In the Dead of Winter

In the dead of winter

midway between the solstice and the equinox

the light of Christmas and the gloom of Lent

remember trees give wood

for crèches, cradles, crosses, crucifixes

(a crucifix was called a “tree”)

Jesus’ Tree took His life and gave us His

On it He died
in a Cradle He was a newborn

The Tree points back to the Cradle

Man owed God a debt

A man had to pay it because Man owed it

God had to pay it because it was owed to God
so God became Man
He was born to die

The upright goes from earth to heaven

The crossbar reaches all space and time

Jesus’ "tree" is the center of all things.

E = m * c^2 and all that

I was thinking lately (a thing that some of my friends say I should not do too much) and it occurred to me that if God possesses infinite energy -- and I can't see any reason why not -- then creating a universe, even a very large one, out of nothing is no big deal.

Now since E = m * c^2, where c is the speed of light (about 186400), then m = E / c^2. This means that to create one kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of matter, God used up 9 * 10^16 joules of energy, or about 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules.

So what's a joule? One joule is the amount of work done when a mass of one kilogram is moved against a force of one newton. And one newton is that force which will give a mass of one kilogram an acceleration of 1 meter per second per second (or 1 m / s^2). In "English" units, 1 m / s^2 is about 1/10 the normal acceleration of gravity on Earth.

Matter and energy are interchangeable. Force, mass, work, acceleration -- all these terms, and the phenomena they name, are interrelated. (God is pretty smart.)

So some smart-aleck may ask: even if God possesses infinite energy, if God created an infinite universe, would that use up all His energy? The answer is no, because there are orders of infinities, some are bigger than others, and you can take away infinity from infinity and still have infinity. For instance, from the infinitely large set of ordinary counting numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) you can take away the infinite large set of even numbers, and still have an infinitely large set of odd numbers. And since every number has a double, which is an even number, there are as many even numbers as there are numbers.

(Don't blame me, I didn't make this up!)

Anyway, God said "Let there be light!" And there was light. And I can't see why that wasn't the same as the Big Bang.

That was the first Big Bang.

When I was at Adoration the other night, a line from a French Christmas carol ("He is Born, the Holy Child") ran through my head: "Depuis plus de quatre mille ans, nous le promettait les prophètes." -- "For more than four thousand years, the prophets promised us Him."

It doesn't make any difference to me if there were four thousand or unpteen bazillion years between creation and the birth of Christ. Let's just say it was a very long time. Dinosaurs came and went, continents shifted, seas rose and fell, glaciers advanced and retreated, and then at some imprecise time, God breathed life into the clay of the earth and made Man. (This does not seem to me to be necessarily inconsistent with the physical evolution of the human body.)

Then sometime about 1900 years before Christ, there was Abraham. After 1900 years, Christ was born and lived about 30 years, before He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was about four or five days between that and the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood at the Last Supper. It was about 12 hours after that, that Christ was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and put on trial. It was about three hours He hung in horrible torment on the Cross. It took maybe one minute for Him to utter His very last words -- and then time sort of stops.

And tradition tells us that forty hours after that was the second Big Bang -- Christ's resurrection!

And just as the universe expanded and formed itself after the first Big Bang, the Church has expanded and formed Herself after the second Big Bang.

The first was physical, the second spiritual; the second depended on the first (without a universe, no Earth, no people, no need for redemption). But the second is infinitely more important.

Take care and God bless!

Regina Caeli

Regina Caeli laetare, alleluia

Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia

Resurrexit sicut dixit, alleluia

Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia

Gaude et laetare Virgo Maria alleluia

Quia surrexit Dominus vere alleluia!

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia,

For He Whom thou wast made worthy to bear, alleluia

Has risen as He said, alleluia

Pray for us to God, alleluia

Rejoice and be glad O Virgin Mary, alleluia

For the Lord is truly risen alleluia!

HAPPY EASTER!

I wish a most blessed, happy, and holy Easter to all my blog friends! Also Pesach Shalom!

ХРИСТОС ВОСКРЕС!

Khrystos Voskres! (Christ is risen!) - to which the response is Voistynu Voskres! (Truly He is risen!) I worshipped with my Ukrainian friends this morning; I'm honored they accept me.

Христос Воскрес! - Воістину Воскрес!

Which means: Christ is risen! - He is truly risen!

My Triduum and Easter was shared between Latin and Ukrainian rites. Thursday and Friday I was at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Minneapolis, and Sunday I was at St. Stephan Ukrainian Catholic Church in St. Paul. The Thursday and Friday liturgies were done reverently and tastefully. The Sunday liturgy was in a mix of Ukrainian and English. (I suspect but don't know that Father does that for the benefit of the children and grandchildren who gave "gone Latin," just as I have "gone Ukrainian.")

