March 25: LADY DAY [Transferred from Holy Week 2024]

[First published in 2015]

Some questions for Dr. David Pence on this Feast of the Annunciation:

If we had lived in England during the period between the 12th and 18th centuries, we'd be celebrating today as the beginning of the New Year, right? 
                                   
Yes, here we are, exactly nine months before Christmas. This is the day that Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit -- and the Word was made flesh.

Jesus Christ who has always existed as the Son of God is now, with the Virgin's "fiat," incarnated. He is begotten, not made. The human species has been welded to a Divine Person in the Trinity. The species now has an incarnated Head-a center of meaning and gravity that integrates humans in a Body that will incorporate us  forever in an interpersonal relationship of love.

Creation -- and specifically, the human species -- had reached its epitome!  (It will take about eight weeks for Baby Jesu in the womb to become half an inch in size.)

We need to have some rough figures in our head. Matter (the protons, neutrons, and electrons in all atoms) was created almost 14 billion years ago. The first life on earth—the first bacterial cell was imprinted by the Holy Spirit about 4 billion years ago.

The first parents of the human species were probably created around 150,000 years ago. But it is 2000 years ago that the fulcrum event of humanity occurred. This is the true Enlightenment: when God's plan becomes incarnate in a person. The Head takes form and the rest of history is us filling in His Body.  

Where is our species heading?

Our biological destiny is not to eventually produce some new successful mutant that will evolve into a higher form of life. Quite the contrary.

Our highest male and female forms have already appeared and the task before us is to now conform to them more perfectly. At the Annunciation the feminine form was so receptive, so attentive to the Spirit, so submissive to the will of God that her own flesh was incarnated by the Spirit begetting the Son. All of us, as males and females, are trying to bring our souls to that level of responsiveness to the Spirit and submission to the Father so we can play our roles.

                                     

You say that humans are a 'eusocial' species. What does that mean, and what does it have to do with Christianity?

Actually it has a lot  to do with the Body of Christ, the nature of the Eucharist, the meaning of the Church, and the analogical reality between the Trinity and the destiny of the human species. First, I must apologize that I have been unsuccessful in communicating this biological truth which is so clear to me in my head, but which I always fall short at explaining in print or during our conversations.

"Eusocial organism" is a descriptive term from sociobiology, which is the study of the social structure of animals. It's a kind of subset of the larger term ecology. You know how fish swim in schools and wolves run in packs with certain social roles. Well, there is a group of insects called eusocial insects in which the ties of sociobiology go way beyond the pack and herd structures of other animals. The eusocial insects tend to act as a single organism. Reproduction is highly restricted and (wonder of wonders) what distinguishes one sex from the other is not the presence of a sex chromosome (like the 'y' chromosome distinguishes human males from females), but one gender comes from fertilized eggs and the other are "virgin births." Unfertilized eggs become, for instance, male bees. The perfection of bees occurs in how they function as a single organism. The perfection of  human beings will be realized in how we participate as eusocial members of the Body of Christ.

Our alpha male whom we worship is of a virgin birth (parthenogenesis in biology). Our most basic sacrament binds us together by eating the flesh that makes us one Body. We are still persons but we are incorporated persons. In ecology there is another term called symbiosis: organisms living together in some deeply interrelated union. Let me just say these biological phenomena are deeply suggestive of the Trinity, and the interpersonal destiny of human beings in the Body of Christ.

On this feast day of the Incarnation we are celebrating the "engraftment" of the human species into the Second Person of the Trinity. It is true that God comes into the womb of the Virgin and develops, but this is just as Christ comes into us now as the food of the Eucharist. We are emerging as the eusocial organism which the human species was destined to be from the beginning. There are all sorts of physical lessons written in the book of nature which help us see how man's nature is so much more "plastic" (capable of being conformed) than the angels. Lucifer, to his great consternation, recognized what great things the Almighty had planned for His lowly ones.


What's the connection between the Greeks achieving their independence from the Turks, and the feast day we're celebrating?

Ever since the sack of Constantinople in 1453 (marking the demise of the Byzantine Empire's thousand-year run), Greece had been under the thumb of Muslim rule.

On this day in 1821, however, the war of Greek independence against the Ottoman Turks began when Bishop Germanos raised the flag of revolution over a monastery -- and 'Freedom or death' became the motto. The struggle took years but when all seemed lost, the British and the French and the Russians came to the aid of the Greeks. Finally in 1829, Greece became an independent state; and March 25th is their high holy celebration each year.

When you think of the Greek nation, it is fine to remember Pericles and the polis of Athens and Sparta. However, it is the height of ancestral impiety and religious amnesia to forget that the blood and arms that set the Greek nation free came in the name of Christ, not Socrates!

"Through the bottomless mercy of our God,

  one born on high will visit us

to give light to those who walk in darkness..."

              (Gospel of St Luke, chapter 1)

UPDATE: Take a look at this article on the Orthodox patriarch, and how the Russian believers celebrate the feast in Moscow's Cathedral of the Annunciation.

It will be a great American tragedy if we insist on blinding ourselves to the common Christian ties we have with the better and deeper part of Mother Russia.



A line from Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop:

"A life need not be cold, or devoid of grace in the worldly sense, if it were filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le rêve suprême de la chair  [the highest ideal of the flesh]."

The Solemnity of Saint Joseph: Husband, Protector, and Patriarch of Israel

[originally published March 19, 2015]
                     

On March 19, 2013, the pontificate of Francis (the first non-European to sit in the Chair of Peter in 13 centuries) was inaugurated.  In his homily he accepted as his mission that of St. Joseph--to be custos: the protector. 

It is inspiring to read of his trust in Joseph, who taught our Lord what manliness and fatherhood looked like:

"... I would like to tell you something very personal. I like St Joseph very much. He is a strong man of silence. On my desk I have a statue of St Joseph sleeping. While sleeping he looks after the Church. Yes, he can do it! We know that. When I have a problem or a difficulty, I write on a piece of paper and I put it under his statue so he can dream about it. This means: please pray to St Joseph for this problem."

Pope Francis went on to say: “In the Gospels, St. Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man, a working man, yet in his heart we see great tenderness... [Exercising the role of protector as St. Joseph did] means doing so discreetly, humbly and silently, but with an unfailing presence and utter fidelity, even when he finds it hard to understand... [The bishop of Rome] must be inspired by the lowly, concrete and faithful service which marked St. Joseph and, like him, he must open his arms to protect all of God’s people."

