Friday, March 22, 2024

How much is enough?


Enough!   It seems such a simple word, but it can be powerful.  Used in self-defense, it can stop us from over-indulging, as when we find ourselves drawn back to a heavy-laden buffet; or being over-served, as by an indulgent grandma, aunt, or barkeep.  Used for governance, it can announce that the threshold has been reached beyond which penalties will be imposed, such as to a carload of rowdy children.  But also, and often, it is the word of condemnation.

Some people use it to condemn themselves.  I do not pray enough, they say in confession.  I do not love my children enough, or I am not patient enough with my kids, they say.  They grieve their shortfall.

I ask you, though, what I often will ask them: Who does pray enough?  How much prayer is enough?  Only Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Who does love enough?   Who is patient enough?  Again, only God and His sinless mother manage that; this is why we are so attached to them.  With quantity impossible to set, as for prayer, or love, or patience, the accusation of not enough is guaranteed to condemn.   

If this is how we accuse ourselves, then we damn ourselves to continual misery, since we are in fact constitutionally incapable of loving God, our neighbor, or even our spouses or children enough.  We are all wounded by Original Sin, which leaves as its scar a large streak of selfishness and limitation.  Nonetheless, we can be aware of our insufficiency, and grieve. 

It is different when we fail in a specific, discrete act that CAN be counted.  In such cases, to use the word is a deception, for example to say, I don’t go to Mass enough.  Our obligation is clear to attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, unless impeded by specific circumstances like sickness.  More accurate, and more honest, would be to confess: I missed Mass last week for no good reason; or, I forgot about the Holy Day last month; or, I haven’t been to Mass for seven years, except when my mom came to visit.   The hidden benefit of such quantitative honesty is that having named our specific shortfall, we can identify and achieve the necessary and specific remedy. 

The obverse type of obfuscation would be, I lied too much.  How much is the right amount (enough, but not too much) of lying?  Zero!  So, I lied several times, is a more honest self-analysis, and an error we can amend, with the help of God.  

Our culture has lost sight of the reality of Original Sin, and thus the universal insufficiency that characterizes the human race.  The scientific and technological models of predictability and tolerances has been thrust onto human beings, and our laws and our society frequently and freely pronounce judgment on whether someone did enough.  This ambient attitude can hobble us in our mission to grow in grace and virtue.

It can also damage or destroy the very fabric of our community and society.  If of ourselves no human being can ever do enough, then we are always vulnerable to accusations of insufficiency.  If someone is injured on your property, then you obviously failed to do enough to prevent it.  According to our legal system, that makes you liable.  If terrorists fly an airplane into the World Trade Center, clearly someone failed to do enough to prevent it.  But who failed?  The government?  The airlines?  The architects?   According to our norms, we must find out, so liability can be assessed, penalty imposed, and money flow.  

Remembering in honesty our creaturely weakness, we know we never can or will do enough.  I cannot do enough to prevent an elderly Mass-goer from falling and being injured approaching our church, though I pray that no one be injured that way.  Any time you read an article declaring that someone did not do enough – to prevent an injury, or death; to solve a problem, or make something fair; to avoid injustice, or thwart evil – say a prayer for that person as you recognize, there but for the grace of God go I!   For from this analysis there is neither defense nor reprieve.

All power lies with those who publish and accuse people’s insufficiencies.  Whoever admits to having not done enough is already condemned.  In our persistent insufficiency, all that remains for us to hope is that we not be found out.  Yet before God, we know that hope is vain.  

Moved by this awareness, we must admit: I do not do enough.  I stand condemned.  And yet.  This day the Son of God handed Himself over to be crucified, in fulfillment of His Father’s will.  He handed over His spirit, and said, It is finished.  It is consummated.  It is accomplished.  This, and this alone, is sufficient.  

I am redeemed; it is enough.

Monsignor Smith

Friday, March 15, 2024

I bind unto myself this day the strong name of the Trinity

Saint Patrick's idea of a good place to spend Lent

Would Saint Patrick be encouraged, or rather find it strange that his name annually is on the lips of every retailer, restauranteur, and party planner in this faraway nation?
  Unlike “Christmas”, “Saint Patrick” is a name and a concept that the most secular around us seem to invoke readily and often.   Add that the reality that this evangelizing saint's strict regime of fasting and penance could not be more distant from the spirit that expects “dispensation” to eat meat on a Lenten Friday when his day falls there, and he may as well be the patron of ironic twists.   

