St. Francis Parish
Magazine
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 2013: All Saints-All Souls-Christ the King
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Respice finem: Look to the end!
The month of November, liturgically speaking,
should cause us ‘to look to the end’ – respice
finem. All Souls Day: to look to death, the end of our life in this world.
All Saints Day: to look to the goal of our life, the end for which we have been
made, to become holy. Christ the King: the end towards which all things are
ordered and directed, Jesus Christ the King of All Things.
THE SAINTS
Dom Hubert van Zeller O.S.B.
THE ideal of the Christian soul is that God's
will should stand for so much in his life that in following it he comes to
resemble Christ with whom his whole purpose is identified. The saint may never
rest in anything short of that. To stop short is to restrict the response to
grace, and for sanctity the response must be as complete as it is constant.
Does this mean that the saint never sins? No, it
means that the saint never tires of trying not to. Does it mean that the saint
is always at the top of his power in the activity of loving God? No, it means
he is always wanting to be.
Sanctity is a condition of heart which may fail
again and again in its ideal but which is in constant renewal. Its
uninterrupted purpose of wanting God expresses itself in acts, and, when fully
informed by grace, becomes itself an act. It is like the numberless photographs
of a film becoming a single moving picture: the acts of perfection are so
continuous in the soul of the saint as to become an ever-present activity, and
so a habit.
For the ordinary Christian as for the saint, God
is the ideal. The Catholic who goes to Mass on
Sundays will admit that, when you get down to it
and face the essentials, it is God alone that
matters. The saint knows this too, but will not
let it rest at that. The saint takes that one single piece of truth and
expands it to its fullest implication.
To one man God is the terminus a quo and ad
quem; to the other God is the sum of his happiness. To one man God is the
means of his attaining to heaven when he dies; to the other He is the whole end
of his desire whether in this life or the next. One man will allow that God has
first claim on him but at the same time allows other claims which he wants to
see satisfied in his life; another man has God's claim always before his eyes and
takes care that there should be no room in his life for any other. The saint is
the one whose allegiance is habitually single.
Though the saint, unlike the other man, has
nothing in his life that is not God's, he is not on that account forever
preoccupied with the thought of what, in order to maintain that state, he may
next be called upon to renounce. Saints are not people who are constantly
discovering new things to give to God, new horrors to inflict upon themselves,
new worlds to conquer for Him. They are people who let God take, who let Him
arrange the matter of suffering, who let Him do the conquering.
The real reason why grace holds undisputed sway
over the soul of the saint is not so much that the soul is empty of attachments
and self-interest as that it is full of the desire to love.
What makes the saint different from the ordinary man is simply this: he is possessed by the will of God not only because he has offered himself to fulfill it as perfectly as he can but because it is for him the only reality There are many who offer themselves to fulfill God's will, but few to whom it is the whole significance of life.
What makes the saint different from the ordinary man is simply this: he is possessed by the will of God not only because he has offered himself to fulfill it as perfectly as he can but because it is for him the only reality There are many who offer themselves to fulfill God's will, but few to whom it is the whole significance of life.
It is because the essential difference between
the saint and the rest of men is something interior, something confined
to a way of looking at God and the things of God, that you can know the
saint only in some of his acts. The external effects of a man's attitude of
mind can help you to form a judgment- you know the tree by its fruits-but they
do not give the whole
story. You come to think of the essence of sanctity in terms of the external: you become so fascinated by the manifestations of sanctity that you forget what they come from.
story. You come to think of the essence of sanctity in terms of the external: you become so fascinated by the manifestations of sanctity that you forget what they come from.