Joseph was the last patriarch of the Old Testament. He was the head of the household of the Lord. He is strong, virile, chaste and silent. He was the living link to King David and Bethlehem. He taught his son to love his country and he incorporated him in the Covenant rituals  of his countrymen.  He repeated the journey of the Israelites in and out of Egypt. He handed his son over on the eight day for the circumcision and naming. He took him to the temple on the 40th day and ransomed him from the death of the first born.  He saved the Virgin Mother and the Baby Savior from the murderer. He taught Our Lord the manual skills of the carpenter craftsman. He brought him to Jerusalem for the public feasts(and we are not sure he was as upset as Mary that Jesus stayed back to do some temple teaching at our Lord's own unique bar mitzvah).  Joseph is the patron of afternoon naps and a good night's sleep because that is when the angels gave him his orders. He is the patron of a good death because he was in the presence of Mary and Jesus when he died. God did not tempt him by keeping him alive for the Crucifixion of his son. We don't know what he might have done. He was not perfect. He would not have run away.       

UPDATE: Two other holy men who had a deep devotion to Joseph the Worker: Pope John XXIII (see his prayer); and Josemaría Escrivá (d. 1975), the Spaniard who founded Opus Dei. In 1955, Pope Pius XII responded to the Communist celebration of Mayday as International Workers Day by Christianizing labor with a May 1 Feast Day celebrating the carpenter craftsman - St Joseph the Worker. The Communist-Socialist holiday was in remembrance of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre in May, 1886.  

Father Escrivá wrote: "I don't agree with the traditional picture of St Joseph as an old man... I see him as a strong young man, perhaps a few years older than our Lady, but in the prime of his life and work."

                           
                                  

Ash Wednesday: a few thoughts on Inquisitions and Penitentiaries

[first published March 3, 2014]
             
                                     

                                  
An interview with Dr. David Pence:

We've come round to another Ash Wednesday. Do you remember how Father Neuhaus [the late founder of First Things magazine] referred to the American bishops' response to sexual abuse as "The Long Lent of 2002"?

The American bishops and their fraternity of priests never had a long Lent or any Lent at all! Lent is confession of sins, repentance, reparation, and reform. There has been no real confessing of sins nor repentance nor judgment and punishment of any group of bishops or priests inflicted by churchmen on churchmen. Newspapers have exposed and courts have punished, but the Church herself has not acted to purify the priesthood by her own standards.
                                 

Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the prisons visited by Tocqueville in 1831

                         

You contend that Church leaders have to use ecclesial institutions to punish priests who have offended. Why does it seem that nowadays if an evil priest hasn't been convicted in a criminal court, we shower him with "disability pay" and other perks?

Reform in a hierarchical Church comes from the Pope and bishops, but each in his own place. Diocesan reform will be initiated by a particular bishop who has a critical mass of priests with him ready to truly purify an existing diocesan prebytery. The reform of bishops will require another mechanism, but it will be more local and synodal than papal. Just like we need model saints who inspire all of us, bishops need a model bishop to clean not the whole world but a particular diocese. A bishop who wants to lead the bishops of his nation and the Church must put his net down right where he is -- and reform his local presbytery. The diocese will be the locus of the deepest reform.

All reform will start with a true aggressive investigation and assessment of priests. This can be carried out by a well-known Catholic instrument: the Promoter of Justice. This man must look much more like Eliot Ness searching for the trails of crime than an ACLU lawyer insisting on Miranda rights. This is what once was called an INQUISITION. An aggressive questioning in pursuit of real justice for the Church which means unfaithful, sacrilegious, and immoral priests are pursued, confronted, judged, and punished. Professor Mirus does a good job of explaining this in a recent column.

Offenses against the Creed, the Sacramental/Liturgical Order, and Morality are the standards by which bishops must purify the priesthood. These are sections of our Catechism. No court of law will uphold these standards. No secular newspaper will be outraged at a breach of these duties. The Church has a legal system and a demanding code of conduct. Pope Benedict, in an interview in 2010, talked about the role of punishment in church governance:

"The Archbishop of Dublin told me something very interesting about that. He said that ecclesiastical penal law functioned until the late 1950’s. Admittedly it was not perfect -- there is much to criticize about it -- but nevertheless it was applied. After the mid sixties, however, it was simply not applied anymore. The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but rather a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people. 

Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of love, which in fact is not just being nice and courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of the truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love."

(ADDENDUM AUGUST 2018
A description of the liturgical rite of by which a bishop was degraded of his office.  Benedict XIV promulgated this ritual in 1862)

Explain your notion of how we provide for these priests according to canon law, while having them live a life of penance. And what is this about donning a distinctive cowl?

We hear that canon law requires that the local diocese must "provide" for all priests. "It's simply justice," they say. Well, fine... let's be serious. Get a building, and provide housing and simple food while requiring prayer and labor. They should wear a distinctive garb showing they are penitents, and special markers if they are sexual predators. This is meant as punishment. It is meant as reparation -- and if a priest will not comply -- then his disobedience is grounds for laicization. Criminal priests are exploiting their clerical state and playing on the interests of their superiors in preserving an employment entitlement program. The idea that these guys are on a voucher system which we owe them, is a sham perpetuated by clerics who see the priesthood as lifetime employment. This is how the previous vicar general, Fr. McDonough, sounds in most of his pronouncements on these questions -- he was an unholy blend of urban ward-heeler, union steward, and defense attorney.

No reform in any diocese could bolster the worldwide church more than instituting a real place of penance and public acknowledgement of betrayal by predator priests. This reform must be enacted by a local bishop; it cannot be a papal reform. The pope knows what we all know.  Local bishops must govern; and to govern is to punish when crimes are committed. Abbotts too. A place like St John’s Abbey [in Collegeville, Minnesota] should immediately require a clear and distinctive garb for all monks under restriction. St Benedict in his original Rule provided a multitude of ways to distinguish monks following the Rule and those being disciplined.

The Church did not sin. Men sinned, and individual men should do penance -- not Holy Mother Church, who Herself has been besmirched.

