A MAP for Life, Part 2
On Community, the Blessed Mother, and St. Michael's Lent
An astute reader commented yesterday that she hoped I would address the need for community as part of Catholic life. She beat me to the punch, and she is absolutely right. Christ did not create an assemblage of lone rangers. He called disciples and of those disciples he called twelve men to lead and guide the Church after He ascended.
Some years ago I was drawn to a fellow at our parish’s That Man is You program. We started meeting during the week, just to reflect on things, and out of that, a friendship grew. Although he is a new friend, he is one of my very best friends. Also out of that program, a diaconal candidate — now a deacon — called a friend of his and me to join him in Exodus 90. Out of the two programs, we assembled a group first of three, then four, then five or six, and now, a year after I’ve left the area, the group is seven or eight, men who meet weekly to discuss the readings for the upcoming Sunday Mass and to share their lives with each other.
Reflection on the Word, in a group, however small, leads to growth. “Where two or three are gathered in My Name, I am in the midst of them,” the Lord promises — and the promise holds true.
The growth of that group is related to a program: That Man is You and then Exodus 90 — sometimes dubbed TMIY 2.0 — were the catalysts for the group coming together, a group that came together spontaneously. What holds the group together is common reflection upon the Word of God and a willingness to share the joys and struggles of life.
I speak of community as a second — but not secondary — matter, because it is a fruit of faithful reflection on the Word. And we have to speak of groups of men. That is how the Church spread, and that is how the Church grew, and grows, strong. The College of Apostles was masculine. Women were present, active, and revered, in the New Testament itself — and in the early years of the Church down to the present, the Church grows and spreads under the leadership of men: even the women’s communities, formal and informal, convene and serve in response to the hierarchical leadership — preaching, teaching, administration of the sacraments —exercised by the successors to the apostles and the priests and deacons. Even the individual missionaries, the Jesuits, for instance, grew out of a community of men. When men band together, in loving response to the Word, things take off. So I would say that even before you look about trying to create a group, try instead to make the morning prayer with the text of Sacred Scripture. The Lord will do the rest. He calls us one by one, and then He calls us together. We know our reception of the Word is fruitful when we do come together. If we want the Church to be strong, we want, and need, faithful men, laymen especially, to band together: the clergy and the women already do, and they are waiting for us.
I write these words on the Solemnity of the Assumption. Today the Church celebrates the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption into glory and her crowning as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. This doctrine comes to us from Sacred Tradition, but its antecedents are in Holy Scripture. Enoch walked with God — right into heaven one day. Elijah left this world in a chariot of fire. The Letter of Jude speaks of a contest between Michael the Archangel and the devil over the earthly remains of Moses, suggesting that Michael carried Moses’ body to heavenly glory. Revelation 12 shows the Woman clothed with the Sun in childbirth, just before war between Michael and the devil; the Church takes this passage of proof of Our Lady’s presence, body and soul, in the heavenlies. To these Scriptural hints the Church adds that there is no shrine to Our Lady where she died: wherever the Apostles died, or the saints, there the faithful have built shrines and gone on pilgrimage. The sacred tradition is that Mary departed this world from Ephesus — and there is no shrine, no gravesite there.
We speak of Mary for so many reasons. Indeed, the theologians tell us, de Maria, numquam satis: about Mary, enough can never be said. Today I want to focus on her queenship and her faithfulness. She is Queen, because she is Mother of the King; and the Old Testament shows us that in the Davidic Kingdom, no one was more powerful than the Queen Mother: she was the one who could and did influence the King. But when we speak of queenship and kingship, we speak of family. Christian community is essentially family life, because we have been adopted into Christ through baptism, and we are therefore part of the royal family of God. Healthy families, and their family members, spend time together. Remember the slogan, the family that prays together, stays together. In my experience — I don’t know if this is universally true—, the only times families pray together is when individual members of the family pray by themselves.
Mary is supremely the faithful one, the Daughter of Zion. She remained steadfast in all the sorrows of her life — at the Presentation, in the Flight to Egypt, in the losing and finding of Jesus at the Temple, on the Way of the Cross, at the Cross, in her removing Her Son from the wood of the Cross, in the Burial; at the loss of St. Joseph. We would like to assume that somehow the Blessed Mother was exempt from suffering because she was exempt from sin, redeemed perfectly as she was at the first moment of her conception. Yet she is a mother, and mothers suffer. As a mother she suffered for the sufferings of her Divine Son, and, as she was sinless, she also saw with blazing intelligence and moral purity the heinous nature of sin and its effects, upon her Divine Son, upon herself, who witnessed the sufferings of her Son and suffered with him, in a way wholly suited to her alone, for the world’s salvation, and upon both the victims and perpetrators of sin. She nevertheless never once hesitated in her acceptance of her divine vocation to be the Mother of God Incarnate — to be, therefore, the Mother of God —, having uttered her fiat.
As the supremely faithful human being, Mary thus becomes the model of our own faithfulness — and the victory of her Assumption (God took her up into heaven, she did not ascend on her own), is, like the Eucharist itself, to which the Assumption is related, a guarantee of the glory that all who are faithful will enjoy in the age to come, each according to the measure allotted to each.