Acts of sanctity do not spring from heroism but
from grace. Heroism is a quality which we
can grasp, which has a ring about it, which we know to be connected with fixity
of purpose, so we look for it in the saint. The operation of grace in the soul
holds less interest for us (but nothing except grace can make a man a saint. Neither
knowledge nor zeal nor industry nor endurance can make a man a saint. But it is
either knowledge or zeal or industry or endurance that we recognize about the
saints. So we mistake the cause and effect. Because we can imagine types of sanctity,
reconstruct the specific sanctity of individual saints, know all about the
various signs of sanctity, we tend to miss the actual sanctity that is being lived in
the world around us. This would not matter so much if it did not lead us to
regard saints as belonging to a different dimension of spirituality from the one to which we are trying to
accustom ourselves.
We have to be constantly reminding ourselves
that the prepared environment of the saints is the same as the prepared environment
in which we have to live out our own lives. And that the whole thing depends upon whether we meet it surrendering at every
point to the action of grace which is our only sanctity or whether we insist on
hewing out a sanctity of
our own which is no sanctity at all.
our own which is no sanctity at all.
Saints are not those who have won their way to
the topmost pinnacles: they are those who have lost their way in the back streets,
following after Christ whom they are always just missing. But they have not in fact
missed Him, for He lost all and they bear their loss with Him.
So saints do not become saints by being either
successful or unsuccessful. They become saints by being united to Christ. It is
only then that they become themselves. God meant them to become saints all along, and until they do they fall short of their own
identity.
THE DEPARTED
Hugh Ross Williamson
Our thought is on Communion, which once those we
loved shared with us, and because of that Communion we can, as in no
other way, still commune with them. "Since their life is plunged deep in
the interior of God; since He is their home, their food and, as our prayer so touchingly expresses it, their
sleep, if we identify ourselves more closely with Him "as we are about to
do when we receive his body " we shall enter into their life, and the
converse broken off on the visible plane will be resumed in a more living
fashion in the silent commerce of souls," says Zundel. "They are in
God, the very heart of love. God has not taken them from us: He has hidden them
in His heart that they may be closer to ours."
The very fact that we pray for our dead assumes
that they can benefit from our prayers. Otherwise it is a vain, sentimental
self-indulgence whose only effect can be to harm ourselves. But there is no
known time when Christians have not so prayed. The doctrine was part of the
Church's inheritance from Judaism and still, in the reading for anniversary masses for the dead, the
faithful are reminded how, a hundred years before Christ, Judas Maccabeus sent
a great sum of money to Jerusalem for sacrifices on behalf of his dead soldiers
who had died in sin " doing therein very well and honestly in that
he was mindful of the resurrection; for if he had not hoped that they which were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead; and also in that he perceived that they who had fallen asleep with godliness had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins."
he was mindful of the resurrection; for if he had not hoped that they which were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead; and also in that he perceived that they who had fallen asleep with godliness had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins."
In the synagogue worship which Christ attended,
prayers for the dead were in use and He Himself, during his ministry, categorically
contradicted the Sadducees, who denied survival. "God is not the God of
the dead but the God of the living; ye therefore do greatly err." He told
the parable of Dives and Lazarus which at least implies a state of consciousness after death in some
way dependent on conduct during life. And on the Cross, he promised the penitent thief: "To-day shalt thou be
with Me in Paradise." Inscriptions in the catacombs such as
"Intercession has been made for the soul of the dear one departed and God
has heard the prayer and the soul has passed into a place of light and
refreshment": the testimony of Tertullian: "We offer oblations for
the dead, as birth-day honors": the rules of
St. Cyprian, the explanations of St. Clement of Alexandria, and the Liturgy itself, leave no doubt of the beliefs and practices of the early Church. There is, indeed, only one writer, Arius, who opposes such prayers and offerings; and, as he also denied the divinity of Christ and founded a schism of his own, even his testimony is valuable.
St. Cyprian, the explanations of St. Clement of Alexandria, and the Liturgy itself, leave no doubt of the beliefs and practices of the early Church. There is, indeed, only one writer, Arius, who opposes such prayers and offerings; and, as he also denied the divinity of Christ and founded a schism of his own, even his testimony is valuable.