                                       

"Christ among the Doctors of the Law" (Paolo Caliari, 16th century)

           

What is your reaction to the comments of Fr. Kevin McDonough in this recent news story at MN Public Radio? How could the vicar general thoroughly delude himself that a pastor -- arrested separately for trolling for young men in a public park and in a bookstore -- posed no danger to the boys in his parish?

Father McDonough throughout his career has run interference for the huge homosexual subculture in the St Paul Seminary system and the local priesthood. This most notably included his homosexual priest brother who was teaching seminarians “the gift of gay celibacy” decades ago. It is an axiom in the Catholic gay subculture that homosexuals are no threat as pedophiles. (It was a corollary that they made better priests because of their sensitivity and non-interest in football, war, or any male group effort to organize the protective use of force). That is why McDonough remains so adamant to this day that "there was no evidence Curtis Wehmeyer was a threat to children." For Father McDonough, stubbornly not "outing" the homosexual proclivities of a predator took precedence over protecting young males.

The corrupting role of an influential secretive "gay subculture" in a priesthood -- whose most fundamental oath is tied to a purity code -- is the story that the vicar general kept hidden for decades, and that our secular newspapers still can't quite figure out how to tell. The Church will properly practice Lent when a bishop takes his priests behind closed doors as individuals and as a group, and institutes a program of priestly purification which must include aggressive questioning (call that the Inquisition) and just punishment for the sins of omission and commission which have corrupted the fraternity (call that the Penitentiary). We could call that a good Catholic Lent.


If a Catholic is completely fed up with the decadent rot of the Petrine face of the Church -- almost tempted to flee -- how should he fight that?  

He must focus on that reality of the Church which has never sinned. The Marian Church is still pure. The Church herself has been defaced and dragged through the mud, but still she is holy. Churchmen have sinned, not the Church. Ponder the heart of Mother Church. Do what the devout women did during the 1970s: they kept alive the adoration of the Eucharist while trendy seminarians ridiculed the “wafer worshipers." The spotless Church and her corrupted priesthood has the Eucharist; and we must eat to live.

The Church has the Spirit, and He will reform the Church. The Ark has a noxious stench, and a lot of the present crew are cowards or worse, but we can’t jump the Ark. It was built at too high a price. Look outside before you jump; the Flood waters are even worse.
                                   

February 22: The Feast of the Chair of Peter. Pope Francis and the leadership lessons of Lincoln

Chair of St Peter. A wooden chair given to a Pope by an Emperor in 875 AD. Gilded in bronze in 1647. 

On the birthday of America's founding patriarch (see Feb 22 below), the Church dedicates a Feast Day to celebrate a Chair given as a gift from an Emperor to a Pope.  We are meant to contemplate this symbol of authority and the Petrine office. Community demands Authority. Pope John Paul II asked all Christians to  suggest how this office should be lived to bring Christian Unity. Pope Francis has called together all the heads of Bishop Conferences and heads of religious orders to a summit in Rome "to listen to the cries of the little ones." A major theme of the Pope for episcopal and priestly reform is the necessity of synodal governance of the Church.(His address on 50th anniversary of Bishop Synods)  He called the February 2019 gathering to show the Church in a synodal form addressing abuse of minors. He is at all times keeping in mind the bishops of the Orthodox tradition and the need for unity with them so the Church can "breathe with two lungs". He has strongly resisted the American desire to insert lay people into Church governance. He has called the Apostles together to confront the pain of the victims and assert their every bishop and bishop's conference must go back to their home territories and show mercy by ruling justly. His gathering of the leaders is to insure that the sins of some do not diminish the authority of the Apostolic whole. His war against clericalism is not a war against the sacral Apostolic character of priestly identity. Unlike his predecessors, Pope Francis has shown any individual can be stripped of his rank to purify the priestly bond. The dramatic reduction of Theodore McCarrick the big spending, high flying American to the lay state is a vivid reminder that the old days of gentle whispers are over. The communal whole is greater than the wealthy maverick.

In this conference he is pointedly not addressing  homosexuality in the priesthood as a root cause of the crisis. This does not mean other bishops and free flowing press conferences cannot forcefully make the connections. Rather the Pope is mustering the authorities in the ecclesial form of the corporate brotherhood in prayer and parrhesia(fearless speech).  This is the antidote to the lobbyists, the magnified little men behind the curtains of media, the secret intriguers who fill the chanceries and Curia, the "homosexual parish" that shapes Catholic clericalism. He draws bishops together as he expects them to assemble their priests---in public, face-to-face, man-to-man encounters of fraternity under the Father. He has always emphasized that in synodal gatherings the bishops meet with (cum) the Pope and under (sub) the Pope. The problem with the Church is not an all male clergy. It is an emasculated clergy that has lost its sacral identity as a fraternity of fathers.

 Pope Francis knows the clerical rot is deep and he will need many new men and groups of men rising within the  diocesan and national gatherings of the ordained. He sees the synod in the Church the way he sees fraternity among the world religions and the nations. Fatherhood and brotherhood are the antidotes to spiritual incest. These are built in the many communal forms of the priesthood and episcopacy.  The Holy Father always starts with the whole before the part. He has written about this for decades (see The Mind of Pope Francis) 

President Abraham Lincoln faced the division of the American nation as he assumed the Presidency in 1860. Slavery was the fundamental sin which could not be reconciled with the Declaration of Independence though it was allowed in the Constitution. Many abolitionists demanded he build his campaign and Presidency on condemning the evil of slavery. But Lincoln understood he must hold together the Union or he would never have the authority to end slavery. He built his Presidency and  his Second Inaugural on expanding the civic brotherhood upon which the nation was founded.   The Pope is acting like Lincoln and many of us critics (self included) are playing the abolitionist. We should pause to see the whole and respect the Chair. ( There may be a lesson from the world of motorcycling explained in Matthew Crawford's book on The World Outside Your Head. He says when you are walking, you keep your eyes on a hazard ahead to avoid it. But if you are on a high speed motorcycle you must deliberately keep your focus on the clear road ahead not the hazard. )From the beginning of his papacy the Pope has said he will not focus on "contraception, gay marriage and abortion". He is not an individual writing a blog entry.  He is on a very fast and dangerous motorcycle, directing a global Church. His vision and words must inspire millions of poor fathers trying to find work in the megacities before placating hundreds of western elites debating their abominable perversions.