Always falling in the middle of Lent, his feast generates much celebration and precious little consideration of what the saint himself said or did.  There’s no green glitter here, nor corned beef, nor beer, but your observance of your heritage – as a Catholic – should include reading his own words.  Slainte!

Monsignor Smith

My name is Patrick.  I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many.  My father was Calpornius.  He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburnia.  His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner.  I was about sixteen at the time.  At that time, I did not know the true God.  I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.  We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments.  We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved.  The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth.  It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.

It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith.  Even though it came about late, I recognized my failings.  So, I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance.  He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil.  He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.

That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity.  This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven.

This is because there is no other God, nor will there ever be, nor was there ever, except God the Father.  He is the one who was not begotten, the one without a beginning, the one from whom all beginnings come, the one who holds all things in being – this is our teaching.  And his son, Jesus Christ, whom we testify has always been, since before the beginning of this age, with the father in a spiritual way.  He was begotten in an indescribable way before every beginning.  Everything we can see, and everything beyond our sight, was made through him.  He became man; and, having overcome death, was welcomed to the heavens to the Father.  The Father gave him all power over every being, both heavenly and earthly and beneath the earth.  Let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ, in whom we believe and whom we await to come back to us in the near future, is Lord and God.  He is judge of the living and of the dead; he rewards every person according to their deeds.  He has generously poured on us the Holy Spirit, the gift and promise of immortality, who makes believers and those who listen to be children of God and co-heirs with Christ.  This is the one we acknowledge and adore – one God in a Trinity of the sacred name.

He said through the prophet: ‘Call on me in the day of your distress, and I will set you free, and you will glorify me.’  Again he said: ‘It is a matter of honor to reveal and tell forth the works of God.’

Although I am imperfect in many ways, I want my brothers and relations to know what I’m really like, so that they can see what it is that inspires my life.

… I pray for those who believe in and have reverence for God.  Some of them may happen to inspect or come upon this writing which Patrick, a sinner without learning, wrote in Ireland.  May none of them ever say that whatever little I did or made known to please God was done through ignorance.  Instead, you can judge and believe in all truth that it was a gift of God. This is my confession before I die.

Saint Patrick

born in Roman Britain in 387; died at Saul, Ireland, on March 17, 461

 

Friday, March 08, 2024

Revealed in voices, places, and faces

Why, it must be Thursday!**

Christ used stories because we have stories; the Church gives us Christ’s life and all Scripture broken down into stories because stories fit into our lives.
  Not only are we able to recognize and understand the story of salvation, and the parables of Jesus, because they have reflections in our own stories, but also so that the holy stories become part of our own stories.

Lent lays out the story for us in one long, familiar pattern, where each day and its stories come on a schedule that help us recognize how far along we are on the path, the Great Fast of Forty Days.  Ash Wednesday reminds us to beware of doing religious acts for other people to see, right before we smirch our faces.  The first Sunday, Christ is in the desert; and the second, He is transfigured.  The three-year cycle scrambles the next several Sundays from year to year until we find our feet firmly in the Passion, and while clutching our palms, we know again where we are, and where Christ is.  We hope there’s less distance between us than when first we started.

But the weekdays of Lent suffer no variety of programming, bringing the same Scripture to the same day year after year.   On Thursday of the first week of Lent, as I read the Gospel of the Rich Man and Lazarus on his doorstep, I was transported to a moment in the late 1980’s, when I heard Fr. Brainerd (remember him?) proclaim and preach it.  Jesus’ story that day begins, There was a rich man who dressed in purple and linen; which is exactly how Fr. Brainerd, as the priest must necessarily be, was dressed for that Mass.  Yes, I remember; Thursday was the day that after work I went by metro to the Cathedral for Mass. 

As I may have told you before, each day of Lent has a place attached too, a church in Rome where the Stational Mass is offered, according to ancient tradition.  From my seminary days through my later assignment there, I would trek each Lenten day to the appointed church for the dawn Mass (in English) organized by the North American College seminarians.  That’s nine Lents, and some of the churches are inseparable in my mind from the days and their scriptures.  

