We leave a couple minutes early and stop at St. Joseph’s on Capitol Hill for the 8:00 a.m. Mass. I’ve seen Senator Rick Santorum heading into this Mass before, on other days, but no sign of him today. See, he goes on just any old day. Good for him. I’m here today actually only because we’re required to go somewhere today, it being a holy day of obligation, as we say.

Sadly, there’s no singing, except for the Alleluia. The start of the Mass is announced by bells ringing, something I’ve only otherwise seen & heard in Italy.

Crazy first reading from Revelations. I don’t even begin to know how to put together all the imagery, the woman wailing in pain as she gives birth to the child about to be devoured by the seven-headed dragon. Except that we’re all about the Blessed Virgin today, so maybe she’s supposed to be the woman. Except, check, right, this is Revelations, and it’s all just crazy.

The Gospel is the Magnificat. Of course!

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;
my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

The Assumption itself is a dogma, and it describes the conceit whereby the Mother of God did not die but rather was assumed into heaven. (Hmm. We were just talking on Sunday about Elijah and something similar.) Looking to the OED, assume comes from the Latin ad sumere, meaning to take to oneself, as in God taking her to himself. So that’s assume in that sense, rather than the we don’t know any better so we just assume it to be so sense, you jokesters.

I think it’s a lovely concept, probably somehow logically necessary even, in like divine argument or something. How could the mother of God die, I guess is the question, and that needs to be answered by, well, she didn’t. Like how could the mother of God be born with original sin? Again, she wasn’t. That’s the Immaculate Conception.

But it’s also something of an article of faith, more than merely a concept or a logical necessity. It’s a belief that to deny, according to His Holiness Pope Benedict XIV, would be impious and blasphemous. (That’s fourteenth, note. Not the current sixteenth.) And then it was formally constituted to be a dogma of the Church by His Holiness Pope Pius XII in 1950:

[W]e pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

Furthermore,

Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.

Cool.

All about nourishment today. All about the Eucharist.

In the first reading, Elijah says enough is enough. He sits beneath a tree and prays for death. Then he lies down and sleeps. An angel awakens him and gives him food and drink and sends him on his way.

The response in the Responsorial Psalm is Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. More nourishment, although oddly, that line seems to come from the Lectionary, whereas the NAB has as Learn to savor how good the Lord is. (Just for completion’s sake, I’ll add here that the King James has it O taste and see that the LORD is good.)

The Gospel is from St. John. You can tell right away since it starts with a jarring The Jews murmured about Jesus … (St. John was writing for non-Jews, is why his Gospel is so un-PC, is my understanding.) But anyway, Christ tells us about spiritual nourishment:

I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

Interestingly, Elijah in fact did not die. In 2 Kings he flies up to heaven in a whirlwind. Apparently some think he will return, and that’ll signal the end times. Yikes. But he’s an interesting one, that Elijah. I know mostly nothing about him. But remember last week when he appeared with Christ and Moses, and Peter thought each of them should get a tent. He’s evidently a big deal, this Elijah.

(More things I don’t know are broom trees and hearth cakes, Elijah falling asleep under a broom tree and the angel giving him a hearth cake to eat. I imagine a tree made up of old-fashioned brooms all sticking up where branches would be. The OED tells me that it’s the other way around, that brooms originally were made from twigs from the broom tree tied together, whence the broom gets its name. And a hearth cake isn’t a cake made out of a hearth; it’s a cake baked on a hearth. Duh, Ed.)

St. Paul has other things on his mind, and once again seems to speak to qualities that I’ve been unfortunately lacking lately. [B]e kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another, he tells us. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling
must be removed from you, along with all malice.

And here I’ve been so bitter and unforgiving so very recently.

Lord, help me to act according to your will, to leave my smallness and petty-mindedness behind.

The Transfiguration is something of a newer concept to me. It’s something of a newer addition to the Rosary as well, so I don’t feel so out of it, so all alone on this one. What happens basically is that Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on the mountain. While there Jesus is transfigured, his face and clothes shine bright, and with him, also shining, are Moses and Elijah. God’s voice is heard, saying, “This is my beloved Son.” After everything calms down, Jesus tells the guys to keep quiet about it.

According to the notes on the passages themselves at the USCCB NAB, the incident does a couple of things. They say:

The account of the transfiguration confirms that Jesus is the Son of God and points to fulfillment of the prediction that he will come in his Father’s glory at the end of the age. It has been explained by some as a resurrection appearance retrojected into the time of Jesus’ ministry, but that is not probable since the account lacks many of the usual elements of the resurrection-appearance narratives. It draws upon motifs from the Old Testament and noncanonical Jewish apocalyptic literature that express the presence of the heavenly and the divine, e.g., brilliant light, white garments, and the overshadowing cloud.

On that note, those Old Testament motifs, our first reading is from Daniel.

As I watched:

Thrones were set up
and the Ancient One took his throne.
His clothing was bright as snow,
and the hair on his head as white as wool;
his throne was flames of fire,
with wheels of burning fire.
A surging stream of fire
flowed out from where he sat;

There’s them motifs. And then I especially like the repetition of fire, first the flames of fire, then the wheels of burning fire, then the surging stream of fire. And then sort of along those same lines, Psalm 97 for the Responsorial Psalm has the line, The mountains melt like wax before the Lord.

The Gospel is the description from St. Mark, about the same as in the other Synoptic Gospels. St. Mark however has God’s voice saying This is my beloved Son. Listen to him. same as St. Luke, whereas St. Matthew has it This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him. I like the addition of the with whom I am well pleased, as that echoes the Baptism of the Lord, another Luminous Mystery.

