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Byline: Elizabeth Scalia

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Sin

The Value of Conscience

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The memory still stings: there I was, age 7, the veteran of a splendidly moving and memorable first holy Communion and graced with an oddball love of the Sacrament of…

The memory still stings: there I was, age 7, the veteran of a splendidly moving and memorable first holy Communion and graced with an oddball love of the Sacrament of Confession in all of its velvet-curtained-sliding-screen ambiance, planning to steal a toy “ladies fan” from a candy store, simply to see if I could.

The fan was red, and I had always been — and still am — a sucker for all things red. It was airy, lacy and flamboyant, and I had the 10 cents the thing cost in my pocket.

But the toy display was on the other side of the cashier, and the devil was on my shoulder: “Take it,” he whispered. “I bet you could slip it into your pocket and no one would know.”

Petty theft, which I had never before aspired to, became suddenly a tantalizing challenge. And the fan was red. I took it. I cleverly slipped the thing into my sleeve and casually walked out the door. It was so easy. And so completely unsatisfying.

By the time I’d walked home, fanning myself all the way in a manner I was sure duplicated the graceful lines of a señorita, I had begun to feel a peculiar emptiness that was new, and throughout the day that feeling grew, until it threatened to become a black hole into which I could disappear. By eventide, I had thrown the fan away from me in disgust. It wasn’t mine; it was ill-gotten booty. I had sinned, and it was not good.

The next day was Saturday — confession day in our neighborhood, for in 1965 it was a rare Catholic who would receive Communion without first reconciling themselves to God. I frankly couldn’t wait to get the theft off my chest — and out of my heart and soul — and had barely gotten the “bless me father” off my tongue before the full story came pouring out. The priest, spending another glorious Saturday within a small, airless box and — at that hour — listening mostly to the piping sins of children, had given a grumpy acknowledgement that my sin was a biggie. “Stealing is mentioned in the Ten Commandments; it especially offends God,” he said, and I thought, “I know, I know, it’s been eating at me.”

Thank God for penance. A Rosary decade on my knees felt sufficiently arduous, and I emerged from church feeling like I’d done my piece. And yet . . . it couldn’t be that easy, could it? Where was the justice? The man at the candy store was still out his 10 cents.

Walking home, I fingered the quarter in my pocket, given me by my grandmother and designated for an orange drink I craved. My sense of justice wrestled with my thirst. I did dearly love my orange drink. But, finally, conscience won out; stepping into the candy store, I approached the counter, meaning to confess my crime, pay the dime and be done. But I couldn’t. Serving justice on a coward’s tray, I waited until the man’s attention was diverted, and quietly slid the quarter on his counter and quickly left the store.

It was not a perfectly balanced redemption; it left me cleansed, but out 15 cents. But I had not yet explored the vagaries of fairness. I was ignorant of all but the most elementary theology, and it would be many years before I could distinguish between the unsophisticated notion of “Catholic guilt” and the heavy grace of “a properly formed conscience,” but I felt better. My Catholic grounding had informed my sense of both justice and mercy. I had confessed regret to my God and made a generous, if anonymous, restitution, and the gaping mouth of emptiness so eager to swallow me had been resolutely snapped shut. The red fan was never again a pleasurable toy, but it became a favorite possession, a reminder that whenever God is pushed aside, only emptiness awaits.

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Sacramentals

The Scapular Is A Spiritual Nudge

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My husband noticed a brown cord peeking out from the neckline of my shirt and asked, “What is that?” Oops. Busted. “It’s a brown scapular,” I admitted. “That’s pretty hard-core,…

My husband noticed a brown cord peeking out from the neckline of my shirt and asked, “What is that?”

Oops. Busted. “It’s a brown scapular,” I admitted.

“That’s pretty hard-core, isn’t it?” he asked. “When did you take that up?”

