CNS Photo

This morning the U.S. Bishops celebrated mass outdoors for American Youth at The Domain—a first at World Youth Day. It was a vibrant mass with superb music and great preaching by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Chicago Francis Cardinal George, who is also the President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Since I’m traveling with Chicagoians I got to meet the Cardinal after mass and gave him a copy of my book, Googling God. He was a very gracious man and spent a good deal of time with the folks from his Archdiocese and engaged almost all of us in conversation. Considering that he’s still recovering from cancer and that his legs aren’t strong to begin with (he had polio as a child) this was no small task for him. He looks a bit weary from the travel but is plugging along nonetheless.

We then hiked from the Domain to Randwick Racetrack for a few miles where the evening vigil was to be held with the Pope. Young people sleep out under the stars after a prayer service with Pope Benedict and then they awaken to celebrate mass with the Pope the next morning. The place is jammed. It’s difficult to step in and out without trampling some poor teen-ager in a sleeping bag or kicking someone in the skull accidentally.

Here’s a bit of the set up for tonight:

Lauren Gaffey from Charis Ministries in Chicago discusses the good and badapsects of her World Youth Day experience:

This was usually Pope John Paul II’s “rock star” moment at past World Youth Days. Even more than when he celebrated mass, the evening vigil would be a huge opportunity for him to connect with all the different cultures of the world and give a brief spiritual message alongside playing up to the crowd with the various chants. Lexi, a young woman I’m traveling with recalled the chants of “JP2—We …

An on the spot report to start:

A consistent theme I’m finding among young adults here—and one that’s also been heralded by many members of the clergy here at World Youth Day—is the struggle of being embarrassed of being Catholic.  In secular society, religion is often a taboo subject, relegated to “a private matter” for most people. In other segments of the world, religion is a nuisance, at best, or a complete farce—something that is overly restrictive, or a fantasy that one tells themselves out of comfort. At World Youth Day those pressures simply disappear.

Below are interviews with some young adults who talk very openly about their struggles with being Catholic here in Australia.  As the week goes on, we’ll talk with people from other countries about their experience of faith—how do they pray?  Where do they most feel God’s presence in their lives?  Where do they struggle?  What big questions are they asking today and how are they navigating the secular world they live in with their faith and what role has their family and heritage played in that?

Spending some time with these young adults today made me see that they are very typical young adults who have had some influence by the practice of their families faith and while some seem to be going to church for the sake of their families, many have found great meaning in their spiritual lives. Some clearly struggle with regular practice, while others find that even being a typical college student who hangs out in pubs on the weekend but longs to have a deeper connection with the divine, but finds it difficult to fit into the normal church structures.

Tomorrow: The Pope arrives.

Nearly 150,000 young people from all over the world have gathered in Sydney, Australia to meet, learn, share their faith…and to get an experience of the Pope up close and personal.

While there are plenty of scheduled events to attend, the most compelling aspect of World Youth Day is easily the opportunity to interact with so many different young adults from all over the globe. On the afternoon of the event’s opening I had the chance to interview some young women from Tonga—a group of islands in the southwest Pacific—about the challenges of integrating their faith and Tongan culture. (Hear the interview here.)

My companions from Chicago and I ran off to the Opening Ceremonies later in the day and heard a surprisingly religious welcome from Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. He began his address to the pilgrims by saying: “Some say that faith is irrelevant in the 21st Century…I say they are wrong.  Some say that faith and reason cannot live together.  I say again, they are wrong.”

The Prime Minister went on to praise the work that the Catholic Church has done in with the poor, specifically their work in schools, hospitals, and offering places of refuge to those in need.

Firestorm
The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell set off a small firestorm of controversy this morning by starting off matters in this largely secular country with a staunch pro-life message. All the local papers characterized it as “populate or perish.” “No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable” the Archbishop said. “Ruthless commercial forces are telling young people that this is the way forward, this is the modern way and they remain totally silent of the difficulties and damage this does to marriage and family life.”

While he challenged Catholics to turn away from a contraceptive mentality and to have more children, many pilgrims here in Sydney, who agree with the heart of the Cardinal’s message questioned if the timing of his words at the start of World Youth Day was necessary.

