​This morning I offered Mass for a group of cloistered nuns from Mexico, in which female religious sisters are known as madres. Today’s Mass is a relatively new feast, “The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church,” established by Pope Francis five years ago. How can we celebrate a woman who is both virgin and mother? Well, nothing is impossible for God, but we must do our part: we must celebrate with due reverence the mystery of virginal motherhood, most beautifully manifest in the life of Christ’s mother.
 
Hillary Clinton said in 2017 that “the future is female.” The Catholic Church, which venerates a woman as the greatest of all saints and heroes, would go a bit further, perhaps, in saying that the past, the present, and the future of humanity passes through the woman. Hillary Clinton, however, as a politician and a secular feminist, sees things primarily through the lens of power. The Church, too, when she is unfaithful to her Founder, also sees things through the lens of power. But the Church, when she is faithful to Christ, sees things through the lens of God’s love rather than the will to power. Mary is the Mother of the Church because she sought not power, as a woman, but love.
 
She was standing by the Cross of her Son when she received her supernatural motherhood: “Woman,” Jesus said as He hung dying, “behold your son.” Then, to John the Disciple, “Behold your mother.” 
 
There are three levels of motherhood, as there are three of fatherhood: physical, spiritual, and supernatural. Many women are physical mothers, but all woman are made for spiritual motherhood as well, both to their own children (if they have some) but to all the children on the block. A mother’s heart beats in every woman’s breast, more sensitive to every person’s needs, with a burning love to care for the neediest. But there is also supernatural motherhood, to which consecrated virgins are called, such as the madres for whom I offered Mass today. In their cloister, hidden in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, these mothers bear and nurture new life on a supernatural plane. They do not seek power; they seek love, to receive it and give it back.
 
Jesus cried out from the Cross that He was “thirsty.” Thirsty for his mother’s milk, for love. And, standing beneath the Cross, she fed Him again. He asked her to feed now His mystical body, the great Mass of humanity for whom he died.
 
The future is female, indeed: not about power, but about sacrificial love. Only love creates. Everything less destroys. Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us!

Please say a prayer for my 97-year-old father, who died at 12:15pm yesterday (Sunday). I was finishing the Nicene Creed at Mass—the words expecto resurrectionem mortuorum (“I hope for the resurrection of the dead”)—when Dad breathed his last in Pennsylvania.

Although my father had stopped attending Mass when it stopped being in Latin, he never stopped saying grace in Latin every night at the dinner table. He had picked up Marxism at Columbia University in the 1950s, but it wasn’t Karl Marx that eroded his faith in the Catholic Church. It was the college girls in mini-skirts distributing Holy Communion at our local parish that led him into agnosticism. 

That was 1971, and he did not receive Holy Communion again until 2014. Dad was in the hospital with pneumonia, and a priest chaplain stopped by to offer the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist. Dad accepted, and from then on received the sacraments every month at home. I am forever grateful to the hospital chaplain who brought him back to the sacraments, as well as the parish priests who heard his confessions and administered Holy Communion to him over the years. 

Mom always said that Dad’s faith was weak because he had never been confirmed. At age 93 Dad agreed to be confirmed by the local parish priest, with Mom as his sponsor. Two years later she died, holding his hand, after 68 years of marriage. Mom died 18 months ago as I was about to begin the 11:30 Sunday Mass, and Dad died yesterday as I was offering that same Mass. What more could Catholic parents ask but that they die as their son is offering the Holy Sacrifice at the Altar? What more could I ask but that my father die a few hours after having received the sacraments from the local parish priest? 

Requiescant in pace. Amen.

This morning I was listening to a podcast conversation between a female teacher and a male author. In referring to her students, she was a bit fastidious in using “his and her” and “he and she.” What a bother to have two distinct sexes in the human race—twice as much work, constant complexity, ongoing conflict, and never-ending drama! How much easier it would be to use vague pronouns than always being sensitive to such a messy reality. But, as my very elderly father said not long ago, “the older I get, the harder it is to deny reality.” The physiology, the psychology, and the sociology just won’t go away when it comes to the “binary” nature of the human species.

“90% of life is just showing up” according to Woody Allen. 90% of life is receiving rather than taking, accepting things as they are rather than manipulating them into what we think we want. We are in fact made; we do not make ourselves. We can shape ourselves to some degree through ars and techne, but the human essence cannot be “remade.” The older I get the more I realize how little my essential personality has changed since I was a boy. Contemporary theories about sexuality, in particular, miss this fundamental reality of the human person.

