Life is hard. Sometimes dark. There are times when troubles pile so high we fear we might suffocate under them. We are lonely. We are scared. We are burdened. These are wintery, cold spiritual seasons when there seems to be no light, no help, no relief, no comfort in any direction.  It’s at these times, when we are most discouraged, most weary, that the angels teach us what we must do. We must SING!

Angels are actively engaged in the unceasing praise of God. At Mass several parts of our Liturgy come from Scriptural accounts of angelic worship. The Gloria begins with words sung by the angels at Christ’s birth (Luke 2:14). The Sanctus is from Isaiah’s vision of God surrounded by angels who sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Is.6:1-3).

Some angels are called cherubim, thought to be from the root “to mount.” The Psalms describe a majestic God “mounted” upon, or riding, the winged cherubim: “And He ascended upon the cherubim and He flew: and He flew upon the wings of the wind” (Ps 18:10).

This sort of ascendance imagery is also used in fifteen songs which comprise one of the most precious and beautiful portions of the Bible, the Psalms of Ascent. Sung by the children of Israel as they ascended Mount Zion in Jerusalem during liturgical feasts, their worship was an integral part of the sweaty, joyful exertion and anticipation of arriving at the summit where God awaited.

Their physical climb up the mountain was a type, model and picture of the slow upward trajectory of the Christian spiritual life here on earth. It is a glorious, sweaty enterprise that will ultimately require our very last breath, but those same Psalms of Ascent lift and accompany us, too, up the grand, grueling mountain as we sing them in the Divine Office and our hearts ascend to God in daily prayer.

Far from baby-faced, Ezekiel’s vision of the mysterious cherubim reveals a strange, soaring creature, part eagle, part human, part lion, and part ox. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia the faces are understood to signify a 4-part natural possession of the “soaring sublimity of the eagle, the intelligent wisdom of man, the lithe strength of the lion, and the ponderous weight of the ox.”

Alternatively, it is thought that each part represents a corner of the astrological zodiac at which cherubim stand guard: Scorpio (eagle), Aquarius (human), Leo (lion), and Taurus (bull). This enigmatic hybrid creature, then, symbolizes the cosmos which upon which God mounts and presides, enthroned.

Cherubim are first mentioned in Genesis 3:24, where God placed them at the eastern end, the entrance, of the Garden of Eden to “guard the way to the tree of life.” Later, the entrance curtains to the tabernacle and the temple, models of the Garden, were decorated with beautiful weavings, artistic renderings of cherubim in vibrant colors and fabrics. At God’s instruction, cherubim were on both the tabernacle and temple veils that screened the Holy of Holies where God’s presence rested.

Two golden statues of cherubim stood at either side of the Ark of the Covenant. Their mysterious wings covered their faces and spread completely over the ark, functioning somewhat as armrests on the “throne” of the invisible God of Israel. That God’s presence was “located” above the Ark of the Covenant, over and between the cherubim, also suggests that the cherubim were “mounts” upon which he “ascended” and “ruled.”

For us earth dwellers, these elevated Scriptural depictions tell us a bittersweet secret about worship. God’s instructions for the craftsmanship of the cherubim over the ark’s mercy seat were specific. There would be two cherubim on the mercy seat, both of one slab of hammered, beaten gold.

“The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be stationed at the two ends of the mercy seat above the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies” (Ex. 25:17-22).

In the Cherubic Hymn and Great Entrance in the Orthodox Liturgy it is said, “You are carried upon the Cherubic Throne by the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Our Eastern brothers and sisters teach that we “mystically represent the Cherubim — high ranking angels that carry the Lord upon His throne, praising His holiness in the thrice holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity.”

God dwells in the midst of the praise of cherubim, and of men. Indeed, He draws near to it, so that He would be one with it, mount it like the wings of angels, and rule the heaving cosmos from it. He is seated enthroned upon your praise (Ps. 22:3, RSVCE). He inhabits it (Ps. 22:3, NJB). Like the cherubim, of beaten and hammered gold in the dark secret of the Holy of Holies, we must sing!

When circumstances have reduced your joy to a whisper, you must SING. It is when we least feel like it, when it is most difficult, that praise is sacrificial, and therefore most potent. Raise your voice in golden praise. Chant the glorious Psalms of Ascent that lift battered spirits to the divine summit.

Groan if you must dear one, if through weakness, awkwardness, anguish, struggle, or discouragement, but it is when life has hammered and beaten you down that you are nearest the seat of the mercy of God. He is near to the brokenhearted (Ps. 34:18).

Does the Shroud of Turin, on display in Turin, Italy’s cathedral right now, offer scientific evidence of the Resurrection? Can an interpretation of the Resurrection through cutting edge physics research correspond with a traditional Christian understanding? Is the Shroud, therefore, somehow a portal to another dimension, heaven perhaps?

The Shroud Codex, by Jerome Corsi, Ph. D., suggests so. Corsi, inspired and informed by his lifelong interest in the Shroud of Turin, draws scientific speculation on advances in quantum physics and intrigues in religious mysticism – namely stigmata, relics, and near-death experiences – together, until they meet in the Shroud of Turin in a literary Venn approach.

