Everybody loves a good mystery.  Teasing out a riddle, figuring out how all the pieces go together: it’s one of the great pleasures of life.  We love being tantalized and confronted with question marks that lead suggestively away into shadows and half-darkness where things don’t quite add up.  To be sure, we don’t like blank confusion.  But we do love it so when some things come to make sense and elusively lead us on with the promise that more things will make sense as we press on.

The reason we respond this way to mystery is because we live in a mysterious world and much of our lives as human beings involves teasing out the Mystery and trying to make sense of it all.  Of course, it...READ MORE

When I first became a believer, it was in the context of a small non-denominational group of Evangelical charismatics who lived on my dorm floor.  I knew from nothing about Christianity when I became a believer, having never attended Church when I was growing up.  My total information pool about the Christian tradition consisted of Sunday school on the Air Force base where I was born (from which the only thing I remembered was the notion I somehow formed that you were not supposed to say Jesus’ Name out loud).  In addition to this, there was A Charlie Brown Christmas, some Bible movies like The Robe and Ben-Hur, a few Chick tracts I picked up at Halloween, and my stab at reading the Bible...READ MORE

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is an idea that has fallen into disfavor in modernity, for various reasons.  In Protestant circles, of course, the notion that the Mass could be a sacrifice is often seen as a repudiation or usurpation of the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, as though it’s an either/or choice.  Perhaps the all-time favorite Bible verse among such critics Hebrews 9:25-26:

Nor was it to offer Himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the Holy Place yearly with blood not his own; for then He would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, He has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

Such...READ MORE

Luke puts bookends on his gospel.  There is both a prologue and an afterword to his gospel that are meant to refer us to the source and summit of our worship: Jesus Christ fully present in the Eucharist.  The front bookend is the story of the Nativity, where Luke bothers to give us a very significant detail:

And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger. (Luke 2:7)

Why does Luke pause to tell us Jesus was laid in a manger?  Not because he was anticipating the needs of millions of greeting card manufacturers centuries hence and their requirements for a picturesque Christmas scene.  No, the reason he mentions this detail is because of...READ MORE

Yesterday, we looked at the fact that the book of Revelation reflects the shape of the Mass.  We noted that that it begins with a penitential rite, moves on to the Liturgy of the Word and is filled with thanksgiving.  The final thing to note is that it climaxes in exactly the same way that our worship on earth climaxes:

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.” ‘(Revelation 19:9)

Reality, like the Mass, is consummated with the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. 

It is easy to see the imagery in the book of Revelation originating in cloud cuckoo land.  But the reality is that...READ MORE

Revelation was regarded as a dicey book in the early centuries of the Church.  People then, as now, didn’t quite know what to make of it.  Many shared the sentiments of a much later Christian named Martin Luther, who said, “A revelation ought to reveal.” Amidst all the battles, beasts, horns, monsters, !@#$% of Babylon, white-robed martyrs and images of Jesus with a sword coming out of his mouth, ancients (like moderns) sometimes had a tough time figuring out what the visionary was getting at.  But at the end of the day, the Church wound up including Revelation in its canon of Scripture.  Why?

One big reason was that Revelation reflected the life and worship of the Church.  That is,...READ MORE

The news last week that John Paul II practiced various mortification and the totally predictable tongue clucking from the “That’s just… just sick!” crowd prompts me to offer a little excerpt from my chapter on the Holy Rosary from Volume 3 (Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood) from Mary, Mother of the Son:

The Scourging at the Pillar

In the Rosary, we are invited to contemplate the reality of redemptive suffering in the mysterious Scripture that “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).  In our culture, that’s supposed to be the same thing as saying “We are invited to contemplate sick, masochistic weirdness.”  For our culture appears, at first glance, to have no place for redemptive...READ MORE

Thursday, I was in normal old Seattle.  Fourteen hours—just half a day—later, and I’m in, like, this whole ‘nother country on the other side of the globe: the sort of country you read about in books when you were a little kid!  Australia is this slightly unreal place were kangaroos don’t live in zoos but just bounce around loose!  They grow platypuses and koalas and wallaroos here!  And Tasmanian Devils!  The plants are completely different (except for gum tree, we have those in Seattle).  The birds?  They have budgies and cockatoos just flying around down here wild!  And everybody drives on the wrong side of the road and sits on the wrong side of the car to do it!  And the...READ MORE