Filled with the power of the Spirit, he hastens to be alone. There in the deep silence of the wilderness, in prayer and fasting, the storm within him swings itself still; and when temptation comes, it is not repulsed by struggle, but seems to ricochet effortlessly against the invulnerability of freedom sprung from divine necessity. Then Jesus begins his task. \ — Romano Guardini, The Lord

From the Gospel reading on the first Sunday of Lent: following his baptism by John in the Jordan, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert to fast and pray for forty days. Having entered the wilderness to fetch us back from exile, as St. Ambrose writes, the Lord contends with the master of the world. He is tempted three times.

The first and second temptations - squarely aimed at appetite and ego - are both met with responses from Deuteronomy: One does not live by bread alone and You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve. The Law given to the Israelites is repeated by the Word which has fulfilled it.

The final attempt comes with a sense of desperation: a direct challenge, and an appeal to scripture as well:If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from this high place, for it is written that the angels will guard you, lest you so much as dash your foot against a rock? Marvel at this: even the Devil can quote scripture when it suits him. “If you are the Son of God,” he says, daring Him to prove it.

Jesus again responds with the words of the Law: you shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.

First: our senses and ego. Later: self-doubt and second-guessing. Our senses and appetites are not bad, for by these we know the world and desire things that are good. Introspection and self-examination are also good, inasmuch as they provide a means for improvement. Even so, this is where the adversary will meet us. Small shortcuts here and there, complete with rationalization. Or later on, self-doubt which causes us to either shrink from the moment or rush headlong in, driven by vanity. We will be tempted. Many times, we will fail. But sometimes we will not fail. Sometimes we will take a tiny step towards our perfection.

In neither case are we alone in the desert, however empty it may seem.

The ascent of the Easter mount is the by far the most serious and difficult climb the Christian will find in the liturgical year. This is in keeping with the fact that Easter is the high point of the entire year, the pivot on which our holy faith depends; for the resurrection of Christ was the greatest of His miracles and most strongly substantiated His claim that He was the Son of God. As St. Paul said, “if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith also vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). More than anything else, the resurrection clearly and conclusively demonstrates that the dead Christ on the cross on Good Friday was God, and thus corroborated all His teachings as to the redemption of mankind and the institution of the one true Church. \ — Rev. Bernard Strasser, O.S.B., With Christ Through the Year

After tonight we part ways with the sensual, pagan world for awhile. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. We follow Christ into the desert for 40 days, fasting and praying with Him, spending Passiontide in preparation for the great feast of Easter. This is a time of thought and reflection, prayer and almsgiving, penitence and patience. At the far end of this journey lies the Upper Room, the Cross, and further still, the empty tomb.

In the special way particular to this season, we will enter most deeply into the Paschal mysteries, recapitulating the entire history of salvation. We will follow the Master on the road to Jerusalem, welcome him as the Messiah, and then join the crowd to call for his death. There is a place for us to stand at every step along the way.

The Gospel reading for today (Mark 5:1-20) is the story of the Gadarene swine.

A man is tormented by unclean spirits, wandering throughout “the tombs.” He threatens others and himself. Attempts to bind him are unsuccessful. These spirits recognize the approaching Lord, and drive the man forward to fall at the feet of Jesus. Spare us, they beg, for we know who you are. We are Legion, there are many of us. He commands the spirits to enter a nearby herd of swine, which are driven to madness, plunging off of a cliff and into the sea.

A crowd gathers at the commotion and meets the man, now well. He is calmly sitting, dressed and in his “right mind.” Witnesses relay what has happened to the onlookers. Greatly disturbed at the events, the crowd implores Jesus to depart. The restored man, for his part, pleads for the Lord to “remain with him.”

But Jesus would not permit him but told him instead,\ “Go home to your family and announce to them\ all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.”\ Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis\ what Jesus had done for him; and all were amazed.

This curious ending catches my attention. Rather than the usual instruction to “tell no one,” the restored man is explicitly told to go and proclaim what has happened. Unclean spirits, torment, and disease are types (used in the scriptural sense) of sin. An encounter with the Lord restores this man and rids him of his disorder. Now calm and brought back to right reason, the man rightly wants to remain with the Lord, maybe indefinitely. How can he be blamed? Who hasn’t experienced moments of love and belonging so profound that we wished they could stretch to an eternity? God has other plans. This restoration is to drive us to move purposefully along our true road. He returns to community, leaving the dead behind for the living, proclaiming what the Lord has done for him.