A brilliant quantum physicist leaves science on a religious quest and enters the Catholic priesthood. After a near death experience leaves him with the belief he has a cosmic role to play in history for both science and religion, he begins displaying stigmata that mimic exactly the bloody image left on the herringbone linen weave of the Shroud of Turin.

Atheists and believers in both the scientific and religious communities investigate the reality of the physicist-turned-priest’s claims. Is he traveling through time by way of multiple dimensions to literally experience aspects of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, as he claims his stigmata, cutting edge physics, and the Shroud reveal? Or do his stigmata testify, rather, to severe psychiatric disturbance?

As a sharer in Corsi’s interest in both the Shroud of Turin and quantum mechanics, I was particularly interested in how he would bring his scientific and religious themes together through them, and what new information I might discover about the Shroud and particle physics through the story. The images of the Shroud, information on the scientific investigations done on it in the 70’s and since, and the arguments for and against authenticity were significantly explored in the book, at least they were to my satisfaction as a reader.

I was disappointed in the treatment offered on quantum mechanics as a scientific explanation for the soul’s survival into an afterlife and the Resurrection of Christ, the protagonist’s stigmata and related experiences, and the probabilities of our living in a multi-dimensional universe.

The scant discussion left me wondering if Corsi really understood what he and quantum physics seem to suggest about them, or if he was worried his audience would not understand such seemingly convoluted “realities” if he delved too far into them. Either way, I was left wanting more information from that angle, but the author provided extra resources in the back of the book that I will happily explore.

I was also somewhat disappointed in the author’s fiction writing style, but as his professional brilliance, background, and success lie more in political nonfiction, that does not really surprise me. Non-fiction writers often have difficulty writing fiction, and this story suffered from some of the typical pitfalls. I found the whole situation with Anne Cassidy, the contemporary Mary figure, forced and improbable, as well as other, less significant aspects of the story somewhat flat and unbelievable.

However, the book’s pace was brisk, the themes were thought-provoking, I learned quite a bit about the Shroud of Turin through reading The Shroud Codex, and the author’s knowledge, interest and love for the Shroud were evident in the story. Together, these were enough to make me pleased I read it.

If his intention was to explore how faith and science can be mutually supportive, I believe Corsi succeeded. Although the author demonstrates that science and reason can get us to the threshold of understanding great religious events and realities like Creation, Resurrection, afterlife, stigmata and the like, he preserves the mystery and necessity of faith by showing that they can never take us all the way to God, who is immaterial and waits to encounter us in extraordinary ways that will always require a leap of faith.

In the Old Testament area, between the horned altar of sacrifice and the entrance to the sanctuary, stood what Protestants would call a baptistry, Catholics a baptismal font. In the Scriptures it is called a “laver,” from the word for wash; we get the word lavatory from the same root.

Ordered as part of the tabernacle equipment, it was made of copper (“bronze”), a symbol of judgment (Exodus 30). Of two parts, “the bowl and its foot,” it was shaped something like a birdbath, and made from the polished mirrors of chaste women who served at the entrance of the tabernacle.

The laver was constantly refilled, probably from the stricken rock, which was the only available water source in the desert. “It was no motionless rock which followed the people” ( S, Ambrose, de Sacramentis, lib. v. c. 1). Tertullian called this water-rock their “companion” and said, “This is the water which flowed from the rock which accompanied the people” (de Baptismo, c. ix.). This water-giving rock followed them miraculously through the desert as a type of life-giving Christ (1 Cor. 10:1-4). The sacrifices and priests were ritually cleansed in the laver of water.

The Forerunner of New Testament Baptism

The word for wash (laver) in Greek is baptism –the only two New Testament occurrences of the word laver are in Ephesians 5:26, “…that He might cleanse her (the Church) by the washing (laver, baptism) of water with the word,” and Titus 3:5, “he saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing (laver, baptism) of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.”

These verses are an echo of what Christ said to Nicodemus: “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). He emphasizes His meaning is spiritual, a spiritual rebirth that must be generated by water and the Holy Spirit. St. Peter re-emphasizes this point, saying baptism saves us (1 Peter 3:21).

The Ephesians passage indicates that it is the Rite of Baptism, the water and the words spoken (as always, the words of Jesus), that accomplish the cleansing. The Titus passage clarifies that the action of grace performed by the Holy Spirit makes the water and words efficacious. The necessity of faith not disputed, taken altogether these verses indicate that Baptism does indeed generate new life.

As always, however, the complete meaning of this laver/baptism was unknown until Christ. His first miracle was to change the water used for ritual cleansing in Judaism into the wine blood of the New Covenant under Mary’s direction, a fulfillment of the prophets’ use of water as a symbol of the New Covenant that revealed how cleansing, baptismal waters would soon also create new life. Then He shows us what New Testament baptism would mean.

