Tag Archives: liturgy

Christ Be King

Just a quick thought on the significance of today, as we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King. The liturgical year is coming to a close this week, and we will begin the Church year over with the start of Advent next Sunday. Today’s liturgy in the Mass, and the Collect prayer in particular, help to reset our hearts to acknowledge the God who is ultimately in charge of the universe — but more specifically the God to whom our entire will should be in submission.

Today we have the opportunity to check our hearts, especially before we enter this Advent season — is Christ King of my being? Do I live my life surrendered to his will, or my own? The words of the Our Father offer a particularly important meditation today: “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done.” We are to end the year in complete surrender to Christ’s will in our lives.

It’s easy to make Christ’s kingship and kingdom something external — to embrace the idea of him conquering all the evil out there in the world and bringing it to an end. But it’s quite another thing to turn that proclaimation inward and embrace the idea of your interior life being put under complete submission to Christ — to ask Jesus to conquer the evil within you and make his kingdom come in your heart.

The words of St. Origen from the Office of Readings for today offer a convicting and re-orienting perspective:

“Thus it is clear that he who prays for the coming of God’s kingdom prays rightly to have it within himself, that there it may grow and bear fruit and become perfect. For God reigns in each of his holy ones.”

He goes on:

“Note this too about the kingdom of God. It is not a sharing of justice with iniquity, nor a society of light with darkness, nor a meeting of Christ with Belial. The kingdom of God cannot exist alongside the reign of sin.”

We see over and over again in Scripture, and it is reflected in the rhythm of the liturgical year, that our new life in Christ can only come after a death to self — that sober penitance must precede the celebration of redemption and re-birth. In the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). For Christ to be King, we can’t be sitting on the throne of our lives, and we can’t be slaves to sin. As this liturgical year closes, let us pray the words of the collect for our own hearts  that Christ would be King there, as he is over all of the universe.

 

Copyright 2017 Jessica Ptomey

The Ultimate Memorial Day

Arlington_National_CemeteryIt’s Memorial Day for our nation — the day once a year that we have designated as a country to remember and reflect on the sacrifices made by men and women. We memorialize their bravery and willingness to risk their lives, and even lose them, to protect and preserve our freedom. When we think of this kind of sacrifice, one day seems insufficient. For those of us who have had family members serve in the military, and those who have lost dear ones in the service, many more memorial days exist in our hearts. And that is as it should be. By setting up days of remembrance, we honor those who have laid down their lives for others.

The Catholic Church (as well as the Orthodox Church and other liturgical traditions) is all about memorial days. Continue reading

The Rhetorical Significance of Liturgical Prayer

Last week I discussed the importance of examining what our prayers communicate about our theology. I have been attempting to be more aware of the implications of my own prayers — whether borrowed (ones commonly used in liturgy) or original (my own impromptu daily petitions). In doing so, the rhetorical significance of liturgical prayer has become apparent to me. There is formative theological richness to prayers that have been part of church history for centuries. Assuming that these prayers encase vital elements of our theology and faith, it follows that our habitual incorporation of these prayers will begin to influence our impromptu ones, as well as various other actions in our daily lives.

I have become aware that my own daily petitions, and I suspect those of other Christians as well, often include imbalanced language when it comes to important doctrines and theological concepts. An example that illustrates this phenomenon is found in the often ego-centric petitions for forgiveness in our prayer language, de-emphasizing or excluding altogether confessions of forgiveness for the transgressions of others. Two prayers used regularly in Christian liturgy express a “collective” and “communal” theological understanding of forgiveness.

The first, The Lord’s Prayer, most of us know by heart. The second, is the well-known and often recited Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. The Lord’s Prayer certainly carries a great deal of theological and rhetorical significance, as it is the primary example of prayer that Jesus gave to His followers. The line that applies to forgiveness has been spoken tens of thousands of times by believers over the centuries: “…And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Other translations use “trespasses” as the synonym for “sins,” but the meaning is the same — our own forgiveness is absolutely conditional on our act of forgiving others. 

We see this illustrated and emphasized again in Matthew 18 with Christ’s “Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.” St. Francis’s prayer echoes Christ’s command to forgive “seventy times seven” with the phrase, “in pardoning we are pardoned.” I think the poetic context is significant in this piece of rhetoric — so here is an excerpt from the prayer:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

The entire prayer is beautiful; but more than that, the concept of acknowledging how our individual forgiveness by God is directly connected to how we deal with the transgressions of others is powerful in its daily application. If our own forgiveness is conditional on us forgiving others, then it would follow that our daily petitions for our own forgiveness should be equally matched by our expressions of forgiving others — which is precisely the example of prayer language that Christ left with his followers.

If this is the case, then we can see how the theologically rich prayers of liturgy have an important place in our daily lives. They serve as a theological compass for all our other personal prayers and petitions. They force us to interact with and question the theological significance and validity of our own original, impromptu prayers to God.