Daily Mass and Technocracy

One of my friends shared how going to daily mass has provided his life an anchor. The repetitive liturgical action, rather than tedious monotony, has become the orientation point for his whole day. Everything else might change, but Christ's offering to the Father in the power of the Spirit is in the center of his heart and feeds him the spiritual nourishment that he needs for whatever challenges come. 

His observation makes sense when we think about the Eucharist and the power of our faith. The power of the Christian faith purifies the heart, healing, restoring and raising up all that is good, noble and true in our innermost being.  This power comes from the Cross of Christ and is communicated through the truth and love of the Holy Spirit.  At Mass, the outpouring of the Spirit is manifest and establishes us in these realities.  Such faith allows the heart to receive this great gift and it renders the depths of human existence vulnerable to the merciful tenderness of God.  

My friend's witness has helped me see that this is true even in a technocracy.  Indeed, he and I live in a society ruled by technological power.  Technology by itself is a good thing and can lead to human thriving.  But it can also be used for manipulation.  That is, instead of serving as a tool that protects and promotes human dignity, it can be abused even to the subjugation of a whole society towards a merely material end. Our use of technology should cede space to our faith not the other way around. This, however, is exactly our struggle: to protect and promote the sacred in daily life. 

When it is used to keep faith out of the public square and hidden behind the walls of a church or a home, technocracy has achieved a certain tyranny, locking the human spirit in the merely material and pharmacologically efficient. In such a world, there is no more room for the sacred in daily life and the result is the monotony of constant innovation, one irrational social policy after another until we think absurd inconsistency in normative. When my friend told me about his experience of daily mass, I was thinking about how we live in an era of extreme manipulation and I found in his observation an answer to how to be Christian in the midst of technocracy.  

His insight into daily mass is key.  If we do not find a way to live our faith in the face of social manipulation, we will easily come to worship the work of our hands. Indeed, the human heart is made for religious devotion even in an empty, de-sacralized world. If it does not find God, the heart will cling to something. 

Without the sacred, the world sinks into chaotic meaninglessness, a meaninglessness no heart can rise above without divine help. Still, even in nihilism, the heart needs to believe in something. This is why the world that cuts itself off from God has its own kind of faith that is opposed to the Christian faith. In this world, we put of faith in the making of things and the shaping of perception.  The tangible, visible, and measurable results are the absolute standards for life, and this creed demands that we shut our eyes to whatever is beyond the results of our own industry. If not actual in human making, even if the heart of a child, such a mentality blindly holds that it is not real. Such obscuriticism never knows the gift of creation or the even more wonderful gift of our redemption.  

To some extent, we need to examine our conscience about the ways in which we have failed to live our faith in a post-Christian world. For failure to receive the gift of God, we should not be so shocked when our children do not find our faith attractive. Instead of the power of Christ, we too often baptize them in the pusillanimity of the way we live it out. They see how we have allowed our social and pharmacological fears to drive our day to day existence instead of God, and they rightfully reject our hypocrisy. 

We must look at what we have not done in regards our faith in the public square.  We have allowed our educational systems to convince them that shared resentment over evil is actually able to hold a society together and advance it toward peace, and then we wonder why they do not see any advantage to forgiveness or mercy. We have allowed the entertainment industry to educate them about the meaning of human sexuality, and then we wonder why chastity is not attractive to them. They see us passively accept a spirit of accusation and resigned despair in our communities, and then wonder why our explanations of Christian hope fall flat.  We have failed to witness the power of God in the face of death and sin, and therefore cannot help lift their eyes to the fulfillment of all desire.  

The way out of such darkness is the sacrificial love of Christ - believing in it to the point that we follow our crucified God in daily life. Under the shadow of the Cross, the storm of secularism is not the last word about humanity.  The love revealed in His death, a love that alone raises to new life, is more powerful than technology, more actual than results.  

This is where my friend's comments about daily mass come in.  Mass orients us beyond ourselves and above what is merely visible. Daily mass puts one in the position of pondering the Word of God, taking up the ascetical discipline of our faith, resisting the boorishness of contemporary living, fasting, forgiving, seeking forgiveness, helping our neighbor, entering into silence before the Risen Lord, allowing Him to reveal the Father to us through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. 