Just before His Passion, Jesus takes up the priestly girdle in a towel of menial service; he washes the disciples’ feet, Judas included, speaking of the importance of baptism, sacrificial service, repentance and forgiveness, and then He reveals the crowning glory of what baptism means: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized,” he said, and proceeded to walk the terrorizing hill of Golgotha to be crucified.

Jesus was our example in all things, reminding the Church that she must also take up her cross daily, and be crucified with Him at the hands of others and in service to them. It is the Law of the New Covenant, and the Holy Spirit’s fountain of living water (John 4), our refreshment and restoration, rushing, flowing, moving, springing, redeeming, musical, quenching water.

Enter the Lenten desert unafraid, for you will find there the Living Water.

It has always struck me as almost a waste that God makes so very many of something. Profusions of stars that remain undiscovered, innumerable people who will never be “known,” pastures and pastures of wildflowers, most of which are never seen or appreciated by a single human eye. He’s so extravagant, isn’t He?

A Tiny Beauty

And in the face of all that excess, I often feel pointedly insignificant. What possible purpose could we have for being here? Aren’t we really like a single wildflower, one of a gazillion others, here today, gone tomorrow, just like Jesus said?

I pick wildflowers when they’re in bloom. I love welcoming a bit of that profusion and freshness into my home, but I always shudder that my small handful does not make a dent in the pastures that remain, for it reminds me that if I weren’t here, there would be others to take my place.

This occupies a lot of my time, contemplating the position and purpose of things in the millennial meadow. I know it is silly, but somehow I see myself as simply one of the innumerable souls God has brought forth and sprouted, blooming silently in the single pasture of time, nodding peacefully and sitting prettily next to you until I’m gone.

Although I know with some inherent “amen” that I am “worth far more than these” (Matt. 6:26-34), flowers fade quickly, their fragile beatitude unable to resist the inexorability of winter, just as I will. What possible contribution could a single wildflower make?

A Tiny Light

It is not until wintertide, when all the flowers have bowed their heads for the last time, that stars take up their hymn of infinitude and teach me the significance of the solitary. It is so like God to leave us a prolific witness in the dark, cold death of winter.

There’s something about midnight clarity, scrubbed clean of any sound and wrapped in winter’s frozen blanket, that reveals God. I am struck by the darkness of it, by how very far the smallest lights can be seen at midnight and how millions of them combine in a swirl of stardust overhead.

My son received a telescope for Christmas this year, and as our family took turns probing the frigid darkness, I was breathless at the vast spread before me.  A single star, light years away, pierces the black sky and leaves a pinpoint of light. All those pinpoints together, strewn across the vastness of the cosmos, make up the pasture of our Milky Way.

Under a profusion of tiny star-dots I wondered at the many millions of years it took their light to reach me. Each single light, if extinguished, would be immediately swallowed up in the surrounding darkness, and as that thought occurred to me, I understood something of the deliberation of God’s message in overwhelming us with incalculable numbers.

While it communicates something of His infinity, it also enshrouds and whispers each ones’ supreme dignity, for where there is a flower, there is beauty. Where there is a star, there is light.

When He finally reveals Himself to be the mysterious force that guides all things to their proper end, will I have accomplished the thing for which He sent me? Will the position I occupied in history be one of light and flower? Surely we must shine faithfully on our neighbors, so that Light can dawn on those who sit in darkness and shadow of death, otherwise they are overwhelmed and sucked into its void.

We are invited, you and I, to radiate spiritual beauty and light in this dark, somber world that “breathes unbelief.” “[F]or once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light” (Eph. 5:8). If we persist in this sublime task until the end, the spiritual space around us, although seemingly small and maybe truly so in the scheme of millennia, plants a permanent light and beauty in history that beats back the encroaching darkness of sin and death and testifies to the beautiful plenitude of God. What must all those circles of light, nestled against one another throughout the vast expanse of time “look” like?

One silent night the Light of the World entered our darkness and sin, and a faithful star split it open to reveal Him and make it holy. It is the same with us, so that the Spirit and holiness of God shines on us and through us to our neighbor. That “light is the life of men.” Although surrounded with darkness as the stars in the night sky, we rest in light and cast it forth to others who “sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide [their] feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).

The thought that I, grace be to God, may win a tiny place of beauty and light in space and time for God inspires me to simply and faithfully shine where I am placed, to trust that although my spot is small, it can be seen by those who are searching from the farthest reaches of the universe.

I was already sick of it again, sick of the racking cough, the inability to breathe, being enslaved by it, the way I and everything I owned reeked of it. But I couldn’t quit. I had tried so many times, and the one time I succeeded, I capitulated at the first stressful event. I was doomed to emphysema.

No one at church knew I smoked. I hid it out of supreme embarrassment, because I was once approached at a restaurant by a beautiful older woman who told me in the drawl of the consummate southern belle, “Young lady, you’re too pretty to smoke.”  If anyone at church had suspected I was a smoker, I know they would never have asked me to teach that class.

It was during this time I received one of the best parenting strategies I have ever heard of, but of course I didn’t know that then. I was still honeymooning, a child myself, one very conflicted about teaching a class while participating in what I knew to be sin. But would I have been asked if He did not want me to do it, I prayed?

