"See With the Eyes of Your Soul": St. Aelred on the Resurrection

As I noted last month, Saint Aelred of Rievaulx's letter to his anchorite sister contained some beautiful meditations on the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Aelred encouraged his sister to imagine that she was there witnessing these events. When it comes to the Resurrection, he tells her to follow Mary Magdalen to the tomb and there meet the Risen Christ:

After all this, make sure that you do not quit the fellowship of Mary Magdalen; but when she goes to Christ's sepulchre with her sweet-smelling balms to anoint Christ's body, follow her. Ah Lord, sister, if only you might be worthy to see with the eyes of your soul that which Mary saw with the eyes of your body . . . within the sepulchre, one angel at the head, another at the foot, singing and praising the joy and bliss of Christ's resurrection . . . Jesus looking happily on Mary Magdalen who was weeping, full for sorrow His death . . . now His sweet voice as He call her by name: 'Mary!' What could be sweeter than this word, or more joyful and blissful--Mary! Now Mary, let thy tears run down, and thy sighs come forth. What heart didst thou have, what spirit, what strength, when thou didst fall headlong at Christ's feet, and didst greet Him saying: 'Rabboni!' I pray thee tell me, with what affection, with what burning desire of thy heart thou didst cry out, for thou couldst not say more for sobbing and weeping when thou saidst, 'Rabboni'. The great love thou didst have for Jesus had filled all the senses of thy body and soul.

Saint Aelred meditates on Jesus's command, Noli me tangere/Touch me not and it is hard to tell who is speaking, Mary Magdalen or Aelred:

Why, blissful Lord? Why may I not come near to Thee? Why may I not touch thy dear feet that were pierced for me with nails on the cross? Why may I not handle them, nor kiss them? Good Jesus, has Thou become a stranger to me, and no more my friend, now that Thy body is even more glorious after Thy resurrection? Now for sure, I will not let Thee go, and I will not go from Thee. I shall never cease from weeping. My breast and heart will break for sobbing and sighing unless I touch thy feet just once. And then says the merciful Jesus: 'I am not yet ascended to my Father.' That which you ask, He says, is not taken from you but is only delayed. 'Go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father. . . . '

Then Mary runs from the garden, and surely she runs all the faster, so that she may come back to it more quickly. . . .

And he notes that Mary Magdalen's wish to grasp the feet of Jesus is fulfilled:

I beg you to notice how that which was at first denied is now granted to Mary Magdalen and her companions. As the gospel says: 'They went and clasped Jesus about His feet.' (Matthew 28:9)

Christ Is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

Today is my mother Rita's birthday! God bless her in Heaven in that eternal Easter of joy and love!

Easter and April Fools Day and Blessed John Bretton

Christ is Risen, as He promised! 

Christ is Risen, He is Risen Indeed!

Happy Easter!

Like Christmas, Easter is a day in the commercial, secular world. All the Easter candy and decorations will be on sale tomorrow, if not marked down later today! But in the Church, Easter is a season and we will continue to remember the triumph of Jesus over death and sin and our sharing in that triumph through being united with Him through Baptism. After remembering the institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood on Holy Thursday, the Church's Good Friday service recounted Jesus's Passion, prayed for the world, reverenced the Cross, and shared the presanctified Holy Communion.

The three o'clock service (No Mass on Good Friday) at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament here in Wichita was very well attended. The Veneration of the Cross must have taken 15 to 20 minutes and the two cantors in the choir loft led us through the great Improperia or The Reproaches twice, then other hymns and psalms, including "Were You There?", "O Sacred Head Surrounded", and Isaac Watt's great hymn:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Immediately after the service, we prayed the Divine Mercy chaplet, beginning the novena that will last through the great first week of Easter--every day a Solemn Feast--until Divine Mercy Sunday.

On Holy Saturday, there was no Mass and the Tabernacle was still empty: only with the Great Easter Vigil Saturday night did light, and the Mass, and the Real Presence return.

