“Rejoice, O Pure Virgin!”

For this joyful Easter week, a brief musical interlude:



The Angel cried to the Lady full of grace:

Rejoice! Rejoice, O pure Virgin!

Again, I say rejoice! Your Son is risen

from His three days in the tomb.

With Himself He has raised all the dead.

Rejoice, rejoice all ye people!

Shine! Shine! Shine, O new Jerusalem!

The Glory of the Lord has shown on you.

Exult now, exult and be glad, O Zion!

Be radiant, O pure Theotokos, in the Resurrection,

the Resurrection of your Son!

***

This is one of my favorite Easter hymns. It’s based on an Eastern Orthodox chant which reflects an oral tradition that Mary was the first to hear of Christ’s Resurrection, by a message from an angel. The idea is that it was sort of a second Annunciation; just as Mary was the first to hear the good news of the Incarnation, it seemed fitting that she would also be the first to know of the Resurrection.

I particularly like this hymn, because it’s one of the few that celebrates the Marian dimension of the Paschal mystery—which in turn, can help show us as consecrated virgins the particular way in which we are called to interiorize this sacred mystery in our own life of faith.

H/t to Emily for finding a video and the words to this song.

(P.S.: How does everyone like the new template?)

Easter 2011

(A reading from the Easter Vigil…)

The One who has become your husband is your Maker;

his name is the LORD of hosts;

your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel,

called God of all the earth.

The LORD calls you back,

like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,

a wife married in youth and then cast off,

says your God.

For a brief moment I abandoned you,

but with great tenderness I will take you back.

In an outburst of wrath, for a moment

I hid my face from you;

but with enduring love I take pity on you,

says the LORD, your redeemer.

This is for me like the days of Noah,

when I swore that the waters of Noah

should never again deluge the earth;

so I have sworn not to be angry with you,

or to rebuke you.

Though the mountains leave their place

and the hills be shaken,

my love shall never leave you

nor my covenant of peace be shaken,

says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

O afflicted one, storm-battered and unconsoled,

I lay your pavements in carnelians,

and your foundations in sapphires;

I will make your battlements of rubies,

your gates of carbuncles,

and all your walls of precious stones.

All your children shall be taught by the LORD,

and great shall be the peace of your children.

In justice shall you be established,

far from the fear of oppression,

where destruction cannot come near you.

—Isaiah 54:5-14

Easter Time

Sorry for the slow posting lately! I’m now back in Florida, finishing up the final weeks of the final semester of my Master’s degree program, but I did have a wonderful Holy Week back home in New York.

The Dominican Nuns of Corpus Christi Monastery in the Bronx, NY warmly welcomed me to stay at their monastery for the week (we used to have the same Vicar for Religious in the archdiocese, who made the introduction). Corpus Christi is currently the oldest Dominican Monastery in the United States, and like many second-Order Dominican Monasteries in this country, they have perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Corpus Christi was founded in 1889 when Archbishop Corrigan invited the Dominican nuns into the archdiocese for the express purpose of establishing a monastery of contemplative nuns to pray for the clergy and seminarians of the Archdiocese of New York.

The nuns still remember the New York priests in a very special way. So that was something else the Sisters and I had in common!

Besides attending some of the Holy Week services at the monastery, I was also able to visit St. Joseph’s Seminary for Tenebrae and the Easter Vigil, and the Chrism Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Since I still have a lot of writing to do for school, in lieu of a regular post here is a video from Emily’s blog of the chant “Regina Caeli.” This takes the place of the Angelus during Easter time, and is also the proper seasonal Marian antiphon for the conclusion of Night Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.



Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia.
Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia.
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia.
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

(Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia!
For Him whom you merited to bear, alleluia,
Is risen as He said, alleluia!
Pray for us to God, alleluia!)

Feast of the Acsension

Happy feast of the Ascension! As glorious as the Ascension is, it's also somewhat bittersweet; it's hard to "let go" of Jesus after His post-Resurrection time with us.

Certainly the Apostles must have felt this way. I imagine this is why they needed the angels to tell them, in effect, to "get moving."*

This feast is especially poignant to me, as I'm someone who tends to "miss" Jesus. As much as I whole-heartedly identify with "Bride of Christ" imagery, ultimately the reference to marriage in the conventional sense is sort of an analogy. Even though I can love Him with a very deep and real love, I still won't be able to look at the face of my future Spouse in this life.

