M3M, September 11, 2008
Feast of the Holy Cross
Chants: Opening, #12: Beloved, Whom I Long For
Prayer, #38: Let Go, Let Be
Table, #1: A Feast For All People
Sanctus #31: Holy, Holy, Holy One 1
Closing # 71: We Are Children of the Fireball
Antiphon: Answer me when I call, O God. Psalm 4
A Reading From the Christian Gospel
“ ‘Now my soul is troubled…Now is the judgment of this world…And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Jesus said to them ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light. so that you may become the children of light.’ “
Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Church.
Thanks Be to God.
A Reading From the Continuing Revelation of God to People of Faith:
The cross is made of stout beams, an intersection of railroad ties. It stands in a field of weeds that slopes down from the road. The field is abutted on one side by the old theater, where gas canisters were stored, also looted gold; where much later Carmelite nuns accomplished cloistered works of expiation, sparking fury; and where now a municipal archive is housed. On another side the field runs up against the brick wall, the eastern limit of the main camp….
The surprise, in the tangle of feelings and questions, when I was first snagged by it at the foot of the papal cross in sight of the starvation bunker, was that it mattered so much to me… I had arrived at Auschwitz…braced for ovens, mounds of shoes and human hair, railroad tracks, chimneys…but…the Cross- here was the surprise. … In coming to Auschwitz, I knew enough to be suspicious of emotional intensity, as if it mattered …I summoned detachment of another kind. In coming to the death camp, I had resolved to guard against conditioned responses, even as I felt them; the numbness, the choked-back grief, the supreme sentimentality of a self-satisfied Catholic guilt…but before the cross- something else took over… The Shoah (‘catastrophe’) throws many things into relief…it also highlights the imprisonment of even well-meaning Christians inside the categories with which we approach death and sin…Christian faith can seem to triumph over every evil except Christian triumphalism. When I found myself standing at the foot of that cross, on the transforming edge of a contemporary Golgotha…I reacted as I imagine a Jew might have. The cross here was simply wrong.
Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll
Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Church
Thanks Be to God
A Reading From the Continuing Revelation of God to People of Faith:
Even so, I was just another Christian presuming to supply a Jewish reaction. But perhaps not. … I love the cross, the sign of my faith, yet finally the sight of it here made me, in the words of the Spiritual, tremble, tremble, tremble. Because of the resounding Jewish response, I saw the holy object as if it were a chimney. …So the ancient Christian symbol here, despite my knowledge that it was wrong, was a revelation. I was seeing the cross in its full and awful truth for the first time.
Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll
Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Church
Thanks Be to God.
A Reading of the Continuing revelation of God to People of Faith:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord all the earth
Let the sea roar, and all that is in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
Let the hills sing together for joy at the presence of the Lord,
For he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness
And the people with equity. Psalm 98
Hear what the Spirit is Saying to the Church
Thanks Be to God.
Antiphon: Answer me when I call, O God. Psalm 4