Another Man who understood the Authority of His Chair

All those who have taken this crisis as an opportunity to strike at the liturgy of the Novus Ordo, the validity of the Second Vatican Council, and the papacy of Pope Francis should consider the whole. They are in very dangerous waters playing the Accuser in trying to discredit the true agents of the Holy Spirit. They do the Accuser's work more efficiently than enemies who display no veneer of "faithful Catholics' to fool the faithful. They recoil with righteous indignation when they and their fraudulent clerical heroes (Vigano and Burke) are exposed for helping the Serpent who wants a headless Church. Those two same Chief Pharisees were quick to accuse the women in adultery after the Papal Amoris document but were not so authoritarian as they let two notorious homosexual bishops (Nienstedt and Apuron) slip through their perfumed hands of mercy. So stringent with the lady in the back pew with her kids; so gentle and accompanying with the predator clerics. Those polluted priests have done much more to desacralize the Eucharist from the priest side of the altar than any lady reaching through the crowd to touch Christ's garment. As Pope Francis says, there is something of the Black Mass with the predator priests. "The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord." It is not the Novus Ordo that desacralizes the Mass. That is another smokescreen from diabolos. It is the Nienstedts and Apurons and McCarricks and Spellmans. It is not the sins of the laity which threaten our liturgical life--it is the priestly pollution.

 
The "traddies" and "resistance" should be mindful. Their momentary  media bubble is a glass house built on sand. As the traffic generated by their hysteria recedes, they will have time to remember the first rule of regicide. Be sure you kill the  king, if you are going to shoot at him.
For those of us who want to help the Father clean the filth we must reassert the whole with Pope Francis.  Vatican II is "rereading of the Gospels in a concrete historical situation." The event of Vatican II and especially the liturgical reform is the biblical answer to modernity not the fruit of modernism.  The renewed Church of Vatican II will be composed of synodal brotherhoods not the hidden clerical cliques of chancery, Curia, and "the lavender parish".

 One principal storyline of the Francis papacy is restoring the Papacy  as Shepherd-Ruler after the papacies of the philosopher-prophet and the theologian-priest. The journey Pope Francis is walking with us cannot be interrupted for you tube monologues contrasting two American queens like Raymond Burke and James Martin. We must think much bigger to think with Francis who is not the provincial that American neoconservatives label him.

It is not only the Church but the nations which constitute Christendom and humanity. Pope Francis understands the Church must go 'to the periphery" to baptize the nations or the Church forfeits her mission. Pope Francis is calling together the Apostolic Church as a Synodal fraternity to reform herself and function as a template for humanity. He is leading the biblical People of God amidst the nations. He is showing us the public fruits of Vatican Two are still maturing while the twisted fruits of hidden clericalism are rotting.  Following the true Spirit of the Second Vatican Council, he has initiated his unique diplomacy of fraternity to Confucian China and Islam. He answered the beheading of the Coptic martyrs on the shores of the Mediterranean with public Mass on the sands of Arabia. Synodal brotherhood in the Church and fraternity amidst the religions and nations of mankind may just be the wholistic approach that will best isolate the lavender Judas in the Vatican and the  salafist Cain in Mecca. Let us pray for Our Holy Father on this feast day and honor that Holy Chair.  He has a large plan and we can all agree he has not yet  found his General Grant.  

President George Washington: All Praise the Patriarch

by David Pence

This Monday’s federal holiday officially commemorates the birthday of our first president George Washington (b. Feb 22, 1732). In many states this is called Presidents Day and is meant to both commemorate the men who were presidents and honor the office which they held. In five states (including our own Minnesota) those February Presidents Lincoln and Washington are the special objects of our civic honor.

Patriarchy means rule of the father. A patriarch can also refer especially to the beginning father or the founding father. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) are called the patriarchs of Judaism. Christianity is deeply patriarchal with the model prayer taught by Jesus petitioning that  God our Father will extend His rule in heaven over all the earth. Americans have always referred to Washington as a founding father, and our most affectionate name for Lincoln came from the black tradition: 'Father Abraham.'

We honor George Washington today (Read this AOA profile as your civic duty for the holiday)  for leading our first national army to victory in winning independence from the British, for acting 8 years as our first president under the 1787 Constitution, and for giving up the office of authority establishing a tradition of peaceful succession for the commander-in-chief of the military. "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen." In Washington’s farewell address to his troops, he prayed that the brotherly bonds of affection forged in war would animate the bonds of citizenship in the new republic. Men who believed in republics rather than monarchy still believed in authority, fatherhood, and God. They knew that men in protective and productive civic groups needed strong leaders with considerable discretion to act for the group. As Washington wrote:

"It is impossible to govern the world without God. It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits and humbly implore his protection and favor."

There is in our land a hatred of the father and a rebellion against authority which destroys community. It is a repudiation of God the Father and disrespect for authority figures from the local policeman to the President. Abraham Lincoln in one of his first public speeches as a young man to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield decried the mobs and hate and violence that were infecting public life and replacing the civic bonds of affection that come from men living under God and the Law together. (See Matthew Holland’s Bonds of Affection describing the twofold love of American civic life.) President Trump reminded us in his inaugural that the loyalty of patriotism by its very nature deepens the loyalty of Americans to one another. (AOA on our current President)

There can be no community if there is no authority and respect for law. The baby boomers were wrong and that disastrous party is now over. The adolescent death yelp we are hearing across the nation is a primal recognition that a certain kind of partying is coming to an end. There can be no civic peace in our cities unless there is a renewal of fatherhood in our families. But we do not have to wait a generation for the  spiritual renewal of marriage and good dads. There are city fathers in blue patrolling every city in America. A great blessing of American civic life is the republican tradition of local universal male protective duty expressed in the militia tradition and policing as a local responsibility. The local male citizens in every city, town and county can offer to young males the identity and status which comes from taking up our shared duty of protection. This is the classic definition of that much abused form of male bonding-politics. 