Regardless, they came out …

On Sunday, July 13th Busted Halo® Managing Editor Mike Hayes will be featured on Canada’s National Catholic TV Network, Salt and Light at 7pm and 11pm (EST). The show is called “Catholic Focus” and Mike will be interviewed for the entire program by host Pedro Guevara-Mann on How to Minister to Young Adults in the 21st Century and the findings in his book Googling God (Busted Halo® Books).

Salt and Light TV is Canada’s first national Catholic Television Network. You can watch the show live over the internet as well by going to their website www.saltandlighttv.org and clicking on “Live Streaming” just under the logo on the upper left side.

Mike will also be covering World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia beginning on July 15 and running through July 20th for Busted Halo®.

For most of my adult life, I was what you might call, a casual evolutionist.  You know, the type of person who could handle your run-of-the-mill, cocktail-party conversation on Darwinism.  All the obvious stuff just seemed to make sense, like how giraffes with longer necks had a better shot than their shorter cousins.  Or that stronger lions killed more zebras than the weak ones.  Or how Donald Trump is still able to date fashion models because…

OK, well, perhaps Darwin’s theory had its limits.

But during my recent breakup with my girlfriend, Linda—somewhere between the “I swear this is the last 3 am phone call” and the restraining order—I had an epiphany. With all the extra time on my hands and a serious existential crisis brewing, I began reading Richard Dawkins’ popular book The God Delusion.  Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who became famous years ago for writing The Selfish Gene. His life’s work has been consumed with explaining how all of evolution goes back to genetics and all of life goes back to evolution.  The man is a genius. Reading Dawkins’ books was like being born again. It was as if the scales had been removed from my eyes. How could I have been so blind to how all-encompassing this theory of evolution truly is?

Origin of the Hotties
I finally had answers to all of the questions that had plagued me for years. Why am I attracted to certain kinds of women?  Well, obviously a beautiful woman is more likely to have beautiful children, and those children are more likely to reproduce and so it’s in my genetic best interest for me to fall in love with hotties. 

What about my thing for smart women?  Clearly, smart people have a better shot at surviving adversity—be it a wooly mammoth or a boardroom presentation—so my attraction to smart people has nothing to do with our shared “love of literature.”  I just want someone who will bear me smart, strong, sabre-tooth cat fighting children. 

All my categories had been blown apart. While I thought I was looking for …

Young lovers hear inhuman growls when they stroll past it. Passing tourists feel tugs at their shopping bags, but when they whirl around, nothing is there. Teenage thrill-seekers take photos of it and delight in the beast-like faces that show up in empty windows.

The abandoned Gothic mansion at 432 Abercorn in Savannah, Georgia is haunted, but it’s not the city’s only ghost-ridden structure. “Up to 80% of homes and buildings in the historic district of Savannah are haunted,” says Scott Warner, a ghost tour guide for Ghost Talk Ghost Walk in Savannah.

Shannon Scott, a local paranormal investigator, says that the American Institute for Parapsychology (AIP) recently designated Savannah, Georgia the most haunted city in the United States. “Savannah’s a living classroom for anyone studying the paranormal,” Scott says.

Savannah is noted not just for its ghosts, but also for the many houses of worship that line its Spanish moss-draped, tree-lined streets. So what better place than Savannah—locked in the Bible Belt—to learn what religion has to say about ghosts?

Luke 24: 37-39
James Caskey, a Savannah local and owner of Cobblestone Tours, a ghost tour company, says that he doesn’t see a contradiction between believing in the Bible and ghosts. Caskey, who researched the topic for his book, Haunted Savannah, says that the New Testament supports a belief in ghosts.

Caskey quotes Luke 24:37-39, where Jesus, after his resurrection, appears to the apostles and reprimands them for thinking he’s a ghost: “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

Caskey argues that Jesus did not chastise his apostles in Luke 24 for believing in ghosts but rather for believing that he (Jesus) was a ghost. Caskey writes in his book: “Jesus shows a familiarity with ghosts in this passage … He even notes the difference: …

A recent telephone call illustrates the problem.

Deb Geissler of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is working the phone bank for Barack Obama headquarters in her home state, when she reaches a man who bristles at the mention of her candidate’s name.

