Editor's Note

January 16, 2021

The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth; it is in your heart.

This verse was in the center of the passage I turned to during Divine Adoration this Friday. Paul, in Romans, quoting Moses. As we greet a new group from Manquehue this week, and hear from our friend Alvaro Gazmuri, I express gratitude for the MAM devotion to lectio divina, a practice emphasized in Benedict’s Rule. It has been for me a steady and strong stream of spiritual vitality, a constant grace, readily available. Saddened by events in our nation, fatigued in the ongoing depths of pandemic life, having difficulty with focus and enthusiasm, I sat before the Blessed Sacrament, and discovered this verse in lectio.

What does it tell me? God is with me. I need not ascend to the skies, nor descend to the depths. This word, this scroll consumed by Ezekiel, is offered again and again in the very Host before me. In my mouth; in my heart - may I recall this verse when I next receive communion. Over the past weeks, we have heard the Christmas message of Emmanuel, the Epiphany of the meek and merciful God, the Baptismal newness ever renewed - all this that we have also just encountered these past tumultuous weeks. May we carry this, His Word, into the present environment of suffering, anger and division that might lead us to conclude that God is very far from us. Not far, very near: his word in our heart, even in our mouth. His Word: His Law, to love my enemy; His Scripture, to hear with my heart; His Body, offered on the cross and from the altar. These all express the Word that is near, the God that is with us. Very near, almost too close to see. And a powerful remedy for all in distress.

Pax,
Blake Billings

January 10, 2021

And so we trudge into what now is strangely designated as Ordinary Time. Sunday’s celebration of the Baptism of the Lord inaugurates our new “season” lacking in seasoning. But it is worthwhile to recall the significance of the “Ordinary.” This does not tell us that all is common, mundane, blase'. Rather, it implies that time is ordered by God, that it is His creation, that Time is His. Tempus per annum, it is called in Latin. Yet each annum is now designated in the Christian faith as an annum Domini. Our present moment is one of great contrast: the intense reflection on each moment, now situated within conformity to “protocols” - a word many have come to despise. Yet it is an intensity that seems suffocated in redundancy and withdrawal, a life that becomes provisional, and from which we long to return - to something more ordinary. Our tempus out of tempus, off tempo, temporary. And maybe we need to regather our focus on that prayer to be led not into “temp-tation” - that our tempus not tempt us (I know, sounds like a “festivus for the rest of us…”). One of the distinctive characteristics of our present time’s temptations: despair, despondency, defeat. So: may it be auspicious that we begin, as our seasonless season does, with a Baptism. Let us remember our own, a call to a new life, to a new time, to a year of Our Lord, an eternal year of jubilee. May this time be truly ordinary for us, God’s own, manifest in our time.

Pax,
Blake Billings