All of this makes space for the glory of God in the world, even an overly technologize one. It is the glory of God shining through our lives that wins the hearts of those we love. Availing the world to the love of God, such faith provides the only compelling answer to the riddle of death, guilt and longing that plague the human condition.  Above and beyond what is comfortable and what might help us live longer, this is the one hope that remains even when everything else in the world falls apart.  

The Gates of Holiness

"Open to me the Gates of Holiness: I will enter and give thanks."  The holy is at once the point of departure and the destination of humanity.  What is sacred is also gated, a reality protected against the chaos of the profane and merely secular.  To enter into the Gates of Holiness is to find shelter from the dangerous voids that otherwise haunt our existence.  Bereft of what is holy, life easily drifts into meaninglessness. Indeed, failure to respect that the human person is first of all spiritual and religious before he is biological and political is a catastrophic failure of secular society.  

When we walk away from the Gates of Holiness and leave our hearts out in the cold, we loose the capacity to recognize the goodness of God and give thanks for the blessings that He lavishes on us.  We live in a world ordered toward the holy and we have begun to discover just how dehumanizing it is when we go against this order. Biological health and political acceptance are things lower than human dignity, things meant to serve the greatness of our vocations. Yet whenever we place a lesser good above a higher one, the human spirit is lowered rather than raised up no matter how respectable the lesser good seems to be. We are always diminished when we prioritize passing things over the unchanging love of God.  Those things were only meant to take us to the Gates, but they can only do so when we use them to seek God. When we seek them instead of God, we are locked out of the sacred, trapped in the profane. Bogged down in the mundane, we cannot lift up our hearts to the Lord, and we exist bereft of the truest and most just thing our frail humanity was meant to offer.

If we have done things that keep us locked outside the sacred, we also do not enter the Gates of Holiness because of things we have failed to do. We suffer coldness of heart, the coldness outside the Gates of Holiness, to the extent that we have allowed ourselves to be bullied into believing that it is okay to abandon the sick and dying when they most need a word of hope. We succumb to the manipulation of meaningless secularity when we convince ourselves to forsake gathering together with the Risen Lord at Mass, even if we do so for fear of earthly death. 

As creatures that are on their way through this world and not at home in it, we need sure reference points, signs that point the way, and standards under which we might rally to help each other move forward.  Such are the Gates of Holiness and Jesus Christ has opened the Way out of unsatisfied frustration and into a new fruitfulness for humanity. Without Him, even should we find these gates, we could not gain access or enter. But with Him, even in the very face of death and the loss of everything we hold most dear, a portal opens and we stand on that firm ground in whose vast horizons alone we find courage before the Face of God and the confidence to give Him thanks.   

The Pathway of Extreme Humility

Jesus Christ has opened up the pathway to freedom and this pathway is the pathway of extreme humility. It is a trail blazed by the Word made flesh and a journey that leads to the Burning Bush where the limitlessness of God sets the limits of man aflame with love. Love alone knows how to find this trail and faith, unshod and thus vulnerable, progresses step by step into what would seem to be powerlessness.  Such a journey is never an evading of responsibility but it is courageously engaging the task at hand with total reliance on God.  It is a pilgrimage that one makes under the authority and power of heaven. 

The earth is filled with chaos and its own power and authority are subject to futility and death. For this reason, no earthly power ever succeeds in stemming death.  Yet, the temptation is to grasp for and covet control even to the point of coercing the behavior of others. Indeed, in a world that is passing away, self-preservation means either gaining control over circumstances as long as possible or else losing it all together. The more one lives by the struggle for earthly power and authority in this way, the more one's own freedom is diminished until one is competely subservient to the very power coveted. 

On the royal pathway of true freedom, recourse is made to earthly power only as love for Christ deems necessary and then it is quickly surrendered. Indeed, regarding the possession of earthly power and authority, the pathway of extreme humility requires total indifference to anything that is not God's will.  Rather than taking control for the sake of control, one patiently provides order only to the degree that others might be drawn to the truth by love. 