“Obama?” he asks, sounding offended. “Isn’t he the Muslim one?”
“No, sir” answers Geissler. “He’s a Christian.”
“Well, I heard he’s Muslim.”

Faith in Barack

Geissler recounts this story to me on an unseasonably cold, gloomy Friday in Aiken, South Carolina. It’s the day before the South Carolina Democratic primary, and Geissler—a middle-aged nurse with piercing blue-grey eyes—is fresh off a six-hour car trip from Tuscaloosa. She is driving around a low-income black neighborhood of Aiken in her silver Honda Civic hybrid, along with three students from the University of Alabama: Ruthie Puckett, Crystal Murray and Jarvis Edwards. Like Geissler, they’ve come to help any way they can in the hours before Obama’s most important primary yet.

On streets like McCormick, Dillon and Toole, the houses sit close together. Many feature wooden front porches, held up by cinder blocks, and cars, as often as not, sit parked on the lawn. The four volunteers take turns hopping out of the Civic with a list of addresses where they have permission to place Obama door hangers. Together, they make up a diverse quartet, representing in miniature their candidate’s broad appeal. They are black and white, younger and older, and even American and Canadian—Geissler is a native of Nova Scotia.

In her almost stereotypically polite, North-of-the-border accent, Deb Geissler expresses her faith in Barack Obama. And she explains that in her eleven years in Alabama, she’s seen how much nastier America’s politics can be than their Canadian equivalent. For her, there is no clearer example than when she spoke with that man back in Tuscaloosa, wondering how he got his information or, frankly, why it would even matter.

Faith, the Facts

Nobody is exactly sure where the rumor came from. Newsweek, which not long ago published an article about unsubstantiated accusations against Obama (all of which the magazine found to be maliciously false), wagered that …

Raymond Lewis, a retired mechanic living in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, tucks away his rosary and rises from kneeling and praying in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary in his living room, “Tonight, I take peyote and maybe see the Mother Mary,” he says.

Lewis, a 67-year-old full-blooded Navajo, who preferred not to use his real name, says he’s not unlike many Native Americans who practice their Catholic faith alongside their native religion. “There’s no contradiction. Both religions speak of being kind and living in harmony with one another, the Creator and nature,” Lewis says as he straightens a picture of a Navajo goddess, hanging behind the statue of Mary.

The Peyote Way
Lewis says taking peyote (a hallucinogenic) has always been a way for him to deepen his Christian convictions by allowing himself to meditate on Christ and occasionally see visions of the Mother Mary and other Christian saints, including Saint Francis and Saint Anthony. “Peyote is a sacrament. When I consume it, I feel holy and more open to holy things.”

But Lewis emphasizes that the purpose of peyote—which federal law protects the right of Native Americans to use in religious ceremonies—is not to get high or see visions. “If you see something, that’s fine, but it’s more important that you use the experience to look objectively at yourself and see how you can become more holy, more righteous, more Christian.”

Knowing nothing about Catholicism, Lewis says he converted to the Catholic Church thirty-one years ago after seeing a vision of the Mother Mary while on peyote. The next day, a Sunday, he says he went into a Catholic Church and saw the same image of Mary on the wall and knew he had to be a Catholic. “You can’t tell me that didn’t mean something,” says Lewis, who was formally baptized less than a year after his vision and today still regularly attends Mass and confession. “Just like Quanah Parker, I saw something holy that changed my life.”

Quanah Parker
“The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian …

“I need to tell you something.” My mom said. “Okay.” I prepared myself for something tragic, when instead I heard, “I’m not Catholic anymore, I just thought you should know.”

My mother’s religious coming out was overshadowed by the more familiar kind of coming out that had occurred five years prior. I was seventeen years old when she announced she was a lesbian. I am as aware as I can be of how difficult coming out was for my Mom. It was something she had been grappling with for the 30 years of my parents’ marriage. But this new announcement baffled me at the time; somehow leaving Catholicism seemed much more entwined in her life long identity.

