Hannah and Samuel, Mary and Jesus

Today’s first reading at Mass came from the first Book of Samuel and continued the story of Samuel’s mother, Hannah. She was barren and wanted to have a child more than anything else in the world. Having known a few couples unable to have children, I think I can safely say that they have felt much like Hannah felt. So she did what any person of faith would do; she kicked the table. Just kidding. She trusted in God, knowing that He seeks to give us the desires of our heart, and she asked Him for a son.

“In her bitterness she prayed to the LORD, weeping copiously, and she made a vow, promising: ‘O LORD of hosts, if you look with pity on the misery of your handmaid, if you remember me and do not forget me, if you give your handmaid a male child, I will give him to the LORD for as long as he lives; neither wine nor liquor shall he drink, and no razor shall ever touch his head’ ” (1 Samuel 1:10-11). She asks God for a son and says that she will give that son back to God if God gives her one. She even goes so far as to say that he will be a Nazirite who does not cut his hair or eat or drink any product of grapes, especially wine (Sampson was another Nazirite). He will be specially consecrated to God.

The Responsorial Psalm comes from chapter two of First Samuel, and it was what Hannah prayed in the temple when she dedicated her son to God after she had weaned him. There are many parallels with what Mary prayed when she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth; the prayer is known as the Magnificat. The response today from Hannah’s prayer was: “My heart exults in the Lord, my Savior.”

There are many parallels between Hannah and Mary, the handmaids of the Lord. They were both deeply desirous of a son. Mary had come to terms with it when she had consecrated herself as a perpetual virgin and arranged to have a virginal marriage with Saint Joseph. Yet it was the crucifixion of her greatest earthly desire. As a virgin, Mary was “barren.” Hannah prayed, “The barren wife bears seven sons, while the mother of many languishes,” and Mary prayed, “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” They were both barren and empty, and they both were filled with “good things” because of their trust in God. They both gave their sons back to God, whenever and however He wanted them.

Right after the Passover in Exodus 13, “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Consecrate to me all the first-born; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine’ ” (13:1-2). Later, I want to write in a more in-depth manner about the first born, but for now it is interesting to note that the first-born belong to God. The passages continues saying, “Every first-born of man among your sons you shall redeem” (Exodus 13:13). The first-born have to be paid for or bought back, for they belong to God. Samuel and Jesus are first-born, and they are offered back to God from Whom they came.

My theory is that Eve also wanted a son (just as Sarai did), and that this wanting was part of the test God devised to see if she loved and trusted Him: be fruitful and multiply but do not have relations. She sought her life and so lost it. Mary gave up her life and so gained it and was given the very Son of God for her faithfulness of giving up children altogether. Hannah desired a child, but she did not sin to try to get one. She prayed. She also realized that children are a gift from God, and so she was willing to give that gift back to God to use as He sees fit. God wanted to give her a child, and He wanted her to seek His help to have it. God tested Hannah and strengthened and purified her love and trust in Him through that test. She passed the test, as did Mary, and she gave birth to the great priest and prophet, Samuel.

Life and fruitfulness come from God, and they come via our faith and trust in Him. The other part of the theory is that the tree of life is the heart. It is the heart that loves, trusts and obeys God; any heart that does that has spiritual life. Any heart that does that bears good fruit and leads those in its vicinity closer to Christ. May you and I seek, ask and knock in faith, hope and love of God and so bear good fruit for Him.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

We Do What Pleases Him

There was a beautiful quote from today’s first reading from the first Letter of Saint John that I want to highlight tonight: “Beloved: We receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:22).

“Please.” Please is a magical word. My mom always told me it was the magic word. We want to please God; therefore, we keep His commandments, and that is why He answers our prayers. On the relational path of pleasing another, we start off wanting to please Our Heavenly Father, and we end up wanting to please our divine Spouse and Bridegroom, Jesus.

My wife is leaning over my shoulder as we eat salsa, hommus, and chips, and she said that God doesn’t always answer our prayers. That is true, for God does not answer every one of our prayers as we want. Let me come back to explain this after I explain something else first.