As prejudiced as the question sounds, he was only being curious. My husband is a tolerant sort; if someone wants to practice devotions that he doesn’t feel particularly called to, that’s all right by him. In this case, however, I sensed a tinge of leeriness. After all, just prior to the appearance of the scapular, I had built an oratory, and had been exploring the use of head coverings at Mass. Now, suddenly, a brown scapular?

I confessed that I’d begun wearing the scapular, as a discipline; for penance and correction. “It’s my hair shirt,” I explained.

A Benedictine of my acquaintance has told me that scapulars began as a practicality — a protective covering for monastic robes; over time it took on a spiritual significance as a sign of one’s willingness to “take up the yoke” and learn from Christ. Pious laity eventually adapted much smaller counterparts to wear, both as a devotional and — in the case of professed laypersons — in solidarity with members of their scapular-wearing order. Lay Dominicans wear the largest, a white square of wool, perhaps 6 inches across. Benedictine Oblates like me generally wear a Jubilee Medal, but some also wear a postage-stamp-sized black scapular, reflecting the black scapular and habit. Carmelites, of course, will wear the brown scapular.

In my case, not having a black scapular, I recalled the brown scapular a priest friend had blessed and given to me as a gift. I’d never worn it, but I knew it was Mary-connected, and that the scratchy woolen thing was the closest approximation I would ever get to what I really believed I needed at the time — a proper hair shirt — to challenge me. As ever, my spirit was willing, but my flesh had an attitude.

I have worn the brown scapular ever since.

Calling it “the world’s tiniest hair shirt” is no exaggeration. The one currently between my shoulder blades is new, and itchy. It is uncomfortable, but I have come to love it, because when an itch breaks through to my awareness, or the thing rides up and needs adjusting, it reminds me (and always just when I need reminding) that I am weak and need help.

Well, good. I need to be made uncomfortable and annoyed; I need to be reminded of my shortcomings.

I began wearing the scapular during a difficult time in my life, when I was not dealing well with a situation meant to teach me what I resisted learning: patience, humility and enough discretion to just shut my mouth, sometimes, rather than let it run rash and reckless as usual.

I was like a dumb ox, in need of a yoke to get me in line; to guide me and help me to obey. The scapular is that yoke.

It is not heavy; as yokes go, it is light, and even “easy,” but it is still a discipline. When my impatience surges, that itch can restrain me, and the restraint is humbling. The resultant humility actually gentles me a bit. It reminds me that life is sometimes a hard row to hoe, requiring a supernatural assist. As my impatience ebbs, I am reminded that willingness is all that is required, and that slow growth is better than no growth.

So, this scratchy, abrasive little penance is a very useful spiritual nudge; it awakens me to the hushed grace notes that linger soul-deep, amidst all the superficial noise of my heart and head. It helps me to own that grace, in much the same way a musician finds music within the spaces between the notes.

The prompting to find and wear that first brown scapular was a hard-core gift that I could only receive when I was cracked enough to need such strings.

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Lent

The Emptiness Of Lent

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Each year I watch Catholics complain about Lent and the upcoming 40 days of sacrifice. I suppose some people do hate Lent, but I love it, and I think —…

Each year I watch Catholics complain about Lent and the upcoming 40 days of sacrifice. I suppose some people do hate Lent, but I love it, and I think — despite all the complaints — that many Catholics also love it, even as they complain. Life hands us all kinds of challenges exterior to us. Lent is the interior challenge to consent to taking an extended walk in the desert and to face what we might both find there and lose there.

I was raised in the desert of the American Southwest, and in the 10 years I endured in that place, I never found any beauty, except in the fleeting glimpses of wild horses running in the distance.

I wanted to run, too. Those were not happy times.

But a couple of years ago, visiting Israel, I found myself in a different sort of desert, one that, in places, seemed even more desolate than the dry lands of my youth and yet was also inexplicably beautiful. In rocks, in caves, in arid and lifeless ground, the desert in Israel was golden, everywhere.

Driving through it, it is easy to think, “This? This is what people are fighting over? Why here?”