When I was six years old she graduated from college with a BA in Religious Studies and began work on her masters in Theology, but her dedication to the academic study and practice of religion and Catholicism began long before she decided to go to college. Hoping to achieve the fullest expression of her faith, she joined a convent when she was eighteen. During her year there she slowly realized that though she felt called in some capacity, she didn’t feel that it molded into the life of a nun. She left the convent, married my father and began our family. She became an active member of the local church, and assisted and led community service projects throughout our town.

The Next Best Thing

When she began college and fell into the scholarly study of Catholicism, she found the venue she was looking for—to know the religion as wholly as she could, so she could spread that knowledge to others. The priest-hood was unavailable, so she turned to the next best thing—teaching.

She put together high school courses in Peace and Justice and Bioethics at the Catholic school my siblings and I would all at some point attend. She took to teaching naturally, and improvised her classes with a skillful flourish. This 4’11″ woman could take problem students and reveal them as lumps of love to less compassionate

…

The controversial comments made by Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright has re ignited a debate among many Americans as to how religious leaders should approach political issues of the day when they are preaching to their congregations. The pulpit has historically been a place where these sorts of topics are discussed—often sparking controversy.

BustedHalo® is interested in compiling answers to the following questions from as broad a cross section as possible of preachers (priests, ministers, rabbis, imams etc) who regularly give sermons to their congregations.

Please pass this questionnaire onto as many priests, ministers, rabbis, imams etc as possible.

Click here to submit your answers

1) How often do you preach?

9) Other comments/thoughts/anecdotes you’d like to share?

10) Given your experience, what are your reactions to the way Pastor Wright has dealt with the current situation? Has the press been unfair?

…

In the days leading up to the arrival of Pope Benedict in the United States, a number of media outlets contacted BustedHalo.com to get “our take” on the papal visit. During the interviews I did, I discovered a few themes developing that generally went something like: “Why isn’t Pope Benedict’s pending trip to America not a bigger deal?” or “Don’t the statistics about Catholic practice among young adults in the United States indicate that the pope is out of touch with the reality of American life?” There seemed to be some real skepticism about just how relevant Pope Benedict was and how much his trip to the United States truly mattered.

In an age where media and audience fragmentation continues to whittle away at our society’s sense of shared experience, it’s becoming more difficult to convince people of the importance of events that aren’t Presidential elections or Super Bowls. The task is made exponentially more difficult when it involves a public figure like the pope who doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories (liberal/conservative, traditional/ progressive etc). But since his return to Rome four days ago, my lingering impression of Pope Benedict’s time in the United States is that it was—to borrow a phrase from the lexicon of business strategy—a triumph of under promising and over delivering.

Tough Act

Since his departure on Sunday night, the most common reaction that I’ve heard from a variety of people across the board religiously and politically—and one that I share—is genuine surprise at just how important and positive Benedict’s visit turned out to be. Is that simply a function of expectations being so low for anyone who succeeded the charismatic and media savvy John Paul II? The last pope was certainly a tough act to follow, but the impact of last week’s visit can’t be explained away that easily.

Years after the sex abuse scandal first erupted, who could have foreseen how deeply wounded the Church still was and how powerful it would be to hear the Pope speak so openly and pastorally about this shameful time in our history? …

Lately I feel like my brain is on holiday. I find myself wandering the supermarket unable to remember exactly what I’m supposed to be shopping for, reaching the end of a newspaper article and having no idea what I’ve just read.

It has to be the sleep deprivation. A few happy, isolated incidents aside, I haven’t had more than five hours of uninterrupted shut-eye since my daughter was born six months ago. Maybe once she gets the hang of not waking me up at three in the morning I’ll get back to some good, serious thinking. For now my brain’s stuck on diaper rash remedies, dirty laundry, the absolute adorableness of little baby toes.

My previous multisyllabic lifeI used to be a lot deeper. I used to be a grad student and spend hours and hours in the library; I had a shelf full of books about culture and social systems and religion. I knew what a lot of really long and hard to pronounce words meant.

Lately most of my reading happens when I tuck my three-year-old in for the night, and has to do with talking animals and dump trucks and cartoon characters.

If I have to read the freakin’ Lion King one more time…I’m fine with this though. I now have an exhaustion-born appreciation for simple stories, simple images. I don’t mean anything along the lines of Teletubbies mindlessness or those too-long children’s books clumsily condensed from Disney movies—on four hours of sleep I feel ill at the thought of reading any more about Simba and that glorious circle of life.