The Epistle was read in Ukrainian and English; the Gospel (John 1:1-18) was read in Ukrainian, Ancient Greek (as far as I could tell), and English. Father's sermon was really good. He talked about the Easter customs of the secular world -- bunnies, eggs, and chicks -- and remarked that the secular world just doesn't get it. They have the symbols without knowing why. Bunnies are symbols of fertility and teeming life, eggs are the symbols of unborn life, and chicks are symbols of new life. Life, more abundant life, eternal life, is what Jesus Christ came to Earth to give us, and He did it through horrible suffering . . . and then His Resurrection.

There is life after life. Death is not the end. We Christians know it and the secular world doesn't.

Going back a bit to Lent, I found that saying the Anima Christi prayer every night before bed, and reading the Way of the Cross (the old style) as often as I could, were great devotions. Then Thursday and Friday I reread Jim Bishop's The Day Christ Died and Dr. Pierre Barbet's A Doctor at Calvary. I found that I appreciate the joy of Easter much more after paying a lot more attention to Christ crucified.

A word about the Ukrainian community I know.

At this little church in St. Paul, I'm almost the youngest person there (I'm 65). Most of the folks are postwar DP's (know what a DP is? It's a "displaced person"); there were hundreds of thousands of them in Europe after the War was over, and they sat out a few postwar years in DP camps in western Europe, before being admitted to the US as refugees. Some Ukrainians, sadly, who were in areas controlled by the British, were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they were almost certainly shot or sent off to the Gulag.

One couple I know lived in what was politically part of Poland in 1939, but was ethnically Ukrainian. When the Nazis of the Third Reich and the Soviet Communists signed a non-aggression pact in 1939, they partitioned eastern Europe into spheres of influence, and the Soviet Army took over this couple's village. Then in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the German Army came marching in and took many of the able-bodied folks to be (slave) laborers in the Reich, in farms, factories, what-have-you. Some of the good-looking women were forced into brothels for the German soldiers.

I hardly have to say that the Ukrainians were forbidden their Faith by both the Nazis and the Communists. Those who came here were overjoyed to be able to worship again. Back in 1964, I met a young woman who was a high-school senior; she told me that the only family she had that she knew of was her immediate family. All the rest, she said -- well, they had no idea even if they were alive or dead. I was told that after the Soviet collapse, one of the first things the folks in Ukraine did was start building churches. One old lady showed me some pictures of a little wooden church in the village where she grew up. "They're going to have Mass again for the first time in 70 years!" she said through tears.

One old lady who spent about five or six years in a DP camp after the War and came to the US about 1950 or 1951 told me once: "Never trust anyone who wants to take away God, marriage, or the family."

These people have suffered plenty, they became hardworking citizens as soon as they could, and they value highly the freedoms we have here.

(I have to add in closing that I can guess pretty accurately what they think of the present administration.)

Holy (Maundy) Thursday

I saw last night the moon was either full or one day lacking of full, so it looks like this is one year where Passover and Easter occur at the same time. And according to the calendar we use now, it's only three days past the actual date of the Last Supper, about which some scholars disagree (I think), but which Jim Bishop puts at Thursday, April 6, AD 30.

So today is the first of the Triduum or "three days" that are the holiest in the Catholic liturgical calendar, climaxing with the Easter Vigil Mass, after dark but before dawn, Saturday night-Sunday morning.

So who's Jim Bishop? He was a journalist who, in 1957, published The Day Christ Died, an hour-by-hour account of Jesus Christ's passion and death, from 6 pm Thursday to 4 pm Friday; with three interspersed chapters, "The Jewish World," "The Roman World," and "Jesus."

In my not-so-humble opinion, it is the best book ever published on the central point of human history. I've read it almost every Lent since it came out, when I was 13 or so.

I think most of us like happy endings, and of course this story, the most important story in the world, has a happy ending. But there's only the tiniest hint of that in the book.

As best I know, it's been the constant theme of the greatest saints down through the ages that to rise with Christ, we have to die with Him. He Himself said that unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will not bear fruit. Suffering is something none of us like and most of us would like to avoid. But Jesus and the saints, His most faithful followers, have said over and over again that the Cross -- our crosses -- must be carried if we're to be worthy of Him.

There's a very important notion in Catholic thought (it might be in other Christian denominations too, but I don't know), that of redemptive suffering. The idea (based on a passage in St. Paul) is that if we offer up our sufferings to Christ, He will use them to help redeem the world. So our suffering isn't meaningless, it isn't senseless; it has profound and eternal meaning. And I not only believe the idea, I like it -- because I'd go crazy otherwise.

Anyway, the more we immerse ourselves in Christ these next three days, the more we'll appreciate the joy of Easter. And the closer we stick with Him in our lives -- including carrying our crosses -- the better chance we have of "arising glorious with Him on the Last Day."