“If you love me, do what I say,” was the reply, implanted deep in my heart as I read the Scriptures (John 14:15). I did love Him. I believed very strongly all I had been taught.

And yet as He repeatedly confronted me with this verse, I understood that I did not really love Him if I did not do what He commanded, if I did not seek freedom from cigarettes and truly make my body a temple through which He could work (1 Cor. 6:19-20).

I was deeply disturbed by this, because I knew I was completely unable to quit smoking. The truth was, I liked it as much as I hated it and could not imagine my life without it. To add to the conflict, I had run across this:

“We know that our old self was crucified with him so that … we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin…So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:6-14).

If I loved Him, I would obey, and I did love Him … so I did the only thing I knew to do: I tried again. I tossed the remains of my last pack with the nostalgia of one who casts the ashes of a beloved pet to the tides. And then I went to bed. I knew the physical addiction would be eliminated in 5 days, so that was my goal, and what better way to begin than with unconsciousness, in which I could not smoke.

It was a minute by minute struggle. I watched the clock and commiserated with profound compassion with St. Paul who (I imagined) wailed, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:21-24).

I begged God for help every second, it seemed, until I had gone all morning without smoking, and the morning turned into evening: the first day, the first week, the first year. Victory. The first New Year’s resolution I ever kept. I have been a non-smoker for sixteen years, and it was the hardest physical habit I have ever had to break. The most surprising thing I learned was that what follows freedom from sin, is freedom to serve God without reserve and with a clear conscience.

When my oldest son was very small and he was learning the difficulties of deciding whether to obey or not, I asked God how to help teach him, and my Heavenly Father reminded me of a lesson He once taught one of His own wayward children, “If you love me, you will do what I say.” There have been watershed moments in parenting when this approach has made all the difference for us, and what I am learning is, the matchless power of love can move mountains and “make straight the way of the Lord” (Is. 40:3).

It is the season of hospitality, time to welcome friends and family into our homes, and yet some of us are questionable hosts who lack the hospitality gift, at least in the conventional way. It is telling then, that Advent is centered around hospitality, welcoming a child, a child of Promise.

Oriented to the Roman winter solstice, the arrival of the Child coincides with the arrival of the sun and the end of the longest, darkest day of the year. To welcome this Child is to welcome light and hope into the darkness of our world.

I would argue, however, that we are routinely presented with the opportunity to welcome light and hope by hosting secret gurus in our homes. Upon their arrival we might believe they are mere children, cute little responsibilities that we must teach and mold and nurture:

“A young man according to his way, even when he is old, will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6). I assumed this meant I must discipline them in the proper paths. How, then, are they so incisive, so penetrating, if they are not spies planted by God?

When my oldest was two he determined hewould dress himself and consistently wore mismatched socks, even though I paired them carefully and laid them out for him. The difficulty I had in stifling the overwhelming urge to make him change revealed a silly perfectionism, and began a series of confrontations with incidents in which he behaved according to his personality and temperament, but I was strongly tempted to force him to conform to my, or other people’s, expectations.

From my son I learned that dark emotions provoked by others’ personality expressions are often signals that there is a lesson present for me through them, and that a lack of respect for the divine timeline of others’ unique development, spiritual or otherwise, simply exacerbates everyone’s anxiety and stymies our potential.

He taught me that differences are resources rather than deficits. I once corrected a picture he had drawn by asking why he had colored the people yellow. He reported in sensible tones that it was the way he felt about morning. Duh.

At eleven, it only took a couple of sarcastic remarks escaping from his mouth to recognize my own tone, and I learned to my chagrin that I am a smart aleck who often answers questions with sarcasm.

I can always tell when my priorities have become muddled and my offspring need individual time with me, because their behavior degenerates into mob mentality and something is usually broken.

But I have also learned that dandelion fluff makes my hair look prettier and watermelons make the best bombs. We should not wear watches or talk softly. We should learn to speak Sioux, eat more broccoli trees and less pie, and sing Shakespeare.

I have learned God writes operas from the music of rivers, whispers “I Love You” through the wind, and sends us poetry in the Psalms. Since “all things are possible with God” I also know He could bake thirty minutes brownies in two minutes, and that pennies thrown in wishing wells are prayers He might grant.

Did you know one’s perspective is broader from the limbs of trees, and broader still from one’s knees? How else might picking wildflowers, growing lettuce, and gathering eggs all be lessons in treasure hunting?

Pain will pass, but laughter is eternal, godly; I have it directly from sages, and I, on miraculous rare occasions, get a glimpse of a poignant love and intimate gratitude that God experiences when “brothers live in unity” and care for one another with real love (Ps. 133:1).

While God loves me tenderly and deliberately through them, He is teaching me to really SEE. In my most desperate times when I feel no one really sees me, my three year old has been known to hold my face in his miniature, grubby hands and tell me, “You’re my pleasure.”

“In the spiritual life of childhood the things children say or do are never puerile or childish” (Josemaria Escriva, Spiritual Childhood ). The things children say and do frequently heal the blind.