We are to be active rather than static. The freedom given to us is freedom to choose to move in the directions God has knitted into our very being.

Jesus came with his disciples into the house.\ Again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat.\ When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him,\ for they said, “He is out of his mind.”\ — Mk 3:20-21, Saturday of the Second Week of Ordinary Time

In brief, here are two reactions of the world to the Christian life fully lived. In the first, the crowd gathers, hungry to be near him. Perhaps they came as many did, for physical healing, or out of simple curiosity. Word has doubtlessly spread of this healer who spoke with a strange, new authority. Those from afar are drawn near. His relatives - those closest to him - respond differently. Something is clearly wrong. At best, he is unwell; at worst, possessed by a devil. There is a hint of scandal.

We easily notice interruptions in patterns. An intentionally Christian life is an interruption in the current of the world, an eddy which lives in the stream but gyres and wends its own way. Attention is caught, interest piqued.

How do we, react in the face of witness which challenges us? Do we examine the person, impute motives, tidily categorize, rationalize, dismiss? God speaks to us through others, in their words and actions, even if the other may not fully realize his own participation. We ought to have the ears to listen and the eyes to see.

There may be occasion for us to bear Christian witness in word or deed. If the attention turns to us, what then? How well do we bear the scrutiny? Do we invite or repel? Do we smooth things over, quick to resume our place in the pattern, or do we stand fast?

…human action is a part of time, and when its hour has passed, the act is also a thing of the past. With Jesus it was different. He was man and God in one, and what he did was the result not only of his human will and temporal decision, but also of his divine and eternal will. Thus his action was not merely part of transitory time, but existed simultaneously in eternity. — Romano Guardini, The Lord

Msgr. Guardini is writing about the mysterium fidei – the unfathomable mystery of the Eucharist. What could I possibly add to all that has been said? The words of institution stand on their own, and cannot suffer interpretation or mental gymnastics that allow us to do anything else but take them as they are: literally. Here is no mere symbol or tidy metaphor. This is my body, this is my blood. Did those around him understand? Possibly no better than we do, and probably less than we do, as the Advocate had not yet descended. Even so, the mind fails in attempts to truly understand, and thus: the Paschal mystery. At most, we can listen, approach, and trust. This will suffice.

So many prayers and hymns have been written about the Eucharist - the Anima Christi, Pange Lingua. It’s the Canticle of Simeon, the Nunc Dimitis, that comes to my mind in those moments after receiving. My eyes have indeed seen him under the appearance of bread and wine, exactly according to his word:

Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace;\ Because my eyes have seen Thy salvation,\ Which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples:\ A light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel.

The Gospel reading (Mark 3:1-6) tells the last of a series of encounters between the Lord and the Pharisees in Caparnaum. He has healed a paralytic, dined with sinners, forgiven sins, and – in their eyes – profaned the Sabbath. Their reaction has changed from awe, to anger, and finally, to conspiracy with others in common cause. The final straw was the restoration of a man’s withered hand. The law allowed for the saving of a life on the Sabbath, but this man was not in imminent danger.

The Lord, knowing their thoughts puts the question to them: is it lawful to do good or evil on the Sabbath? His response to their silence is to heal the man with a word. So intent were they on catching a violation of the rule, it escaped notice that the very source (and fulfillment) of the Law stood before them.

The tools of piety are not ends in themselves. They should point the way to the true end, or they threaten to imprison us by our own shortsightedness. Focusing too closely on minutiae risks trapping us in an endless feedback loop of examination and correction. Like the Pharisees, we will ultimately be unable to pin down the Son of Man, however purely are intentions began before descending into a madness of our own making. He will not find the way out - He is the way out, and we have but to conform ourselves to his will to follow.