Tuesday of the second week of Lent brings Christ’s Gospel admonition to call no man on earth your Father, a loaded moment for a church full of current and future priests.  The church that day is Santa Balbina, one of the least popular, least attractive churches on the rotation.  It’s a simple, ancient, heavy church built into the back slope of the Caelian hill, which has risen over the intervening millennium or so, that the interior of the church is more like a basement, and a damp one at that in the Roman winter morning chill.  The cracked walls are lit by bare bulbs hanging on wires from the undecorated ceiling; its one glory is a magnificent if anomalous inlaid marble throne against the wall behind the altar.  That Gospel reading takes me straight there every year, bringing a chill to the back of my neck, but sparing me the long walk along the Tiber and Circus Maximus.

Monday of the fifth week of Lent is at San Crisogono, one of the original churches in the stational lineup, which means it goes back to the fifth century.  You should visit the excavations beneath the current, medieval church when next you are in Rome, but you won’t -- because this isn’t even the most important or beautiful church in its own neighborhood of Trastevere, much less in the city.  Anyway, the Old Testament reading that day, the longest first reading in the whole lectionary, is the story from Daniel of Susanna and the two dirty old men.   My first year there, my classmate (now-Msgr.) Tom Cook of Winona, Minnesota, declaimed it with such relish and emphasis that every year, it is his voice I hear say: Your fine lie has cost you your HEAD!

Finally, finally, in my last year as a pilgrim in these Lents, I was called as a substitute for a priest who became ill, and was able to be principal celebrant and homilist at Mass for Wednesday in the fifth week of Lent, at the church of San Marcello.  One of that church’s most striking features is an enormous fresco of the crucifixion which is on the back wall above the entry doors, which means I got to appreciate it from the ambo and altar.  The Gospel for that day is from John 8, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.  That very excerpt is carved into marble over the main entrance of Central Intelligence Agency headquarters.  Coincidence?  You make the call.

Unrehearsed, unresearched, these moments come to me clear as light.  Such is the power of liturgy and God’s Holy Word to break through the prison of our present moment and transport us into the Communion that is outside of time yet unabating in our lives. 

The story of our salvation, the stories that Jesus told to His disciples and that they have told to us, become entwined with our own stories when we encounter them in moments of grief or joy, in our need or in our distraction, recalling us to the awesome truth that no matter where our feet stand on this earth, our eyes and ears behold the very mysteries of heaven. 

Monsignor Smith

**The church interior pictured is that of San Giorgio in Velabro, the Station Church for the second day  of Lent, the day after Ash Wednesday.  The connections, of course, are more complicated than that.   

Just a few weeks before my seminary class arrived in Rome at the end of August, 1993, in a "warning" to Pope John Paul II after his strong condemnation of "the Mafia" (for lack of a better word for Italian organized crime), two powerful bombs were detonated, one of which blew to bits the ancient carved stone portico of this church.  San Giorgio was closed for years thereafter as the portico and church were restored, and the Stational Mass was moved to a nearby church, usually the bizarre, octagonal San Teodoro, whose vinyl, high-backed benches resembled nothing so much as school-bus seats.  But I digress.  At some point the Lenten pilgrims got into San Giorgio again, I THINK before I finished seminary, maybe my fourth year.   

No less significantly, this is the church in which Father Ben Petty, son of this parish, delivered his first homily to family and friends on the day after he was ordained deacon in 2018 at St. Peter's in the Vatican, so by his gracious invitation I have also celebrated Mass at this altar. 

Notice that the church is off-square, and the walls of the nave not parallel.  You can see it clearly using the grid on the church ceiling for comparison. 

Friday, March 01, 2024

Just a leg to stand on?


Sitting in the barber chair this week I heard the fellow sitting next to me telling his barber about what he was and was not doing for Lent.  I was moderately delighted and even surprised that somebody “in the outside world” even knew it was Lent and was speaking about it beyond his most intimate circle.  Wow, church-talk, right here in the barbershop!

Sometimes, from our island of sanctification here on the boulevard, I look at the flow of traffic and the souls it bears along, and I wonder how many among them even know the great and saving work of God in Christ that is being accomplished here, and how many would recognize the culture nurtured by the sacraments and liturgy that we allow to shape the fabric of our lives.  The intimacy with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that forms and informs us; the conversations with the Holy Mother of God that pour out so earnestly; the sadness for our sins, and the expectation and extension of forgiveness. 