Yesterday I was talking about Saint Augustine’s book on virginity, and he was quoting and discussing what Saint Paul was saying about marriage and virginity. Paul said: “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34). The married seek to please their spouse; the virgins seek to please their divine Spouse. This does not mean that married people do not try to please the Lord, but it means that virgins have the ability to have more of an “undivided attention” for God.

The word “please” is a word often used in reference to a spouse. We seek to please the one to whom we are married, and it is right and good to do so. Virgins dedicated to God live the life of heaven here on earth and take God as their sole and primary Spouse. They sacrifice the very great good of an earthly spouse to gain the even greater good of the divine Spouse.

All of us are called to please the Lord and to love Him with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. Insofar as we love Him and give ourselves to Him, we grow closer to Him and draw closer to becoming His spouse. After drawing close to Him, we do keep His commandments and we do seek to please Him; our wills more and more become as one. Our will and mind ever more closely conform to His will and mind. Our heart loves Him, and we seek to please Him. It is in this state of conformity of our mind and will to God that in our prayer we ask for what pleases God, and He always gives it because it is what He wanted to give all along.

Jesus, in His humanity, struggled with this conformity of His will to the divine will in the Garden of Gethsemane as He prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). He did not want to undergo all the suffering that He knew was right around the corner, at least not in His humanity He didn’t. But above all else, Jesus was of one will with the Father, and so that conformity and obedience to the Father is what He wanted in His heart of hearts. He concludes His prayer to be spared the suffering with the prayer to be in union with the Father’s will. In the end, His prayer is only to do the Father’s will.

How do I pray with the very prayer of God? If we give ourselves trustingly into God’s hands, He will teach us and help us to pray: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26-27). Eventually, if we do not give up and rely increasingly more and more on Him, His heart will become our heart, and His will will become our will.

When you and I love God with a full heart and mind, when our tree of life is strong and bearing good fruit every month, then our prayer will be the very prayer of God Himself, and we will receive whatever we ask of our Father and of our Husband: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 This I command you, to love one another” (John 15:16-17).

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

A Living Sacrifice

God promised a son to Abraham when he was seventy-five, and God gave him that son twenty-five years later when he was 100 years old. Isaac grew up and became a strong young man. “After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you’” (Genesis 22:1-2).

Abraham had failed his first major trail of faith fifteen years before when he listened to the voice of his wife and went in to her maid to try to fulfill God’s promise. Ishmael was the fruit, and circumcision was his penitential punishment and symbolized what needed to happen to his heart. This, now, is Abraham’s second chance to live by faith, eat of the tree of life, and trust God in the face of death. God’s asking Abraham to sacrifice his son is the fulfillment of what circumcision symbolized: a heart of faith that trusts and obeys God even when intellectually it makes no sense.

What is the significance of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son? This was the promised son who took twenty-five years for an elderly barren couple to birth at the ages of 100 and ninety. They had waited what seemed like forever, and all human hope had long ago vanished that they would ever conceive a baby. When they heard of the updated promise that he was still going to come to them, they simply laughed. It was preposterous that a ninety-nine and eighty-nine year old should conceive a son, so all they could do was laugh. And they did.

Beyond just the extremely long and impossible waiting for the promised son, this son was incredibly important. This was the boy through whom God had promised to make Abraham a multitude of nations and a father of descendants greater than the sands on the sea shore. This Isaac and no other was the one who would marry, have a family, and be the beginning of an enormous number of people. This Isaac was the one God asked Abraham to sacrifice.

This makes no human sense. God had promised both to give Abraham a son and that this son would be father of an innumerable quantity of descendants; it is similar to God’s command for our first parents to be fruitful and multiply. God then asks Abraham to kill this son which God had given him; this is similar to God asking our first parents and Mary to remain virgins (which normally means one is not going to have children). All of these appear to be contradictory commands/directives from God. They don’t make sense. Our intellect does not know how to handle this discrepancy.