I like kids’ books that are a little poetic, that aren’t part of some huge merchandising scheme.

The rock stayed the sameLuckily my son has had good taste these days.
One of his favorites—it belonged to my husband when he was a boy—is the nicely written God is Like: Three Parables for Little Children. It’s based in Scripture, and it uses straightforward metaphors to describe God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s …

Yankee Pope

Constantly Alert

“Praying fervently for the coming of the Kingdom also means being constantly alert for the signs of its presence, and working for its growth in every sector of society. It means facing the challenges of present and future with confidence in Christ’s victory and a commitment to extending his reign. It means not losing heart in the face of resistance, adversity and scandal. It means overcoming every separation between faith and life, and countering false gospels of freedom and happiness. It also means rejecting a false dichotomy between faith and political life, since, as the Second Vatican Council put it, “there is no human activity – even in secular affairs – which can be withdrawn from God’s dominion” (Lumen Gentium, 36). It means working to enrich American society and culture with the beauty and truth of the Gospel, and never losing sight of that great hope which gives meaning and value to all the other hopes which inspire our lives.”

Saturday April 19, 2008

From the Pope’s Homily at

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Different Voices

“For all of us, I think, one of the great disappointments which followed the Second Vatican Council, with its call for a greater engagement in the Church’s mission to the world, has been the experience of division between different groups, different generations, different members of the same religious family. We can only move forward if we turn our gaze together to Christ! In the light of faith, we will then discover the wisdom and strength needed to open ourselves to points of view which may not necessarily conform to our own ideas or assumptions. Thus we can value the perspectives of others, be they younger or older than ourselves, and ultimately hear “what the Spirit is saying”

…

Yvonne Draper came to Sedona to kill herself. With a ruptured disc in her back, a hip that slid out of the socket, knees and ankles that constantly went out, Draper was in chronic pain. Also burdened by personal and financial setbacks, Draper was ready to give it up in the place voted by USA Weekend as the most beautiful in America.

“But then,” she says, “something got in the way—Sedona.” Draper said when she arrived in Sedona in 2002 she was seduced by it natural beauty: towering red monoliths, wind-chiseled canyons and breathtaking crimson vistas.

Yet, it wasn’t Sedona’s scenic charm alone that saved her, but it’s spiritual energy. “The vortexes helped blow blockages out of my body,” Draper explains. Vortexes, as understood in Sedona, are locations where the earth’s energy radiates and offers special physical, psychological and spiritual benefits.

Draper visited the vortexes three or four times a month before receiving pain-relieving results. “The best way to experience a vortex is to sit or lay on a rock,” she says. “Squint lightly and look for the energy around you. And if you’re lucky, you might see energy vortexing.”

Draper says she’s seen men sit and weep near vortexes asking, ‘Why am I crying?’ She tells them they are releasing negative energy that’s been blocked in their bodies and affecting their physical and emotional health. “Sedona has done miracles for me and others,” Draper says.

And it’s not hard to find others who agree. With over three million tourists visiting Sedona a year, more and more people are finding spiritual answers, meaning and healing in this small desert community in Northern Arizona.

A Cancer Miracle
After learning she had cancer, Alison Nail, 34, was devastated and decided to spend a weekend at a healing center in Sedona. Not a big believer yet in New Age spirituality, Nail says she went out to a flat, red rock and lay down for four hours, asking the higher powers that be for answers about her cancer. Soon, Nail says, she felt spiritual guides visit her and share stories of how Sedona …

The children who show up for Kids ALIVE in Burlington’s Old North End number between 40 and 50, and most range in age from about 8 to 16. Many live nearby, in poverty. On a grey, snowy Saturday morning in February, they trudge in from the cold, filling a small, blue-and-white room in an old building on Elmwood Avenue, and shed their coats, hats and snow boots. The younger kids are shepherded to an adjacent playroom; the rest linger and chatter until a pastor, who oversees the weekly, nondenominational outreach program, leads them in some opening music. They sing: “Jesus loves me, this I know…”

The crowd is larger than usual today, and the reason for this is a young man named Justin Fatica, who stands by the door, bellowing in a baritone that nearly drowns out the rest of the room. Only 29, Fatica has already staked a claim as the most intensely passionate — and most intensely debated — Catholic youth minister in America. As founder of the national Hard as Nails movement, and leader of the Syracuse diocese’s Mega Youth Ministry, Fatica is the face of two successful ministry programs in the Northeast. Last December his life and work became the subject of a highly publicized HBO documentary (also called “Hard as Nails”).