My children carry an inherent message, a promise, one that I must allow the room to emerge. It is not my message. I don’t plant seeds of my legacy in them. We hold one another’s hands along the path to sanctity for a while, but they carry their Father’s legacy, just like the first Child of Promise.

The Christmas Jesus teaches me about the inherent gift of children, full of promise, full of anticipation, were they never to do another thing but “be,” because what they are, is love. Children simply love. Their smallness, like His, conceals the largess and presence of this love to us and to the world through them.

They beckon us with giggles to listen for secret wisdom, to accept divine hugs through little arms, and welcome messy, glorious virtue kisses pressed upon our weary cheeks. How significant that Jesus appeared to the earth as a little, laughing, noisy, Child of Promise.

It is, therefore, my job to provide an environment of hospitality where their weaknesses are minimized and their gifts and talents can come forward and be acknowledged and strengthened and released to a waiting world. The necessity of this extreme hospitality might worry me if it weren’t for how desperately I love them and want to welcome them, these promise carriers.

Instead it comforts me to know He chose me to receive the love they are, and in receiving them as guests and not possessions, I will reveal to them that they have something priceless to offer, something beautiful, something of the image of God: their love.

I must offer the same hospitality in my own heart, allow Him to minimize my weaknesses and use my strengths, and thus prepare to welcome His promise for me this Christmas: Love.

At times my priorities are so askew I forget there is any such thing as intrinsic value, and that through God, I can glimpse it, but my children teach me that the mystery of love isn’t something that is gradually diminishing in a modern world; it simply grows with my simplicity.

And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars,
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere.
No finch but implies a cherubim;
And glancing on my own thin, veined wrist,
In such a little tremor of blood
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their faces unaware. -Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

Oppressed by Egyptian taskmasters, the Lord heard the cries of His weary people and sent a deliverer. They left Egypt for the desert with spoils of gold and silver, but barely out of sight of their slavery, complaints ensued. The dry desert lack revealed a more insidious bondage.

On the surface, their fear seems legitimate — one can hardly live without food and water — and God answered their accusations of neglect by refreshing them with daily water from a rock and manna from the sky. Not a word of thanksgiving is recorded.

Instead the “angels’ food,” inspired more “intense craving,” a polite way of communicating their lust for the variety and plenty enjoyed while slaves in Egypt.

“’Who will give us meat to eat?’ they said. ‘Think of the fish we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic! But now we are withering away; there is nothing wherever we look except this manna!’” The disgusted Israelites regarded the simple, daily, miraculous manna as monotonous and unsatisfying, revealing a stunted capacity to digest spiritual sustenance.

Using every discomfort as an excuse to find fault and claim deprivation and neglect, the murmuring of the people and their offenses were regarded against God Himself, personally, and His own leadership and provision for them.

St. Jerome kindly explains the complaining by way of the fatigue of the journey, a fatigue we surely all share when feeling the extended pinch of slashed budgets and incomes, but the Lord patiently offers them a lesson by granting their desire:

“[S]ince you have wept in [God’s] hearing, saying: ‘Who will give us meat to eat? How happy we were in Egypt!’ Very well, Yahweh will give you meat to eat. You will eat it not for one day, or two, or five, or ten or twenty, but for a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and sickens you, since you have rejected Yahweh who is among you…” (Num. 11: 19-20).

Psalm 78 offers a chilling interpretation of our spiritual ancestors’ experience, relating that they sinned against God by testing Him in their hearts and asking for food “for their desires.” He gave them what they fancied and did not deprive them of what they craved, but while the satisfaction was in their mouths, it was judgment that they swallowed.

It was not hunger or thirst that insulted God, just as it is not our own legitimate desires or needs that qualify as sin. We lie to ourselves when we indulge the belief that it was better for us when we were more prosperous, that we will die of lack in this economic desert.

Oblivious to the real poverty in huge portions of the earth and complaining constantly of lack of spice, we are the fool whose house is too small to hold his constant accumulation of stuff, stuff that requires a bigger house when the old is adequate (Luke 12:13-21); stuff that suffocates us to death in debt and cares.

In these times of economic downturn, emotional pressure mounts to collect “things” in an attempt to anesthetize ourselves from the reality of our spiritual condition, dependence, and we can hardly cease from bottom-feeding for something else to assuage the anxiety.

The Father has graciously provided what we need (Matt. 6:31-34). It is we who reject his provision in favor of immediate, but temporary, satiation. We limit God, refusing to wait on His counsel, demanding what we crave in the desert, all the time accusing Him of lack of care (Ps. 106:13-15).

We must discipline ourselves in times of perceived deprivation, for God may grant our request, as He did the Israelites’, but as it runs out our noses we are quickly disgusted by what previously delighted us: the Christmas bling gives way to the burden of glaring credit card payments in the face of an unforeseen and devastating job loss.

When we persist in rejecting God’s provision for us, either in the timing or the substance, do we suspect judgment: leanness of soul, days consumed in futility, years in fear (Ps. 106:13-15; 78:33), and finally, the forfeit of the freedom we were on our way to meet (Ps. 95)?

