don't curse the darkness, light a candle

I've seen great sadness and dismay over the cancellation of religious services (especially Catholic Masses) due to Coronavirus. I think this sadness rightly arises from a desire to let Christ govern our lives, and an awareness that one ordinary means we honor His kingship is through worshipping with other believers. The last few days, I've been thinking about what it means to continue to allow Christ to govern our lives when we're deprived of this ordinary means.

If your bishop, priest, or pastor has cancelled services or if you have decided it is imprudent to attend services, it’s ok to be upset and to acknowledge this as a source of suffering. God made us communal beings and called us to worship together. God made us incarnational beings and called us to receive His grace through the sacraments. Communal worship and sacraments are good, and so temporarily losing access to them is rightfully a cause of sorrow.

You may think this decision is the product of collusion between diabolically-influenced clerics and the Illuminati. You may think this decision is an unnecessary measure taken by authorities who generally have folks' best interests at heart and sometimes slip up through fear or misinformation.You may think this is a wise decision made by a legitimate authority.

Regardless, coronavirus does not void that which is our privilege and duty: to consecrate the Lord’s day. If we become so upset over the situation that we forget that the hour or two we would have spent at church still belongs to God, Satan is pleased. Not the goal, I'm pretty sure, regardless of which of the three above categories you fall into. If (like me), you're not accustomed to sitting down to an hour+ of private prayer in a single go, a few ideas (not to be limited to Sunday, either!):

-Pray for a grace-filled outcome to this situation. Pray especially for those who are critically ill, doctors lacking needed rest or in positions to make difficult ethical decisions, and those who will be financially and materially hurt by the lock down. Pray for the wisdom to know your responsibility in helping provide for your community.

-Spend time reading and meditating on Scripture.

-If your church uses a cycle of readings, read those Scriptures alongside your fellow believers, in spirit if not in body. (Catholics, Magnificat, which has the Mass readings and reflections on them, has been made available online for free: https://us.magnificat.net/free!!)

-Spend time in listening silence away from technology

-Do some non-Scriptural spiritual reading

-Listen to or sing hymns and praise music

-Watch or listen to a Mass (if you’re Catholic) or another service (if you’re not) online, on TV, or on the radio

-Check your church website to see if your pastor has posted (or ask if he would be willing to post) a reflection or sermon on the Sunday Scriptures

-Pray with your family. "Where two or three are gathered" doesn't only apply to non-blood-relations.

Beautifully, too, because this is a cause of suffering, we can particularly heed the command of Paul to “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice.” There are many who experience a desert of communal worship and sacrament on a far more regular basis who can use our prayers and sacrifices at this time:

-those who are currently struggling (spiritually, physically, or materially) who have not had the church reach out to offer them support

-those who do not attend religious services at all because they have never heard the Gospel, or have never heard of God's love from people whose witness is convicting

-those who love God, but who do not live in an area where they have weekly (or even monthly, or yearly) access to the sacraments

-those who desire to receive the Eucharist but currently do not because of irregular marital circumstances

-those who have left the church because of abuse (or any lesser failure on the part of members of the church to live out Christ's self-sacrificial love)

-those who have sought and been unable to find a robust church community that is both welcoming and challenging

Also, I'm personally thankful at this time that at least I don't live in the Middle Ages, when interdicts were imposed on cities and entire regions for political squabbles that usually had little to do with the conduct or interests of those who ended up deprived of the sacraments. Nothing like a little history to keep things in perspective.

they shall be satisfied

"The Church has an obligation to feed the poor, and we cannot spend all our money on buildings. However, there are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty--and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. Here is a place of transcendent beauty, and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco." (Dorothy Day, speaking in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco)

"The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole Continent. America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization." (Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia in America)

Earlier this semester, when my students were studying the colonization of the Americas, I had them read parts of a translation of the earliest record we have of the Guadalupe apparitions. We had just been discussing the horrific treatment perpetrated on the people of the Americas by Spanish soldiers, many of whom justified their imperial project on the grounds of evangelization but in fact cared for nothing of the sort (without disparagement intended towards those small groups of religious who came and valiantly spread the Gospel without sequestering land, money, or power for themselves). A Spanish Dominican friar, observing these crimes, remarked with ire that "the Spaniards, from the beginning of their first entrance upon America to this present day, were no more eager to promote the preaching of the Gospel of Christ to these nations, than if they had been dogs or beasts. Worst of all, they specifically laid many restrictions on the Religious, daily afflicting and persecuting them, so that they would not have time or leisure to attend to preaching and the Divine Service, for they looked upon that to be an obstacle to their getting gold, and raking up riches which their greed pressed them to obtain."

If I were in those circumstances, I thought as I prepared for class, what would I say to the faith of these men who came from without, who brought more disease and violence than they brought order and love? Why would God send the message of His universal redemption through people who did not live the universal love demanded by the Incarnation? Why would I accept a faith that seemed more an imposition of European-ness than a gift intended for the ends of the earth? To be honest, I thought, I probably wouldn't. The relationship of conqueror to conquered is not a relationship that manifests the living reality of the Church.

The ten years after Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico became ten years of increasing failure on the part of God's wayward Spanish sons to show the American people a Church is a mother and bride, not master. Could it be coincidence, then, that at Tepeyac He gave, not an education broken by sin and language barriers, but contact with the living reality of His Mother, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the type par excellence of the Church Herself? You are mine, Juan Diego, she said, not because you are Spanish or European but because you are a man, just as my dearest Jesus was a man.

