Lent - Day Twelve - Between Heaven And Earth

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Second reading Philippians 3:17-4:1 © Our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes Christ to transfigure us My brothers, be united in following my rule of life. Take as your models everybody who is already doing this and study them as you used to study us. I have told you often, and I repeat it today with tears, there are many who are behaving as the enemies of the cross of Christ. They are destined to be lost. They make foods into their god and they are proudest of something they ought to think shameful; the things they think important are earthly things. For us, our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the savior we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body. He will do that by the same power with which he can subdue the whole universe. So then, my brothers and dear friends, do not give way but remain faithful in the Lord. I miss you very much, dear friends; you are my joy and my crown. This morning we almost had a tragedy and it was just the luck of the Irish that kept it from happening.  One of the brothers whose turn it was to make breakfast started the fire which had gone out during the night.  He went over to the bag which held the cooking utensils and noticed that it had not been sealed properly the night before.  He opened it and reached in and got the coffee pot and the pot used for making cereal.  As was his custom he grabbed a towel and was going to dust the inside of the pot but something made him look inside it first.  Inside was one of the deserts most fearsome creatures, a deathstalker scorpion had taken up residence there during the night my companion was just inches away from getting what could be a lethal injection of the neurotoxin that this delightful desert creature uses to kill its prey.  The tiny beast was ready and willing to dispense a jolt of his special elixir but to his credit, the man holding the pot did not panic.  Instead, he went to the edge of camp and catapulted the creature out of the pot as hard as he could.  The little guy had an experience most deathstalkers do not receive, the experience of flight!  Now, in spite of the colorful name of this creature, death to a healthy human, while not unheard of, is unlikely if they are stung by this scorpion.  From what victims say it is not an act of mercy to survive the sting as the potent venom causes great pain.  Children and the elderly are most vulnerable but it is considered a medical emergency if you are stung by one of these and in our present situation, medical help and the antivenom that is required is so far away that any dying that the victim would be doing would be done by the time any help could arrive.  So it was on this cheery note that our day began and in our morning prayers, we thanked God that our friend was spared the agony of a sting from this scorpion. After breakfast, as usual, we broke camp but it took a bit longer because we were carefully checking to make sure that the little fella hadn't brought any friends of his own.  No other examples of this miniature death machine were found and as the sun rose above the horizon, we began our trek.  While walking today, I began thinking of death but not death itself with all of the pains that might be attached to it but rather what happens after death. Physically, once the blood stops pumping your body begins it's the journey back into the elements that it is made of.  Tissues break down and in no time the only thing left of bodies that are not specially embalmed such as the Egyptians of old will be our bones.  And years from now, even those bones will return to dust.  All that was "me" will be gone.  The flesh that I work so hard to keep animated, the brain that fuels my thoughts and emotions will be no more.  Yet, through this all, I survive not as a memory on a tombstone with a date of birth and date of death and if I were rich enough some clever saying to mark my time on earth. What will remain of me is any of the good that I accomplished.  My mark will not be a long obituary story nor a small death notice.  My mark will be the seeds of love I planted while I, a body and a soul, walked and talked on this earth.  My soul will be in heaven.  I will be next to those I love and those that love me and we will glorify God together in songs of worship and praise.   This reward, this new life after death is as certain as gravity and as we are counter-culture people, our ways will receive persecution for "forward thinking" men and women who only can see what is in front of them and who take no notice of God, His laws, and His rewards.  They will be furious when we point out that their way of life is contrary to the Word of God.  They will tell us to follow our God in our own way and to leave them alone.  If that was only possible.  They do not live and let live as they want us to do, they pursue through the rule of law to make their rights to sinful things the law of the land.  They will do all that they can to enforce their rights while limiting ours.  But these people who are the most pitiful creature on earth are the enemies of Christ and the Cross. They existed at the time of Christ, at the time of the early Church, at the time of the great revolt of the Protestants, and exist until today.  Our Church is built on rock and in spite of the scandals of the moment it will survive and thrive because Jesus said so.  Paul tells us that our real homeland is in heaven.  We cannot keep silent about this because God wants a bountiful harvest and wants as many as possible to join Him in the never-ending feast. So, stir up your spirit, gird your loins and announce the Good News by the way you live and by the people you love.