I think not. I think, instead, our corpses fall as blindly as the Israelites’ into “graves of the craving” (Num. 11:34), and we never see the Promised Land or the wonders of the infant Savior.

Advent suggests we embrace our dependence and change how we deal with Christmas pressures. Jesus is coming! What shall we offer Him? “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord” (Ps. 116:12).

Simplicity is a priceless gift of Advent, one in which Jesus offers Himself in the Cup of the Eucharist and asks us to call on Him for help to resist capitulating to obsessive consumerism, to determine to be content with what He has provided, and thereby receive what truly satisfies this Christmas.

I am a legend. My notoriety as a motor vehicle operator is a well-acknowledged fact even to my neighbors, friends and extended family. Five years ago I shocked them all when I blew up my husband’s cherished ’78 4×4. I tried to start it after he had removed the carburetor (who knew?!) on the windiest day on record for years.

Sooner than the time it took to open the hood, it was engulfed in flames high enough to be seen ten miles away, and required several bemused firemen and their screaming trucks to put it out. My hand held fire extinguisher was utterly impotent.

Although I was not the first to do so, a riding lawn mower with a sticky gear shift somehow landed upside down at the bottom of our creek while under my control. Thinking it was in reverse, I gunned the accelerator to back away from the edge of a hill and found myself soaring over the precipice while negotiating a graceful leap off the back of the mower.

While I managed to avoid being pinned to the creek bed, I limped home dripping algae and stinking fish water with a crayfish clinging to my shirt tail. Really.

According to my three-year-old son, “policemen give Mama mail,” and this summer my eleven-year-old asked my father, a retired state patrolman, why he stopped  at the stop sign at the end of our road since his mother never does. It is for these reasons I was the butt of all the hilarity at our last family gathering.

I guess my husband and oldest son were looking for moral support as they related my foibles in great comedic detail, and insisted they have worn out the grip handles on the door frame of my car. We laughed till we cried, because everyone knows I get it from my mother, who gets it from hers!

I recently backed over a boat that had been surreptitiously parked directly behind my car. It wasn’t until my husband returned home from a fishing trip that I wondered if the leak that almost sunk his boat was my fault. When we first moved to the country, I got three speeding tickets in one year, but only because the highway is like an interstate out here.

Because I am a firm believer in justice, I have never tried to get out of receiving a speeding ticket, and have, therefore, been to traffic school four times for tickets in two counties and two cities. My father was a career state patrolman, and I know exactly how many miles an hour over the speed limit I can drive without being ticketed, and many other very useful items of safety trivia. This makes my record all the more surprising, and in response, I resorted to setting my cruise control on the highway and driving to town exclusively on back roads whenever I can.

So you can imagine my bewilderment when, recently, I found myself signing another little piece of mail pushed through the car window. While I prayed for another warning, I thanked God that my oldest son was not in the car to tell on me when I got home, but God’s will was clear through a city cop hiding behind the rise of a hill and holding a handheld radar detector on a lightly traveled back road.

How many times has God attempted to correct this undisciplined and even dangerous behavior in my life? I know the answer is many times — many tickets, many warnings, many trips to traffic school that defrayed ballooning insurance rates, many jokes and sideways glances regarding my driving.

As I drove away from the scene of the crime, the Lord asked me if something awful would have to happen before I finally took this issue seriously. It is Advent, a season of waiting, reflection, and repentance in preparation for the coming Savior, a divine protest against hurry, the root of my driving sin. Advent is a divine object lesson of perfect law, perfect plan, perfect order, and perfect method.

Haste, however, implies confusion, lack of order, and impatience of slow growth. It mistakes ambition for inspiration. Ever seeking to substitute energy for a clearly defined plan, hurry never realizes that slow, careful foundation work is the quickest in the end. Instead, it throws truth, thoroughness, poise and generosity to the sacrificial winds.

Advent teaches us to wait. Contemplate. Repent. Appreciate. It illustrates that everything great in life is the product of slow growth. The greater, higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, and the surer its lasting success.

Advent teaches us to accept slow growth, if it must be slow, and to know the results must come, just as we accept the long, lonely hours of Advent night with absolute assurance that the burden of patience must bring the dawn of salvation. This is hope, and it is the liturgy of the Church to all of us for today, this week, right now.

Where has God repeatedly attempted to speak to you about something you consider trivial, or that you know you shouldn’t participate in but believe it won’t really hurt anything or is too small to matter? What sin are you laughing off as just a quirk of your personality? Don’t hurry through this Advent without serious consideration and preparation.

The reality of evil is eerily similar to the reality of holiness. It is hidden in the clothes of daily life, so that its horror is disguised, and the evil that seeks entrance is casually allowed and even ignorantly embraced by those who would resist it if they could see it more plainly. Like a cancer, it does its deadly work undetected until the damage is so extensive as to be irreversible.