But then a thought comes behind it: only in a place this empty, this rugged and unbearably hot, this dauntingly vast; only in this place of naked challenge and certain defeat could a hoped-for promise of redemption take hold and thrive. God chose His worksite well.

Life lashes at us. No one escapes it without experiencing at least one episode of excruciating pain, and loss: loss of a loved one, certainly, but also loss of one’s own dignity, of a sense of safety or security; a loss of hope; a loss of one’s sense of place, or worth; a loss of belief in the goodness of others; a loss of belief, full stop.

These losses, particularly if they come early and often, pull you into the desert, while you are still dewy with youth, and if you’re lucky, you will wander for a very long time, but you will survive. And if you’re looking for them, the blessings, eventually, become apparent; the promised land appears on the horizon; and you finally know that if you only keep moving, it will become enlarged in your sight, and everything will make sense, and then there will be glory.

I came to love the deserts of Israel early in the course of my brief visit there, because I recognized myself — or, rather, various stages of myself, and everything I have ever known — within all that was stark and vacant, dry yet golden everywhere. Holy mystery was there, too, everywhere.

In those short days, I learned to “love the empty,” as I called it, which was so expansive and total that one was forced to make peace with it, and then learn to survive.

In the empty I came to realize how illusory were some of my greatest concerns — the political, the professional, even some of the personal, in terms of the over-packed and heavy baggage I’d been lugging around for too long. I discovered they could be left there; all of the excesses that were weighing me down, and distracting me from what really mattered, could be dropped and left behind, because they were that empty themselves. In the great empty of the desert, they became as one more grain of sand, something to turn away from in the gloaming of my life, left on the bare plains, deserted in the desert.

In the empty, any ambitions I may have harbored became sidelined, and the future was kissed up to heaven. It became easy — and enough — to simply be within a day, and get through it, with faith and praise intact.

So, I look forward to Lent, and I am glad to have the chance to once more enter into the desert, to be denuded of the detritus of hard times and harsh realities too long held to. I will carry them with me, into the place where light bears down, with no escaping it. And there, I will abandon them into the sand drifts of time and sun and make a sacrifice of praise.

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Christmas

Christmas and the Flight Into Egypt

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A few years ago the U.S. Postal Service did something different with its religiously themed Christmas stamps. I’m not sure whether the change came about as a nod to non-Catholic…

A few years ago the U.S. Postal Service did something different with its religiously themed Christmas stamps. I’m not sure whether the change came about as a nod to non-Catholic Christians who were averse to using the images of the Madonna and Child offered each year, or simply because someone at the USPS felt bored and needed a change, but I loved the new stamp.

It featured a silhouette of the Holy Family against a bright orange sky and a dazzling star. Joseph is leading a donkey carrying Mary and what looks to be a sleeping bundle of newborn King in her arms.

I bought scores of the stamps so as to use them even after Christmas, and then was delighted to find them offered the next year and each year since. The stamp speaks to me in a different, more immediate way than the lovely Madonna/Child stamps, and I’ve wondered why. I think it may have to do with how much more “contemporary” the image feels. Even as it shows a traditional image, the stamp speaks to a relevance to our times and our headlines. Christ is born, and the family is making a hazardous trek through the desert and into Egypt, because it is not safe for them in Bethlehem, or Nazareth, or anywhere Herod reigns, and so they are migrating — they are refugees from terror.

The Holy Spirit often uses the most confounding means and methods to get our attention and open us to God’s instructive promptings, so perhaps we shouldn’t marvel that a few years before immigrants and refugees became the stuff of our daily headlines (and a source of considerable consternation for people inside and outside of the Church) the U.S. Postal Service was pulling our thoughts in that direction.

Yes, it speaks to our times. We see a family uprooted from everything they know, everything “normal,” comfortable and familiar. Not only are they unable to simply “go back” to the way things were, they are being led into something wholly different, with nothing to go on but trust: a man, a woman and a baby, moving against a whole world of uncertainty, injustice and danger.

