I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through the belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism, through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial, through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension, through the strength of his descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today through the strength of the love of the Cherubim, in obedience of angels, in the service of archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet with reward, in prayers of patriarchs, in predictions of prophets, in preaching of apostles, in faith of confessors, in innocence of holy virgins, in deeds of righteous men.

I arise today through the strength of heaven: light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock.

I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to save me from snares of devils, from temptations of vices, from everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and anear, alone and in multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils, against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul, against incantations of false prophets, against black laws of pagandom against false laws of heretics, against craft of idolatry, against spells of witches and smiths and wizards, against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

Christ to shield me today against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come to me abundance of reward. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness, of the Creator of Creation.

The biblical view of revelation is refreshingly practical.  One of the many pathologies of modernity is that it is far too absorbed in theory.  The fatal words of so many of the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries were “according to my calculations…”.  Marx had a shiny, perfect theory which he promised would bring heaven on earth.  It produced the largest pile of corpses in the history of the human race.  And, as it did so, theoreticians kept insisting that “according to their calculations” it was going to work, any day now.  Mao said the same.  So have the apostles of the sexual revolution.  So did Hitler.  So do the present-day theoreticians who say “Morality doesn’t matter so long as the economy is good.”  All these bright boys have a theory and all of them tell us our task as their disciples is to overlook the mounting bodies and social catastrophe and attend to the theory.  In contrast, biblical revelation says to look, not at theory, but at what God has actually done.  He can be trusted because what He says is true and what He does actually works.  He actually set Israel free from slavery.  He actually worked real miracles.  He actually healed broken lives and gave joy.  He actually rose from the dead.  This stuff happened, not in some cloud-cuckoo-land of theory, but in this world.  Today, thank God for His wonderful works and His solid, concrete and practical judgments.

One of the works of God is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Some people have the notion that the God of the Old Testament was big in the “afflicting the comfortable” department while the God of the New Testament is more of a “comfort the afflicted” kind of God.  But this is, of course, to totally forget that there is only one God and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  The God of the Old Testament was Israel’s healer.  The God of the New Testament “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones” (Luke 1:51-52).  In all this, His goal was the same: the salvation of the world.  Ultimately, His desire is “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).  Today, seek the Lord, your healer.

Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.”

A Marvelous thing is longsuffering; it places the soul as in a quiet harbor, fleeing it from tossings and evil spirits. And this everywhere Christ hath taught us, but especially now, when He is judged, and dragged, and led about. For when He was brought to Annas, He answered with great gentleness, and, to the servant who smote Him, said what had power to bring down all his insolence; thence having gone to Caiaphas, then to Pilate, and having spent the whole night in these scenes, He all through exhibiteth His own mildness; and when they said that He was a malefactor, and were not able to prove it, He stood silent; but when He was questioned concerning the Kingdom, then He spake to Pilate, instructing him, and leading him in to higher matters. But why was it that Pilate made the enquiry not in their presence, but apart, having gone into the judgment hall? He suspected something great respecting Him, and wished, without being troubled by the Jews, to learn all accurately. Then when he said, “What hast thou done?” on this point Jesus made no answer; but concerning that of which Pilate most desired to hear, namely, His Kingdom, He answered, saying, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” That is, “I am indeed a King, yet not such an one as thou suspectest, but far more glorious,” declaring by these words and those which follow, that no evil had been done by Him. For one who saith, “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth,” showeth, that no evil hath been done by Him. Then when He saith, “Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice,” He draweth him on by these means, and persuadeth him to become a listener to the words. “For if,” saith He, “any one is true, and desireth these things, he will certainly hear Me.” — St. John Chrysostom, Homily LXXXIV

Our culture thinks that the Church speaks against unchastity because it thinks sex is dirty.  But Pope John Paul II shows that this is wildly off the mark.  The real reason the Church commends chastity is not that unchastity is dirty but that unchastity is dishonest.  For the sexual act is the highest incarnation of self-giving in human experience.  By it, we say with our bodies, “I give you all of myself.”  To say that, apart from the sacrament of marriage is, bluntly, to lie.  Unchastity is the lie of self-giving incarnated in the act of taking: taking the dignity and love of the other while exploiting them for the sake of a physical sensation.  As C.S. Lewis said, to say that an unchaste man “wants a woman” is false.  He does not want a woman.  He wants an experience for which the woman happens to be the necessary apparatus.  And it matters not a whit if both parties are “consenting” to that mutual exploitation.  Mutual lies do not make a truth.  They merely complicate the betrayal.  In contrast to this culture of mutual betrayal and exploitation is the Church’s sacrament of marriage, in which husband and wife participate in the awesome self-donation of Christ and his Bride to one another in mutual love.  Today, pray that the culture of life will overcome the culture of betrayal and exploitation that so characterizes the modern world’s understanding of sex.