God called Abraham, the Hebrew Father, out of pagan, idolatrous people toward an area inhabited by pagan, idolatrous people, their idolatry characterized most grossly by human sacrifices to their gods. God promised to displace them and make Abraham the father of a new nation in their place, a godly people through whom He would reach all the families of the earth. The fulfillment of this promise would begin with a son, Isaac.

Because of his heritage, it would not have come as a surprise to Abraham that God commanded him to sacrifice his only son, the son of the promise, in this new land, for the Canaanites were known to offer such human sacrifices to their gods as were all the surrounding nations. The Lord was simply proclaiming His dominion over all that was Abraham’s in a way that would have been familiar to him.

Obedient even to death, Abraham went to the mountains of Moriah to sacrifice the son through whom the promise rested. In arguably the most shocking narrative in the whole of Scripture, God commanded, waited, and watched while Abraham prepared Isaac to be a burnt sacrifice, and only revoked the command upon the raising of his hand for slaughter.

This revocation revealed a lasting principle: unlike the surrounding peoples’ pagan worship and that to which Abraham had been accustomed, worship of the One True God would not include human sacrifice.

Centuries later, when Abraham was long with God but the Jewish nation he fathered had conquered and inhabited the Promised Land for years, the holy area of Moriah became the temple site (2 Chron. 3:1). Some even believe the altar of burnt offering in the temple was situated on the exact site of the altar on which Abraham intended to sacrifice Isaac to God.

This makes what God’s people commenced in its vicinity more heinous, for at the foot of the alleged mountain upon which God prevented Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac was the Valley of Himmon, the Valley of the Children.

Notorious in the history of Israel, this valley included a specific place called Topheth, meaning “to hit,” and it is said that its name signified the drums idolaters beat in order to drown out the sound of their infants’ cries as they were sacrificed to Molech, the god of the underworld.

Interestingly, the prophet Jeremiah delivered a devastating prophecy of God’s complete judgment upon this particularly nefarious idolatry, so that the Valley of the Children and the whole area would be so destroyed by conquering nations that it would be renamed the Valley of Slaughter as it overflowed with corpses, and those remaining would be reduced to cannibalism to survive (Jer. 19).

Later, in the same valley where Israelite children had been sent to “to burn their sons and daughters alive in honor of Molech” (Jer. 32:35), a constant fire smoldered to incinerate garbage and refuse from the city of Jerusalem. Smoke rose from the burning debris in the Valley of the Children day and night so that Hinnom became a graphic symbol of woe, disaster, and hell, the place of eternal judgment. The Greek translation of the “Valley of Hinnom,” is gehenna, a word Jesus used 11 times, and each time it is used in the New Testament it is translated hell (Matt. 5:22; Mark 9:43, 45, 47).

In the United Sates the bodies of our aborted babies are treated as potentially infectious biomedical waste, which also includes human tissue such as tumors, amputated body parts, blood-soaked rags left over from surgery, and single use plastics and disposables. Ninety percent of this medical waste is incinerated, according to the EPA, producing dioxin as a byproduct, a known human carcinogen. And so begins the destruction and cannibalism of judgment:

“Dioxins are environmental pollutants. They have the dubious distinction of belonging to the ‘dirty dozen’ – a group of dangerous chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants. Dioxins are of concern because of their highly toxic potential. Experiments have shown they affect a number of organs and systems. Once dioxins have entered the body, they endure a long time because of their chemical stability and their ability to be absorbed by fat tissue, where they are then stored in the body.

“Their half-life in the body is estimated to be seven to eleven years. In the environment, dioxins tend to accumulate in the food chain. The higher in the animal food chain one goes, the higher is the concentration of dioxins” (World Health Organization).

Though the destruction is slow and hidden, the judgment for the horrific practice of infant sacrifice is inexorable and absolute. The smoke from Topheth, our medical waste incinerators, testifies against our nation’s and the world’s apathy toward abortion, and by association God’s people always suffer the temporal consequences of such policies even as they are persecuted for their protest of them.

It is one of the most abominable acts of idolatry in the Scriptures, the temple of the body desecrated and destroyed by the worship of foreign gods. Yet what is most stunning about the issue of human sacrifice in the Scriptures goes back to the root account of Abraham and his God.

In maybe the most moving prophecy in the whole of the Scriptures, Abraham reveals something unspeakable, saying to Isaac, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering…” (Gen. 22:8). It would not be Abraham who offered a child sacrifice; in a stunning reversal God would sacrifice His son, His own Self, to be wholly consumed for even the nations and individuals who practiced this evil.

“Abraham called the name of that place The LORD will provide; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided’ (Gen. 22:14). God has provided the solution for this awful evil; we know it is the sacrifice of God’s human Son, “for though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3-4).

He conquered the worst evil humanity could imagine, yet it was “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zec. 4:6). It is at the foot of Golgotha that abortion continues in the Valley of the Children, infant sacrifices to Molech of the underworld, in abortion clinics all over the world within horrified sight of the Cross and the Church.

It is imperative that we continue to denounce the political drumbeat of pro-choice propaganda that drowns out the wailing of the mothers left to suffer, keep vigil at clinics, offer counseling and sonograms and all the tireless work Christians and other concerned citizens all over the world commence in defense of our smallest neighbors. We must.

