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Photina n., An issue of water from the earth; a spring; a fountain. v.intr., To rise to the surface, ready to flow; to rise or surge from an inner source. v.tr., To pour forth. adj., In a satisfactory condition; right or proper. interj., Used to introduce a remark, resume a narrative, or fill a pause during conversation; used to express surprise.dictionary.com |
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![]() Saturday, January 18, 2003 One more note today to say Hurrah for Deb Mantel! Check out the fantastic review of her new CD (& you can check out the music on it, too...) posted by Heidi | 18.1.03 Saturday's chore day & Sunday's rest-and-not-usually-blogging day, so I'll be continuing down this Roman Road on Monday... posted by Heidi | 18.1.03 Today's Gospel was St. Mark's account of Jesus' calling of Levi (Matthew). It wasn't difficult to select an image to go with this reading--the painting that leapt to mind was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's work The Calling of St. Matthew, painted between 1599 and 1600. Alfred Moir wrote an excellent and concise article on the painting. posted by Heidi | 18.1.03 Friday, January 17, 2003 Road to Rome, Part X Summertime, my class was over, and I'd been to the library. Among other things, I'd checked out Under the Mercy, Sheldon VanAuken's sequel to his book A Severe Mercy, which I'd read the previous year. Having read A Severe Mercy, I was well aware that VanAuken was an Anglican, much of that book having been taken up with the story of his journey to Christ. I was finding Under the Mercy quite interesting in a detached sort of way, especially enjoying his commentary on the 1960s. He was right in the middle of the marches and movements and general upheaval, and it was great to get a relatively casual first-hand perspective on it, particularly since I could hold it up to who he'd been prior to the sixties. I was lying on my bed reading it one Saturday afternoon with the same sort of detached appreciation when I was jolted by the realization that he was beginning to talk about contemplating Catholicism. Suddenly this wasn't a distant someone-else's-reality, but something that actually had bearing on my own life. He's talking about it...does he actually become Catholic? If he doesn't, why? And if he does... If he does, it means that he chose Catholicism over the Anglican Church. Staying in the Anglican Church he could say he had just about everything--the sacraments, the liturgy, etc. As a Lutheran, I could easily write off the conversions to Catholicism of many Protestant Evangelicals; this, however, was different. And so I read on, riveted. How many different Protestant denominations all claim Sola Scriptura as the foundation of their theology--and disagree on major points of doctrine? Can any other denomination claim to have been guided (and continue to be guided) by the Holy Spirit throughout history? He threw in the examples of the circuitous and unexpected election of Karol Wojtyla (a man for whom I have always had a tremendous amount of admiration and respect) as Pope, and the unexpected stance of Humanae Vitae. As he kept tossing out examples, I was thoroughly shaken, particularly by the clincher that most Protestants approach the question of Rome backwards. The question isn't whether the teachings on the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception, etc., etc., are true, and thus whether the Catholic Church is what it claims to be, but whether the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, because everything follows from that. Everything follows from that... What was my big issue, the one I was fiercely holding onto? The direction of the Eucharist/Mass/Communion. Lutheran: Jesus's offering of Himself to us. Catholic: From us, at the hands of the priest acting in persona Christi, to God (and then to us). And I don't care which way the priest faces--that's still the way it is. The ridiculous thing is that I was holding onto the Lutheran Church on the mere technicality that Lutherans avoid the word "sacrifice" as thoroughly as possible in the context of the Eucharist. As soon as you admit (which I did, because the typology can't really get around it) that a sacrifice is involved, 1 Corinthians 10:18 comes into play: Consider the people of Israel: Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? So really, it was an issue for me whether Lutheran or Catholic--but it only stared me in the face in the context of Catholicism. Such a humbling afternoon...when I handed this huge stumbling block over to God, He gently showed me that what I'd seen as a wall was nothing but mist if I would choose to walk through it--but a tremendous wall indeed if I would not. Pride. Squeamishness. Fundamentally, far beyond the Mass, that I had been shying away from the reality that it was only through my hands, myself, being bloody with the blood of Christ through His offering of Himself for me that I had salvation. The cross--the greatest curse and the greatest blessing of all of everything. That was the turning point. And two hours later on