This year, Easter Sunday is also April Fools Day, so The Guardian and USA Today have run stories about how to pull Easter--candy, egg hunt, and bunny--themed tricks. 

This Easter Sunday is also the anniversary of a Catholic recusant layman's execution in Elizabethan England. Blessed John Bretton, pray for us!:

According to this tremendous account of his life and death, the layman Blessed John Bretton was executed on April 1, 1598 after years of recusancy "For words spoken out of Catholic Zeal" "because he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church," he "urged others to embrace the same religion" and he "denied the spiritual primacy of the Queen." His wife, Frances, survived him and continued their recusancy. 

Just some highlights: 

John Bretton was executed at York on 1st April 1598 because of his faith, the culmination of many, many years of courage and steadfastness in the face of persecution, by both John Bretton and Frances, his wife. . . .

The earliest reference to the Recusancy of John and Frances Bretton occurs in Archbishop Sandys’ List of Yorkshire Recusants returned to the Privy Council in 1577, wherein they are stated to have “no Habilities (Wealth)” “and yet are the most obstinate and perverse”. This list was sent five years after the Earl of Huntingdon had begun his intense investigation and persecution of Catholics in Yorkshire, four years before the passing of the Act 23 Eliz. c1 which made “reconciliation” to the Catholic Church a capital crime. For many years, because of the persecution he was suffering through his Recusancy, John Bretton was forced to flee and hide. Altogether he seems to have been a fugitive from 1577 to 1593, when the Act 35 Eliz. c2 forced all recusants to return home and stay within five miles thereof on pain of the loss of all property. . . .

That the Brettons were regarded as amongst the more notorious recusants is shown by the fact that on 12th February, 1589, within a year of their first conviction, the Exchequer issued a Commission for the assessment and seizure to the use of the Queen of two thirds of their lands and all their goods and chattels in accordance with the Statute of 1586. The Memoranda Roll recording this Commission and the subsequent enquiries gives the text of the patent, signed for the Queen by Burghley, and the names of the Yorkshire Gentry thereby empowered. They included “John, Lord Darcye: Sir Thomas Fairfax: Sir Richard Malliverer: Sir George Savell, and eleven others” In fact only six people, Richard Wortley, William Wentworth, Thomas Wentworth, Robert Bradford, Henry Farrer and Michael Kaie did the work and had produced before them on 8th April 1589, not only details of John Bretton’s property, but also that of forty five other recusants whose names were included in the schedule, including Maud (Matilda) Wentworth, widow, who was Frances’ aunt by marriage and lived over the way at Bretton Hall, and Dorothy Wentworth, the wife of Maud’s son, Matthew, also living there. . . .

Read more here about how Frances struggled without her husband's constancy and loyalty to the Faith:

One might be forgiven for hoping that, having had so much suffering in her life, culminating in her husband’s execution Frances Bretton would now be left in peace - but this was not to be. Within a month the Escheator was on her track. His very presence was proof that the family fortunes were in great jeopardy. In the midst of her grief, therefore she had to remind herself that it now devolved on her alone, as legal owner, to safeguard the livelihood of her children. To whom could she turn for advice ?

Her own kinsfolk, the Wentworths, one of the most powerful families in Yorkshire, doubtless watched events with interest, if not with sympathy. But, with one exception, (Michael of Woolley), all her male relatives appear to have been, at best, "Church Papists". One or two were strong and active supporters of the new religion. Tenacious of this world’s goods they must, as a whole, have been highly impatient with her rigid adherence to Catholic principle. Even her aunt, Maud Wentworth of Bretton Hall, after maintaining her recusancy for many years had, in her old age, publically (sic) conformed three years previously and thus preserved her property intact for her son, Matthew. 

Although Frances herself finally submitted to the Archbishop of York and was pardoned of her previous recusancy for the sake of her own son, Luke, and his inheritance, she was was soon numberered among the recusants again, and died in the Catholic faith. Blessed John Bretton and Frances also had two other sons, Richard and Matthew, who became Catholic priests!