He’s the one the kids have turned out to see. He takes the front of the room and begins his talk.

Justin Fatica, preaching in front of a group of youths, is a sight to behold. Compact and muscular with a square jaw, wide eyes and cropped dark hair, he jumps, dances, stomps and crouches. His voice vacillates between croaky, Jersey-tinged street talk and a sharp, excited bark. His eyes blaze and the tendons in his neck bulge, even when he’s calm. For emphasis, he throws his right arm outwards, cocking his index finger in an exaggerated point, or flicking his wrist as if he were swatting something—Satan, maybe—away. Frequently he is overcome by tears and stops to compose himself, only to launch into another yell.

With a few too-cool

…

A fourteen-year-old girl—
on tip-toe in the attic—
saw the huge horse-chestnut,

Westerkerk tower, and the random
flight of gulls. “Our tree
is in full blossom . . . even

more beautiful than last year,”
she wrote, on May 13th,
1944.

A nightingale once built
her nest beside the house
of a poet. He was ill.

He sat beneath a plum
one day, and when he returned,
his hands were filled with the scraps

of stanzas. Here is the plum:
I know I shouldn’t, but
I pluck one leaf, I crush it,

place it beneath my tongue,
releasing its bitter mint.
Praise to the angel’s wordless

gaze—her angled cut,
the balm of moss—who coaxes
the root, who stakes the shoot

of the chestnut and the plum.

You’ll find her along the fence line of Memory Hill Cemetery, to the left. The grave sits in a family plot. There are Treanors and Clines—relations of her mother’s—and then, finally at the edge, O’Connors. A low, flat, plain marble gravestone, next to two just like it belonging to her parents. The etching, too, is plain: a cross, trimmed with “IHS,” and beneath it her full Christian name, Mary Flannery O’Connor, the day she died (August 3, 1964), and the day, only 39 years earlier, when she was born: March 25, 1925.

It was tempting, when I was a pilgrim in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, to think of what might have been for her. And it is tempting now, on her birthday. Lupus, the same disease that claimed her father, hobbled her then took her life long before she had tested the limits of her genius. Today, she would have been 83—six years younger than Doris Lessing, who won this year’s Nobel Prize and is still writing.

But what O’Connor left behind remains vibrantly alive. Two gawky, if brilliant, novels, and two collections of nearly immaculate short stories that dig into the deepest spiritual truths. A posthumous collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, that remains required reading for any aspiring, or established, Catholic writer. And an anthology of her correspondences, The Habit of Being, which is hilarious and humane, and one of the most entertaining documentations of Southern life in twentieth-century American literature.

Slightly Grotesque

Milledgeville, Georgia is a town of about 16,000, two hours southeast of Atlanta. It’s where O’Connor lived, mastered her craft, died and is buried. The town remains a Flannery kind of place, slightly grotesque in that rural Georgia way that courses through her works (and that was shed long ago by larger cities like Atlanta and Augusta, where I live). Oddities abound, of a peculiarly Southern hue—tiny churches poke through the woods on the edges of town, and advertisements line the roads for psychics and an

…

It is the great peculiarity of the Church of Rome, that it presents to its worshipers an extraordinary variety of services, each of which has a special significance and fitness for the period of the year in which it is celebrated. Among the most beautiful of these offices are those which are celebrated during Holy Week, and which are called Tenebrae.

The notice above entitled “Tenebrae Services in the Roman Catholic Church” and published in the New York Times, on March 27th, 1872, sounds a little antiquated (when was the last time anybody said “Church of Rome?”), but it none the less rings true for me. Though it might be an odd choice, Tenebrae has long been my favorite service of the liturgical calendar. On the whole, I’m a liturgical progressive; I’ve never once longed for a return to the pre-Vatican II days when the congregation could only hope to get a good view of the priest’s back during services. But somehow I’ve fallen in love with a service that feels like a relic from an earlier, more austere time.

