A Giant Goes to Heaven: Fr. Lawrence Boadt, CSP

To those who have known and loved and worked with him, it came as both a relief and as a very sad event. Paulist Father Larry Boadt died this morning after an incredibly courageous battle with terminal cancer. The Paulist Fathers' obituary says it all much better than I, so please read it there. 

I not only belong in all three of the above categories, I am also one of the untold thousands who, in their theology student days, could never have passed Old Testament without having used his magisterial book Reading the Old Testament. Also, I suppose I have the dubious distinction, as a photographer, of having been the last person to photograph him. Here are some images from the farewell party given for him only last month when he stepped down from the helm of Paulist Press, of which he had been CEO and Publisher since 1998. They show him in his typical way--always smiling and always glad to be around people. He may have been one of the greatest Old Testament scholars in the world, but he never stood on ceremony. Gracious humility was his style. In November 2009, as we were both returning from Montreal on the same flight after attending the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, he cheerfully guarded my luggage while I did some last-minute duty-free shopping and then drove me home from Newark Liberty Airport. This was typical of him.

As he lived, so he died. His colleague at Paulist Press, Fr. Mike Kerrigan, CSP, who devotedly looked after him during his illness, said that watching him go toward that inevitable meeting with his Creator was an inspiring and transforming experience.
R.I.P., Fr. Boadt. May not only the angels but also Fr. Isaac Hecker and the other early Paulist saints lead you into Paradise. I know St. Mary Magdalene will be on the welcoming committee--I already had a word with her.

A Garden Bursting into Life: Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

One thing I love about Mary Magdalene is that she dared to be exactly who she was: a generous, passionate, devoted and grateful person. Mary Magdalene was never, ever a cardboard copy of who she "thought" she should be. She acted out of her core, never out of a list of "shoulds" or "musts." 
    One of my favorite songs is "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol, and the line that always jumps out at me, loaded with layers of meaning, is "Show me a garden that's bursting into life." I dare say, that's Mary Magdalene's theme. Look at the Easter story in the Gospel of John, which we read on her feast. She goes to the tomb expecting to see a dead body to anoint with spices, and what does she find instead?  "A garden that's bursting into life"! And the person in charge is the Ultimate Gardener, Jesus. What a great and wonderful surprise, a gift from the God of the Unexpected.  Who was better able fully and completely to embrace this surprise and all it implied than Mary Magdalene, the "apostle to the apostles"?
    Happy feast day, St. Mary Madgalene.  Happy feast day to my friends among the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and the Paulist Fathers, both of which hold Mary Magdalene in special regard as a patron saint.

In Awesome Wonder: Prophet Isaiah and the "Wow!" Moment

The Book of Isaiah chapter 6 contains that amazing, dramatic account of Isaiah's call by God to be a prophet. Isaiah sees a vision of the Temple with the Lord seated on his high and lofty throne, and the train of God's garment fills the Temple. Six-winged seraphim are in attendance, and the words they call out to one another are familiar to us from Mass: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts ... heaven and earth are filled with your glory."
    Isaiah believes he is surely doomed, because he has seen the Lord with his own eyes; the ancient Israelites believed no one could see God and live.
    I got to thinking about how those words--"Holy, holy, holy"--ended up in our Mass. They weren't put there at the decision of a Liturgical Commission. They've been there since the earliest times because the early Christians, gathered for worship at the eucharistic sacrifice, spontaneously felt the same awe that the Prophet Isaiah did during his vision. The Lord Jesus was descending among them, and for them this was a "Wow!" moment.
    What is this moment for us? All too often we recite these words "Holy, holy" as a prelude to kneeling down for the Eucharistic Prayer, or we sing them to (more often than not) banal music. How can we recapture that "Wow!"--whether it's the wonder of Isaiah as communicated to the early Christians, or its majestic expression in the "Sanctus" of J.S. Bach's B Minor Mass, or the quiet, reserved awe of Reginald Heber in his exquisite hymn "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty"? Yes, that's right--a 17th-century Lutheran musician and a 19th-century Anglican vicar have something to teach 21st-century Catholics about the amazing event that takes place on our altars at each Mass.
    What happens to Isaiah after his "Wow!" moment? A seraph touches his lips with a burning ember and the Lord commissions Isaiah to go--to be the one sent to fulfill God's mission for him.
    Only after being bolstered by this "Wow! experience was he sent by God on his mission.  We, too, are called, called to live as Christians in an increasingly anti-Christian world. Faced with liturgies that so frequently exalt the ordinary and the banal, where do we get our "Wow!" moment?