Sexuality is a “given,” not a “taken,” and in that way not unlike death. To “take” one’s own life is a final act of despair, and to “take” one’s sexuality into my one’s hands (or the hands of a paid surgeon) is a desperate refusal of a gift. Life, and the sexuality so essential to that life, is a “given,” and we are happiest when we are able to receive gifts. Confusion and trauma can make it very difficult to receive such an essential gift, but refusing it, in the end, only leads to more confusion and trauma.
On Saturday I assisted my Archbishop in confirming 32 young people. The candidates approached the prelate’s chair, one by one with their sponsors, first the boys, and then the girls. Each candidate knelt while the sponsor bowed with his or her hand on his or her candidate’s shoulder. The sponsor handed me a card with the confirmation name written on it, precisely in Latin (in the vocative case), below which was written the candidate’s given names. The candidate, himself or herself, chooses his or her confirmation name, but then it is translated into Latin, the sacred language of the Church. So “Joseph” becomes Iosephe, “Athanasius” becomes Athanasi, and “Francis” becomes Francisci.

I was quite moved to receive these cards and listen to the Archbishop quietly pronounce each sacred name as he anointed each candidate’s forehead with sacred chrism. Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti. Francisci, signo te signo crucis et confirmo te Christmate salutis: in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. 

Watching these young people receive the sacramental completion of their baptism was akin to witnessing a childbirth. Each young person knelt, serenely, to receive the new name and the holy oil. Each accepted with joy what was given to him or her, even the little slap on the cheek delivered after the words pax tecum. “In the world you will have trouble,” the Lord told his disciples. “But take courage, I have overcome the world…. My peace I give to you.”

In the Mass, the priest lifts up the bread and says the words of Christ: accipe and manducate, which are mistranslated “take and eat.” The Latin word accipe means “receive,” not “take.” Receive my body as a gift. Receive your body as a gift. Life is about receiving gifts and giving gifts, not about taking, manipulating, controlling, and fabricating. To some degree an intelligent person takes and works with his or her “hands” (“mani-pulates”), but he or she does so deftly, delicately, and with a healthy sense of humility. Life’s deepest reality, and its deepest joy, is to realize what we have been given, and to share what we have received, with our fellow pilgrims.

A Holy Land I write this from a hotel room overlooking the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, listening to the Holy City awaken to birdsong and the shouts of bakers and butchers stocking their little grocery stores. My friend, roommate, and co-leader for this pilgrimage, Fr. Mark Wagner, has gone up to the roof garden to offer the early Mass in Latin. Those attending will see the sun rise behind him over the Mount of Olives, shining off the golden dome on the Temple Mount and illuminating the dull grey domes of the Holy Sepulcher, just a stone’s throw from our hotel. I will offer the Mass in English this afternoon on an outdoor altar at Gethsemane, among thousand-year-old olive trees.

Jerusalem Rises I stepped onto our porch to behold the Holy City rising up to meet the sun. Children are walking in twos and threes to the local school with bookbags in tow; shopkeepers—Muslim, Jewish, and Christian—are setting out their goods; taxi drivers are smoking cigarettes beside their cars; men old and young in broad-brimmed black hats and black leather satchels are walking serenely to begin the day’s study of the Torah; Israeli soldiers, the flower of Israel’s youth, walk with machine guns upright in their packs, chatting in groups; old men sit on chairs watching it all pass by and old women in headscarves mouth their morning prayers. It’s too early for tourists, but occasionally a pilgrim or two will walk past with a bible or rosary. Everybody is squeezed in with everyone else, in a city where people take religion seriously.

The City of Peace While there is a modicum of serenity in the city this morning, there is no deep peace in Jerusalem. Our tour guide, a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, slips into bitter comments about the suffering in his hometown. Bethlehem is essentially a ghetto now, he tells us, surrounded by a 20-foot wall. “The Jews have done to us what the Nazis did to them. The government cut off our water for 20 days last year,” he told me privately, “and only 8% of Bethlehem is still Christian. All the rest have been driven out of their hometown.” Muslim Palestinians respond to Israeli policies somewhat more aggressively than Christian Palestinians, shooting rockets from Gaza while Israeli jets reply with air attacks. Jerusalem, the “City of Peace,” the city that takes religion seriously, will never have earthly peace because religion is drama. “Religion” comes from the Latin word for “relationships,” and real relationships are a thing of the heart. “Love is stronger than death” the Scriptures tell us. As a Muslim terrorist once said to an CIA agent, “you people think money and politics is power. You are wrong. Belief is power.” Belief in a cause greater than ourselves is more powerful than any self-interest, and belief in a personal God is the most powerful force on earth. Here in Jerusalem, mutually-exclusive beliefs are in conflict, like tectonic plates moving past each other. The Islamic understanding of God can never be reconciled with the Jewish understanding of God, which can never be reconciled with the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ.
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The Prince of Peace “In this world, you will have trouble, but take courage: I have overcome the world,” Jesus said. The “world,” the secular culture that distances itself from right worship, will always be in conflict with itself, and in conflict with the Church. Even the most faithful of Christians will engage in a lifelong inner conflict, for “the flesh and the spirit are at war with each other.” As you look out over your own lives—your marriages, your rectories, your work relationships, your parishes and your social communities—you wonder if you will ever find real peace in this world. The answer is no. We will attain little oases of peace, like the city street below me—school children with the bookbags walking beside soldiers with their machine guns. But the fullness of peace is for the next world. In this world, we have the Way of Peace, the Lord Jesus—and that is enough. Jesus is enough to get us through the wars of this life. Holding tightly to His hand, thirsting for His Word and hungering for His Sacraments, we are on the Way to Peace. 