If the criminals are getting the upper hand in certain neighborhoods, then there are American fathers garbed in blue who can come in and take care of our spiritual widows and orphans. Politics is the communal strategy of making fatherhood available to all young males in the territory.  The anti-political forces are a strange combination of brutish predators, violence prone adolescent anarchists,  and effeminate careerists. They all would undermine a civic presence of masculine protectors. Patriarchy and fraternity are not the problems -- they are the solution. Fathers know we need a brotherhood of fathers to protect a nation or a city. We know fatherhood and duty are not based on color but they are entirely dependent on gender. We know the household is not safe if the city is not strong. The great Presidents and Patriarchs called men and their sons into a common identity as American citizens.  The founding fathers who shaped the initial bond of American citizenship and the brave men who secured that Union under Lincoln have bequeathed to American men of every color a template for civic brotherhood under the Fatherhood of God.  

Let us build our country. Let us thank our God. Let us teach our sons. Let us honor our fathers.   

                             

February 2: Candlemas -- A Light to the Nations

by David Pence


It was ordered that forty days after a "son opens the womb",  he must be consecrated to God. Jewish males had been spared on the night of the first Passover in Egypt 1500 years before the birth of Christ. Jewish parents acknowledged that their first born sons were not their own and they presented them in the Temple to God. For millennia the Pidyon haben (redemption of the first-born son) has been performed. In present day Judaism, this custom is now seen as ransoming the boy from his duties as priest. Thus, a Kohen is often paid in his stead.

When Jesus was brought to the temple for this offering, an old man who had been promised that he would see the Messiah before his death, greeted Mary and Joseph and took the boy in his arms and gave thanks to God. Simeon spoke this short song or canticle which is now prayed daily by priests and religious in the official night prayer of the Church.

"Lord now let your servant go in peace;
your word has been fulfilled;
My own eyes have seen the salvation
which you have prepared in the sight of every people
A light to reveal you to the nations
and the glory of your people Israel."

Jesus revealed the glory of Israel through His mother Mary. The God of the Universe chose Israel  among all the nations of the earth and His Son was born to a Jewish Virgin-mother. Thirty years later as a man, Jesus would draw twelve Jewish males into the apostolic brotherhood of the Church. That sacred fraternity would be a template for the territorial nations in which men live bound together as fellow countrymen under a law and leader. The Church and the nations are meant to form the ordered biblical pattern of male agreement in the Kingdom of God. The 2500 bishops and patriarchs during the Second Vatican Council (1961-1965) put forth the Catholic Church's interracial and international priestly brotherhood as such a template for the nations. Their document on the Church was called Lumen Gentium: a light for the nations. On this 40th day after Christmas, every February 2, candles are lit in memory and fulfillment of Simeon's words. The love by which Christ bound his apostles has formed the living foundation stones for the Church. An analogous public love binds men as citizens in nations from Ireland to China. This kind of Love is like Light -- public and emanating by its very nature. Interlocking sacral patriarchal fraternities constituting the Church and the nations are meant to order the public loves of mankind into a single Body under God. Thirty three years after Simeon said that Christ would reveal God to the nations, Christ completed his offering as the Beloved Son. His words fulfilled the promise made at His Presentation in the Temple: "Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit."

January 28: St Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Scholar

[first published January 28, 2015]

by David Pence

The "scientific revolution" was a centuries-long project of dividing man from the primary powers of his intellect to synthesize, categorize, and know as a sacral being in terms of a sacred whole. The modern scientist came to think very much of himself and very little of man. Hundreds of years before that egotistical destabilizing fragmentation, a great Dominican saint rose in Italy to do just the opposite.  Thomas Aquinas was educated by the greatest natural philosopher (student of physical and biological sciences) of his time: Albert the Great. He benefited from the rediscovery of Greek texts of Aristotle and thus learned the metaphysics, ethics, politics, and categories of the Greeks. He knew the Bible intimately and prodigiously. His New Testament commentary, verse by verse, is a compilation of the Church Fathers' commentary as well.

His purity was no small part of his clear vision; and his humility no incidental in his ability to properly categorize. He was called the 'angelic doctor' because the towering intellectual understood the metaphysical necessity and scriptural testimony of those spiritual beings who so embarrass the modern Catholic PhD. Above all, he knew how to pray first -- and write and formulate from that posture. The best biography of Aquinas is G.K. Chesterton's The Dumb Ox.

The online site Universalis, which provides the prayers of the Daily Office in a usable everyday form, also provides a short bio of saints of the day. Below is their excellent synopsis.

To honor St. Thomas, consider going to Universalis and joining the worldwide church in one or more of her daily prayers. It will aid your struggle for holiness and make you smarter as well.
                                                                                   

                                                                   

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274)             

"He was born of a noble family in southern Italy, and was educated by the Benedictines. In the normal course of events he would have joined that order and taken up a position suitable to his rank; but he decided to become a Dominican instead. His family were so scandalized by this disreputable plan that they kidnapped him and kept him prisoner for over a year; but he was more obstinate than they were, and he had his way at last. 

"He studied in Paris and in Cologne under the philosopher Saint Albert the Great. It was a time of philosophical ferment. The writings of Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of the ancient world, had been newly rediscovered, and were becoming available to people in the West for the first time in a thousand years. Many feared that Aristotelianism was flatly contradictory to Christianity, and the teaching of Aristotle was banned in many universities at this time – the fact that Aristotle’s works were coming to the West from mostly Muslim sources did nothing to help matters. 

"Into this chaos Thomas brought simple, straightforward sense. Truth cannot contradict truth: if Aristotle (the infallible pagan philosopher) appears to contradict Christianity (which we know by faith to be true), then either Aristotle is wrong or the contradiction is in fact illusory. And so Thomas studied, and taught, and argued, and eventually the simple, common-sense philosophy that he worked out brought an end to the controversy. Out of his work came many writings on philosophy and theology, including the Summa Theologiae, a standard textbook for many centuries and still an irreplaceable resource today. Out of his depth of learning came, also, the dazzling poetry of the liturgy for Corpus Christi. And out of his sanctity came the day when, celebrating Mass, he had a vision that, he said, made all his writings seem like so much straw; and he wrote no more. 

"Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to inspire us, like St Thomas, to love God with our minds as well as our hearts; and if we come across a fact or a teaching that seems to us to contradict our faith, let us not reject it but investigate it: for the truth that it contains can never contradict the truth that is God."