Was He Kidding Or What?

Foreward:

There is no work as onerous as reinventing something that has already been invented, found to be useful and still does the job.  What follows is a reprise of a blog entry made several years ago on the Feast of Corpus Christi.  I was writing with passion that day and except for the addition of a comma here and an article there, I am reproducing it here.  Sometimes, and this is one of those occasions, I can't find anything to fix.  Praise to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Corpus Christi 2017  Michael

For fifteen hundred years there was no conflict when it came to the Holy Eucharist.  The Church believed that it was the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. Some of the "reformers" took issue with this, notably not the prototype heretic Luther who maintained that it was a sacramental union between Jesus and man.  Other reformers such as Calvin, Knox, and others believed it was only a symbolic memorial.

The Council of Trent at that time confirmed what everyone up until that time believed:

 Christ “instituted this Sacrament, in which He poured forth as it were the riches of divine love towards man” so that the Eucharist would be:

a remembrance, “to venerate His memory” and “show forth His death until He comes to judge the world.”

the “spiritual food of souls, whereby” He feeds and strengthens “those who live with His life.”

an “antidote, whereby we may be freed from daily faults [venial sins] and be preserved from mortal sins.”

a “pledge of our glory to come, and everlasting happiness”

a “symbol of that one body whereof He is the head, and to which He would fain have us as members be united by the closest bond of faith, hope, and charity…   Source: Laura McAlister

The Council of Trent like many councils was a reactionary council called to combat issues that came to because of the rebellion of Luther and the others.  Contrary to what some critics of the Church say the Council of Trent did not invent transubstantiation but rather codified what up until that time had been believed by everyone, everywhere.  I can see why today's Protestants would have trouble with the concepts codified by Trent.  The Council rightly defined the Eucharist as the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ.  This position taken to its logical end proves the Catholic point and thus was bitterly contested by the "reformers."  But for the sake of this blog let us suspend the tenants of the Council of Trent and go to what the "reformers" claim is the only source of Christian Doctrine, the Bible itself.  Let us also restrict ourselves to what the founder of the Catholic Church, Jesus, Himself said about the Eucharist.  (Please supply quotation marks where you think they should go,,,)

While they were at supper, Jesus took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave to his disciples and said; Take and eat. This is My Body And taking the chalice, He gave thanks, and gave to them saying: Take and drink this.  For this is My Blood of the New Testament which shall be shed for many unto the remission of sins.  (John 26: 26-28)

Amen, Amen, I say to you; Moses gave you not bread from Heaven, but my Father gives you the true Bread from Heaven.  For the Bread of God is that which comes down from Heaven and gives life to the world.

John 6:32, 33

I Am the Bread of life: He that comes to me shall not hunger and he that believes in Me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

I Am the Bread of Life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert and are dead. This is the Bread which comes down from Heaven; that if any man eats of it, he may not die.  I Am the living bread which came down from Heaven.  If any man eats of this bread he shall live forever, and the Bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.

John 6: 48 - 52

Amen, Amen I say unto you: Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of man and drink His Blood, you shall not have life in you.  He that eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day.

John 6: 54-55

For my Flesh is food indeed and my Blood is drink indeed.  He that eats my Flesh and drinks My Blood abides in Me and I in Him.  As the living Father has sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he that eats me, the same shall live by Me. This is the Bread that came down from Heaven. Not as your Fathers did eat manna and are dead. He that eats this Bread, shall live for ever.

John 6:56-59

If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word and My Father will love him and We will come to him and will make Our abode with him.