This past Easter Octave was particularly precious to me, and to many in my community, as they have told me. The dirtier and darker our culture becomes, the more necessary clean, well-lighted places become. Take Kevin, for example. He moved from Oakland to our neighborhood after he discovered a clean, well-lighted place at Star of the Sea parish. He is a 6’4” black uber driver who just wants to be around people who love him and share his faith in a power greater than himself. Kevin goes every Sunday afternoon with four or five others into the Tenderloin’s cocaine-soaked street encampments to bring food, hot drink, clothing, and understanding love to the poorest of the poor in San Francisco. He knows just how to diffuse tense situations among the street dwellers, many of whom suffer various manic-depressive disorders. Kevin is a gentle giant with a heart as big as his size-sixteen sneakers. One day an elderly lady, garrulous in the extreme and not quite fully in possession of her rational faculties, called the parish asking for a ride to Christmas Mass from her subsidized apartment in the Tenderloin. I turned to “Big Kev” for help, and several times a month he now picks up this little woman—who never stops talking, God bless her dear heart!—to gently escort her into Holy Mass. Only in heaven will she understand what this modern-day St. Christopher has done for her.
 
This Easter Octave was especially bright for all of us. “The lights shines in the darkness,” the priest would read at the end of every Mass, “and the darkness has not overcome it.” For eight days we have been luxuriating in the splendor of  Easter morning with this verse: haec dies quam fecit Dominus; exultemus and laetemur in ea. “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” The “it” in that verse refers to “the Day,” but the Day is the Risen Christ. He is the Light, the Daystar, and He rises every morning. The Jewish people, even in their darkest periods, have been singing Psalm 22 for 3000 years: “His mercies are renewed each morning, so great is His faithfulness.” And so why are we sad?
 
For 1600 years the priest would begin Mass Psalm 42, including this verse: confitebor tibi in cithara, Deus, Deus meus: quare tristis es, anima mea, and quare conturbas me? “I will praise you, God, my God, on the harp: why are your sad, my spirit, and why do you disturb me?” It's a question I ask and answer every morning before I become fully awake. This time of day is the hardest for me, as the darkness still covers me and I muse on the troubles the coming day will bring. My soul is sad, and it disturbs me, and I have to make this act of will: I will believe that “His mercies are renewed each morning.” Like King David in his Psalm 42, I have to shake my finger at my own spirit, scolding it for disturbing me. Why are you sad, or spirit? Why do you keep bothering me?
 
We all have to scold our own spirits when they moan in sadness. We have to say to them: This is day the Lord has made, and it is Jesus himself. He floods the world with light, so why are you sad, you bad soul? You naughty spirit. Stop bothering me, and let me sing to the Lord my God with all my heart!

​Every Good Friday I sing the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet at a service called Darkness (in Latin, “Tenebrae”). This half-hour liturgy replaces the early morning Mass on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Tenebrae begins before sunrise in churches lit only by fifteen candles on the altar but ends with the sunrise. Today, however, the sun did not rise. Gloomy rain descended on San Francisco early this morning, casting our cavernous church into darkness, requiring cell phone lights to see the texts.
 
Each year the Lamentations speak to me afresh, because each year brings new aches and disappointments. Last night, in the Chapel of Repose, I tried to repose myself against the back wall but my legs, oddly, ached in ways they did not last year. Yesterday I had a difficult meeting with a good person and didn’t get much sleep. Since Tenebrae last year, the Church and the World have declined precipitously, with no end in sight. It certainly seems that the world’s current trajectory leaves no room for the Church, and no role for a Catholic priest. My brother priests are dropping like flies, and for some years now the bishops have given up on their parishes and schools. One good bishop told me two years ago that “the parish is a donut, with a hole in the middle, and that hole is the pastor.” Meaning: the pastor is completely ineffective, effectively absent, canceled, rendered irrelevant, and hopeless. Certainly many young priests I speak with seem rather hopeless, not unlike most young people. What is there to look forward to in a society unravelling at the seams?
 
The Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet were written from exile. Before Assyria and later Babylon invaded Israel, the prophets wept over Jerusalem’s infidelities. Most temple priests and professional prophets had rejected God, leading the people into practical atheism. They lived as if God did not really exist, and Jeremiah warned them that a nation without God will fall. Jerusalem fell in 587 BC, and most Jews were either killed or sent into exile slavery. “Your prophets had for you false and specious visions,” Jeremiah wrote from exile. “They did not lay bare your guilt, to avert your fate. They beheld for you in vision false and misleading portents.”
 
I can’t tell you how real these words were for me this morning as they were chanted in the Mozarabic mode. We are at the end of something, but the money has not yet run out, so most people don’t want to hear Jeremiah’s lamentations. Each Lamentation, however, ends with “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Return to the Lord your God.” Here’s the hope: Jeremiah would not have called for a “return” if he didn’t think it was possible. Jeremiah the weeping prophet was a man of hope, and in the darkness this morning, his hope reached out to us across 25 centuries. The sun will rise tomorrow. Who will see it? Perhaps only a very few, but the sun will rise tomorrow, to warm all who put themselves in its healing rays.

Last Sunday I walked into our church to behold 25 veils: our two crucifixes, 18 statues of Our Lady, and the statues of Saints Francis, Patrick, Therese, San Lorenzo Ruiz, and St. Jude all draped in purple cloth. From the fifth Sunday of Lent (known as “Passion Sunday” in the older usage), churches in the United States are permitted to veil all images of Christ and His saints. The last words of the Gospel for that Sunday give the reason, from John 8:59: “they picked up stones to kill Jesus, so he hid himself….” In a splendidly Catholic way, all images of Jesus, and His saints, are veiled until Good Friday and the Easter Vigil to vividly portray what happened 1990 years ago in Jerusalem.
 
Our redoubtable Thelma has been leading Star of the Sea Altar Guild for many years, providing fresh flowers, linens, and altar hangings every week. She and her little team draped all 25 statues last Saturday night, but she faced a dilemma: many of our new statues include quite fragile appurtenances: delicate crowns, scepters, lilies, etc. To avoid damage, Thelma purchased bolts of rather delicate cloth, which is a bit transparent. So while our images are veiled, one can see somewhat beyond the veil. At first I wondered it this was appropriate, but the people have spoken: “We love the new veils!”
 
A veil indicates mystery, which reveals and conceals at the same time. Each image of our Lord, Our Lady, and the Saints are mysteries, revealing divine beauty and goodness while concealing the full brilliance of divinity behind the veil of frail human flesh. I think it’s rather wonderful that our veiled saints are slightly visible this year. Both their veils and our flesh point to a deeper mystery, that of God’s presence within us. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
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​On March 10, Catholics traditionally commemorate the heroic witness of the Forty Martyrs, Christian soldiers who were executed by the Roman government in the year 320. A luminous Band of Brothers, they died in Sebaste (then in Armenia, now in Turkey) by freezing, exposed naked on a frozen pond throughout the night. One soldier’s courage failed him; he renounced Christ, was taken to a warm bath, and quickly died of shock. One of the guards, seeing the faith of the other 39, removed his garments and joined them on the ice, bringing the total back to forty.
 
In today’s Mass readings, Joseph’s eleven brothers seek to kill him, even though he is his father’s favorite son. In the gospel, vineyard workers kill the landowner’s favorite son, reasoning that by so doing they will inherit the vineyard. But how can these workers be so irrational as to think that the landowner will reward them for killing his son? How do Joseph’s brothers imagine that killing Jacob’s favorite son will endear them to their father? How could they be so irrational?
 
The irrational is a sign of the demonic. Satan is a “liar from the beginning,” the father of lies, and he seeks to blind people to right reason. Irrational behavior leads to death, which is the end goal of the demonic. Widespread irrationality is a sure sign of the demonic.
 
Powerful institutions in our society speak and act irrationally, forcing unreason upon all of us. The law defines a female as a male but requires female-specific medical treatment for women who identify as men. Hospitals that perform abortions deny that what is in a mother’s womb is “a baby” but advertise their maternity services with billboards of pregnant women expecting “your baby.” Critical Race Theory demands an end to racism by judging people on the color of their skin.
 