It is better to remain silent and to be than to talk and not be. Teaching is good if the speaker also acts. Now there was one teacher who “spoke, and it was made,” and even what he did in silence was worthy of the Father. He who has the word of Jesus can truly listen also to his silence, in order to be perfect, that he may act through his speech and be known by his silence. Nothing is hidden from the Lord, but even our secrets are close to him. Let us then do everything in the knowledge that he is dwelling within us that we may be his temples, and he God within us. He is, and will reveal himself, in our sight, according to the love we bear him in holiness.\ — Saint Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr

Seek silence within and without. Within, to still the voice that carries our attention away from Him. Without, to find ourselves, however briefly, in the deserted places where he used to go to pray. Then we too can echo Samuel: Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

It is not easy today. Perhaps it has never been easy to find silence. Parents of children certainly know this. We crave silence to gather our thoughts, and rest for a while in the knowledge that the littlest ones are in bed asleep. For a moment, we can relax our guard. Sleep will be after us soon as well, but until then…night moves through its courses and all things are in silence.

Where we live, the nighttime stillness is broken only by the occasional passing car. When the wind is right, we can hear trains in the distance. Sometimes a dog from the farm next door. Owls. The occasional riot of coyotes passing through the fields and woods. I remember holding a baby in the small hours of the night and longing to get back into bed. Then I thought about the Trappists at the monastery in Conyers, who were preparing to start their day with Matins. Their silence was being broken by softly-chanted psalms.

As Creation imperfectly reflects the One who made it, its sounds can let us hear Him, and maybe loudest of all in moments of silence amidst praise.

Woe to me if I say “I am a Christian” – possibly with a side-glance at others who in my opinion are not, or at an age that is not or at a cultural tendency flowing in the opposite direction. Then my so-called Christianity threatens to become nothing but a religious form of self-affirmation. I “am” not a Christian; I am on the way to becoming one – if God will give me the strength. Christianity is nothing one can “have”; nor is it a platform from which to judge others. It is a movement. I can become a Christian only as long as I am conscious of the possibility of falling away…The real danger is that of becoming within myself unchristian, and it is greatest when my will is most sure of itself. I have absolutely no guarantee that I shall be privileged to remain a follower of Christ save in the manner of beginning, of being en route, of becoming, trusting, hoping and praying.\ — Roman Guardini, The Lord

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.\ — Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Polemic is the order of the day. Thoughtful discourse is abased by a microsecond culture. The immediacy of communication incites a concomitant urge to respond in kind, and bereft of meaningful, authentic human contact as a touchstone for empathy, we have created a subhuman storm of whispers. Any feeling or notion can find immediate confirmation, and where can this help but lead? We are like ships, navigating by lights we carry with us, rather than looking outside of ourselves to a fixed point of reference.

As Christians, we trust because we know God will not test us beyond our strengths. Likewise, we must beware, for the greatest obstacles to salvation are the walls that we pile up on our own, out of our misplaced passions or secret vanities. We can indeed find comfort in Truth, and fly there for refuge. What we cannot do is let comfort become complacency. Scripture is clear on what is to be expected of those to whom much is given.

Lord, keep us ever mindful of who we are, what we are about, and inspire in us humilitas et caritas. Rescue us from the cells we have built for ourselves and help us to remember with kindness our fellow prisoners.

The Gospel for today, Thursday of the first week of Ordinary Time, is Mark 1:40-45, the healing of the leper.

Moved with pity, the Lord wills the cleansing of this kneeling, begging man. He touches this untouchable person and sends him to quietly fulfill the requirements of the Mosaic laws prescribed for ritual cleansing. See that you tell no one, he says.

The man goes and publicizes the event, and the crowds are such that Jesus can no longer openly enter towns, remaining outside in deserted places and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

The man was healed entirely. Though his leprosy was gone, to rejoin community required obedience to the rules and concrete actions. There is something here about sin and reconciliation. Freed from the disease of sin in the sacrament of Reconciliation, we restore our relationship with God. We are then given the freedom to restore right relations with those our sins have affected. Forgiveness comes before penance.

Why did the Lord ask him to remain silent?