We are members of God’s royal family, by adoption. As members of Christ, we have Mary for our mother. As children of Mary, and of the Father, we have an inheritance awaiting us.
But only if we contend for it. Jesus despised the Cross, enduring the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the Father — that’s Hebrews 12. Mary stood by Him at the foot of the Cross, and she stood by the Apostles in the Upper Room as they waited after the Ascension for what was to come. Jesus began His earthly ministry at the Wedding of Cana, where, in response to her gentle observation that “they have no wine,” he converted water into wine of such quality and amount that the world had never seen before nor will see again. Jesus listens to His Mother — and tradition tells us that she was immersed in the Word of God from her earliest childhood onward. So, men, in praying with the sacred text, meeting the Word in the Word, not only are we honoring the Lord: we are honoring His Mother, who is our mother in the spiritual order and who urges us to fight like men, as Jesus did, for the glory of the Father and the salvation of souls. St. Paul tells us, in the Second Letter to Timothy, that if we endure with Christ, we shall reign with Christ — and that if we deny Him, He will deny us, as he can do nothing else but be faithful to himself.
We are not left alone in this battle. In addition to the Lord Jesus Himself interceding for us to the Father, to the Holy Spirit’s intercession for us, to the helps of the Word and the Sacraments, to Our Lady’s intercession for us and the helps that she gives us, to the intercession of the saints, we enjoy the ministry of angels. This is a constant teaching of the Church, from the very beginning.
St. Michael has already appeared twice in this article. He appears in the citation from the Book of Jude, and again in the citation from Revelation. He is a major figure in spiritual warfare.
His prominence is, in fact, yet another signal from the Lord that what the Lord prizes most is humility. St. Michael is an archangel — he ranks below the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, and principalities, and just above the angels. Why did God choose him as the captain of the heavenly hosts? His name itself gives us the reason: Michael means “Who is like God?” Unlike Lucifer, who dared to think he could supplant God, Michael knows there is no one like God, and his recognition signals his own reliance upon the divine power for victory in the spiritual warfare he wages.
Pope Leo XIII in 1886 inserted the prayer to St. Michael at the end of the traditional Mass in response to a vision the Lord granted him showing him the evil about to be unleashed upon the Church in the efforts of the demons to destroy her. A few decades prior to Leo’s vision, in 1851 Pope Pius IX authorized the recitation of the Chaplet of St. Michael, which devotion had been revealed privately in 1750 to Portuguese Carmelite nun Antónia d’Astónaco. The chaplet invokes the intercession of St. Michael and each of the nine choir of angels in turn for an increase in the virtue particular to that choir. The chaplet has shown itself to be a powerful impetus to growth in virtue and to victory in crushing whatever vice besets us.
But devotion to St. Michael goes back much, much further. Since Patristic times, churches and shrines have been erected in his honor. The mysterious Sword of St. Michael is a line of 7 sanctuaries in a straight line proceeding from the west at Skellig Michael in Ireland, through Cornwall, Normandy, Italy, and Greece to Mt. Carmel in Israel. The ancient Kingdom, and now Autonomous Community, of Navarre, in north-central Spain, honors St. Michael in a shrine on Aralar, as the angel who delivered them from paganism (rampant once again in our days). There are many more such churches and shrines.
No less a saint than St. Francis, the Seraphic Father, practiced assiduous devotion to St. Michael, observing a Lent - a time of preparation — that begins today and culminates on his feast day, currently observed on September 29 under the title of the Archangels. It was in fact during one of these St. Michael’s Lents that St. Francis received the stigmata — showing the inseparable link between the Lord’s Passion, our voluntary participation in it, and the assistance of the angels as the only way to victory in spiritual warfare and in the quest for purity of soul.
What I am proposing today is a plan of the morning prayer based upon meditation on Sacred Scripure; devotion to Our Lady as the sure-fire way of generating hope and confidence in the Lord’s promises; and devotion to St. Michael as our mighty patron in spiritual warfare and the ascetically challenges we face. Exodus 90 is offering a program for St. Michael’s Lent, and I highly recommend it: last year, at its conclusion, my wife and I bought on his feast day the home in which we now live, about which at some point I will write. I also commend the short book The Greatness of St. Michael the Archangel, by Fr. Nicola Ricci. You can order the Chaplet of St. Michael from Amazon and have one tomorrow; you can learn how to pray it through the iPieta app, through any number of on-line sites, and in the blue Pieta booklet if you have it.
We begin this journey alone: perhaps a sermon spurs us to seek greater intimacy with Christ, or something we read. Perhaps something a parent, teacher, or friend tells us lights the spark that gets us going. Then we learn to pray, and find out we must pray on our own, face-to-face with Christ. And then the helps multiply faster than we can count them. Our ancient enemy wants us discouraged and feeling helpless and hopeless. The good God, the True God, whom we have the privilege to know, love, and serve, gives us more helps than we can use in a lifetime so that we can safely reach the harbor of the heavenly shores. Let us make good use of them, so that we may give good account of ourselves and bring many souls with us. Daily prayer with Sacred Scripture, devotion to Our Lady, and devotion to St. Michael, will take us far down the road.
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