this, the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul (discovered later), I was in Detroit being turned down for a lease in the interest of "truth," on the grounds that I was studying at a Catholic institution. posted by Heidi | 17.1.03 Today is the Feast of St. Antony, founder of Christian monasticism. Most of our information about St. Antony comes from The Life of St. Antony, written by St. Athanasius between A.D. 356 and 362. The Apopthegmata Patrum (the collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers) contains sayings attributed to him as well. The image to go with St. Antony's feast is St. Antony the Abbot and St. Paul the First Hermit by Diego Velázquez de Silva, a painter of the Spanish School in the 17th century. The painting is based on an incident in The Life of Paulus the First Hermit by St. Jerome, a document that is generally considered to be less authentic than The Life of St. Antony. Nevertheless, I chose this image over any of the rather hyperbolic images of the temptations of St. Antony. Some sayings attributed to St. Antony as well as some from other Desert Fathers are included in these excerpts from the Apopthegmata Patrum. "Whoever sits in solitude and is quiet has escaped from three wars: Hearing, speaking, and seeing. Yet against one thing he must constantly battle: His own heart." --Saint Antony Abbot. posted by Heidi | 17.1.03 Thursday, January 16, 2003 Road to Rome, Part IX In the beginning of January I went on the annual University Christian Outreach retreat, grateful for the energy to go, and not expecting much beyond a wonderful opportunity to be with people I didn't get to see very much from other chapters and spend time praising God. Saturday evening, Dan Keating was giving a talk on the kingdom of God as a reality "already" and "not yet." Somewhere in the middle of his discussion of a passage in Revelations about the hosts around the throne praising God, I had the very clear, concise, out-of-left-field, and second-person-ish thought You could go get your Master's in Theology at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit . Me: What?! What would I do with it? Does it matter? What did you think you were going to do with a B.A. in Social Anthropology? (A major I'd chosen--and a decision I'd solidified at a UCO retreat--after attending a grand total of two Anthro 101 lectures, not having any idea what I'd do with it, but never since regretting it...) I lost track of Dan Keating's talk after that, and sat there wondering if this was me, God, or dinner. I rode home from the retreat with a good friend of mine who I knew had been thoroughly investigating going back to study theology in order to eventually get a degree in canon law. I told her what had transpired during the talk, and as we talked about studying theology, I began to get more and more excited about the prospect of going back to school--something that, just 48 hours before, I'd had less than no immediate interest in. What to tell my parents, though... I expected that my parents would be pleased at my interest in studying theology, but would counsel me to head toward a nice Lutheran school--Concordia for starters, for example, and then Fort Wayne. And why a Catholic school, anyway? It made sense, though. Whenever I wanted information on a point of theology, I usually ended up turning to a Catholic source (usually New Advent) first. To a great degree, this was because the Lutheran catechisms & other formal documents (contained in the Book of Concord) are not very comprehensive--they contain information on the sacraments, the ten commandments, the Lord's prayer, and various points on which Lutherans differ from Catholics. Where did Luther himself (consciously or unconsciously) turn for the things that were not laid out in the catechisms? The Catholic Church. My perspective was basically that whether Lutherans (and those of other denominations) liked it or not, Protestantism had sprung out of the Catholic Church, and one might as well begin where it began--after all, the Lutheran Church had not gone back and started debating the Arian heresy all over again. They started from some point. What point? Fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ. To my great surprise, I heard no objections from my parents, and in the spring I started a philosophy class at Sacred Heart, the first of several prerequisites I needed to get through in order to enter the Master's program. The most significant thing I got out of the class was actually a sidenote. We (three students and Professor Goyette--talk about student-teacher ratio!) read a bit of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzche, and in one of his introductions to Descartes, Professor Goyette talked about Galileo and the dogma of Transubstantiation. I was already at least as intellectually familiar with Transubstantiation as the average catechised Catholic, and it really wasn't one of my big roadblocks to the Catholicism at this point. The good old "in, with, and under" of the Lutheran Church still made more sense to me, though. More sense, that is, until the explanation of substantial form versus accidents. Basically, that the essence, or