Whenever big numbers like “2000″ roll up on the odometer of history, there’s always somebody out there ready to go antichrist hunting.  And the last few years were no exception to that rule.  Of course, there’s been no shortage of antichrist wannabes, particularly in the last century. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all gave good college tries for the position.  But one difficulty with those who are keeping an eye out for Mr. Big with his horns, three-piece suit and sinister plans to use the Internet or the European Common Market to achieve world domination, is that we can often overlook the fact that John warns us against Mr. Little too.  For the reality is, as today’s verse points out, that anybody who rejects the Incarnation (“the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh”) is a little antichrist (though he or she may not realize it and may be as much deceived as deceiver).  For the heart of Catholic faith is not merely that God exists, but that He took on human flesh.  Many people simply cannot, in their hearts, stand that idea.  And many of them are Christians who, whatever they say, are horrified at the notion that God became man and that He continues to meet us through physical means like the Eucharist.  Such people say things like “I believe in a God who is purely spiritual” and by it they mean “I believe in a God who has nothing to do with matter, which is intrinsically evil.”  Still others, fancying themselves secularists, say, “I believe there is only matter and energy and that God does not exist and has nothing to do with the physical universe.”  Both these notions are precisely what John is warning against.  It is the deception of antichrist, even if we happen to think it is “true Bible Christianity vs. Romish superstition” or the New Age or Enlightened Scientific Thought.  The scandal of the Incarnation remains a scandal.  It also remains the Truth.

When Jesus stood in front of people and spoke, all some people could see was a somewhat scruffy manual laborer with a bit of Galilean twang in His speech.  He ate, drank, slept, and washed like the rest of us.  He was, to a certain sort of eye, ordinary.  When Peter looked, and then looked again, and kept looking more deeply, he saw in, with and through that ordinariness, “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).  Peter received mystical insight from the Father Himself and realized that, standing in front of him, against all likelihood or hope, was the very power that hurled the Andromeda Galaxy, led Israel from bondage, and created all that is seen and unseen.  It is with that same mystical double vision that John sees the Church in today’s verse.  Where you and I might see double-chins, a squabbling parish council, a priest with lousy taste in music, or a bad RCIA program, John reminds us to look again, keep looking more deeply and recognize what the truth is: here is the Bride of Christ, adorned for her husband.  And there, on that ordinary altar at that ordinary Sunday morning Mass, is the mystical Lamb of God, offering himself in the Marriage Feast of Lamb and dwelling with us.  Already, death has been defeated.  It’s been dead for 2,000 years.  Already, the worst thing that can ever happen has happened.  Already, Christ has turned it into the best thing that will ever be.  Behind the thin veil of the ordinary, the awesome mystical fire of the Trinity is burning at the heart of the Church, right there on that altar.  Today, see the Church with John’s vision and rejoice, for the former things have passed away!

To decide things by lot was to decide things by chance.  Lots were cast for Jesus’ clothes.  It does not follow that the soldier who won the lot was an especially worthy recipient of the prize, nor that the man who hung naked on the cross above them deserved that punishment.  Similarly, it is worth noting that today’s verse does not say that deciding things by lot is good.  It merely says that powerful contender’s disputes are ended that way.  Some people imagine that we modern civilized people don’t act that way any more.  They point to medieval “trials by fire” which decided whether somebody was a witch by chance and say, “Those days are over.”  But then, such people usually say that every war ever fought was always won by the right side.  In other words, they reject little lotteries as “deciding” things, but accept without question the notion that big lotteries and trials by fire called “wars” are accurate arbiters of justice.  To suggest that, say, the American Revolution, or World War I might have turned out better had they turned out differently is, for such people, almost like heresy.  Such an observation will not put an end to war.  But it may put an end to the notion that much has changed about our fallen race in 3,000 years.  And that, in its way, is progress.

2 Peter is not the first place we would normally turn for a subtle metaphysical discussion.  Yet here it is.  Right in the middle of a letter written, as moderns so often think, by a primitive man with simplistic notions of a God with a big white beard who sits up in heaven on a decorated chair, we suddenly discover the “primitive man” has a grasp of the eternity of God which would do St. Thomas Aquinas proud and would bowl over many a modern philosopher.  For the mysterious reality is that, however we may speak of God in human terms as living in time, “foreseeing” this and “remembering” that, the reality (beyond human language) is that God dwells outside time in the eternal now.  He has all eternity to hear the brief prayer of man in a car accident.  He sees all of history and each of its details in a single glance.  It’s enough to make your head spin.  But it also means that He sees you and all you love in all your particularity.  We don’t have to understand that.  But it’s good to know since it means that God’s love can reach every part of life and that all of time, like all of space, is His.

The number “666″ is fraught with grim significance in Scripture.  Most famously, 666 is the “number of the beast” placed on the hand and forehead in the book of Revelation (13:18).  There are lots of theories about what that number might mean and nobody can really be sure.  But it is interesting to note that the number does turn up elsewhere in that favorite book of the author of Revelation – the Old Testament.  It appears in 1 Kings at the moment that marks Solomon’s corruption from a righteous son of David to a king who disobeys God’s law.  The Old Testament king was under three prohibitions: not to pile up wives, horses—or gold.  Right here, with the ominous number 666, Solomon begins to systematically violate that prohibition.  Now it may be that Revelation’s warning about the “mark of the beast” will be fulfilled in a manner foreseen by popular (and rather implausible) theories about barcodes tattooed on our foreheads and hands.  But it might also be argued that anybody who worships Mammon and turns from obedience to God is already a slave to the mark in their minds (symbolized by the forehead) and their work (symbolized by the hand).  Whatever the case, Jesus warned clearly of the danger of worshipping Mammon and the impossibility of serving both it and God.  Today, find ways to avoid Solomon’s mistake.