UPDATE: Don't miss this short video on Aquinas' central teaching on nature and grace, by Taylor Marshall; and another on the reasons why Catholic men in every generation should love the Italian saint (who's buried in the southwest of France).
                                               

Tomb of Thomas

In remembrance of Martin Luther King: Sacred Selma is no bridge to Sodom

[first published March 17, 2015]

{Jan 21, 2019 Addendum--Student statement on fabricated racism event at pro-life march by students from Catholic Boys School-a white teen guilty of looking an old fraud in the eye. Looking eye to eye is the Latin root of the word RESPECT}

by David Pence
                               
One of the themes preached at Brown Chapel Church in Selma, on the day before the 50-year commemoration of 'Bloody Sunday,' was how the liberated Israelites forgot their true destination and were soon worshiping false gods in the wilderness.
                           

In the spring of 1965, local Negro Christians led a procession across the Alabama River in response to the shooting of a black Baptist deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, two weeks earlier. The purpose of the march was to link the shooting to the need for black voting rights in the state. The destination was Montgomery, the capital 50 miles away. When the marchers left the city limits and crossed the Pettus Bridge they came under the jurisdiction of the county sheriff and state patrol. The sheriff, Jim Clark, had called all white males over 21 to be deputized as a county posse. The state troopers were George Wallace’s men, and eager to strike a blow for a segregated "Heart of Dixie." Several national TV camera crews recorded the onslaught. A nation still capable of moral outrage was shocked.

It was several days later that Reverend Martin Luther King and ministers from across the land came for the second Selma march. They only went to the end of the bridge, obeying a federal injunction against completing the march to Montgomery. After kneeling in prayer where the violence had occurred, they then turned around. Some of the younger black activists criticized King and dubbed that day "Turnaround Tuesday." It wasn't a compliment.

The third march (Mar 21-25,1965) two weeks later was allowed and protected by federal military policemen, army troops, and a federalized Alabama national guard. They completed the march to the state capitol in Montgomery four days later. This time, preachers from all over the country and famous entertainers were in the crowd to hear Reverend King's "How Long, Not Long" speech. He praised "white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over ugly customs and privileges of generations to come forth boldly to join hands with us." He gave a history lesson on Jesus and Jim Crow:

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)

He explained the many contorted forms of segregation that it took to divide a Christian nation by color:

 They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; (Yes, sir) they segregated southern churches from Christianity (Yes, sir); they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; (Yes, sir) and they segregated the Negro from everything. (Yes, sir).  

But for this Christian movement the cry of "no justice, no peace" was not a threat of violence but the continued soul-power of love restoring men to brotherhood:

"And so I plead with you this afternoon as we go ahead: remain committed to nonviolence. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man."

Finally he reminded us that persistence in protest does not come from the defiant wills of clenched fists, but the open hearts of men who trust in God:

"How long will justice be crucified, (Speak) and truth bear it?" (Yes, sir)I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, (Yes, sir) however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, (No sir) because "truth crushed to earth will rise again." (Yes, sir)How long? Not long, (Yes, sir) because "no lie can live forever." (Yes, sir)How long? Not long, (All right. How long) because "you shall reap what you sow." (Yes, sir)How long? (How long?) Not long: (Not long)Truth forever on the scaffold, (Speak)Wrong forever on the throne, (Yes, sir)Yet that scaffold sways the future, (Yes, sir) And, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own.How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. (Yes, sir)How long? Not long, (Not long) because:Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; (Yes, sir)"

Reverend King called President Johnson's speech, given ten days earlier on the Voting Rights Act, "an address that will live in history as one of the most passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a president of our nation"; and he noted it was given by a "president born in the South."

After his speech to a joint session of Congress, LBJ ordered that protection be provided to the Selma marchers. He challenged an attentive, wary, sparsely applauding legislature:

"The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, 'What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' "

The Voting Act became law on August 8, 1965.

John Lewis, congressman from Georgia, was one of the few men who spoke at the 50-year commemoration who also marched on Bloody Sunday. In his short and stirring speech before President Obama’s address, Lewis quoted LBJ's opening words to Congress: "At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama."

Johnson said in the same Selma-inspired speech: "I want to be the president who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races, all regions, and all parties." John Lewis began his talk not addressing the dignitaries, not even the president. He said, "Beloved brothers and sisters." He said we are here to "renew the soul of America." The movement was about love -- and John Lewis still remembered. It was about love of God and love of neighbor. It was not about black men yelling 'racist' at white men, but calling them brothers and calling them to love as Christ had commanded us. It always began in churches; and there was a lot of spiritual healing and calling on Jesus to grant courage. It was about redeeming love; and we cannot properly remember this day without remembering that building the spiritual bond of civic charity was driven by the redeeming suffering love of the Gospel.  

Lewis remembered: "We walked down that sidewalk over there. With a kind of military discipline, we were so peaceful, so quiet." Listen to the voice of Lewis, listen to his plea, and the spiritual echo of that day will come clear. Only their prayer time in a church when they were not so quiet had armed them for what would come next. It was not "their will against the will of the policemen," as the president said. For when Israel fights its enemies depending only on itself -- on its own will -- it always loses. These men and women knew they were following the will of God, and that is why eventually as Lewis said, "they knew the truth would win out." It was not their will that triumphed that day. Someone else was writing in His own hand, turning the soul-force of unrequited suffering into Victory.

                             

Rev King flanked (at far L) by Rev Abernathy and (far R) by John Lewis

It was shortly after Selma that a lot of chosen people forgot, again, where they were marching and Who was directing their march. Five months later the first great urban burning and looting riot would occur in Watts, California. That looked a lot more like the revelry at the Golden Calf, than the redeeming march through the parted waters of the Red Sea. Younger men turned the movement for Christian brotherhood into something very different -- black power, color identity, hatred, and a glorification not of redemptive suffering but redemptive violence. The Christian themes of following God’s will and reuniting a beloved community in the brotherhood of men under the Fatherhood of God gave way to color consciousness, sexual licentiousness, envy, greed, and wrath. “Soul” which once meant that spiritual principle of human life, which was instantly recognizable by men of every color, was turned on its head and came to be shorthand for “Black.” The jutting of the chin, the militant posture on college campuses, and the celebration of the criminal inside the confines of black ghettos had replaced the open hearts and hands seeking love.