substantial form, of a thing (the me-ness of me, for example) is distinct from the "accidents" of its material form--its appearance, etc. Transubstantiation refers to a change in substantial form, a change in the essence of something, without reference to whether its material form, its accidents, its appearance changes. I had been locked into the scientific mindset that what something appears to be (according to the range of scientific measurements) constitutes what it is, rather than the reverse. For more on substance and matter, check out a fascinating article (that I need to read all the way through): "Particle Physics, Matter, Reality, and God" by Jim J. McCrea. Suddenly Transubstantiation made a great deal more sense than "in, with, and under," but my issues were deeper... posted by Heidi | 16.1.03 Today's Gospel reading is St. Mark's account of the Jesus's healing of the leper--the same event recounted by St. Luke in last Friday's Gospel. In looking for another image to go with this story, I came across Modern Leper by Xavier Cortada, a Miami-based Cuban-American artist, attorney, and activist. posted by Heidi | 16.1.03 Wednesday, January 15, 2003 Road to Rome, Part VIII Messiah Church. Once upon a time, Messiah Lutheran Church. I had been there twice before during my summers with Detroit Summer Outreach, and it was exactly what I was looking for in a church...except that it wasn't Lutheran. They even used the Lutheran hymnal I'd grown up with (the Green hymnal--more frequently found in ELCA than Missouri Synod churches). But despite a Lutheran service and a Lutheran hymnal, great preaching, a wonderful, welcoming (& diverse & musically talented) congregation, it wasn't a Lutheran church. The congregation had left the Lutheran church some years/decades before (for reasons I never found out) and joined the Evangelical Covenant Church, itself a denomination that had splintered off of the Lutheran church sometime in the nineteenth century. I already had issues with Luther, though. During Advent of the previous year, a friend of mine had given me Christopher West's Naked Without Shame tape series because we'd had a number of fascinating conversations about it while she was listening to it, and I (even before that) was already pretty much in the Catholic camp where human sexuality was concerned. Christopher West's tapes are "a 14-hour crash course in John Paul II's Theology of the Body." And the sacramentality of marriage slammed home. Marriage, which the Lutheran church relegates to the civil sphere, the arguments being that it was instituted at creation, not by Christ, that it is for all of creation, not just for Christians, and that is does not directly impact the salvation of the participants. [If you want to see what can happen when you move marriage from sacrament to civility, check out this perspective on blessing same-sex marriages and then hold it up to the Theology of the Body...and, incidentally, let's be clear that even in Catholic theology the sacrament is conferred on the spouses by each other--the priest is only assisting and witnessing. See CCC 1623]. Issues with Luther. Issues with Luther regarding marriage, and issues with Luther regarding celibacy: Therefore all vows of chastity out of the married state are condemned by this commandment [forbidding adultery], and free permission is granted, yea, even the command is given, to all poor ensnared consciences which have been deceived by their monastic vows to abandon the unchaste state and enter the married life, considering that even if the monastic life were godly, it would nevertheless not be in their power to maintain chastity, and if they remain in it, they must only sin more and more against this commandment. from Luther's Large Catechism. But I had other issues with Catholicism, so I took comfort from the fact that the Catholic teaching is that all marriages between baptized persons are sacramental, not only marriages of Catholics (see CCC 1617 and 1640), and didn't head toward Catholicism. Three things came together in my decision to begin attending Messiah Church: First, repeatedly running into Ephesians 4:4-6: There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all, and confronting the reality that Messiah Church baptized (including infants) just as validly as the Lutheran Church, and their teaching on the Eucharist was at the very least not defined, so I could basically believe what I wanted (à la Episcopalianism). Second, I had a paragraph from Oswald Chamber's My Utmost for His Highest ringing in my head: Beware of making a fetish of consistency to your convictions instead of being devoted to God. I shall never do that - in all probability you will have to, if you are a saint. There never was a more inconsistent Being on this earth than Our Lord, but He was never inconsistent to His Father. The one consistency of the saint is not to a principle, but to the Divine life. It is the Divine life which continually makes more and more discoveries about the Divine mind. It is easier to be a fanatic than a faithful soul, because there is something amazingly humbling, particularly to our religious conceit, in being loyal to God. I