Could it be... Seton or Satan?

My first experience of Elizabeth Ann Seton was when I visited her shrine daily in lower Manhattan when I was in New York City for financial advisor training in 1997. It's an unassuming Federalist chapel attached to a mansion built in the late 1700's on the site of her former home. Daily Noon Mass there was a trip. Folks of all varieties were present, from tourists to executives, all in the shadow of One World Financial Center where I was taking classes.

I was and am fascinated by the various roles in Seton's life. She was the first daughter of America to be canonized. Married woman of the world, teacher, foundress of an order of nuns. She was all of these things in turn, and she exemplifies what is best in the American spirit and in Catholic Social Teaching.

We could do worse than emulate her spirit of service. She, like our Lord, counted her position as nothing, and lowered herself to work on behalf of those who were in need. Like our Lord, hers was a choice she freely made.

Pope Paul VI spoke to the American situation when he said the following in 1975 at her canonization ceremony:

This most beautiful figure of a holy woman presents to the world

and to history an affirmation of new and authentic riches that are yours:

that religious spirituality which your temporal prosperity

seems to obscure and almost make impossible.

I shudder when I compare Seton's spirit of selfless service with the Spirit of Fear and Greed which animates our economic system. For example, we're fighting a war in Iraq whose economic cost is overshadowed by the lost opportunity cost of being unable/ unwilling to feed our hungry, house our homeless and educate Americans to a level we all deserve.

The tally on the box at the right shows the cost in dollars. That's bad enough. But, when you dip that dollar wad in the blood of innocent civilians as well that of our own service people the result is downright Satanic. We are not just shooting ourselves through the foot with this misbegotten war. We are stabbing ourselves in the heart.

I ask Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton to pray today for us, that we may have peace and gospel priorities for this dear country of ours.

Blessed be you, Lord Jesus, for having given us Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton as our sister. United to you, she loves us and carries us always in her prayers. May the fidelity and fervor of her life here on earth renew us in our own vocation. Hear us, Lord, in whom all the saints are one.

Athanasius and the God who is Love

I found the following in a local newsletter called "Got Culture?" Chesterton speaks very eloquently of the meaning of the Incarnation.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) provides the following insight into the depth of St. John’s words, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

"There had arisen in that hour of history [ca. 325 A.D. the Arian heresy], defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way.

If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son.

On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, “God is Love” [1 John 4:8].

Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other.

The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians.

It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family. "

---G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, CW2:359-360; cf. "The Endless Empire" in The New Jerusalem

Mary, Mother of God

As we approached the Christmas season I was asked by my spiritual director to consider Mary under her title of Mother of God or theotokos. The Feast of Mary, Mother of God is actually celebrated today (January 1st) in the Roman Catholic Church.

The icon above comes from the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, fka Constantinople. Here is where what became known as the Orthodox Church found its spiritual home until the Islamic conquests during the Middle Ages. I want to go there some day and pray before this icon.

The picture touches my heart because it, like my own life, is partially defaced. Yet, the image is still beautiful, and evokes a strong response. Even though our lives are fractured, or perhaps because they are so, Mary our Mother longs to make us whole and holy by confirming us to the image of her perfect Son.

Here is a prayer, the Alma Redemptoris Mater, with which I end the Office of Compline each night during Advent/ Christmas season:

Loving Mother of the Redeemer,
gate of heaven, star of the sea,
assist your people who have fallen
yet strive to rise again.
To the wonderment of nature
you bore your Creator,
yet remained a virgin after as before.
You who received Gabriel's joyful greeting,
have mercy on us poor sinners.

To which I add my own words:

Mary,
make our heart like unto yours,
pure, undefiled and always willing to do the Father's will.