Faith of Our Fathers

Many of us will remember a hymn that begins,
"Faith of our fathers, living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword ..."
It came from the pen of Frederick William Faber, an evangelical-turned-Anglican-clergyman-turned-Catholic-priest who joined John Henry Newman's band of Oratorians but then broke away to form an Oratory in London -- the famous Brompton  Oratory. This was the era (mid nineteenth century) when Catholicism was enjoying a revival in England; the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act had removed many of the restrictions imposed on Catholics in the wake of the Reformation, and optimism ran high that England, which had once been so staunchly Catholic that it was known as "Mary's dowry," would regain its identity as a Catholic country.
    With the typical fervor of many new converts, Fr. Faber was "more Roman than Rome." The "faith" in his hymn was not some general Christianity but specifically Catholicism, and the "dungeon, fire, and sword" referred to the persecutions that followed the Protestant Reformation.
    The final stanza of the hymn, in Faber's original version, goes:
"Faith of our fathers, Mary's prayers
Shall win our country back to thee."
With the slight change of "back to" to "unto," it was the way we all learned it in Catholic school here in the USA.  The words otherwise are suitable for any Christian denomination, and in non-Catholic hymnals one often finds a version that eliminates the reference to Mary in this stanza. Fine.  But when attending Mass during an out-of-town trip this past weekend, I was dismayed to discover that the missalette (it happened that we sang this hymn), one produced by one of our premier liturgical publishers, contained one of the Mary-less versions instead of the original.
    We moan about how Catholic bashing is the last form of bigotry permitted in the world, and indeed that would seem to be the case.  But if we don't respect ourselves and what we believe and what we stand for, how can we expect others to respect us?  How far backward can we bend with misplaced political correctness?

The Prophet Amos Pulled No Punches

Hi, and welcome to "the thoughtfulcatholic" blog! I'll be using this blog to comment on various items and issues of interest to Catholics. The topics will be varied, though I expect that a number of them may refer to what I call (with, alas, very little hyperbole) liturgical atrocities. Anyhow, I want to start with the prophet Amos. Some of the liturgical readings for recent weekdays were from the Book of Amos.  In one of the readings Amos is doing what he does best--making The Establishment very uncomfortable--and The Establishment, in this case the priest Amaziah, tells Amos to get lost and take his prophecies elsewhere.
I've always found Amos' response somewhat poignant. He's no professional prophet, he says, but "a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores." In other words, "I have no advanced degree from an accredited Prophet College, no Prophet License, I'm just an amateur doing what the Lord sent me out to do."
Now, we know that God sometimes has an interesting way of choosing unlikely folks to do his bidding. But though they may appear unlikely to us, God obviously saw something "likely" in them. What was it about Amos? Why did God "take him from following the flock" and send him out to prophesy?
I like to think that it was because Amos had no fears about being outspoken. He pulled no punches, shot straight from the hip, said what had to be said, and used colorful language. Period. In our age of "political correctness" and exaggerated fears of offending anyone, Amos is an intriguing character. Let's face it, a lot of us wish we could be like Amos. Through him the Lord tells the hypocritical worshipers, "Spare me the din of your chanting!" How many pastors would love to say that to those responsible for what passes for music in their parishes?
And the lazy women who live for the food and drink their husbands can provide for them while the weak and oppressed go hungry, Amos isn't afraid to address them as "you cows of Bashan." Considering that the bulls of Bashan were animals renowned for their extraordinary size, this is a really strong insult! Colorful imagery, hits home, you can see why God was eager to harness this talent for his purposes.
Something I mentioned in passing about Amos bears further unpacking, but I'll save that for another blog.