When we consider, on the one hand, the moral imperfections of so many Christians at death and, on the other, the
impossibility of , seeing God 'without sanctification,' as Hebrews puts
it, we are forced to believe in a life beyond the grave which includes a disciplinary purgation of character
while the soul awaits the final judgment and its
reuniting with the body.
reuniting with the body.
Yet, having insisted on this, it is necessary to
insist equally strongly that we know nothing at all of the nature of the purgatorial
state. The Church, always careful to make no dogmatic definition on the
subject, even went out of her way at the Council of Trent to reprove those who
tried to terrify the faithful with fearsome imaginary pictures. Bishops and
clergy were bidden" to exclude from their preaching difficult and subtle questions which tend not to edification and from the
discussion of which there is no increase either of piety or of devotion."
And a ' place of refreshing, light and peace,' as our prayer has it, can still be a state of purgation, since the
motive behind the purgation is our own love. Refreshed, we can. see the sins
that in our tiredness we did not think of as sins; light illumines the dark comers; in peace we dare
relinquish the possession of our souls.
CHRIST THE KING
Bede Griffiths
Christ is the Head
not only of all mankind but
of the whole physical universe; all things, in St. Paul's words, are to
be gathered
to a head in him. When he assumed a human nature, he assumed the whole
universe in a certain sense into himself. For by the
incarnation the whole universe is brought into organic relation with
Christ and
raised to a new mode of existence in him. When we assisted at mass we
were assisting
at the mystery of the "new creation," by which the whole world is
destined to be transformed, passing from its present mode of extension
in time
and space into the eternal order of being in God. The creation was
revealed for what it is, a symbol of the eternal reality manifested in
time, a
process of "becoming" always moving towards its realization in the order
of absolute being, where each creature will participate according to its
capacity in the divine glory. But still more intimately we were
assisting at
the return of mankind to its lost unity. Through the sacrifice of Christ
man- kind which had
been divided by sin was restored to unity, and the sacrifice of the mass
was
the means by which this unity was being achieved. Sin operates
constantly as a
force by which mankind is being divided, husband against wife, parents
against
children, class against class, and nation against nation. The sacrifice
of Christ was the
supreme power acting against this power of sin and drawing men into the
unity
of his Church.
Note: This year All Saints Day falls on Friday. You can
meet your obligation by attending the following Sunday after All Saints.
However, if you do come to Mass on Friday November 1st you will have
a chance to experience the Extra-Ordinary From, the Mass as it was celebrated
for the greater part of Christian history. But more importantly than that, you
will experience the silence of the ‘old’ Mass, what Charles Harris describes as
‘fearful and awe-inspiring . . . full of fear and dread’ . . an atmosphere of
mystical awe. St. Francis is the only Anglican Parish in our diocese and
city to offer the Extra-Ordinary Form of the Mass weekly.
Liturgical Silence: an Anglican View
(from an article by by
Peter Kwasniewski
at New Liturgical
Movement: http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org)
A friend of mine sent me a fascinating essay,
“Liturgical Silence” by Charles Harris, from an Anglican collection of studies
called Liturgy and Worship (1932), ed. W. K. Lowther Clarke. I was so
taken with it that I decided to present a summary with generous quotations and
some applications to our present liturgical life
Harris first talks about the psychology of silence, saying:
[T]he
effect of silence (or of subdued or whispered speech) is to lull the outward
senses into a receptive condition; to induce tranquillity, repose, and inward
peace; to relax the tension of the nervous system; and gradually to induce a
state of restful waiting upon God, which opens the ‘subconscious’ or
‘unconscious’ mind to the influence of grace and religious suggestion. (775)
In second place, Harris attempts to locate the
origin of the transition from a spoken Anaphora (Canon of the Mass) to a
partially or completely silent one.
At an
early but undetermined date, it gradually became customary, both in the East
and in the West, to recite certain of the most solemn Eucharistic prayers,
particularly the greater part of the Canon, in a very low or inaudible voice.