What remarkable steadfastness and love! John Bretton was beatified among the 85 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1987.

Image Credit.

Blessed John Henry Newman on Easter

From Parochial and Plain Sermon "Christ, a Quickening Spirit":

O blessed day of the Resurrection, which of old time was called the Queen of Festivals, and raised among Christians an anxious, nay contentious diligence duly to honour it! Blessed day, once only passed in sorrow, when the Lord actually rose, and the disciples believed not; but ever since a day of joy to the faith and love of the Church! In ancient times, Christians all over the world began it with a morning salutation. Each man said to his neighbour, "Christ is risen;" and his neighbour answered him, "Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon." Even to Simon, the coward disciple who denied Him thrice, Christ is risen; even to us, who long ago vowed to obey Him, and have yet so often denied Him before men, so often taken part with sin, and followed the world, when Christ called us another way. "Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon!" to Simon Peter the favoured Apostle, on whom the Church is built, Christ has appeared. He has appeared to His Holy Church first of all, and in the Church He dispenses blessings, such as the world knows not of. Blessed are they if they knew their blessedness, who are allowed, as we are, week after week, and Festival after Festival, to seek and find in that Holy Church the Saviour of their souls! Blessed are they beyond language or thought, to whom it is vouchsafed to receive those tokens of His love, which cannot otherwise be gained by man, the pledges and means of His special presence, in the Sacrament of His Supper; who are allowed to eat and drink the food of immortality, and receive life from the bleeding side of the Son of God!

Happy Easter!

Chesterton to the Neophytes

In the diocese of Wichita, Kansas last night, perhaps 327 adults joined the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. At least that's how many Candidates (who had already been baptized) and Catechumens or Elect (who have never been baptized) participated in the Rite of Election this year, according to The Catholic Advance, our diocesan newspaper.

The Elect received the Sacraments of Initiation last night: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion, while the candidates affirmed their belief in all that the Catholic Church teaches and received the Sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Communion. Some may have been baptized Catholics and have received their First Holy Communion in the second grade and then fell away from the practice of the Faith: they were confirmed last night. The Elect of last night are the Neophytes of this Easter Sunday Morning.

I know at least two of those who became Catholics last night and I know that G.K. Chesterton played a great role in one of them deciding to become Catholic.

Chesterton thought often about his "conversion" to Catholicism from the Church of England and he wrote about it often, publishing at least four separate works on why he converted:

The Catholic Church and Conversion
Why I Am A Catholic
"Why I am a Catholic" essay in The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic
In The Well and the Shallows, essays on
MY SIX CONVERSIONS 

I. THE RELIGION OF FOSSILS 

II. WHEN THE WORLD TURNED BACK 

III. THE SURRENDER UPON SEX 

IV. THE PRAYER-BOOK PROBLEM 

V. THE COLLAPSE OF MATERIALISM 

VI. THE CASE OF SPAIN 

VII. THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS

Our G.K. Chesterton group has been reading those various essays which Ignatius Press has collected in one volume--and are just about to finish the last three essays, which will combine with reading chapters from The Woman Who Was Chesterton starting in April. 

Perhaps these two paragraphs from the "Why I Am a Catholic" essay in The Thing summarize Chesterton's reasons for becoming a Catholic. He just kept finding out that the Catholic Church told the truth:

There is barely space here to indicate this one thing out of the thousand things that confirm the same fact and confirm each other. I would undertake to pick up any topic at random, from pork to pyrotechnics, and show that it illustrates the truth of the only true philosophy; so realistic is the remark that all roads lead to Rome. Out of all these I have here only taken one fact; that the thing is pursued age after age by an unreasonable hatred that is perpetually changing its reason. Now of nearly all the dead heresies it may be said that they are not only dead, but damned; that is, they are condemned or would be condemned by common sense, even outside the Church, when once the mood and mania of them is passed. Nobody now wants to revive the Divine Right of Kings which the first Anglicans advanced against the Pope. Nobody now wants to revive the Calvinism which the first Puritans advanced against the King. Nobody now is sorry that the Iconoclasts were prevented from smashing all the statues of Italy. Nobody now is sorry that the Jansenists failed to destroy all the dramas of France. Nobody who knows anything about the Albigensians regrets that they did not convert the world to pessimism and perversion. Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. "Dominion founded on Grace" was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality. In nine cases out of ten the Church simply stood for sanity and social balance against heretics who were sometimes very like lunatics. Yet at each separate moment the pressure of the prevalent error was very strong; the exaggerated error of a whole generation, like the strength of the Manchester School in the 'fifties, or of Fabian Socialism as a fashion in my own youth. A study of the true historical cases commonly shows us the spirit of the age going wrong, and the Catholics at least relatively going right. It is a mind surviving a hundred moods. 

As I say, this is only one aspect; but it was the first that affected me and it leads on to others. When a hammer has hit the right nail on the head a hundred times, there comes a time when we think it was not altogether by accident. But these historical proofs would be nothing without the human and personal proofs, which would need quite a different sort of description. It is enough to say that those who know the Catholic practice find it not only right, but always right when everything else is wrong; making the Confessional the very throne of candour where the world outside talks nonsense about it as a sort of conspiracy; upholding humility when everybody is praising pride; charged with sentimental charity when the world is talking a brutal utilitarianism; charged with dogmatic harshness when the world is loud and loose with vulgar sentimentalism--as it is to-day. At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the centre; he knows.

Welcome home, Neophytes, reverts, and new Catholics! Make yourself at home, all cradle Catholics who renewed our baptismal promises--that perhaps others made for us--last night or will renew them today! 

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

Christ Is Risen, Truly He is Risen!

Music for Easter Sunday from the great Abbey of Solesmes:

Happy Easter!

Stations of the Cross in the Easter Season

The Church of the Blessed Sacrament recently acquired and restored a set of Stations of the Cross that had once been in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception here in Wichita, Kansas. Some parishioners hung them in the church on Friday last week and I went to pray the Stations of the Cross that afternoon. They replaced a set of stations that depicted just the face of Jesus at each station--so where before we had a rather minimalist interpretation of the Way of the Cross, now we have a set of dramatic vignettes. These new/old stations show each scene with Jesus at the center, of course, but with many other characters in the background or the foreground.

After I prayed the Stations, I went back around to take some pictures in the available light of the late afternoon (in a church on a north/south axis) with my husband's Canon S95. The pictures that turned out best, because of the angle at which I was taking them (perhaps four feet above my head), were those in which I zoomed in on a portion of the scene. As I viewed and re-viewed these stations, I noticed these details. From the Seventh Station: Jesus Falls the Second Time, see the dog growling at Jesus:

 

This was in the darkest part of the church in the late afternoon so it's a little grainy. From the Eighth Station: Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem: He stretches out His hand in blessing even as the soldiers are moving on from this meeting:



The sky in the background of the Tenth Station, Jesus is Stripped of His Garments, is beautiful:

Notice the argument beginning over Pilate's sign to be placed above Jesus on the Cross (do not say that "He is King of the Jews"; say that "He Said He was King of the Jews"--and Pilate's reply, What I have written, I have written) in the background of the Eleventh Station as Jesus is Nailed to the Cross:

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus consult in the background as the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John, and St. Mary Magdalen mourn the death of Jesus in the Deposition station (the Thirteenth Station):

 

I think these Stations of the Cross complement the stained glass windows above them which depict different parables from the Gospels. The general style of garments and the colors in both the windows and the paintings match well.

 

It can seem strange to pray the Stations of the Cross and meditate on Christ's Passion and Death during the Easter Season, but it is true that without Good Friday there can be no Easter Sunday and without Easter Sunday, Good Friday has no meaning or purpose. Throughout the Easter Season, the readings from the Acts of the Apostles describe how St. Peter and the Apostles, and St. Paul preach how Jesus was crucified, died, and rose from the dead--and is alive, the Savior of the world!