St Monica and Vatican II For Lutherans. 27 August 2010.

We Lutherans -- that is, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, insofar as the name has not been removed or hidden so people don't think we're some kind of frozen chosen, maintenance rather than missional mentality, wannabe Catholics stuck in a Eurocentric liturgical straight-jacket for worship rather than ablaze to bring you to a critical event and get you all on fire with our praise band -- are about to celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 27 August.

Thing is, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May.

Huh? Who cares? What difference does that make? And who is and why bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky! Besides, it's all adiaphora, right, why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?

Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Geez, whozzat? Well, arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies, to your searches or Wikipedia. Except for this: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, and a celebrated figure in his time, and his conversion was brought about by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.

When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since that is the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.

St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?

The "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity -- in this way rather like my guys, the Benedictines -- all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther. Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another one whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire church.

This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was/is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, and when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.

Until the Revolution. Er, Vatican II.

One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible. So they effectively banned the old stuff and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar -- a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.

One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.

However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica not because of her physical motherhood of St Augustine but because of her example, particularly her example of the power of persistent prayer, in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and that we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated it on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of their patron on 5 May. And then to stay connected to and become a part of that ongoing history by leaving it there rather than turning one's back on all that and relocating it.

Sorry, Roman dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not our ideas of what makes something more "accessible", and to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party. If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.

Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.

And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord. We moan and groan why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches that will drive you with purpose and give you your best life now.

We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises, yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options that we can Lutheranise when we set before them as confessional Lutheranised "options" modelled after 1960s Rome equally with our common catholic history -- this historical mass and that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary and that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar and that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar. Why not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too with their false hopes and promises when we adopt and adapt the stinking filth of the Whore of Babylon as it toys with our catholic heritage? Why should they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!

Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!

St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not that but in her role in his spiritual birth, his conversion, in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, or better yet finally inserting the Conversion into the Calendar, rather than moving her feast day from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast, which does not.

Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform. They are the products not of the Christian church, but one denomination, and that headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice and learned German guy -- and now the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.

Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and when we do, we abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use.

The Root of the Problem.

Well I'll be double dag dog dipped. Just got done with a working week-end, and preparations therefor -- only taking enough time to dash off the Sacred Head thing in one sitting -- when looking around to see what I've missed the last few days I see on Dr Kilcrease's blog Theologia Crucis that Michael Root of ELCA fame swam the ruddy Tiber.

Way shocking? Oh hell no. I'm sure some of the former Lutheran Tiber swimmers, on one of whose blogs we had indirect contact, are just happier than pigs in deep mud, and find vindication of their own move into "full communion" with the Bishop of Bullroar whose office bears the marks of Antichrist.

What conversion? A guy leaves a body that is no longer Lutheran for a body that is no longer Catholic. Why the hell not? A few more deals like the JDDJ in which he was involved, a betrayal of both traditions, and the full communion of the Whore of Babylon will be complete, the main brothel in full communion with all the brothelial unions!

It ought to work out well. Hell, when it comes time for the novus novus ordo -- this will be after they get through with "more faithful" translations of the current novus ordo, Judas it took them a generation to fix some stuff my high school Latin class could have done as a week-end assignment -- they will all be in one house, rather than the round robin of ICEL, CCT, ELLC etc and all these various hymnals by all these like-minded "ecclesial unions" as Rome calls them now.

The quoted news release post contained a comment with something about finding another tradition more compelling. Long way from The Word of the Lord endures forever, but what the hell. Long way from the Abjuration of Heresy converts made when I was Catholic, but what the hell.

He's right though. If what you want is a 1960s collage of phenomenology, sociology and a little existentialism, with a revision of the liturgy, calendar and lectionary to accompany so you superficially resemble the former deal, hell yes if you want to go ad fontes go to the fons et origo of the whole stinking mess, the religion and church created at Vatican II. The originals do it way better and more compelling than their Lutheran and Anglican/Episcopalian wannabes, plus they got the real estate, bank accounts, and period costumes from before too!

There's a succession, but there's not a damn thing Apostolic about it.

