite retains the gesture of prostration only for ordinands during the Sacrament of Orders; however, it is retained for the people in several special liturgies in the Byzantine Rite. I had the privilege of experiencing one of these liturgies several years ago on the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross (September 14). I found prostration before the Cross of Christ to be an extraordinarily powerful experience.

To truly prostrate oneself before the King of Kings, a gesture of humility through which one shows his assent to the Lordship of Christ, is a sign of the total giving of the self to the Other as a gift. This is because it is a giving ones own lordship over oneself and all of one’s own personal power over to the good of the Other. It is an act of total self-abandonment to God.

The Magi, prostrate before and gift-giving to the Christ Child show us the mark of discipleship. They show us how to follow, how to be men before God, and point towards the Christian life of self-sacrifice on the Cross.

So let us pray to the good Saints Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchoir, that we might follow their example of spiritual poverty and attain the Kingdom of Heaven.

And let also us pray to our Seraphic Father Francis that we might join with him and become heralds of the Great King.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The slaughter of the young boys of Bethlehem is especially difficult for a father to contemplate I have two boys two years old and under. Two of mine would have been massacred under Herod’s order.

But it seems to me today that this feast is about Hope. Just four days ago we celebrated the birth of Hope, the Radiant Dawn, the King of Nations, Emmanuel. However, Hope requires something of us. While our Hope truly is a gift from our Heavenly Father, it is one that requires a response from us and our participation to grow and bear fruit in our lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about Fr. Doran’s homily on the First Sunday of Advent, when he spoke about the silence of God and our need to nurture and cultivate our Hope.

On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Fr. Doran spoke to us about the Homily of Pope Benedict XVI on the Immaculate Conception, which was very fitting because these two Solemnities had the same Gospel reading. These two paragraphs from Holy Father struck me with particular force:

The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

Linking these various threads together: the Nativity, Herod’s slaughter of innocents, the necessity to cultivate Hope and the mistrust of God in preference to personal power, we can see what this day teaches about Hope. Herod’s response to the Hope offered by Christ is to exercise his own personal power in a terrifying way. By his horrifying response, Herod teaches us that hope and power are opposites. Trust is the proper response to Hope. Trust is the activity of cultivating Hope, and in trusting we abandon ourselves and we give our lives over to Another, and this is the activity that bring us to the Cross.

One Other Thing…..about today. It is good in these times when illegal immigration is so much discussed and poor families have become the object of so much contempt for daring to seek some method of providing for themselves in America that we remember that the Holy Family in their flight to Egypt were uninvited by their hosts, were poor and without a means to support themselves, and were fugitives from the justice of Herod, the legitimate ruler of Judea. How much better it would be if we saw in every illegal immigrant the reflection of the Holy Family.