The devil loves to tear apart. He is a divider and a liar from the beginning. He loves to come disguised as an angel of light, fighting for liberation but still peddling his same old chains of slavery.
And just what the racists had predicted started to happen. All the moral capital of the innocent, beaten by lawmen, was set aside. The march for freedom was perverted into a license for revelry -- just like the pagan erotic cult at the foot of Mount Sinai that had so angered Moses. The higher morality of love over law became the immorality of disrespect for authority and the law. "The Man" became the enemy. Another kind of male became the Superfly. Then, the greatest metaphysical error in American political history insured that the movement among men for the equality of public brotherhood was hijacked by the protest of middle-class white women against the sexual order of marriage and familial duty. This was coupled with a wild sexual rut among the males, again masquerading as a freedom train. The women said they would not be mothers and clamored for abortion, while the men said they would not be soldiers and ran from their protective duties. So many times during this forty years of wandering, the devious cults of "self" came cloaked in the sacred cloth of Selma.
                                 

"The Adoration of the Golden Calf" by Nicolas Poussin (1634)

White feminists were quite content that black men were into separatism. Back then, black men did not treat the analysis of the white chick with the obeisance we see now. The feminists left the black man his urban streets and the prisons. She and her soft white male allies took the universities, churches, and public service unions. Later, a crass calculation of everybody against the white male (down with patriarchy!) would lead to the diversity racket of electoral majorities and cottage industries in big cities, universities, and the world of non-profits. As Eric Hoffer said, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Black men who wanted to progress in public office drank the feminist Kool-Aid in public speeches and policy, if not in their personal lives. Religious institutions rejected the patriarchy of the Lord's Prayer for the gender obfuscation of inclusion. The widows begged for husbands and the orphans for fathers -- and in the name of civil rights we gave them sexual anarchy, making more spiritual widows and orphans than ever before in our history. Under the rubric of diversity, a coalition was struck of rights and reparation, the black power movement, the feminists, and finally the homosexuals. The party of city immigrants and working men turned into an umbrella for diversity. God was exiled, the beloved community abandoned, and idols erected by a coalition of the oppressed.

The faith-healing, Scripture reading, and Gospel singing that broke the back of racism were sent to the back of the bus. It could be resurrected when needed for nostalgia, but it could no longer be taken seriously as a spiritual organizing principle. It was not a worship of the mighty God, though He still could be evoked for the closing of speeches. It was a celebration of "us," of the humanistic pride that turned worship of God into a celebration of congregations. The people celebrate themselves, savoring the wounds of their parents while rejecting their wisdom. This communal celebration of self had happened long ago. The people set out to make a name for themselves and forgot God. They built a tower at Babel.

The ordered relationship of sexual fidelity in marriage, the purity in thought and speech toward the sacred goods of God’s name and the marriage act -- these ordered relationships became the enemy of the new freedom divorced from freedom’s Author. And that public form of Christian love -- fraternal brotherhood among adult men -- now became the love "that dare not speak its name." It became a mantra of militant black men that they did not seek to love or to be loved by the white man. Brotherhood was for wimps, and soon the wimps would rule in a way no American man of fifty years ago could ever imagine.

The integrated body politic, the black and white males in a posse for justice who would protect the widows and orphans of every color -- that dream became a joke. The marriage of a black man and white woman or a white man and black woman -- that sacred bond was now allowed. But in a bizarre twist that could only come from the twisted Father of Lies, this natural love has now become a rallying flag to honor the unnatural. Those who marched at Selma would wonder at a president who diluted their blood with such acts of sexual sacrilege. All of us who were in the movement, we exchanged our glorious God for a grass-eating bull. Elections indeed were won, a coalition with those serving other gods was struck…but what doth it profit?
                                     

Bloody Sunday in Selma

There are many more female black faces in high places, and yet so many more male black faces in jail. Every third pregnancy by a black female is aborted -- five times the rate of white women. There are black males in elected offices, but all must worship at the altar of feminism to be admitted to the club.

In his speech at Selma, President Obama broke open the moral capital of the Selma "bank account" and distributed blank checks to the sexual pretenders. It had been his honest claim as a black man to that social capital which helped him defeat an entitled feminist for the presidency in 2008. But any honest assessment of Mr. Obama reveals he has done much more for the sexual revolutionaries than for interracial brotherhood among men. He said he would be Joshua, but the feminist brain chip is the paradigm most deeply implanted in his heart. The sense of solidarity with the men of his country or the men of other cultures who rule by the traditional male forms of patriarchy and fraternity is not part of the moral grammar of this mother's son. He considers patriarchy an evil, and masculine fraternity as fun for the playground but oppressive in religion and politics.

The billy clubs and tear gas of Sheriff Clark could crack open a man's head and break up a marching crowd, but they could never touch the movement's soul. But now the blood of the martyrs has been polluted at an altar to a foreign god in the wilderness. Our souls no longer rest in the Lord. The shame of our president is that his speech at Selma was a sacrilege against a sacred space. The president, whom so many of us voted for as an act of racial reconciliation, once again used his pulpit to preach not the saving grace of brotherhood but the enslaving confusion of the sexual revolution.

The Christian movement brings us back to the original promise of the country and the truth of Scripture. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Real peace comes from deeper and broader bonds. The tenor of the Christian movement, even in its dreams, was a return to some order that lay at the heart of our nature as creatures of God with human souls. It was a check written long ago which we had come to cash. We were not looking for endless change, and more and more categories of the oppressed that might be released from social obligations and rules of decorum. We were seeking something old -- that men might live like brothers, that a man and woman might marry and raise their family in peace, that elders would be called Mister and Missus.

Selma was a place in history where the fate of a nation was hinged. It still is such a place.  As President Johnson said:

"There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans -- not as Democrats or Republicans -- we are met here as Americans to solve that problem."

                                                         

President Johnson

Every crucial speech from that era reminds us this was a Christian movement of brotherhood that was deeply resonant with the initial Christian movement that formed the colonies and towns of America’s Protestant seaboard.