More compelling tradition, eh? What a laugher. Amusing as all hell to me though. I left the RCC because I could NOT find the Catholic tradition, which of course I thought at the time was the catholic and Apostolic tradition left by Christ, any more, and thinking there could be no other, left Christianity too. Conversion stories like this remind me that if some day I woke up thinking that Catholic tradition was the more compelling, like say true, the last place on earth I would go for it is the Roman Church of Vatican II.

Talk about not your grandfather's church. It ain't even the church in which I was born and raised or to which my father converted and my grandfather returned!

Thanks be to God for his gift of the Lutheran Confessions in my life and I could finally disentangle catholic from Catholic and finally see the Word of the Lord which does indeed endure forever.

On St Bernard, Sacred Heads, and Other Stuff.

Well here it is 19 August and our Commemorations list says it's the Feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

OK, for starters, the feast of St Bernard of Claivaux is actually 20 August. That's the day he died, and traditionally, the date of a person's death, faith seeing it as the date they were born to eternity, is used as their feast day, if known. You die on 20 August, your feast day is 20 August. Pretty simple. It's a Christian version and continuation of Yahrtzeit, meaning "time of year" in Yiddish, when relatives remember a family member on the date of their death.

So what possessed the compilers of our Commemorations list to move it up one day? Hell if I know. I also do not know what possessed them to create several commemorations for Old Testament figures, but one of those is for Samuel, which they put on 20 August, so I guess they needed the day.

Anyway, Bernard, especially for a rip roaring kick-ass let's get serious about this Rule of St Benedict for monasteries type, has a pretty good rep among notable non-Catholics, including Martin Luther. In spite of, say, choosing the "right" pope when two were elected -- hey, what if he got the Innocent/Anacletus thing wrong? -- he does show some signs of knowing it all comes down to faith in Christ and what he did for us.

That can happen, even in the RCC, and in all fairness I gotta say old Bernard was one of those. As a Benedictine never-was, the only thing worse than a has-been, lemme tell ya a little reform wouldn't hurt those guys at all.

He is best known among non-Catholics because the hymn "O Sacred Head" is attributed to him. Let me be clear -- O Sacred Head, which everybody knows God sings as O Haupt voll Blut and Wunden, is among the greatest hymns ever written by anybody, any time, any where.

Unfortunately Bernard was not involved in it.

The text to the hymn comes from the last part of a long mediaeval poem called Salve mundi salutare (I ain't translating, ask Father Hollywood) which mediates on a number of Christ's body parts as he suffered on the Cross. The last part meditates on his head and is called Salve caput cruentatum. It dates from the 14th Century; Bernard lived in the first half of the 12th Century (1091-1153 to be exact).

The tune is even later. It was written originally as a love song by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). When one of the great contributors to our magnificent Lutheran hymn heritage (no clowning around here, he was great and it is magnificent) Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) translated Salve caput cruentatum into German as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunder (the aformentioned version God now uses -- OK that's clowning around) Hassler's love song got used as the tune (no textual reason for this parenthetical comment except to make three in one sentence and thus reflect the perfection of the Trinity, it's a monkish thing).

But hey what the hey, our national anthem's tune was originally a drinking song.

So what's the point? Bernard didn't have a damn thing to do with O Sacred Head, neither as tune or text. And for that matter, being thoroughly Roman Catholic, makes a hell of a lot better Roman Catholic saint than Lutheran commemoration.

The point is, the power of the Gospel, well meditated on in O Sacred Head, is such that the hymn does not depend on or even need pious legends and myths about its earthly authorship. And that the power of the Gospel, of which Bernard shows signs of being aware, is such that it can penetrate even the largely pagan accretions laid over it by the RCC. Thank God for the Lutheran Reformation, that we no longer live in times like Bernard, where church and state alike were choked by these accretions, and the Gospel can be rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered in our churches openly.

15 August 2010. The Dormitory of Mary.

Yeah I know, it's the Dormition of Mary, aka the Assumption.

Dormition, dormitory -- all from the Latin for "to sleep". One of the dormitories where I went to university was called St Mary Hall, formally. It was just "Mary Hall" otherwise. Everyone went there whether they had a room there (I didn't) or friends there (I did) or not. Reason being, St Mary Cafeteria, or "Mary Caf" as we called it -- the culture may include tendencies which may strike those unfamiliar with it as unduly familiar, even slightly irreverent -- which wasn't a cafeteria at all but an on-campus restaurant and gathering place.