We have a guest priest, whose name I don’t catch, who celebrates Mass and gives the homily. He points out how once again Peter screws up, this time deciding to build tents for Jesus and Moses and Elijah. As St. Mark puts it, He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified. But, not to be so hard on St. Peter, I do like the second reading, the Epistle, from St. Peter himself today, rather than St. Paul. It’s his description, from 2 Peter 1:16-19, of these very events, where he tells us, We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.

We get the miracle of the loaves & fishes today.

First up is a mighty interesting reading from Second Kings. A man brings to Elisha twenty barley loaves, and Elisha says to give it to the people to eat, despite the man’s protests that it’s not nearly enough for the hundred people. But Elisha insists that, and indeed there is, enough and then some. There’s some left over after they have eaten.

This of course prefigures pretty much the same scene in the Gospel. Or, actually, Gospels. We hear today from St. John, but it’s in all four Gospels, apparently the only miracle recounted in all four. (It also seems to be in St. Mark and St. Matthew twice each.) And even though it’s Year B, with lots of readings from St. Mark. And despite the fact that this miracle is in St. Mark. And despite the fact that we kinda left off last week, with Christ moved with pity by the crowd, a sheep without a shepherd, in St. Mark, and then this miracle is recounted immediately thereafter. But, still, we switch to St. John.

I’ve mentioned before what a big fan I am of the readings when they can tie Old Testament to New Testament. This is a classic example. Although St. Paul is really off message in his epistle. No loaves, no fishes. Although he specifically counsels humility, patience, and gentleness, traits I’ve been sorely lacking recently. Paul wags his finger a lot, but oh sometimes I sure do need it.

Deacon Rice reads the Gospel from the high pulpit, so we know that he’s going to give the homily as well. And it’s a satisfying sort of one for me, with the idea that we produce quite enough food in this world to feed everyone, (thirty-five hundred calories a day for everyone, says he). Problem of course is distribution, with getting it to those who are in need. It’s not the fault of this beautiful bounty that the Lord provides for us, it’s our system, or systems, that are at fault. It’s us.

And this of course makes me think of the collapse of the Doha round this week. All due to the agricultural subsidies. And the US blames the EU and the EU blames the US. And in the meantime people in the developing world are starving, subsistence farmers can’t even subsist. Although some quarters are cheering the collapse, thinking that the rich countries will game the system no matter what, that despite the stated purpose of making things fairer for developing countries, things would just get worse under Doha. I plead ignorance as usual as to the subtleties of trade policy, but note that it’s of course a truism that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich will always win, will always run the table, and maybe even steal your wallet while you’re not looking.

What with the choir being gone, and so much to do around the house, we go again to 8:30 a.m. Mass. Leading us is Father Caulfield, with Deacon Work assisting him. I see Heather in the procession as one of the eucharistic ministers.

The readings are all shepherds, all the time, scattering and reassembling the flock. First is from Jeremiah. “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord … I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands to which I have driven them and bring them back to their meadow.” St. Paul tells us, “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ.” And especially Christ the Good Shepherd, from the Gospel reading:

When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things.

Now, oddly enough, all this makes me think of President Bush, who famously declared to be “a uniter, not a divider.” And I had never ever noticed the evangelical overtones to that statement before, but there it is. Here it is.

It makes me think of another semi-famous instance in 2000 where then-candidate Governor Bush in his stump speech would say, “Don’t be taking a speck out of your neighbor’s eye when you got a log in your own.” Then Washington reporter (and now food critic) for the New York Times, Frank Bruni, reported that Bush seemed to have invented a new twist on the old adage about the pot calling the kettle black. Governor Bush of course was loosely quoting Jesus, from the Gospel of St. Matthew.

I don’t know if President Bush actually believed it at the time, about being a uniter, not a divider. More lately he has declared that he is the decider. But whatever, he has rather become a most polarizing figure. But the message that he presented way back when, was both politically soothing, as well as a Biblical reference, that some people got I suppose, but I didn’t.

Or, as better put elsewhere, here’s how a profile of Mike Gerson in the New Yorker explains it.

Gerson says that he is flummoxed by the debate over religiosity in the White House. “There’s an idea that we are constantly trying to sneak into the President’s speeches religious language, code words, that only our supporters understand,” he said. “But they are code words only if you don’t know them, and most people know them.”

Gerson then goes on to cite the Frank Bruni example, saying with obvious relish, “No one at the Times seemed to know that these were the words of the Sermon on the Mount.”

(And I have to admit that I know the reference from first reading it in Stephen King, in The Stand, where Frannie for some reason ponders the line from St. Matthew, wondering about motes and beams, as they’re called in the King James. She free associates, coming up with Abe Beame, once the mayor of New York. Hearing it in church ever nowadays, or reading it in St. Matthew, or hearing Mike Gerson talk about it, I still instantly think about Frannie and Abe Beame.)

With all the shepherds, the Responsorial Psalm is, of course, from the Twenty-Third.

The processional hymn is There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy. The first time I glance at the title on the music leaflet, I think it’s “There’s a Wildness in God’s Mercy.” Whatever could that mean? Or, it’s better than “There’s a Weirdness in God’s Mercy,” I suppose.

Then, later, I can’t for the life of me get out a line, without screwing up, of the recessional hymn, Praise to the Lord, the Almighty. It’s in 3/4 time (or maybe 6/8, with snatches of 3/8?) with syllable count of 14 14 478. Crazy. Dawn has no trouble with it, though.