The Catena Aurea has this reflection from St. Bede the Venerable:

Now it may well be asked, why our Lord ordered His action to be concealed, and yet it could not be kept hid for an hour? But it is to be observed, that the reason why, in doing a miracle, He ordered it to be kept secret, and yet for all that it was noised abroad, was, that His elect, following the example of His teaching, should wish indeed that in the great things which they do, they should remain concealed, but should nevertheless unwillingly be brought to light for the good of others. Not then that He wished any thing to be done, which He was not able to bring about, but, by the authority of His teaching, He gave an example of what His members ought to wish for, and of what should happen to them even against their will.

Righteous action demands nothing except silence and stillness as place for work. Once given the grace to participate in God’s will on Earth, there is nothing we can add. Seeking earthly glory (or its quieter personal version, which is vanity) moves the focus away from God.

Perseverance in faith even on Calvary – this was Mary’s inimitable greatness. And literally, every step the Lord took towards fulfillment of his godly destiny Mary followed – in bare faith. Comprehension came only with Pentecost. Then she understood all that she had so long reverently stored in her heart. It is this heroic faith which places her irrevocably at Christ’s side in the work of redemption, not the miracles of Marianic legend. Legend may delight us with deep and gracious images, but we cannot build our lives on imagery, least of all when the very foundations of our faith begin to totter. What is demanded of us, as of her, is a constant wrestling in fide with the mystery of God and with the evil resistance of the world. Our obligation is not delightful poetry but granite faith – more than ever in this age of absolutes in which the mitigating spell is falling from all things and naked opposites clash everywhere. \ — Romano Guardini, The Lord

Granite faith, not poetic image. Here are words for someone who has struggled with Marian devotions in the past. So deeply venerated, she has become nearly superhuman, distant, untouchable, almost unknowable. I have held this sort of piety at arms length for a long time, unwilling to close a door but unable to find a way to her through the apparitions, visions, prophecies, and thousand-fold promises of This Devotion or That One.

Digging past all of this, the elemental faith which followed her fiat - uncomprehending, internal, unshaken. Something in this view resonates deeply and authentically with me. To learn that she held things in her heart, maybe silently, pondering them for many years and struggling with them until the end is to discover a path through the bewildering cloud of Marian devotions.

She trusted, though she did not understand. Time and time again, the sword pierces her - yet she follows in faith all the way to the foot of the cross. What must have passed through her mind afterward, on Holy Saturday? Was she trusting still, but numb? Joy beyond reckoning awaits on Easter Sunday, but up until that point? I imagine her, turning over the events of his life in her mind, recalling the Annunciation, drawing a breath and holding on to the faith - even in the midst of the silent darkness following the death of her son - that Something Wonderful was yet to happen. Exactly what, perhaps she was unsure.

This is granite, not roses and lilies which pass in a day.

Perhaps he comes to sanctify his baptiser; certainly he comes to bury sinful humanity in the waters. He comes to sanctify the Jordan for our sake and in readiness for us; he who is spirit and flesh comes to begin a new creation through the Spirit and water.\ — St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 39

Emerging from the long silence of childhood and family life, the Lord arrives at the Jordan to be baptized by John. He makes no announcement, asks for no particular privilege. He submits himself for baptism and begins his public life and ministry.

“I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?”\ Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”\

John’s hesitation is understandable. He has spent his life preparing himself and others for the Lord’s arrival. John’s words and actions, laid out in his father’s prophecy, were so powerful that some thought he might be the long-awaited Messiah. No, he demurs. There is one coming whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.

John consents. The heavens open, the Spirit descends upon Jesus and the voice of the Father is heard from heaven: This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

For one moment before John - while Jesus is praying, according to Luke: God the Father, speaking to the Son, by (through? with?) the Spirit. Later, the Lord will command his disciples to baptize in the name of all three.

Jesus' every act is governed by the Father; hence the Spirit (through which the Lord was conceived and made man) is always with him, for it is the bond of love uniting Father and Son. Yet we read that the Holy Spirit “comes” over Jesus, just as one day, it will come over all whom Jesus calls his own. The intellect cannot cope with such paradoxes, though it somehow senses the reality beyond all reality, the truth beyond all truth. Precisely hear lies the danger. The mind must never allow itself to be misled into seeming ‘comprehension,’ into facile sensations or phrases with nothing solid beyond them. The whole problem is a mystery, the sacred mystery of the relationship of the triune God to his incarnate Son. We can never penetrate it, and knowledge of this incapacity must dominate our every thought and statement concerning Jesus' life.\ — Romano Guardini, The Lord

The baptism of Jesus sanctifies water, and so makes possible our own baptism. As his very human self entered the waters to sanctify them, so our following him into the waters joins us to him as adopted children and heirs. Prefigured in the passage of Israel through the Red Sea, the water of baptism delivers us from slavery to sin and into a new life, in a new land.