Mary Caf was not the regular cafeteria, where those with a meal plan, which being a rural campus not in any town was just about everyone, ate. Rather, it was where one ate burgers and fries and stuff like that on their own time, and dime. So why is a restaurant called a cafeteria when it really isn't? Well, the regular cafeteria wasn't called a cafeteria either, but a refectory, so the word was available. And it did have trays.

Holy crap, what's a refectory? Comes from the Latin reficere, to restore, which gave rise to the word refectorium, a room where you get restored, ie eat. It's a monk thing, and being a Benedictine institution we were all about that. Now, in a real refectory, according to the Rule (as in Rule of St Benedict for monasteries, geez do I have to explain everything?) meals are eaten in silence, one guy reads from Scripture or the saints (that's lectio divina, or divine reading) and no meat from mammals except if you're sick.

However, true to the very heart of the most venerable tradition, Benedictine in particular and Catholic in general, it ain't really like that. As more and more "feasts" came in to the church calendar, the meals got better, and, by the time it took four digits to write the year, the obvious solution was to eat the other, better, food in another room, and keep up appearances in the refectory. Not have your cake in one room, then eat it in another. Perfect.

And in a student refectory, where the teaching monks ate too, as distinct from the monking refectory of the monkatorium itself, there ain't no lectio divina and ain't much of anything done in silence either.

So it don't get no more Benedictine than to have the refectory and Mary Caf, the official restoring room and the other one on the side. Hey, don't laugh, the Eastern Orthodox, as usual, amp it up even more. In their monkeries the refectory is called the Trapeza, always with at least one icon and sometimes a ruddy church unto itself, altar, iconostasis and all.

And they got this Lifting of the Panagia to end the meal too. What in all monking monkery is a Panagia? It's the prosphoron from which you take a chunk in honour of the Theotokos. What the hell izzat? The former is the loaf used in the Eucharist, the latter is Mary. After the service, the refectorian (don't freak, it's the monk who runs the refectory) cuts a triangle out of it, cuts the rest in half, puts it on a tray, the boys go over to the refectory with the tray in the lead, and after the meal there is a ceremony in which the refectorian says "Bless me, holy fathers, and pardon me a sinner", the assembled holy fathers say "May God pardon and have mercy on you" (as if he had not already done so at Calvary, but I digress), then he says echoing the liturgy "Great is the name" and the boys chime in with "of the Holy Trinity", then comes "O all-holy Mother of God help us" and the reply "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us" (as if he ..., oh well), then accompanied by a dude with censer offers it, each holy father taking a piece between thumb and forefinger, running it through the incense, and eating it.

Now that's some serious monking. Judas H Priest, we're a bunch of Bavarians, or at least the joint was founded by them: hell, the closest we came to anything like that was to make sure you went back for more of the good dark bread before they ran out. Closest I'm gonna come to it now is the lifting of the Panera. Besides, Panera's got wi-fi too I think -- for some digital lectio divina of course. I still don't like white bread, though, and will take a wheat or dark bread every time. Every time. Still call a dining room the refectory once in a while too. It's a spiritual thing.

So we had our refectory and our "cafeteria" named for Mary. Later, the food service would open a more night oriented spot, Der Keller, which means the cellar or basement in German, in the cellar of the old main building, though it took a new food service director who was a Baptist from Alabama to come up with the idea. Now that's my kind of Baptist! Also my kind of refectorian. Hell, with the secular and ecclesiastical sides of the 1960s both raging, he was more German and Benedictine at heart than the German Benedictines.

And Mary? Just as Gabriel said, full of grace, the Lord was with her; blessed is she among women and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And if you're looking for a little direction, there is no better example than her submission in faith to God, for which she for all she knew at the time ran the risk of execution as an adulteress, to survive that only to see her son executed as a criminal, if your cost of discipleship is seeming a little high. And no better direction, rather than quasi-pious speculation about dormitions and assumptions, than she herself gave to those wanting her to sort things out one time at the wedding in Cana -- "Do whatever he tells you".

You Are Free! (Also, on hymns as preaching)