There is much consolation in this lovely picture. In the crucifix we encounter “The God Who Knows” — the one who understands our feelings of fear, abandonment, betrayal, shame, thirst. Here we see “The God Who Knows” familial anxiety, too, and social separation, material deprivation and — perhaps again — thirst. His stepfather, obedient to something as ephemeral as a dream, places everything into the hands of Divine Providence and leads them through new terrain, seeking wells and watering holes as they travel for Mary to drink that the infant might be nourished. This is the God who has been part of a family unit that worked like a closed circuit of surety and continuance, and the God who also knew all of its stresses.

There is nothing going on in the world, or in our personal spheres, for which Scripture and the life of the Christ do not offer an instructive correlation, if only we bother to seek it out. This image is an invitation to the whole world to trust God, even amid blaring headlines, because He is always faithful. It says “Ephphatha, be open!” It says, “I know the plans I have for you.” It says, “Fear not, for I am with you.” It says, “Do not worry about tomorrow.”

At the absolute baseline of the life of faith, God asks us a question: Do you trust me? We are creatures who, since Eden, have willfully embraced the illusion that we are in control of everything, when, in fact, the only thing within our control is our decision to trust or to doubt, to be open or to be closed, to believe or not to believe.

The Flight into Egypt stamp is a powerful reminder of that truth, and it bears the word “Forever.” We are forever meant to surrender our illusion of control, forever meant to be opened, forever meant to trust in Divine Providence. Call it a coincidence if you like. I see the Holy Spirit giving necessary instruction to our time.

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Advent

The Liturgical Love Words of Advent

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“Advent” does not mean “expectation” as some may think. It is a translation of the Greek word parousia, which means “presence” or, more accurately, “arrival” — that is, the beginning…

“Advent” does not mean “expectation” as some may think. It is a translation of the Greek word parousia, which means “presence” or, more accurately, “arrival” — that is, the beginning of a presence. In antiquity the word was a technical term for the presence of a king or ruler, and also of the god being worshipped, who bestows his parousia upon his devotees for a time. “Advent,” then, means a presence begun, the presence being that of God. — From “Dogma and Preaching,” by Pope Benedict XVI

Like many Catholics, I have been queried more than once by evangelical friends wondering why Catholics put so much stock in “ritualistic” things not explicitly spelled out in Scripture — things like Advent and its purple vestments; the candles marking the weeks; the O Antiphons, whose beautiful images so intensify our longing, even as they paradoxically deepen our sense of assured contentment.

“Jesus came once for all; He doesn’t keep coming,” one such friend reminded me. “Christmas is a great season, but why do you need a whole advance season, too? What’s the point?”

“But, surely, Jesus does keep coming to us, no matter where we are in our lives,” I answered. I reminded her of where she had been a year earlier, and the weighty concerns that had lain on her heart — and of the difficult but beautiful Advent my own family had endured a few years previous, at the bedside of a dying brother. “Christ is constant,” I said, “but we are not; our lives are not. We can get so caught up in things, in working, paying bills, making deadlines, tending to our families — and then, suddenly, we hear a prophet saying, ‘make straight a path in the wilderness,’ and it resets our priorities. It’s not just a story we’re meant to remember; it’s an action we are meant to undertake, so Christ can alight anew within us.”

Advent coaxes us out. We look up and there is a darker sky than before. The stars show more clearly, and they inspire us to hack through the things we have allowed to imprison us, so that we may walk a freer path and ponder what transpired in a lonely cave in Bethlehem, 2,000 years ago — what it meant then, and what it still means for all of us today.

Because it is monumental, this parousia is an encounter with Love as it had never before existed, and as it will never end.

And, yes, it has “already happened.” But if God is outside of time, and we know He is, then that momentous event “is happening” even as you read this. Right now, a star is shining brightly; a people are moving toward the places from whence they came; a young woman is great with child; wise men are lifting their eyes to heaven and wondering. The place of our own origin, from whence we came, beckons; it sends a flare as a guide! And the One who is All in All is moving toward us — in breathtaking humility — to show us the way back.