realized that my sticking to a Lutheran church at that point was less from devotion to God than it was from fear of moving out of my comfortable niche in the Lutheran church and being put in a place to really examine my faith. Third and finally, the straw that broke the camel's back occurred when I stumbled across the statement of belief and practice of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which contains the LCMS's statement on the place of the Lutheran Confessions (the catechisms, etc., contained in the Book of Concord): The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod accepts the Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and subscribes unconditionally to all the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God. We accept the Confessions because they are drawn from the Word of God and on that account regard their doctrinal content as a true and binding exposition of Holy Scripture and as authoritative for all pastors, congregations and other rostered church workers of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (emphasis added). My major issue was simply the fact that I didn't hold the Book of Concord to be a "true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God." So I began attending Messiah Church in Detroit, and was still attending it (with no sign of choosing otherwise) two months later when I made the decision to begin pursuing a Master's in Theology at a Catholic seminary... posted by Heidi | 15.1.03 Mark's Gospel today talked about the crowds that descended on Peter and Andrew's house to receive healing from Jesus. Christ Healing is an engraving by J. Bertrand, done sometime in the nineteenth century. posted by Heidi | 15.1.03 Tuesday, January 14, 2003 Road to Rome, Part VII University Christian Outreach. I hit the ground running, and particularly enjoyed the brainstorming sessions we had to generate ideas for our opening party, which was a smashing success. And then came September 11. The nation reeled and came to a standstill, and then moved on, more soberly, more quietly, more deliberately for awhile, and our Outreach was no exception. September 20th, my mother's birthday, 17 years to the day after she received her own diagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma (which she was treated for & fully recovered from), my Mom accompanied me to my doctor to have her take a look at a lump I'd discovered just above my left collarbone in the middle of August. It felt like a grape, a green grape, just above my collarbone. I could poke it; move it a bit (though not freely); it wasn't painful. The doctor counselled waiting a bit more (& not poking at it, which tends to increase inflammation!). I waited, and it got bigger. Went back and scheduled a biopsy. By the time of the biopsy I was expecting the Hodgkin's diagnosis. A rubbery supraclavicular lymphadenopathy on the left side that was over 1.5cm occuring in someone whose mother had had Hodgkin's lymphoma. Coming home from the consultation with the surgeon I poked at it, having restrained myself for two weeks, and, sure enough, there was a companion sitting right next to the first one. A big green grape and a little green grape. Hodgkin's lymphoma (not to be confused with non-Hodgkin's, which is the opposite!) is a methodical form of cancer that travels from lymph node to lymph node to lymph node, not hopping around and appearing in unexpected places. Treatment tends to be very straightforward and very successful, provided it's caught in one of the first three stages. Mine pretty much could not have been identified any earlier--we're pretty sure I noticed it when it was only in one lymph node, which is amazing. To God be the glory! I began radiation treatment at the end of November, just after I started driving into Detroit for church... posted by Heidi | 14.1.03 Road to Rome, sidenote I realized that I have left out a singularly relevant detail in this story. Sometime in the spring of 1999 (which I can only really place because I remember I was sitting at my desk in my dormroom), my younger sister called me up and told me that she was becoming Catholic, though not yet in RCIA, and wasn't sure how to tell our parents. She was a senior in high school at the time, and her own journey (fostered again by rubbing shoulders with charismatic ecumenical types) is a different story. My reaction was shock, mostly because I had expected that if anyone in our family were to become Catholic, it would be me. She went through RCIA at Michigan State and entered the Catholic Church at Easter of 2000--and my whole family went to the Easter Vigil (my first Easter Vigil experience, though not the first Mass I'd attended). My sister and I tended to exasperate each other whenever we got into discussions about theology, however, so we basically stopped discussing it. posted by Heidi | 14.1.03 Road to Rome, Part VI Detroit. During the summers of 2000 and 2001 I did Detroit Summer Outreach, living with a group of young women (& near a group of young men) who served alongside me--Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. During both summers I was responsible for coordinating the Vacation