The internal contradictions that abound in our powerful institutions are a sure sign of the demonic. He tries to terrorize us by irrational fears, and to bully us into submission, to impose unreasonable laws upon us just because he says so. But he is weak, and God is strong. Stand up to him with the strength, and the rationality, of God’s own Word. To resist the irrational requires courage, perseverance, and dependence on God’s grace. By God’s grace I’ve been praying in front of abortion facilities for 35 years, calmly (with some regrettable exceptions) speaking truth to power.
 
The martyrs we commemorate today provide a luminous witness of calm rationality. Against the full might of the Roman Empire, they stood on a frozen pond 1700 years ago simply witnessing that there is a God, since it is impossible that the universe created itself. We are not gods, but God loves us despite our puerile petulance. Keep calm, and speak rationally, with eyes fixed on the Logos and logical principle of all that exists, Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

Yesterday, although I had vowed to eschew music for Lent, I listened to Mozart play his first composition (written at the precocious age of five) on our old school piano. Well, it was actually a Mozart stunt double with a slightly lopsided costume store wig and baggy frock coat, but it was the music that counted. Mozart lived at our Classical School yesterday!
 
Our fourth-grade teacher, Miss Carmel Richard, who is also a music teacher, pulled off a school-wide music festival yesterday, herself playing Mozart’s elder sister Nannerl. Somehow Carmel convinced me to dress up like Pope Gregory, although I ended up looking more like a cross between Don Bosco and Hercule Poirot. In any case my peculiar attire arrested the attention of our schoolchildren, a sea of wide-eyed youngsters to whom I described in foppishly Italianate English how I had invented “Gregorian Chant.” Next was Wolfgang Amadeus himself, in excited and thickly Teutonic tones, describing how he had begun composing at age five and never stopped. Then there was Beethoven and J.S. Bach, again in charmingly affected German accents, and finally Sir Thomas Ravenscroft in the Queen’s own English. Between live piano pieces and violin duets, Miss Carmel (AKA Wolfie’s older sister) would run up to the CD player for some harpsichord and chamber ensemble pieces.
 
I usually listen to Classical music every morning while washing up, but I have been fasting from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart since Ash Wednesday. “Hunger is the best spice,” they say, and so hearing (and seeing) the beauty of these compositions was a feast to a starving man. But consider this: most children today have been starved of Classical Music all their lives. They’ve never heard (let alone seen) good music. Yesterday’s performances opened up a wonderland for their ears and minds. And that is why classically-educated children are so happy.
 
I was nine years old when I first heard Gregorian Chant. I was bounding down the stairs for dinner, and Dad had put on a record of French monks chanting the Missa de angelis. The sound lifted me up to heaven, opened my intellect to a new dimension of creation, stirred my heart with a burning desire to know and love God, and inspired a fascination with all things, Great and Small. Most “music” today is self-referential and performative, unable to escape the centrifugal force of one’s own navel. Classical music, by contrast, is outward-looking, and Gregorian Chant in particular is positively universal. By its measured order and comprehensive perspective, good music affords listeners the joy of beholding the entirety of the human experience; it reveals how individual parts of the created order relate to each other in forming an integral whole.
 
Besides all that, good music is good fun. In our period costumes yesterday, portraying charming cultural accents and playing the sprightly capriccios of Mozart and Bach, we laughed and rejoiced to see ourselves as parts of God’s wonderful universe. A good school teaches good music, and so teaches goodness along with truth and beauty. That’s why our students—including myself yesterday afternoon—are so happy!

​I woke up in silence today, an hour before my alarm. I rested in silence for an hour before getting up to begin Lent. Yesterday we burned last year’s palms at School Assembly, and today I will impose ashes from that fire. Each us must pass through the fires of earthly death one day; our ashes will rest in the silence of the tomb for a time.
 
I woke up in silence today, the first day of Lent. Usually I wash up in the morning to the sounds of either Mozart or a stimulating podcast. But for the next 40 days I will shave in silence; I will do my morning stretches in the still emptiness of a city before dawn. I will listen only to the Word of God before going downstairs and watch nothing more than the light quietly rising from the east.
 
Fasting from food is essential, but fasting from noise is no less essential. Giving up sweets heals our bodies, but giving up noise heals our souls. Silence of the ears, silence of the eyes, silence of the touch: this purifies our souls to receive God and His wonders. This Lent, I warmly recommend fasting from screen time, from music, from podcasts and “news,” from useless conversations (e.g., gossip). Read a book instead. The written word, received in silence and recollection, is still the best way to see and hear God’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
 
I woke up in silence today, dreading my usual discipline of silence for forty days. Having entered the emptiness, however, my deeper senses quickly sharpened, and I rejoiced in the stillness. In the silence of the heart God speaks, and I’m ready to listen.