Not everyone enjoys this divine light and celestial music in their busy modern lives; not everyone in their desperation or their satisfaction knows to whom to turn with petition and with thanks.  This grand reality of diversity which we celebrate with increasing uniformity admits by its own definition us who worship God, with the many who do not worship God, and not only because they come from foreign lands or alien cultures. 

Into this polyglot conversation, we joyfully admit that we “do something” for Lent, rather like rooting for the team from our childhood hometown.   Perhaps it is our contribution to the picturesque expectations of the to-each-his-own crowd.  But if we stop to think about it, already it’s been a few weeks since we remembered that Lent, the Great Fast, has three equal legs, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.   Maybe, just maybe, by this time we’ve settled for That Thing We Gave Up and we’re calling that Lent.  Rather than hope this one-legged stool can keep us upright, perhaps now is a good time to review, refresh, and renew our participation in what we know can and should shape us for the whole year.

Privileged to pay pilgrimage to Fatima for the first time this past autumn, I was both moved and encouraged by the events that occurred there, and the personalities who participated.  Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children out in the rustic and rugged landscape where they followed their charges.  They were young, but serious beyond our imagining about their responsibilities to their families, and about their faith.   Our Lady asked of them one thing: that they pray.

But they already prayed.  They prayed almost constantly; it’s how they passed the time while they were together.  They prayed alone, too.  They skipped school to visit the church and pray more.  Yet Our Lady asked them to pray.  

They were not insulted by the suggestion that their prayer was insufficient; they did not argue that they were already quite prayerful, possibly even as much as was prudent.  No, they listened to Our Lady’s request and with renewed fervor set about praying – for those who did not pray.

By the power of the Holy Cross on which the sinless Son of God died for all our sins, we, you and I, like the children of Fatima, can offer our sacrifice not only for our own sins, but also for the sins of others.   We can deny ourselves pleasures for the good of other people who seek only pleasure.  And we can pray for people who do not pray.   

This powerful work of reparation, which is grounded in and modeled after Christ’s saving act on the Cross, is our participation in and emulation of the divine charity that is our only hope.  To pray for those who do not pray, to offer sacrifice for those who do not worship, to attend to the glory of God for the benefit of those who pay Him no mind, this also is the invitation of Lent.  

Almsgiving is the material work of charity and bears great fruit toward the forgiveness of our own sins.  We give from what we ourselves were planning to use, a self-denial that is not limited to fasting.  And yet, Jesus asks for more, though not material: prayer, the sacrifice of time and attention and care and love.  Is it harder to sacrifice our limited time, our precious attention, for someone who does not care for nor love us, or for someone who does not care for nor love God?  Yet Christ does both, and insists that we too do both.   

It is a shock to encounter faith and prayer anywhere outside of church because it is, in reality, uncommon.  Lent calls us not only to do penance for our own sins, but also to offer sacrifice on behalf of those who do not worship, and to pray for the ones who do not pray.  We are graced to know that our very lives depend on our communion with Christ; this knowledge compels us to pray for all who do not share this awareness, and the joy it bestows on us; to pray for them as if their lives depend on it.  

Monsignor Smith

 

 

Friday, February 23, 2024

The consolations of Februarsophy

(With apologies to Boethius) or, a Rhapsody in Bleak


The snowdrop is a modest flower,
blooming low to ground, and casting down its gaze
.

If ever there were a month that elicits yearning for consolation, it would be February, the month that wears both crowns: shortest, chronologically; and longest, experientially.  One of my favorite comic strips yesterday had its two high-school-boy lead characters grappling with this very burden.  Is this the 39th or 46th of the month? asked Pierce; February, you’re killing me! groaned Jeremy.  

February can seem to go on forever, as we tire of winter and yearn for spring.  The days grow longer, but the cold gets stronger, a friend’s mother said.  This leap year, we have even one more day of it – though not a 39th, much less a 46th.

And yet.   There are signs throughout the bleak month that God’s mercies are not spent, and it is precisely the bleak backdrop that makes them stand out for us to observe, and marvel.  Sunrise and sunset times are not abstractions for daily Mass-goers; already now, there is light in the sky before the 6:30 Mass, and it is still bright after the 5:00 ends.  Like a freight train beginning to move, the lengthening of days began imperceptibly back in midwinter, but now picks up speed to an encouraging pace, as we added fifteen minutes of daylight at both ends of the day just in the first two week of the month.  Soon enough, it will be barreling through the equinox.