Bible School program for the Cornerstone Schools that we served. It proved to be an excellent opportunity to see the practical application of Divine Providence--learning how to rely on God for ordinary things like enough black crayons for one particular art project. Learning how to trust Him both in my weakness and in my strength--and I discovered that it was easy (or easier) to trust Him when something was entirely out of my control, but much more difficult to trust Him with the things that I carried and held as my own responsibility. Our God delights in having us turn to Him in all things--not just in the times of desperate need! From August of 2000 through the spring of 2001, I lived and served, Standing in the Gap, in Detroit Community Outreach, a fledgling ecumenical Christian community near the heart of Detroit. I lived with a family and served together with three other volunteers. It was an amazing year of challenges, opportunities, and growth. One of the frustrations for me, however, was in finding a church to attend in Detroit. I was a Missouri Synod Lutheran looking for a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and I thought it would be a fairly straightforward process; I didn't think my criteria were very demanding. Communion every Sunday, decent preaching, no major liturgical omissions/changes, and, less important, a congregation that was at least somewhat representative of Detroit, and decent music. I am sure that there must be a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Detroit that not only fills but surpasses that list--I just didn't find it. And, in all honesty, I didn't go to that many--every time I did, it was an ordeal (although, I must say, the congregations themselves were by and large very welcoming!). I had fallen in love with the city--it remained for me to find a church before I could call it home. But as I started considering my plans for the next fall (fall, 2001), I found out that the University Christian Outreach chapter that I'd been a part of through college would be (very) short of women staffworkers in the fall. After praying about it, I accepted the offer to join UCO staff in the fall, and shortly after that decided to drive the hour-or-so it would take to attend the church I'd grown up in on Sundays. I would go where You would have me go... Detroit Summer Outreach 2001 finished up at the beginning of August, and I moved out of Detroit and in with another family to begin a school-year of staffwork with university students. posted by Heidi | 14.1.03 Today's Gospel was St. Mark's account of Jesus's encounter with a demon-possessed man in the synagogue. The image that I chose to accompany it is "The Exorcism" from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a book of the hours painted by the Limbourg brothers in the fifteenth century. The most familiar paintings from this work are from the calendars. posted by Heidi | 14.1.03 Monday, January 13, 2003 Road to Rome, Part V The upcoming conference came. The Millennium Conference was a five-day long youth (university/post-university primarily) conference over New Year's in Battle Creek, MI, the theme of which was For Such a Time as This. I came into the conference grappling with the decision to spend a year of service in Detroit, confronting the pros and cons, weighing it, and praying about it. Praying about it. And God confronted me. My plans for my life, or His plans for the life that He would give to me... After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you." -Genesis 22:1-2 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. -Romans 12:1-2 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. -Proverbs 3:5-6 "Here am I, take me; Thy will be done." At the end of the conference I felt as if a thick layer of dirt and dead skin had been vigorously sloughed off me--I felt sensitive, tender, new, clean, and aware to a degree I hadn't been before of the pollution that I encountered in daily life. Fortified by daily prayer with a bunch of young women who lived a few blocks away, I dove into second semester and swam through, ready to head off to fifteen months in Detroit with no idea what to expect. posted by Heidi | 13.1.03 Amazing weekend. Have no fear, I will continue my spiritual saga, but right now I just want to note that today is the feast of St. Hilary of Poitiers, bishop, fierce defender of the faith against Arianism, and Doctor of the Church. You can take a look at his writings. Today's image is an anonymous illumination of St. Hilary writing his commentary on Matthew. A prayer of St. Hilary of Poitiers: Prayer for Perseverance in Faith Father, keep us from vain strife of words. Grant to us constant profession of the Truth! Preserve us in a true and undefiled Faith so that we may hold fast to that which we professed when we were baptized in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - that we may have Thee for our Father, that we may abide in Thy Son and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen. Also note that it is the First week in Ordinary Time, so we are now in green... posted by Heidi | 13.1.03 |
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