John 14:23

From the above, we can see that Jesus considered the gift of His Body and Blood essential to salvation. The Doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a hard thing for some people to believe. It was hard for the people in the time of Jesus.  In John chapter 6 verse 60 we read: " After hearing it, many of his followers said, 'This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?' Jesus does not say that He is only kidding, or what he said before should be taken as a symbol.  When he refuses to compromise or place a spin on what he said, the saddest moment of His life up until that time occurred because the people turned away and John says " After this, many of his disciples went away and accompanied him no more."  (John 6: 66) This too is what the "reformers" did or caused to happen among the poor souls that the clawed away from the Church.  They rejected the great gift of Jesus and just walked away, 

So, there you have it. The Blessed Sacrament is a gift that is misunderstood by some, laughed at by others, seen as a symbol, seen as a rite of passage, seen as something "you do."  The Blessed Sacrament is the union of Jesus and the recipient. You cannot get closer to God in this life than by receiving Him, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity into yourself.  If God can create the world in seven days from nothing, can He not also give us Himself in the form which appears to our senses as being bread and wine?  Does He not have the power and the will to do this?  If you say no then your God is too small.

The Cross

The cross is a very personal thing. Jesus knew this. The cross of Jesus affected his whole body. The pain he was feeling was so severe that the temptation to prove his power by removing himself from the cross had to be running through his head.  Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, it is this fact that makes the cross relevant. If Jesus were just human He could not use the cross to show God's great love for us, He would have been just another sacrifice like those being made at the temple. On the other hand if Jesus was just divine, He would not have experienced life and the dying process as we His creatures do. Both of the elements, humanity and divinity,  had to be and were present.  So the first way the Cross affected Jesus was mentally.  He had to refuse the all too human facility to go against the desires of the Father by using the power that He had as the Son. This required Jesus to put complete trust into God and surrendering Himself as a human to the will of the Father.  

The next way the Cross affected Jesus was physically. Death by crucifixion was a death by inches. The major process was suffocation.  The woulds caused by the nails were just "minor" injuries that the body could healed if the person had been taken down from the cross while still alive. The process that a person goes through while dying on the cross is this. You had to hold yourself up to breathe and that strain on your arms was monumental and the fatigue was cumulative as lactic acid built up in the muscles. The condemned used their legs and the nail that had been pounded through the feet to give some purchase to stay where one could breath. But the pain from the wound in the feet was great and the arms tired and the culprit would sag down into a "Y" formation. The pressure on the diaphragm would make it impossible to breathe and the victim would have to push himself up again.  Depending on the strength of the one on the cross, this could go on for days.  In the case of Jesus, He was already battered and beaten and so his strength was expended in mere hours.  Death on the cross as I said was a death in inches.  The merciless sun beat down upon the criminal and insects of all types alighted on the body. There was the psychological aspect of the punishment as well to consider.  In most of the empire the criminal was exposed naked on the cross. In Israel, the benevolence of Caesar allowed the wearing of a loin cloth because the Jews were scandalized by nudity.  

So for hours Jesus suffered through the dying process. Then near the end he did several things that showed that this was no ordinary execution.  He awarded sainthood to a fellow criminal suffering with Him on that day. On the cross a criminal could be counted on to answer the scorn heaped upon him with curses. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing." Jesus perfectly fulfilled his obligation to honor His mother and father when he put the Virgin Mary, who had no other relatives to help her into the care of the apostle John for a widow with no relatives would have to resort to begging to meet the needs of the day.  Just before He died, he said, "I thirst."  A sponge was soaked in cheap wine and held up to His lips. He took some and he then said, "It is finished."   What was finished?  Do you remember the last supper? It ended before all of the ritualistic rubrics had been completed. They sang a long hymn. After the hymn there was supposed to be a final cup of wine that would conclude the Passover meal.  It was never consumed and the Passover meal was never completed.  By taking that wine on the Cross, Jesus, the Lamb of God, completed the New Passover and redeemed us,  Then one of the evangelists says "He uttered a loud cry."  A loud cry? From the cross? After being scourged, beaten, bled and bloodied?  The loud cry was followed by Jesus handing over His spirit.  voluntarily for us.  It was very hard to speak at all from the cross. To hear a loud cry come from someone near to death must have been  startling to the onlookers.  The loud cry shows that Jesus handed over His life, that it was not taken from Him, He gave it willingly. 