Such recitation was termed ‘mystic’ (mystikos),
an epithet which sufficiently indicated its significance. … It evinced just
such an overpowering sense, not merely of humility, but even of ‘abjection’ and
‘nothingness,’ as befits a creature admitted to the immediate presence of its
Creator. (775)
Almost as an aside, Harris dares a general
judgment about the character or feel of Catholic worship as compared with
Protestant:
There are
obvious disadvantages, both of a devotional and of an intellectual kind, in the
silent recitation of the Canon or Anaphora. On the other hand, it can hardly be
denied that the ‘mystic’ prayer of the celebrant has been a prime factor in
creating that thrilling atmosphere of rapt adoration which has been the
distinctive feature of Catholic worship throughout the ages; and which the more
intellectual, instructive, and ‘edifying’ worship of modern Protestants seems
unable to evoke. (776)
If we do not encounter the living God in prayer
and go out of ourselves to worship Him in spirit and in truth, we will be
hopeless when it comes to living a Christian life in the workaday world.
Third, Harris argues that the silent or ‘mystic’ recitation of the Anaphora (Canon of the Mass) is bound up with an ever more heightened emphasis, in liturgical texts as in preaching, on the awesome reality of the divine mysteries of Christ’s Body and Blood entrusted to the Church.
Third, Harris argues that the silent or ‘mystic’ recitation of the Anaphora (Canon of the Mass) is bound up with an ever more heightened emphasis, in liturgical texts as in preaching, on the awesome reality of the divine mysteries of Christ’s Body and Blood entrusted to the Church.
Harris argues that the Liturgy of St. James,
bearing within itself the early liturgy of Jerusalem, already substantially
existed in its present form as early as 348, and places its composition at
330-335 because of its allusions to Nicene Christology.
An
atmosphere of mystical awe pervades the whole of this Liturgy. The worshippers
are said to be ‘full of fear and dread’ while they offer ‘this fearful and
unbloody sacrifice,’ which is further described as a ‘fearful and awe-inspiring
(phriktēs) ministration.’ After
consecration, the elements are spoken of as ‘hallowed, precious, celestial,
ineffable, stainless, glorious, terrible (phoberon), dreadful (phrikton),
divine (theon).’ (777)
The Liturgy of St. Basil, attributed with good
reason to the saint (ca. 330-379) himself, is no different:
A sense of
‘numinous’ awe pervades this Liturgy, which speaks of the Mysteries as not only
‘divine, holy, spotless, immortal, heavenly, and quickening’; but also as
‘tremendous’ or ‘fearful’ (phrikton,
literally ‘to be shuddered at’). (778)
In terms of witnesses of universal practice in
the early Church, we have a stunning homily from a Nestorian source, Narsai, of
the late fifth century (Narsai died in 502), who tells us in Homily 17 that after
the Sursum corda and before the Sanctus,
all the
ecclesiastical body now observes silence, and all set themselves to pray
earnestly in their hearts. The Priests are still, and the deacons stand in
silence . . . the whole people is quiet and still, subdued and calm . . . Deep
silence and peaceful calm settles on that place: it is filled and overflows
with brightness and splendour, beauty and power. (779)
Harris concludes this treatment of oriental
liturgies by noting that the practice of the silent or ‘mystic’ recitation of
the Anaphora (Canon) was the established and official use of all rites by the
close of the eighth century—and this, in spite of the fact that the Emperor
Justinian attempted, in 565, to prohibit the practice by imperial decree. Lastly,
Harris, having summarized the Anglican tradition’s emphasis on the spoken
vernacular word, makes a practical proposal for the Anglican Church, of which
he is a member, with a view to recovering something of the mystical dimension
that had been lost.
An audible
voice need not be a loud voice. It is possible to obtain the full ‘mystical’
effect of silence by reciting the Canon in a very low and subdued voice, fully
audible to every careful listener in the church, and yet expressive and
suggestive of the deepest religious awe.