All Abraham has left is his faith to pass this test. He has to eat of his tree of life, which is to believe in his heart that God knows what He is doing, and obey what God asks of him. “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.’ He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead” (Hebrews 11:17-19). Abraham’s descendants would come through Isaac, so if God asked him to sacrifice Isaac, God must be planning to raise Isaac from the dead. That is how much Abraham believed in God, that, even though he had never seen it, Abraham believed that God would raise his son from the dead.

The quest for a son that Abraham embarks on many years before comes to completion here when he offers up his only son, Isaac. This quest and Abraham’s faithfulness in the face of his only son’s death, is one of the very most important events in the Old Testament. God stops the hand of Abraham, and He Himself provides the sacrifice: a ram caught by its horns in a thorn bush. This prefigures what God will ultimately do when He sends His only Son crowned by thorns. Abraham’s sacrifice is also the first Passover, for Isaac was passed over. It is his faithfulness which brings down God’s blessings and grace and is the reason for the Israelites’ Passover which set them free from Egypt.

May we eat of the tree of life and so imitate our self-sacrificing Savior and bring down God’s grace and blessings to all those around us; let us offer up our bodies in penance and lay them down in the service of others; let us be willing to be a sacrifice as Isaac was, and if God sees fit, let us be a sacrifice as Jesus was. There is the prayer of the heart, and there is the prayer of the body; we need both, and together they are very powerful. “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (Romans 12:1).


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Adam and Eve Trust in the Serpent

In the attempt to write at least a little each day, I will give you one thought tonight. Chapter three begins with the serpent trying to break the trust and faith the woman had in God. He really doesn't say much: "Did God say, "You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" After the woman responds, he says, "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." That's it. He starts by overstating God's singular command to prohibit any tree, implying that God is overbearing and not really interested in what is good for the man and woman. He concludes by directly contradicting God's warning of death and says that they will increase in wisdom by eating of the tree.

After seeing the desireableness of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and forgetting about God's command not to eat because He is not all that trustworthy, the woman eats of the tree. It does not take much to get the woman to turn away from God. The primary reason that the serpent did not have to do all that much is that she was under an incredible test: she was told to be fruitful and multiply and yet remain a virgin. She wanted a child very badly; she wanted to make a man as God had made a man; she wanted to be like God.

God wanted her to eat of the tree of life so that she could pass this test; to pass this test she would have to believe that remaining a virgin was the best thing for her and the way to life. But virginity means no children, and no children means death. She looked death in the face, and through fear of death, she forsook the command of God and betrayed her husband all of which began with a kiss in the garden. (The new Adam, Jesus, is also betrayed in a garden with a kiss by one dear to Him.) She wanted to get a child, so when that child was born she named him "gotten;" we know him as Cain. In trying to save her life, in trying to fulfill the command of God to be fruitful and multiply on her own terms, she made a covenant with death.

Understanding all of this is an immense help to more clearly and perfectly understand all that Jesus did; ultimately, I want to understand better why Jesus died on the cross and gives us Himself in Holy Communion, etc., and that is what much of this blog will be about. Both Testaments are needed to understand the other, and if when we read the Old Testament our hearts are not burning within us, then we do not understand what it is saying. I hope to help set that blaze upon the earth.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright 2007.

MY MAIN THEORY--THE HEART OF WHAT I AM SAYING

Immediately following the first mention of the tree of life in Genesis Two, God tells us about the four rivers. This is a symbolic geographical representation of our physical heart. After discussing the heart, the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is given for the first time. The very next thing God does is seek a suitable partner/helper; none of the beasts of the field or birds of the air would do. Then God takes one of the man's ribs, makes it into the woman, and presents her to the man as the sought-after helper for the man who responds "At last." The pattern I see here is: mention the tree of life followed by a presentation of the four rivers and worshipping and obeying; mention of not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil followed by the presentation of the woman. There seems to be a connection between this second tree and the woman.

If man is God's Eden/delight, with a garden planted in the east/front of the man, the first tree in our fronts is the heart/tree of life. By worshipping, obeying, trusting, and loving God with our hearts, we bear good fruit in the good things we do. How else do humans bear fruit? What else could be a tree planted in our front in the middle that would be a source of production? What is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Is it possible to know? If we don't know yet after thousands of years, why would we find out now?