Today at Mass we read the Gospel where Jesus asks who do the people think I am.  After a few answers he asks the apostles who they think He is. Peter answers "The Christ of God."  He then tells his followers that to be his follower we have to take up our cross daily and follow Him.  What does this mean?  The cross is a very personal thing.  But we as followers of Chris, what we need to do is this,  We need to wake up each morning and pick up our cross and follow Jesus with it.  A cross is a very personal thing.  For many of us it may be a fault we are working to correct and never can seem to conquer it and it is causing us anguish. For some of us it might mean going to a job you hate because you receive no recognition for your contributions and to contribute to the best of your ability anyway.  It may be dealing with any number of things, but we must pick it up, put it on our shoulder and carry it every day for that is what is means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 

On Death and Dying and The Christian Person

           

Courtesy/consciouslifenews.com/

                                                                During this season of Lent, one of the things we Christians are asked to reflect on is the state of our life and to think carefully about what our destiny is. The fact is that no one will leave this world alive. From the fall of Adam and Eve to the present day, the destiny of the human body is to return to the dust it was made of. If you are human, you will die. No one has escaped that fate, not even Jesus. Jesus did not go into some state of suspended animation. Jesus went through the pain of death that all of us will feel. On that most Holy Cross the body of Jesus went through the process of death. His organs began shutting down to keep the vital processes, heart and brain, going as long as possible. When it could take no more, Jesus knew it was time. To show that He was going to conquer death he cried out in a loud voice according to the Bible, which is a most difficult thing to do while nailed to a cross and He surrendered His soul to the Father. At the moment of death, the soul of Jesus left the body and there was no force to keep the flesh animated any longer. Physically, at that moment, decay began. Blood, without a heart to propel it began to sink into the lower extremities. A soldier who thought that the man from Galilee was faking thrust a spear through His heart and piercing the Pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart there came forth blood and water. The body was removed and Mary His mother held the cooling, brutalized Body in her arms. Her tears were copious and she did not want to let Him go. But the disciples and friends that were on hand gently pried the lifeless corpse from her arms and laid Him atop a shroud. They wound Him up in it and without too much fanfare on that Sabbath eve, laid him in a borrowed tomb, even in death Jesus had no place of His own to lay His head. 

The picture at the top is allegedly a picture of the soul leaving a man at the time of death. The article states that the blue color is the "life force" and you can see in picture on the left there is a lot of blue, and on the right, you can see just a bit of blue at head level, about to depart. I do not believe that they have captured the soul leaving the body. I just thought that the picture would provide an interesting focal point for this post. 

Like it or not one day, maybe today, maybe in an hour, maybe in the next minute we will die. We will experience in some form what Jesus did, that is our bodies ultimate fate. 

For some of us, the lucky ones among us, the process of dying will begin with a doctor telling us that we have a terminal disease and you have X amount of time to live. I say that you are lucky because you will have time to do what needs to be done. You will have been given a grace, a time to make repairs to relationships and in general take your leave of this world in a more or less peaceful and dignified manner.  But before this all of us will go through several phases including denial of death, bargaining with God, until we arrive at acceptance.  

At the time appointed by God, you will enter into the final stages of this life. You will say good bye in various ways and at the pre-ordained moment you will take your last breath and leave the garden God gave to us to tend and you will return home to our Father. 

For a Christian, death should not leave us quaking in fear. We know that death has been conquered and we will rise on the last day. 