We cannot leave the interpretation of this day to the mistaken notion that sexual disorder is Selma's fruit. The bridge from Selma led to Montgomery, not Sodom. Montgomery was the city where the Reverends King and Abernathy first joined as ministers to unite the Negro community as Christians, and renew the whole city as a "Beloved Community" of fellow citizens. Sodom was destroyed; Montgomery was to be renewed. Selma was a spiritual movement that galvanized white and black people across the country. That’s why, within two weeks of Bloody Sunday, armed American white men protected the marchers from their persecutors. That’s why five months later a Voting Rights Act could be passed. If we can unite ourselves again under God and sing His praises loudly, then we can renew a brotherhood of fathers to socialize all our young men -- black, white and Hispanic -- into the Christian form of masculine love that is citizenship.

This spiritual renewal of the American soul is how the South will rise again. Let us be renewed in the public Biblical faith and Christian love of Selma. It is the road to the New Jerusalem which will shine with the glory of God when He comes to dwell amidst His people. Let us not ignore the living Lord or surely we shall be chastised; and the blood drawn at Selma will lose its sacred power "to renew the soul of America." 

The Baptism of Jesus

                                     

Pence writes:

"It was at the Jordan River that Joshua commanded the priests to precede with the Ark of the Covenant, followed by the sons of Israel who – now properly ordered behind the Ark – could enter the Promised Land.

"When Christ emerged from that same river, he was enclosed not by the Ark but revealed in the first manifestation of the Trinity. His Father’s voice proclaimed Him; and the hovering Spirit anointed Him. On this day, the entry of all men to the Promised Land was made possible.

"All the sons of men who would be baptized in the new Adam could now be incorporated in Son-ship with the triune God. Christ’s Baptism washed away Satan, the world, and the flesh – and revealed the sacramental strategy for incorporation in the new Adam.

"The just angels marveled in awe at the new-found glory of man, while Lucifer resentfully plotted a meeting in the desert."

THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST: the Theophany of God and the Baptism of Christ

(first published January 12, 2014)

David Pence writes:  
         
               

                  "... the Sun of righteousness washing in the Jordan,
                                fire immersed in water..."


The Sunday after Epiphany, the Church celebrates the Baptism of Christ. It marks the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Christ’s public life and “Ordinary Time.” In an older calendar, the Epiphany was celebrated as an eight-day feast. The coming of the Wise Men, the first miracle at Cana, and the most important manifestation – the theophany at Christ’s baptism – were all considered epiphanies which explained the true identity of Jesus Christ. In the Orthodox Churches, the “twelve days of Christmas” are the feast days observed from the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem to his Baptism in the Jordan which is called the feast of the Theophany.

The Baptism of Christ is not merely about God and water, or God and nature, or even God and man’s salvation. This is not just an event of Divine Economy – God’s relation to creation. At the Baptism of Christ, something happened quite unexpected. The Baptism is THEOPHANY – the “appearance of God” – and for the first time Jesus is revealed as Son of God; and God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

For a moment let us forget about ourselves. Let us even forget about the sacramental order of saving our souls.  Let us contemplate what was revealed here about the reality that preceded the creation of heaven and earth. Let us think of God before Satan rebelled and man fell.

Who could imagine this? God is three in one. There is a reality called personhood, which can be united in love, as many in one. On this day, in the Father’s voice, we are definitively told that Jesus is God. We are shown “the Spirit of God descending on Him like a dove.” This is how the Christmas season ends: with a lesson about the identity of Jesus as Divine, and the nature of God as an interpersonal love relationship that constitutes the ultimate reality.


Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. 

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
                              
                     

"Today the nature of the waters is sanctified,
The Jordan bursts forth and turns back the flood of its streams,

Seeing the Master wash Himself.

To the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 

Prepare ye the way of the Lord, 

You came, O Lord, taking the form of a servant, 

Asking for baptism though you have no sin. 

The waters saw You and were afraid. 

The Forerunner began to tremble and cried out, saying: 

How shall the lampstand illumine the Light? 

How shall the servant lay hands upon the Master? 

Sanctify both me and the waters, O Savior, 

Who takes away the sins of the world."

  (Orthodox hymn for Theophany)

The Feast of the Epiphany and the true Age of Enlightenment

[first published January 6, 2016]

by David Pence

                                     

                                       

Epiphany means 'manifestation.' The Christmas season is a series of liturgical celebrations of different events in the life of Christ that manifest who He is, and why calendars all over the world begin their numbering of the years based on His coming. The naming of Jesus and his circumcision complete the Christmas Octave (Jan 1st); the twelve days of Christmas end with the “Christmas for the Gentiles” and the coming of the Magi (kings or wise men) on Jan 6th or the Sunday nearby. For centuries this day was associated with the coming of the Magi, the Baptism of Our Lord and his first miracle at the wedding feast in Cana. All of these were manifestations of the unique event that was celebrated at Christmas. The celebration of Epiphany ends with the manifestation of the Trinity revealed at Christ's baptism by John in the river Jordan. A few other traditions extend the season the full 40 days to his Presentation in the Temple as the first-born Jewish son on Candlemas Day (Feb 2nd).

At the feast of the Epiphany he does not transfigure himself, nor do we hear the voice of God or songs of angels. The scene at the epiphany is three kings representing the monarchs and nations of the world bowing to the King of Kings; and acknowledging that from this birth forth, the destiny of nations would be determined in relation to the new King. Not only human history but all of physical nature is reconfigured to the alpha male of humanity -- the Lord of nature and perfecting head of our species. The star pointing the wise men to his person shows that a new law of personal gravity is in effect that will allow Peter to walk on water, and the human species to escape the sure death awaiting any planet tied to the finite life cycle of a medium-size star. The Star of Bethlehem foreshadows the domination and reorganization of nature that the God of eternal life promises. On this 12th day of Christmas let us promise, with the wise men, that we will always teach the truth of nature and the physical sciences, as well as the meaning of history and the story of nations in light of God -- who made Himself fully known during the true age of Enlightenment: Our Lord’s earthly lifespan 2000 years ago--the axis mundi.

                                                 

"The wise men, seeing him, so fair,

Bow low before him, and with prayer

Their treasured eastern gifts unfold

Of incense, myrrh, and royal gold.

The fragrant incense which they bring,

The gold, proclaim him God and King;

The bitter spicy dust of myrrh

Foreshadows his new sepulchre.

All glory, Lord, to thee we pay

For thine Epiphany today;

All glory, as is ever meet,

To Father and to Paraclete."

Addendum 2019-The three men in history and art by Sandra Meisel.