I think it is possible to know; not with an absolute, certitude and with a perfect logical syllogism, but there are many clues that point to what it is, and many realities make sense and fit together once it is understood. It is as I think Cardinal Newman said something such as: it is so based on 10,000 convergences; nothing directly spells it out, but almost everything points to the reality being thus.

So what do I think the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, and what does the woman have to do with it? I think it is an idiom referring to sexual knowledge, i.e. intercourse. Marital relations, it could be argued, is the greatest natural good of this world; it is so good and great that Paul says it is a great mystery referring to the relationship between Christ and His Church (Eph). The test God is giving the man and the woman is two seemingly contradictory commands: be fruitful and multiply and do not have marital relations. This does not seem to make sense: presto, we have our grand trial of faith and the bypassing of the intellect. All that is left is to see if they will eat of the tree of life and believe that what God has commanded them is good for them. Of course, they did not trust.

I will explain my thoughts on this much much more, but for now I want to draw your attention to Mary, the New Eve. I think she underwent the very same test. After explaining her test as I see it, I will call it a night and give you more to ponder soon.

Mary's Test
I'll try to make this brief. The first principle to understand is that when God makes us to be something, that is what we will be good at and that is what we will desire. Among other things, God made me to be a husband, a father and a teacher, and it is those things which I desire. God made her to be the mother of His Son and the mother of the Church; as such, she was created as the most exalted mother of all human history. Being created to be the most exalted mother means that she would have desired to be a mother more than any person who has ever or will ever exist.

The second principle of my understanding of Mary is that she consecrated herself as a perpetual virgin and arranged with Joseph that they would remain virgins perpetually in their marriage. The reason I think this together with the Chuch Fathers is that her response to the Angel Gabriel does not make sense unless this were the case. In the first chapter of Luke, Gabriel says to Mary that she will conceive and he uses five other future tenses when telling her what will happen in the future. He does not say or imply that this will happen right now.

Mary replies, "How shall this be, since I have no husband." She says this when she was already betrothed to Joseph; in many respects what they understood as betrothal, we would understand as marriage. In fact, if they wanted to end the betrothal, a certificate of divorce was required. It was perfectly normal to get pregnant during this time; that is why Mary does not get into any trouble being only betrothed and pregnant. The only significant difference between betrothal and marriage was that the bride had not permanently moved in with her husband yet. Even if she just had to wait until they were officially married, then she could conceive just fine and would expect to do so. It makes no sense for her to say she will not be able to conceive a son since she will not have a husband. She already has a husband! She has just made a life-long commitment never to have sexual relations.

This was the test then: she who longed to be a mother more than anyone ever to exist, knew that God was asking her to commit herself to Him as a perpetual virgin. In her heart she was told to be fruitful and multiply while at the same time not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For the people of the Old Testament, not having children was tantamount to death. One was considered cursed if barren. There was little worse in this life than to not pass life on to ones offspring. In Mary's acceptance of virginity, she would have thought that she had given up her greatest desire (other than union with God):children. Her acceptance of virginity was her crucifixion.

The Annunciation is Mary's Reward, Not Her Test
As soon as Mary and Joseph agreed and permanently decided to never have relations, then the angel Gabriel payed his visit. In offering Mary to be the Mother of God, there was nothing more pleasing to her in all creation. Her hesitation was that she did not understand how it was going to happen because she knew God wanted her to remain a virgin. As soon as she knew that God would provide the Son, she said yes. Never in the history of man was there ever such a joyous and receptive yes as that amen at the Annunciation. Her greatest desire had just been granted.

Mary's test was sacrificing that which was most dear to her on this earth, and her reward was getting that very thing but multiplied infinitely. The first Eve tried to gain her life by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and received death and a son named Cain. The New Eve lost her life for love of God and gave up that which she held most dear and was given the very Son of God as a reward for passing the most difficult test in man's history.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.