Counsel: A Gift Given Us Through the Church
So many of us seem to think that while the faith insists on being incorrigibly public and common to all Catholics, it is also “private,” individualistic, and esoteric. Consequently, many tend to think of gifts like Counsel as Divine lightning zaps of…
Counsel: Prudence Raised to a Supernatural Level
Counsel (aka "Right Judgment) is the third of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit that we receive in Confirmation. The gift of Counsel has been called by St. Thomas Aquinas “the perfection of Prudence,” because, in this gift, grace perfects the…
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Understanding Awaits Those Who Turn to the Lord
During Jesus’ earthly ministry, he often had a hard time being understood. The Gospels record numerous moments in which he made cryptic remarks that either made no sense to his hearers or, worse, were completely misunderstood at the time he made…
Understanding: Connecting the Physical with the Abstract
As we saw yesterday, the natural human faculty for understanding means the ability to “read between the lines” and see the inner essence of a thing. At a very basic level, for instance, a written word is not merely made up of black marks on…
Understanding the Difference Between Intellect and Sense
The second sanctifying gift of the Holy Spirit is Understanding. What is Understanding anyway? And what do we mean when we speak of understanding as a sanctifying gift? Before we talk about Understanding as a gift of the Holy Spirit, we need…
Dunno. I'd ask Shannon.
Mary: The Dwelling Place of Wisdom, Body and Soul
The Old Testament “patron saint” of wisdom was, as we noted yesterday, King Solomon. Given his choice of all the goodies the world offers, Solomon chose wisdom and was both commended by God for it and rewarded with an answer to his prayer. As we…
The Gift of Wisdom and Why We Need It
The first sanctifying gift is Wisdom. Isaiah says of the Anointed One, “The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. And his delight shall…
Starting a Bit of Post-Easter Mystagogia for the Next Month
In the Catholic tradition, the instruction in the Faith leading up to Baptism is called Catechumenate. After you are baptized, what often happens is that people are just left to flop around on the shore of the great Catholic Ocean. What…
On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus
It is for all‘literalists of the imagination,’poets or not,that miracleis possible and essential.Are some intricate mindsnourished on concept,as epiphytes flourishhigh in the canopy?Can theysubsist on the light,on the halfof metaphor that’s…
Resurrection
Easter. The grave clothes of winterare still here, but the sepulchreis empty. A messengerfrom the tomb tells ushow a stone has been rolledfrom the mind, and a tree lightensthe darkness with its blossom.There are travellers upon the roadwho have heard music blownfrom a bare bough, and…
An Easter Poem from Dorothy L. Sayers
Desdichado —This is the heir; come let us kill him.—Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved?Christ walks the world again, His lute upon His back, His red robe rent to tatters, His riches gone to rack, The wind that wakes the…
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at allit was as His body;if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the moleculesreknit, the amino acids rekindle,the Church will fall..It was not as the flowers,each soft Spring recurrent;it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddledeyes of…
The Work of Mercy: Admonish the Sinner, Part 2
The reason it is important to distinguish team-building propaganda from admonishment is simply this: One is often tempted to excuse one’s own evil by comparing oneself with Those Bad People Over There. Not everybody who bucks up the home team is…
The Work of Mercy: Admonish the Sinner, Part 1
Of all the works of mercy, probably the most thankless and despised is admonishing the sinner. Nobody wants to do it (except human toothaches), and people never want it done to them. Repent! is a word that eats at the heart. Your conscience nags, “Who…
The Work of Mercy: Counsel the Doubtful, Part 2
Doubts can be located in the emotions, intellect, or will. Emotional doubts can be potent, but very often, when you interrogate them, there’s no There there at all. Those who seek to counsel the doubtful can often be of tremendous help simply by…
The Work of Mercy: Counsel the Doubtful, Part 1
Doubt can be the emotional equivalent of a brief spring rain or a hurricane. People doubt whether to place two bucks on the Mariners (don’t) or whether the God in whom they have trusted all their life is a sham, fraud, and delusion. Doubt can be a…
The Work of Mercy: Instruct the Ignorant, Part 2
The notion that Jew or Gentile can claim to be top dog in the pedagogy of salvation is like the idea of patients in a cancer ward squabbling about who is the least terminal. Our position, under God, is that “all have sinned and fallen short of the…
The Work of Mercy: Instruct the Ignorant, Part 1
Back in 1971, when experiments in educational theory were just becoming all the rage, my fellow seventh-graders and I were pulled out of what used to be called a “junior high” and packed off to a newly built experiment in education called Eisenhower…
The Work of Mercy: Bury the Dead, Part 2
The ambiguity of our position as fallen creatures is on full display in how we treat the dead. In the Old Testament, burying the dead is as much a pious work of mercy as it is in the Christian tradition. But as in the Christian tradition, it is also…
The Work of Mercy: Bury the Dead, Part 1
“The body,” I was taught growing up, “is just the shoebox for the soul.What matters are the shoes, not the box. So when it’s time to go to heaven, we throw the box away.” Along with this good solid dose of gnostic thinking came a certain aesthetic that…
The Work of Mercy: Ransom the Captive, Part 2
Not surprisingly, the way Jesus described his mission was precisely in terms of slavery and ransom for the captive. It is worth quoting the passage in full, for it reveals how radical Jesus’ approach to the issues of power and slavery were: And James…
The Work of Mercy: Ransom the Captive, Part 1
It’s been a while since the Crusades. As a general rule, when our president goes abroad, he does not get waylaid and find himself in the hands of brigands who send back to the vice president wax-sealed notes saying, “Give us forty thousand ducats and…
The Work of Mercy: Visit the Sick, Part 2
The conviction that Christ makes clean what was unclean animates the Christian tradition and urges on us the duty to visit the sick. This conviction also links, in the Catholic tradition, two sacraments in particular as the “sacraments of healing”:…