After this great manifestation - this realization of the divine promise (for that is what Epiphany means), Jesus will withdraw into the desert to fast and pray. As in baptism, we follow him, this time at a distance, ending the great feast of Christmas and entering briefly into Ordinary Time before withdrawing into Lent.

The Gospels record no encounters between John and Jesus prior to this one. The closest is a meeting of their mothers, when Mary visits Elizabeth, and the unborn John leaps for joy to hear her greeting from afar. This encounter begins to a close John’s life and mission as The Precursor, just as it stands at the threshold of the Lord’s public life.

The one who has the bride is the bridegroom; the best man who stands and listens to him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. So this joy of mine has been made complete. He must increase; I must decrease. (Jn 3:29-30)

St. Paul says of the Lord: “For we have not a high priest who cannot have compassion on our infirmities, but one tried as we are in all things except sin” (Hebr 4:15). He entered fully into everything that humanity stands for - and the names in the ancient genealogies suggest what it means to enter into human history with its burden of fate and sin. Jesus of Nazareth spared himself nothing. In the long quiet years in Nazareth, he may well have pondered these names. Deeply he must have felt what history is, the greatness of it, the power, confusion, wretchedness, darkness, and evil underlying even his own existence and pressing him from all sides to receive it into his hear that he might answer for it at the feet of God.\ — Romano Guardini, The Lord

He that has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.\ — old English proverb

A genealogy fixes a person in time and places him in a larger context of generations past and future. The genealogies of Christ in the Gospels are no different. Narrow focus on their historicity or attempts to reconcile differences miss a larger theological point. He entered into the human family in full participation of the ongoing family story, with all of its highs and lows, virtues and vice.

The genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels were always something I briefly scanned for familiar names: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. David and Solomon of course. Beyond them, things started to get a little hazy. On a narrowly intellectual level, I understood them to establish of his royal lineage in fulfillment of the messianic prophecies. But other than providing for an occasional Sunday School activity (draw out the family tree!) or Advent Jesse Tree project, I was content to pass them over. Too content, and too hasty.

I’ve done some genealogy. Names, boxes, and lines on paper do very little justice to the fullness of the human lives they represent or the family webs they reveal. Focus on impersonal data like names and dates risks losing the forest for the trees. These were people, after all, no matter how many times removed. All children of God, each with an immortal soul. They had interior lives, grew up, loved, and in many cases, aged. They married, reared children, buried their dead, migrated, cooked meals, stubbed toes, dropped dishes, and made love. All these lives bleed, one into the next like a giant, glorious, impressionist mural stretching across time.

Think, too, of all the moments that had to align exactly to produce any one individual - all of us are products of a long panoply of successes, failures, in-laws and outlaws, and yes, the burden of sin comes along with our humanity.

Find any one name in the Gospel lists, then look around it. Four names in sequence might capture the generations that could conceivably be alive together. Two or three is probably safer. Look at your own family - your parents, your children. Think about that mural, and the beautiful Monet-like smearing together of all those colors.

Warts and all, this is the circus he stepped into in choosing to be born “according to the flesh.” As Msgr. Guardini writes, he spared himself nothing. He came not on a white horse at the head of big parade, or by some smoke-and-mirrors spectacle in the town square. He became flesh, like us. Was born, like us. Learned to walk and talk. All of it. His ancestors were flawed - some of them deeply so. None of it was sugar-coated. He entered into - and took on - all of it. Only by taking on flesh could he truly be Emmanuel - God-with-us. Only by remaining fully God could he reconcile all things in himself.

So the genealogies are somewhere to linger. Each name, a complete lifetime - all of the tens of thousands of moments that make them what they are. The generations coming and going with their knaves and fools.

Thank God for the ones who have gone before. May the ones that follow after kindly remember us.