Tenebrae is literally set in darkness, at the height of the gloom preceding the Easter Vigil. It has not been popular in decades, and it would be misleading to call it a “best-kept secret” of the Catholic Church—it’s celebrated by some mainline Anglican and Lutheran communities as well. Further, such an assertion would require more Catholics to be in on the secret, which they aren’t. Most followers of the “Church of Rome” have never even heard of Tenebrae.

Happy Fault
I wish they would discover it. Tenebrae perfectly fits the Lenten season, when spring struggles outside to wrest the climate from winter, and inside, we hear readings about the Israelites in peril and Christ in extremis. We speak throughout the year of “felix culpa”—that “happy fault” of ours and Adam’s that brought about the Resurrection. But from Ash Wednesday up to the Easter Vigil, the happiness of that fault is purposefully obscured. “Alleluia” is banished. And if Lent is our Church’s season of discontent,

…

Holy Thursday begins what has been traditionally called the Sacred Triduum in Holy Week. It is the time in the Church’s calendar in which we liturgically commemorate the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. The significance of Holy Thursday is found at the Passover celebration of the Last Supper during which Jesus instituted the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Holy Orders. Though the conventional thinking is that the Chrism Mass—generally held earlier in Holy Week—celebrates the gift of Holy Orders and the liturgy for Holy Thursday focuses on the gift of the Eucharist, there is another form of priesthood that is commemorated on Holy Thursday that is often overlooked.

It would make perfect sense, of course, that the gospel reading for a liturgy devoted to the institution of the Eucharist would be one of the synoptic Gospels in which Jesus blesses the bread and wine (“Take this and eat it. This is my body”). It is significant—and surprising to many Catholics when they are made aware of it—that the Church chooses instead to proclaim the Gospel of John on Holy Thursday which replaces the Eucharistic scene found in the other gospels with Jesus’ washing of the apostles’ feet. Because of this nuance, I have often wondered if we are not only celebrating the gift of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, but also our participation in our Baptismal call as Christians to participate in the priesthood of Christ.

All baptized Christians are called to be priest, prophet and king. Our common priesthood differs from the ministerial priesthood because it is rooted in the Sacrament of Baptism but it is nevertheless just as real.

Shocking

Scripture scholars have noted that foot washing when entering the house of a guest was common at Jesus’ time. However, washing the foot of another person was not. Furthermore, no one could command a Jewish slave to wash another’s feet, because it was considered such a demeaning a task. In addition, this customary action was performed when one

…

A few weeks ago, I stood in the sacred spot where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. The Baptism site is in Jordan and I was in-country for a week to staff a high-level delegation of my organization that was looking at the Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan and Syria. (Millions of Iraqis have fled violence in Iraq and have either sought safety as refugees in the region, mostly in Jordan and Syria, or are trapped inside Iraq; many others who have been unable to flee are also in need.

Though my reason for traveling to this part of the world was work-related, my trip occured only six years since I too was baptized and ended a lifetime of saying “No” to God or “I don’t know” about God. While my work is not religiously affiliated, I can’t help but see a connection between my involvement with aid organizations and my own faith life; so, in a sense, my trip had an aspect that felt like a pilgrimage as well.

The reflection that follows is an attempt to convey how the ancient sites I visited helped my own faith come alive even more. It is an experience not unlike the Holy Week we’ve just entered where we recall events that happened in this small corner of the earth thousands of years ago that continue to impact countless Christians around the globe today.

Peace
On the day after I arrived in Amman, the capital of Jordan, I went to what I thought was going to be an English language Sunday Mass. Instead, it was in Arabic and I was thrilled. I had never celebrated Mass in a language of the Middle East—the birthplace of Christ and Christianity—with Christians who had always lived in the region. My Arabic vocabulary is 10 words and so I only understood salaam—Arabic for peace and part of the standard Muslim greeting Asalaam Aleikum, “Peace be upon you”, that I had exchanged for years with Muslim friends and colleagues—during the sign of peace, the names of Jesus and Mary and whatever was said …