THE BRIDE: Confetitur

QUOTE:
I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all the Saints, and to you brethren, that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Therefore I beseech blessed Mary ever Virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, all the Saints, and you brethren, to pray for me to the Lord our God. (Confetitur, The "Canonical Rule" of Chrodegang of Metz, ca. 743)

COMMENTARY:
The earliest recording we have of this confessional prayer dates back to the 8th century. It is shocking to present day Evangelicals, and often misunderstood by present day Catholics. The Evangelicals ask, “where in the bible do we find a requirement to confess our sins to Mary and the rest?” And the Roman Catholics assume that their prayers to the saints will make everything right with the Lord, and so they bypass addressing Jesus altogether. However, this prayer hails from a time when both Eastern and Western churches were both Orthodox. This means that the theology of the church taught that the dead saints, along with the angels dwelt in a dimension known as the heavens. This dimension is of such a character that it allows the spiritual beings to live in a way that time is all present, and where mater is accessible to the spirits. In other words, they are in our presence and they see us and hear us, here and now. This is the distinction in Greek thought is seen between chronos and kairos, and things visible and invisible. Hence, the church militant pleaded for the prayers of the church triumphant to come along side their own prayers, especially when it regarded the forgiveness of sin.

And when He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, having each one a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. Rev 5: 8

FATHERS: Wisdom and the Word

QUOTE:
For just as though some musician, having tuned a lyre, and by his art adjusted the high notes to the low, and the intermediate notes to the rest, were to produce a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God (being the Word), handling the universe as a lyre, and adjusting things in the air to things on the earth, and things in the heaven to things in the air, and by combining parts into wholes and moving them by his beck and will produces the universe in its perfect order. (The Function of the Word, Contra Gentes, Athanasius, ca. 298-373 AD.)

COMMENTARY:
The great father of both Eastern and Western churches, Athanasius, describes how it is that the word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, directs the creation, and everything in it to his ends, by comparing this to the work of a master musician who selects the possible sound of his instrument and then plays it in perfect combination of the parts to attain and beautiful score. Most important here is the implication of this truth. Tuning and playing single notes do not make complete sense of the whole piece, they do not reveal its true beauty until the score is fully played. The evangelical Catholic strives to understand that we get to see, hear, and feel is only a piece of the whole composition at best. This is a most valuable comfort when evil seems to be overtaking us.

OFFSPRING: Fruit vs. Fruit

QUOTE:
When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value; because only in God is found the value of everything, and the world is only meaningful when it is the “sacrament” of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves, destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. (For the Life of The World, Schmemann, ca. 1963)

COMMENTARY:
The struggle with Eve’s forbidden fruit is by no means gone from us. Often we look at the creation and forget that it cannot be of real good to us except it be a sacrament of the God who made it for our good. Evangelical Catholic worship, that is "apostolic liturgical worship," trains the body, mind, and soul to be sacramental and thus to live life in the manner which was once called “the way.”

FATHERS: To Each His Own

QUOTE:
The Savior comes in various forms to each man for his profit. For those who have need of gladness, he becomes the vine; to those who want to enter in, He stands as a door; for those who have need to offer up their prayers, He stands as a mediating high priest; and, to those who have sins, he becomes a lamb that he may be sacrificed for them. (Cyril of Jerusalem, catechetical lecture #10, ca. 341 AD)

COMMENTARY:
The Catholic Evangelical understands that our whole being is plagued with injuries, yet, not all injuries are present to the same degree. Thus, this kind of believer turns to Jesus who is the great physician, and the only one who can heal the whole cosmos. This believer knows that our Lord accomplishes this healing exactly where the injury is present, and to the degree necessary in this life. O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. Ps 30: 2

OFFSPRING: For The Life of the World

QUOTE:
“Man is what he eats.” With that statement the German materialistic philosopher Fuerbach thought he had put an end to all idealistic speculations about human nature. In fact, however, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man. Man must eat in order to live, he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood… this image of the banquet remains throughout the whole bible, the central image of life. (For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann, ca. 1963)

COMMENTARY:
The basic imprint of the living God is so marked upon the human psyche that we cannot avoid uttering the most basic truths of God. Even when we desire to suppress His very being, His truth still comes out of us. The plain fact is that Man was made for God, and is only restored to wholeness when he takes God into himself, and makes this God his very flesh and blood. It is in the communion banquet that we feast on the Lord Jesus Christ, God of all creation, into our being.

OFFSPRING: A Life Worth Living

QUOTE:
The church binds us to no theory about the exact composition of Christ’s resurrection body. A body of some kind there had to be, since man cannot perceive the infinite otherwise than in terms of space and time. In any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded that life was worth living and death a mere triviality. (Creed or Chaos, Dorothy Sayers, ca. 1949)

COMMENTARY:
Victory and defeat have great implications on the human heart. Victory fills the spirit with assurance, joy, creativity, while defeat fills us with fear, insecurity, and depression. Sayers reminds us that the resurrection of Christ’s body is much more than a mere science experiment in the mind of man. Interesting as the scientific study of the resurrection may be, it does nothing to improve the spirit of person. However, the fact that death is been stripped of its power totally changes the human’s understanding of their own timeline. It fills us with the assurance of life and hope of eternity. Consequently, we live life as the victors rather than the defeated.

FATHERS: Leaping for Hate

QUOTE:
“Blessed are you when men hate you.” The Lord desired that we should leap for joy in persecutions, because when they occur, then are given crowns of faith, then the soldiers of God are proved, and the heavens opened. He will confess those before His Father who confess Him, and will deny those who deny Him, therefore, be not moved. (The Epistle to Thibaris, Cyprian, ca. 200-258)

COMMENTARY:
The Eastern Church, in which Cyprian is a primary figure, sees the life of the Christian as one of being formed into the shape of the God-man Jesus. The name given to this shaping is “deification,” or being made partakers in the divine. According to Cyprian, a major catalyst in this process is the hatred we experience from others for who we are in Christ. He repeatedly quotes the Lord who frequently addressed the subject, and then reminds us that this very contest between the haters and the hated is the means appointed by God for being drawn into Him. And the victory is attained by joyful trust as we are being destroyed. If Cyprian were around today he might teach a class on smiling as you are destroyed for Christ sake, and find that no one would show up.