THE PARISH ANNUAL MEETING
As is our custom, the Parish Annual Meeting will
be on the Solemnity of Christ the King, Sunday, November 24th,
following the Sung Mass. This is the time that we elect new vestry members and
delegates to Diocesan Convention, the budget for the next year is presented, we
take accounting of parish membership and Mass attendance, baptisms,
confirmations, marriage, transfers in and out, the deaths of members of the parish. We also hear
reports from various parish groups, Sunday School, Austin Street, Altar Guild,
Servers’ Guild, Ushers and so forth. A light meal will be served.
CALENDAR
All Saints: November 1st
Mass according to the
Extra-Ordinary Form
6:45 AM
All Souls: November 2nd
Mass 7:00 AM
The External Solemnity of All Saints
Sunday November 3rd
Low Mass 8:00 AM
Solemn High Mass 10:15
AM
Solemnity of Christ the King: November 24th
Low Mass: 8:00 AM
Solemn High Mass 10:15
AM
Parish Annual Meeting following.
Thanksgiving Day:
November 28th
Mass: 10:00 AM
The First Sunday of Advent:
December 1st
The Conception of Our Lady: Monday: December 8th
Mass 6:45 AM
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord
Jesus Christ: Tuesday December 24th
Low Mass 6:30 PM
Solemn High Mass 10:00 PM
The Nativity of Our Lord: Wednesday: December
Low Mass 10:00 AM
Holy Innocents: Anglicans for Life Mass:
Mass 7:00 AM
Baby Shower and
Reception in the Evening
(details to be
announced)
Novena to Christ the King
Recite One Our Father, One Hail Mary and One Glory Be per
day followed by the Novena Prayer:
O Lord our God, You
alone are the Most Holy King and Ruler of all nations.
We pray to You, Lord, in
the great expectation of receiving from You, O Divine King, mercy, peace,
justice and all good things.
Protect, O Lord our
King, our families and the land of our birth.
Guard us we pray Most
Faithful One.
Protect us from our
enemies and from Your Just Judgment
Forgive us, O Sovereign
King, our sins against you.
Jesus, You are a King of
Mercy.
We have deserved Your
Just Judgment
Have mercy on us, Lord,
and forgive us.
We trust in Your Great
Mercy.
O most awe-inspiring
King, we bow before You and pray;
May Your Reign, Your
Kingdom, be recognized on earth.
Amen.
Novena to All
Saints
My heavenly brothers and sisters, from
those most renowned to those of greatest obscurity, I come before you now in
all humility and commend myself, and all who are dear to me, to your
intercession.
Pray for us always, that we may awake each
day with a burning desire for the Lord whose Face you behold, that we will
maintain an intimate personal relationship with Jesus, our Savior and Head, and
that we will not hesitate to proclaim God’s greatness to others, and love them
as the Lord loves us.
As you offer your continual praise before
the throne of God, I raise my heart to
you now to implore your powerful intercession for these special needs: (………).
I am confident that your prayers on our
behalf will be graciously heard by our loving and merciful Lord. By his grace, may we someday join you in the
glory of the Father’s house.
To be said daily for the Faithful Departed
Psalms 130. De
profundis.
OUT of the deep have I
called unto thee, O LORD; * Lord, hear my voice.
2 O let thine ears
consider well * the voice of my complaint.
3 If thou, LORD, wilt be
extreme to mark what is done amiss, * O Lord, who may abide it?
4 For there is mercy
with thee; * therefore shalt thou be feared.
5 I look for the LORD;
my soul doth wait for him; * in his word is my trust.
6 My soul fleeth unto
the Lord before the morning watch; * I say, before the morning watch.
7 O Israel, trust in the
LORD; for with the LORD there is mercy, * and with him is plenteous redemption.
8 And he shall redeem
Israel * from all his sins.
Rest eternal grant unto
them * Let light perpetual shine upon them.
May they rise in glory!
No comments:
Post a Comment