This kind of indifference to earthly power is impossible except to those who by faith live under the power and authority of heaven. In the Kingdom of Heaven, confidence in the Father overcomes earthly fears and anxieties.  Even if one dies, death is defeated and sin has no claim over the heart before the love of God. Instead, a love stronger than death reigns over the chaos of life and leads to the sacred until one crosses the threshold into God's order and peace.  

A true orientation point for one's whole being is found when one takes off one's shoes before this Burning Bush and listens with the ears of one's own heart. Here, true authority and power are given not grasped in accord with one's identity and mission before the Lord. Here, God opens His Heart and one learns to rest in the glory of His Name.

Christmas Light

Christmas is a special holy day. Normally, on holy days, there is one mass that is celebrated.  Three masses are celebrated for Christmas - at Midnight, at first light and for the rest of the day.  Each of these masses celebrates a sacred characteristic of the Christmas light. 

At Midnight, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is brighter than day in the dark of night and filled with angles and their songs. Thus, we celebrate the Mass of the Angels. It is that primordial and undimmed radiance shining above the world's darkness from before the sun and the moon, on the first day of creation. This angelic light shows shepherds the way to the Messiah and evokes the gift of faith.

At Dawn, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is a new morning glory. It is the first light of day and under these rays those tending flocks beheld with human eyes the saving wonder heralded by heaven. Thus, we celebrate the Mass of the Shepherds.  The brightness of this new beginning is the only newness the tired out cycles of historical life have ever known. These cycles are subject to death. But this light reveals salvation has begun. Wrapped up in the swaddling clothes of a visible existence, First Truth babbles in humanity at last. It is the sacred truth that dawns in the chaos of the world to bring hope.

In the Day, the Christmas light celebrated in the liturgy is a glory that the powers of darkness cannot defeat. Thus we celebrate the Mass of the Nations. In this liturgy, our hearts are filled with a victorious and sovereign light of peace, a light that no darkness can overcome, the light of eternal life. This unending light awaits us in the world to come but it also shines even now whenever we dare to love for the sake of God.

The Word and Silence

In the Nativity of the Lord, the cries of the world, the cries of the human heart and the cries of God coincide.  These shared sighs and aches unveil silences overshadowed by Divine Power and out of which the Savior comes.  

Though unaided reason is ignorant of His presence, God has never been indifferent to the plight of even the least of His creatures. He is always at work on their behalf. That is why we find Him throughout the Scriptures searching in the world's silences and poverties as a shepherd seeks out lost sheep in a wilderness or a father his lost son.  

The Living God implicates Himself in the misery of the most forgotten, overlooked and rejected until He too is rejected, overlooked and forgotten. He is not disgusted with his children when they cry to Him no matter how lost they are. He eagerly takes them home and embraces the consequences of their sins, suffering them with the wisdom that knows that evil is not without limits. Love goes farther than hatred, lasts longer than resentment and bitterness. Love heals what we have destroyed.   

Such a pathway involves humiliation in the short run and in the exigency of the moment looks as certain defeat. But God's love is never defeated. In the pure excess of His love, God chooses the humiliated and the humble even to the point of his own humiliation and death. But His love is stronger than death and the chaos of Hell has no hold on this Light. So He raises up those who are bowed down and refreshes them for the great journey home. The humble "yes" of those who choose to serve Him leads to all this and more. The object of his Divine Affection, these are the souls who He invites into even deeper silences, spacious places that the world cannot know, nights so dark that they alone can hold a light brighter than day. 

For those who choose to trust Him, He invites them to go where no creature has ever gone before. He makes this invitation by entrusting to them His Son. The invitation is by way of faith, the decision to believe when this choice seems most difficult to make. This is because trust alone welcomes God and trust only becomes strong when it is tested. The Word comes to those who will welcome him in times of trial and hardship - He sees the strength of His Father in them, and this delights His heart. He comes in the vulnerability of a baby. He comes as the pure gift of the Father for no other reason than love and love alone. 

Into the silence of the world, the Father has spoken his Word.  Into humanity's deepest silence, the Word entered and resounded.  That deepest silence was in the form of "let it be done to me." It is not only a silence of soul but also a silence of body, a taking flesh in a loving womb because so perfectly held in a humble heart. Sin does not know this silence but through this silence the Word communicates power to overcome sin. This same power waits to be enfleshed in our own lives too - a transformation in light and love.