Like Mary, we are great with expectation, and wonder how can this be? Heaven reaching down in song and succor, to cradle the earth; Creator, come down among us, not to observe or direct, but to inhabit and serve. In his lowly, vulnerable birth, God comes as bridegroom, wedding himself to us — divinity to humanity — and shares with us that most intimate privilege of marriage, the joining of two into one, the mutual dependence, the mutual commitment — and nothing can ever be the same. But every marriage, even the best, needs constant attention, and recollection.

Call the repetitious seasons of Advent, then, year after year, a renewal of our wedding vows, complete with love words, as we make straight our paths, light our candles and beckon our beloved to us, again, with the sweet and beautiful pleadings of our Antiphons. You consent to come to us in all vulnerability; we consent to be vulnerable in return. This is forever.

Elizabeth Scalia is the award-winning author of Strange Gods, Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life and Little Sins Mean a Lot: Kicking Our Bad Habits Before They Kick You.

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Scripture

Jesus’ Secrecy In The Gospel

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It has always puzzled me, in the Gospels, to find Jesus urging secrecy upon those He has healed. On the other hand, it never surprises me that the beneficiaries of…

It has always puzzled me, in the Gospels, to find Jesus urging secrecy upon those He has healed.

On the other hand, it never surprises me that the beneficiaries of his favor, like the two blind men in Matthew, ignore him and go off telling everyone about the wonderful thing that has happened to them. Their behavior seems wholly human, doesn’t it? It strikes me that Jesus was asking a lot of these men — to return to their families and friends with perfect sight and no explanation of how this had come about.

Jesus does it again, in the Gospel of Mark, when He heals a deaf man, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” (“Be opened!”). Immediately, the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly. Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more He ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.

This time He orders not just the object of His healing, but the people with Him, to keep quiet about His miraculous favor. In fact, the text suggests that Jesus several times asked them to pipe down about it, but to no avail.

When something great has happened in our lives, we want to share it with others, and this Jesus acknowledged in Luke’s Gospel, when He spoke about the woman who had lost her coin: “Or what woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it? And when she does find it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found the coin that I lost’” (Lk 15:8-9).

This makes more sense. Something lost and then found is worth exclaiming over, and we are called to be witnesses to the Good News — to tell the great workings of God in our lives.

A few months ago, I made a general confession. It took over three hours, during which time I experienced such an abundance of genuine healing — at one point, I could literally feel a heaviness that had resided upon my chest for decades simply depart — that I urged anyone who would listen to do the same. I had swept my house and discovered something I had lost, and I wanted everyone to “rejoice with me.” Jesus would understand my behavior.

For that matter, Jesus himself acknowledged that keeping secrets is eventually a futile undertaking: “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light” (Lk 8:17).

Perhaps the first chapter of Mark sheds some light on Jesus’ reticence; Jesus heals a leper, and urges him to tell no one, but to show himself to the priests. The leper spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside, in deserted places, and people kept coming to Him from everywhere.

There it is.

We’ve read stories of lottery winners who find themselves besieged by long-lost friends and family members seeking to benefit from the windfall. Those they help often come back for more assistance — all expectation, with little appreciation.

The “lucky” winner begins to feel like little more than a walking ATM, his humanity undervalued, his personhood no longer seen by people who have become blind to everything but what he can provide, until the cash runs out.

Jesus’ healing gifts could never run out, but perhaps He was trying to prevent needy crowds from seeing Him only as a means to an immediate end, devaluing His humanity and completely missing His message. Such behavior kept Jesus from entering “a town openly. He remained outside” (Mk 1:45).

Urging people to tell no one was a futile wish on Jesus’ part. He knew humanity too well to count on it. All He wanted, though, was to be able to walk openly among the people He meant to redeem, and to not be forced to remain outside, away from us.

A need for secrecy is past. Let us bring Jesus openly into our cities and towns and families, telling what He has done for us.

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