But if, as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta says, Jesus is in the distressing disguise of these tiny babies considered enough an enemy of society to deserve death, what else can we do to love Him in them? Can we have their bodies treated as other corpses are, and rather than thrown on the burning Topheth, the garbage heap of society, can we also work to have them separated from “medical waste” and offer them a real burial?

Every state and municipality has different requirements, codes and practices. Is there some way, through us Jesus bearers, that we can carry Him directly into the facilities, to request the bodies of these tiny aborted babies, finally cradle them away in tender arms and treat them with love?

The world worships the appearance of youth, but denies it a real existence, seducing children to play at adulthood in innumerable ways through TV and advertising, introducing them to adult issues at increasingly younger ages in schools and other institutions, and robbing babies of the right to life, then dumping the used up carcasses of our children on the trash heaps of society, all strategies of sacrificing their innocence to the underworld.

What is your part in the issue? Do you participate in the political chatter, read about the horrors, but do nothing else? Do you live a holy, dedicated life, so that your prayers and other charity for children are as effective as possible? Can you pray the Rosary for them regularly and commit them to Our Blessed Mother; fast for the weakest of the weak, the ones with no voice but ours; have Masses said for victims of infanticide?

It is an almost overwhelmingly morose state. It seems such an enormous travesty we are almost tempted to do little or nothing and leave it to the activists. But “if you cannot feed a hundred people, then feed just one,” a little wrinkled peacemaker once said, one who was not an activist, but a lover of Jesus in the weakest.

Everyone can do something. If we are not literally and measurably for them, we are literally and measurably against them. We cannot be content with head shaking and derision. What will you do?

If you have ever read it and wondered why this corny little book was in the Bible, read it again with the knowledge that God has written you a song of adoration, filling it full of the same metaphors He uses for Himself elsewhere in the Scriptures: a shepherd, a banner, paradise, the rock, myrrh, a king, the mountain, living water, fire. An intimate relationship between God the Lover, and His beloved soul, is the song of songs about a “love as strong as death” (8:6).

What kind of love is this? It must, in some way, include a profound intimacy, for the context of this song is marital intimacy between the king and the common girl, illustrating the oneness and fulfillment God intends for His relationship with you. The first consummation of a marriage is sex, but more than skin on skin, it is the “becoming one” of two, and according to St. Paul, more a spiritual mystery than a physical fact (Eph. 5:22-32).

The language of the Scriptures is startlingly earthy, raw, and splendid. The Bible uses the word “know” for the description of physical intimacy: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD”; “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch” (Gen. 4:1, 17). It means a total and intimate knowing, a co-mingling of desire, longing, fulfillment, and spirit. God Almighty, the creator of galaxies, souls, elephants, and atoms, longs for you to acquaint yourself with Him and explore His depths in the most unembarrassed and intimate of ways!

It is these terms with which He describes intimacy with you in Song of Solomon, and this choice of language communicates something shocking about how civilized and unconventional and approachable He is. The Scriptures, the mystic Saints, and the Church, have always maintained that the marriage relationship is illustrative of God’s relationship to His people. The goal, Jesus said, is the two, you and God, becoming one: “And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect . . . “ (Jn. 17:22-23). This spiritual intimacy is what perfects, completes, and/or consummates, us. It is a participation in the glory of God.

He wants you to want Him. He desires that you escape from the embrace of “self” and offer yourself to Him, even to the separation of the joints and marrow of your soul (Heb. 4:12). Your truest, most vulnerable and hidden self must be naked and open to His love, reaching unreservedly to Him from out of the deepest wells of your heart, applauding His strength, beauty, and intelligence. He asks that you seek an unspeakable familiarity with Him as that of a spouse, such that there is always something to say, nothing to hide, perfect comfort, acceptance, profound touch.

Yet He does not bless us with this intimate communion for its own sake. This expression of intimacy and pleasure is also necessary for the generation of new life. God told Abram, “I will bless you and you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). He blesses us so we can spiritually multiply: “Then God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (Gen. 1:28). Part of God’s blessing on Adam and Eve was the pleasure of physical intimacy and procreation. In the Church’s Rite of Matrimony, it is said that this marriage relationship is the only blessing left undestroyed by Eden’s catastrophe and Noah’s Flood, so that spiritual intimacy and procreation continues as part of God’s blessing for you from the foundation of the world.

Do you dare to risk vulnerability in the effort to find God in this world of cynics and scoffers? Every soul who has heard the Lover sing to him the loveliest of songs, has felt their ridicule. “What is your beloved more than any other beloved,” they ask (Song. 5:9). Though we attempt to answer, the heart is barely able to write the words on our lips, for He is inexplicable, wild, and dangerous, a fathomless mystery. Yet Jesus warns us not to stand on the fringes of intimacy with Him: “And I will declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me’” (Matt. 7:23). We must fall into the bed of our soul, ready to be known by the Truth, each one alone with God, yet all furiously alive with the same eternal Song.