However, I find tremendous comfort in the formula for the Solemn Blessing at the end of the Mass for today:

May almighty God bless you on this day

when his only Son ascended into heaven

to prepare a place for you.

R. Amen.

After his resurrection, Christ was seen by his disciples.

When he appears as judge

May you be pleasing for ever in his sight.

R. Amen.

You believe that Jesus has taken his seat in majesty

at the right hand of the Father.

May you have the joy of experiencing

that he is also with you to the end of time,

according to his promise.

R. Amen.

Really, who could ask for anything more?


* see Acts 1:10-11, "While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, 'Men of Galilee, why are you standing there, looking at the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen Him going into heaven.'" (from the New American Bible)

"May We Join the Holy Women..."

The other day I received an Easter card from a religious sister (who is becoming something of a mentor to me), which read in part: May we join the holy women who fell prostrate at the feet of the Risen Lord and adored Him!

I was really touched by the appropriateness of this greeting. Aside from the supreme example of Our Lady, the women in the Easter story are some of my favorite scriptural “role models,” especially as it pertains to my vocation.

While the four Gospels differ slightly in their accounts of the sequence of events on the morning of the Resurrection, all of them name women as the first people to see the empty tomb or to meet the risen Christ. The women were, in effect, the first public witnesses.

This is really a remarkable detail in God’s providential plan for the history of salvation, since in the contemporary culture a woman’s testimony could not be upheld in a court of law without a man to verify her story. Often, when people object to the Church’s teachings on the non-ordination of women to the priesthood, they claim that Jesus did not call women to be apostles simply because of the social constraints of that period. This episode highlights the fact that Jesus is and has always been the Lord of the universe, and He could (and did) call whomever He wanted to whatever He pleased!

I personally feel that it is a very great honor for all women to know that it was women whom God first called to see and to “proclaim” Christ’s resurrection from the dead. I also think that this story has for special significance for women in consecrated life.

As an aspiring consecrated virgin, I hope that through my efforts to love God with an undivided heart, I will grow in faith to the point where I can come to a very profound and personal understanding of the Paschal mystery. And by striving to reflect this understanding with my life, I hope that I too may act as a witness to the Resurrection.

On the morning of the Resurrection, Jesus told Mary Magdalene, “…go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”(John 20:17)

This is verse is particularly meaningful to me because part of the vocation to consecrated virginity in the world is the spiritual support of the local clergy—that is, Jesus’ “brothers”. I pray for the diocesan priesthood daily. But I also hope that the witness of my consecrated life, by being a reflection of the joy of Easter, will provide some encouragement for the clergy today, just as Mary Magdalene’s witness encouraged the original apostles.

Thoughts for Easter 2008

When I was in grade school, I always had a difficult time dealing with the story of the Passion. I disliked the Stations of the Cross because I hated to see Jesus suffer. And I hated the thought that men could do something so terrible to Him.

The one thing which made the Stations of the Cross bearable for me was the “added” fifteenth station—“Jesus rises from the dead”. It made me feel that after Christ was finished dying to save the world, God would undo all the damage and thing could get back to normal. That is, we could all resume our business of loving God and trying to be good, and then live happily ever after.

I suppose in my heart I knew this wasn’t the case. Jesus did rise from the dead, but things could never go back to the way they were before the Crucifixion; just as we could never return to Eden, even while we were redeemed from original sin.

Even though I understood intellectually that Jesus’ risen life was truly better and more perfect then His earthly life, it took me a very long time before I could see this with my heart. What could be better or happier than a comfortable, mundane life with Jesus? Jesus’ post-Resurrection life may have been glorious, but it was still so strange and foreign to everything I thought I knew and loved.

But when I finally did come to understand, I found that it was something too deep and too beautiful to put into words.

I see my vocation to consecrated virginity as a reflection of this aspect of the Paschal Mystery.

If I did not have this vocation, I think I still would have lived a good Christian life. I imagine that I would have been a wife and a mother. I would have made a happy home for my family, and I would have tasted all the highest, best, and most lasting joys this created world has to offer.

But God called me to live in this world as though I was already a citizen of the next. Being called to stake all my hope in Heaven has been slowly teaching me to “walk by faith, and not by sight.” (Which, to be perfectly honest, can be really hard at times.)

Yet in forsaking marriage, I found that I truly could glimpse “the love for which it is a sign.”* In letting the risen Christ lead me to places I didn’t understand, I found that in Him there is a life deeper than life itself.

* from the Rite of Consecration