Wednesday, September 21, 2005

M’s birthday.

Sick and sinner enough for you to call me, and eat with me, according to the measure of your gift, I am signing up to be a eucharistic minister at the Cathedral.

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John Harris: “Abortion Never Kills Just One Person”.

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See also Rising Crosses and Crosses.

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. . . simul adsunt et uno lumine micant tot speciossima tabernacula Dei, tot membra excellentissima corporis Christi.
—Pope Leo the Great

A word (several words) about a word. A body may consist of several bodies; my dictionary gives as examples: a body of soldiers, an advisory body. We Christians are the body of Christ. This is so even when we fight each other, even when we sin. For in the first place a body lives in tensions and oppositions, and in the second the body of Christ suffers in a suffering world. For the sins of Christian bishops, priests and laity are the old sins, not new ones; in sinners the body of Christ is sin, until by endeavoring in the Spirit we are made, after many deaths, a perfect man and the fullness of Christ.

Huston Smith quotes a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

The Emperor Constantine

I could have lived in the time of Constantine.
Three hundred years after the death of the Savior,
Of whom no more was known than that he had risen
Like a sunny Mithra among Roman legionnaires.
I would have witnessed the quarrel between homoousios and homoiousios
About whether the Christ nature is divine or only resembles divinity.
Probably I would have cast my vote against Trinitarians,
For who could ever guess the Creator’s nature?
Constantine, Emperor of the World, coxcomb and murderer,
Tipped the scale at the Council of Nicea,
So that we, generation after generation, meditate on the Holy Trinity,
Mystery of mysteries, without which
The blood of man would have been alien to the blood of the universe
And the spilling of His own blood by a suffering God, who offered Himself
As a sacrifice even as He was creating the world, would have been in vain.
Thus Constantine was merely an undeserving tool,
Unaware of what he was doing for people of distant times.

And us, do we know what we are destined for?