Someone once told me that people study history because they don't have the balls to study philosophy (rough paraphrase). Maybe, if you're a Gnostic (and then who cares what you have the balls to do anyhow?) But if you're Catholic, philosophical truth (logos, if you will) became incarnate at a particular time at a particular place. History is important to us because history is important to God. It matters not just that our Lady appeared, by when she appeared and where she appeared. She appeared in 1531 at Tepeyac because she was needed there. She was needed then.

I tried to say this in class somehow, but the reflection was still new and more tinged with awe than eloquence, so I'm not sure how much of what I tried to articulate above really made it from my heart into my students' minds. But I do remember that one of my students, who isn't always particularly attentive, was leaning forward in his chair with every ounce of concentration focused on what I was saying. When I bumbled my way rather clumsily into some kind of conclusion about the historical import of the event, his eyes got wide, and I almost started crying right there in class. I still do when I remember it, because I could see in his eyes that he got it. History was suddenly no longer one damn thing after another but a narrative unfurling within the providential grace of God.

Why do the liberal arts, the studia humanitatis matter to a developing country? After moments like that, how could one say they do not?

Medieval-Enlightenment Humanities

My second-year students have worked really hard this semester. Below, a tribute to them: the list of works whose excerpts they valiantly soldiered through at the behest of their crazy instructor. (I didn't fully realize how crazy this was until I actually sat down to type out the list. Yikes.)

St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne

Letters from King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII

Magna Carta

St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Canons of Lateran IV

The Rule of the Franciscan Order

The Primitive Constitutions of the Order of Friars Preacher

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron

Canons of the Council of Constance

Dante, Inferno (no excerpting here--we walked alongside Virgil & his pupil to the depths of despair)

Diary of Christopher Columbus

Nican Mopohua

Bartolomeo de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

Machiavelli, The Prince

Martin Luther, 95 Theses and Babylonian Captivity

John Calvin, Genevan Catechism and Institutes

Schleitheim Confession

39 Articles of the Church of England

William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canons of the Council of Trent

St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises

St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Francis Bacon, aphorisms from the Novum Organum

Descartes, Discourse on Method (and a short jaunt into Meditations on First Philosophy for my favorite Descartes passage)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Greco-Roman Roots of Civilization

I'm very proud of my freshmen class. Most of them come to JPII with no exposure to studying the great works of Western civilization, and most dove right into the material and really worked hard to understand what was going on in each work and how they connected to each other.

This semester covered excerpts from the following works:

• Much of Homer's Iliad
• All of Sophocles, Antigone
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Plato, Apology
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics
• Polybius, Histories
• Cicero, On Duties
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Gospel of Matthew
• Acts of the Apostles
• Letters to the Romans and Galatians
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• St. Clement of Alexandria, On Philosophy
• Passion of the Holy Martyrs Felicity and Perpetua
• David Bentley Hart, "Human Dignity was a Rarity Before Christianity"
• St. Augustine, City of God
• Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

even in perplexity

"For still the vision awaits its time,
presses on to fulfillment--it will not lie.
If it seem slow, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

"A telos is an end that illuminates the entire path. You might say the difference between telos and process is fundamentally pedagogical. With a telos, the entire path is redeemed and validated as a movement that presupposes, values, and remembers what came before. We know how to walk ahead because of the lessons the past has taught us. A telos can teach us how our past still has meaning because that past must be absorbed into our journey towards the telos." (Michael Altenburger)

"God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission--I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next...if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling. Therefore I will trust Him...If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us." (St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations on Christian Doctrine, "Hope")

medieval philosophy + big band

what do Boethius, Dante, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Robin Williams have in common?

I'm glad you asked.

a Benque horarium

so, you might ask, how does a missionary teacher in Belize spend her days?

to be honest, it's really not that different from college life--I study and learn, go to class, sleep, eat, and try to block in adequate time to pray each day. Happily, the schedule here is very oriented towards the prayer life of the parish and missionary community, so that last one has been at least slightly more successful than it was at college.

on any given day, with slight variations, this is how I live:

6 am: wake up, shower, walk to church
6:30-7:10ish: holy half-hour with Benediction, plus I try to say Morning Prayer
7:10-8: eat breakfast in the rectory with fellow missionaries who are early risers (it's a small crew)
8-11:30: teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays or do class prep/grading on MWF
11:30-12:15: lunch, back at the rectory
12:15-5:30: more teaching/prep/grading + hanging out with students
5:30-6: supper at the rectory
6-6:30: chanted Evening Prayer with the priests and sisters
6:30-7: walking rosary (if my toe isn't dying--this hasn't happened for several weeks) or pray/read--I'm currently going
7-7:50: Mass (in Spanish except for Wednesdays)
7:50-10:00ish: finish up grading and hang out with the other ladies at my house, quick shower before Night Prayer and bed

Wednesdays are a long day--at 5:30, we have small group with the women students at the junior college, and after Mass is Super Missionary Night Prayer (SMNP)--games, snacks, a testimony from one of the missionaries, and night prayer together.

Friday and Saturday nights the missionaries often hang out at one of our houses or in the (blessed air-conditioned) living room of Deacon Cal and his wife Ginny, who have been married for 56 years and served the community in Benque for 50 of those. We play games (Catan is a big favorite), trade embarrassing stories, or watch movies from the well-curated collection of the estimable Drew Kanne, one of our seminarians.

Sundays are free days--Mass, a leisurely lunch, and an afternoon for napping, letter-writing, reading, or wasting time on Facebook.

There's not a ton of leisure time and life is pretty busy, but it's good--and structured enough that I actually get things done!