Sundry bulbs send up their shoots in response to the sun, though the chill make us disbelieve they know what they are doing.  The tug-of-war between light and cold shows by the rectory doorstep, where the hyacinths emerge crazy early, nurtured by the sun-warmed bricks on the south-facing front wall; yet the Lenten rose (hellebore), burgeoning and blooming right on time, is flattened by an overnight freeze. 

Father Novajosky rejoices to be able to begin his daily walks earlier and earlier, bundling up at first and warming as he goes.   February sun brings welcome brightness without the withering wrath of summertime; barren woods reveal their stark structure.  The still-low sun sends its now stronger light to raise sharp contrast, that even bare bark reveal its beauty.  The sunlit call of open fields and hilltop vistas is an invitation to relish and delight, not a lure to immolation for all who dare leave the protection of shade. 

Ash Wednesday this year clove the month in two; but annually and more digestibly, two great days divide it into thirds, the gift of two great men; the births of Lincoln and Washington reminding us both of what we have received as a nation, and of what we are capable.  The 12th and 22nd are still always on my mental calendar, heedless of the printed ones, as I find more fruit in remembering them than just generic “presidents.”   And speaking of the 22nd, even when Lent starts this early, the liturgical calendar gives us the Chair of Peter to celebrate, unshakeable greatness that Christ built up precisely where He was thrice denied.


Snowdrops cling to the anonymity of the crowd, springing up
not in isolated splendor, but rather huddling together
in random and irregular patches.

Yet a civic holiday is a welcome respite, too, and I took a page from Fr. Nova’s book to walk in some woods along a path I had never tried.  And mirabile vistu, there I found snowdrops, the earliest of early bloomers, before even the crocus come.  Though I hear it can be domesticated, it is most delightful in the wild, where it springs up in inexplicable and unexpected patches, just when you think all is dead and dry.  Vigorous and delicate at the same time, the snowdrops announce that even February need not be fatal, much as the start of Lent promises us of our sin.

In desolation, the tiniest gift is an abundance.  This is the wisdom, the delight, and the consolation to be found for all who have eyes to see, standing out against the bleak backdrop that is February.

Monsignor Smith

Friday, February 16, 2024

Mel Who?


You hear of him at Mass all the time, because his name in is the Roman Canon, when the priest says:  Be pleased to look upon these offerings with a serene and kindly countenance, and to accept them,as once you were pleased to accept the gifts of your servant Abel the just, the sacrifice of Abraham, our father in faith,and the offering of your high priest Melchizedek, a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim.

Maybe you recognize his name from Psalm 110, the famous “Dixit Dominus” (The Lord said to my Lord): The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, "You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek."  From the harp of David himself, this statement has such enormous significance that is expanded in the letter to the Hebrews, of which we hear a great deal during Holy Week:  We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. (Hebrews 6:19-20)

This New Testament text points back to the story of Abraham, when among the many difficulties he encounters in following God to the fulfillment of His promise, Abram’s kinsman Lot and his family and possessions are taken by an enemy.  Abram raises a force to rescue him, and after defeating the enemy, and while returning with his kinsman and all the goods from his victory, Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, "Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!" And Abram gave him a tenth of everything. (Genesis 14:18-20)

This is the first time in Sacred Scripture that anybody is called a priest.  He is first, by translation of his name, king of righteousness, and then he is also king of Salem, that is, king of peace. He is without father or mother or genealogy, and has neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest for ever. See how great he is! (Hebrews 7:2-3)  Jesus is the perfect and eternal high priest; the author of Hebrews wants us to see the connection.

Saint Cyprian of Carthage stated outright what you should be discerning from these same texts when he wrote in about 250 AD:  In the priest Melchizedek we see the Sacrament of the Sacrifice of the Lord prefigured, in accord with that to which the divine Scriptures testify, where it says Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed (Abram).  That Melchizedek is in fact a type of Christ is declared in the psalms by the Holy Spirit, saying to the Son, as it were from the Father: “Before the daystar I begot you. You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

Over the past few weeks, between the harangues about the Appeal, I have spoken of tithing, that is, offering to God one-tenth of everything.  That’s a word not often used in our time, or in our churches.  Where does this come from, some medieval churchman looking to fund his grandiose plans?  Some megachurch preaching a “prosperity gospel?”  Rather, it originates with Abram before he was even Abraham, in the book of Genesis of all places.  You know, “In the beginning.”  