I think that in our world today, especially in the United States and Canada, we deny death until the last spadeful of dirt covers our loved ones remains. We spend thousands of dollars to pickle them so they do not degrade so fast. We purchase elaborate boxes to put them in and we seal those to keep the elements out and we place these ornate boxes inside of a sealed concrete box to await the return of Christ. The death merchants sell us all manner of goods, charging five or six times the wholesale price for a casket. They charge hundreds of dollars for thirty dollars of chemicals and cosmetics and some even consider themselves quasi preachers, providing mushy "funeral committal services" at will for those not affiliated with a church.  So, what does all of this expense buy for us? The undertakers will tell you that it will give the family  closure. Well, maybe it does, but if the death was expected the act of taking the last breath may be all the closure a family wants. The morticians say that what they do will give the family a beautiful a memory picture of their loved one that have had all of the roughness and blemishes of death sanded away using the tools of the dismal trade and they say that will give them peace. Maybe it will, but what the undertaker is hoping for, besides a good profit on the deal, is looking towards the next case. He or she wants people to see how good he is at his work and he hopes and prays that the next one to go dies after saying "Let Snodgrass embalm me, put makeup in me, suture my mouth closed, put eye caps on so my eyes don't fly open and please put me in a very expensive box like X was in. Yes, the funeral directors next bit of business may very well come because of the way your mother or father, or friend looked under the theatrical lights on the day of the wake. Look at what an expensive casket (to be honest this casket was probably on the lower end of the price list, but still six times in what Snodgrass paid for it) looks like after twenty years in the ground: 

Courtest: http://www.documentingreality.com/

 Would you care to open the lid and take a peek inside to see how the occupant fared during this twenty year period?  No, me either. An embalmed corpse locked up in an airless sealed up casket and sealed vault soon putrefies and after even a week or two in the ground becomes a lot less that a beautiful memory picture as the anaerobic bacteria changes the body into a blob of goo. So much for the value the dismal trade give you for your hard earned dollar.  

The fact is that once a Christian dies, his or her body SHOULD be treated with respect, for it was a temple of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean we have to spend thousands of dollars in a vain attempt to keep the body from corrupting. "Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return." An inexpensive casket, I am opting for one of those purple cloth covered ones, and burial in consecrated ground is enough.  Overspending on the funeral only benefits the undertaker. 

I watched a very interesting movie on You Tube the other day entitled "A Certain Kind of Death."  (Click Here to View)  This movie follows the processing of two men through the system in the Los Angeles coroners department. What I took away from this movie was how simply stupid we mortals can be. We work our whole lives, we build up a store of goods and yet one day, all of it will belong to someone else as we are buried six feet under the ground.  The movie is kind of graphic, but not in a morbid way. The coroners office buries the ashes of indigents and unclaimed bodies once a year in a potters field. The scene of the workers emptying the cremated remains of sixteen hundred people into a mass grave still is haunting me today. Each of the small aluminum boxes that contained what was left of a person that lived, had dreams and aspirations, had at one time a family that loved them, had jobs, bills, vacations and perhaps hunger, poverty, disease, and finally death came to an end at that moment. Sixteen hundred people were buried that day in the ground, their only marked a bronze square with the date "1997" on it's face. 

So, let's wrap this up.  What does death and dying mean for a Christian? For us it means that we are going home to God to face final judgement for our lives.  So I think that for a Christian living life is much more important that memorializing it after death. I have to confess, while I won't actually be at my own funeral, for my soul will be elsewhere, I would like to think that there would be some who would attend my funeral and some that would mourn my passing. My family consists of two younger sisters and one younger brother, my parents, uncles and aunts have gone to their rest. My siblings have nothing to do with me, I have no idea why and I intend to make certain that all of my final arrangements are made in advance of my departure so they do not have to be bothered.  I don't want them even to be notified. Let them to continue to treat me in death how they treated me in life.  But be that as it may, I intend to be a morticians nightmare. I believe that my body will rise again as did Jesus when he defeated death. I believe that there is no reason to preserve that which is destined to decay. I will request immediate burial or cremation (I have not decided yet) and any funeral goods that I will need to purchase will be of the cheapest, most utilitarian, minimalist type. My estate, if there is anything left and my wife has died before me, I will will to my Church. 

So for a Christian, I believe we must make an effort to do the things a Christian should do NOW and not wait until the doctors give us a terminal sentence. Love, Laugh, Pray, and be Merciful. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, visit the sick and yes, bury the dead. 

Te Purple Coffin I want to be used at my funeral