What is the offering of your high priest Melchizedek, a holy sacrifice, a spotless victim?  Melchizedek … brought out bread and wine.  Melchizedek is the first priest, and a type and promise of the great High Priest Jesus Christ.  Abram was heavy laden with spoils from his great victory, And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.  

Monsignor Smith

Friday, February 09, 2024

Beyond basic accounting

Among the rosary chapels in the ambulatory of the Basilica,
the mosaic for the fourth Sorrowful Mystery clearly juxtaposes
Christ carrying his cross with Issac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice.

Would you rather that God tell you
 personally what you are to sacrifice this Lent?

Sacrifice.  Oblation.  Expiation.   Progressively these words are less familiar, less intelligible, less often heard.   Sacrifice; that one we might understand.  It is something you give up in order to obtain a different, better thing.   We may “sacrifice” desserts in order to obtain a slimmer figure, or “sacrifice” time at home to obtain advancement at work.   Such transactional understanding reflects our economic and commercial dispositions, describing a quid pro quo between parties that are otherwise equal, or peers.  Sacrifice, then, is the price one pays.

This price-paying takes on added significance when someone other than the one paying receives the benefit, such as the supreme sacrifice our military personnel have made for the freedom and prosperity you and I enjoy.   Sacrifice can kill you.  Yet even that undeniable sacrifice does not carry the full weight of the term that we use in the context of our actions before God.

Expanding our vision to include not only our peers and equals, but also our creator God, sacrifice is what we owe and offer to God because He is God, not because He will owe or grant us anything in return.  It is right to offer sacrifice to God as a sign of adoration and gratitude, supplication and communion. Catechism of the Catholic Church  No. 2099.   As St. Augustine observed, Every action is a true sacrifice that is done so as to cling to God in communion of holiness, and thus achieve blessedness.  This clinging to God changes us as we enter the communion of holiness; and we participate in blessedness, which equates both to happiness and to holiness.

Abram’s sacrifice of Genesis 15 illustrates this clinging to God, Who, desiring to form His own special people among all the idolatrous nations, chose Abram for its head and called him by this name, which means father of many nations.  When Abram bemoaned his childlessness, he responded to God’s instructions and brought (God) all these (a heifer three years old, a she-goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon), cut them in two, and laid each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. … When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land…”  

But the clinging to God is taken to its height in Genesis 22, when God commands the re-named Abraham to sacrifice his late-obtained and only son, Isaac.  When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.  But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I."  He said, "Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." 

As explained to us in Hebrews 11, By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; ... By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, … He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead; hence he did receive him back, and this was a symbol. 

The sacrifice of Abraham points directly to the sacrifice of the only begotten Son of God, Jesus, which is transactional in the sense that it obtains at the expense of His own life, life and freedom for someone else (you and me).  More than that, Jesus clings to God in doing His Father’s will.  

Jesus’ offering the sacrifice specified by the Father, His obedience in offering Himself, should make us wonder, what is the sacrifice that God asks of us?   The short answer is, that very sacrifice:  nothing more nor less than the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.  Will it kill us?

Do not tremble in fear.  Because we are bound into Christ’s body by Baptism, we do offer this very sacrifice when we participate and partake sacramentally in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Mass, both offering and receiving Jesus’ self-offering in our Communion.  This relieves us of the need to offer ourselves in bloody sacrifice, yet at the same time it bestows on us the ability and obligation to bind our own, lesser sacrifices into His one effective sacrifice.  Amidst our daily actions, we cling to God in communion of holiness.

Calling to mind Abraham and all our forebears in faith, ask yourself what would you sacrifice for the health, for the very life of your children?   How would you respond if God Himself were to ask you quite individually and specifically for some sacrifice that in appearance would cost you their lives, or your own?  Then, in the light of this awareness, reflect on what God, through His Church, actually does ask you to do during Lent.  

You need not offer God the price of your life, nor of your sins.  He has paid that bill and exceeded its cost in expiation of all your sins and mine, grave and small.  You need not redeem the lives of your children and loved ones by sacrificing to God something that you otherwise need to survive; their redemption and ours is already purchased.  But how will you, in this season set apart for the purpose, cling to God in communion of holiness, and thus achieve blessedness?  Let go your grip on whatever else you cling to, whatever lesser good, and take hold of God’s promise of mercy in faith.  Though it will not kill you, this is a true sacrifice.

Monsignor Smith