August 11: Memorial of St. Clare (1194-1253), inspired to become a contemplative by the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), ran away at 18, cut her beautiful long, clonde hair and assumed a black habit, foundress of the Poor Clares, similar to the Franciscans. One Christmas Eve Clare was too ill to rise from her bed to attend Mass at the new Basilica of St. Francis. Although she was more than a mile away she saw Mass on the wall of her dormitory. So clear was the vision that the next day she could name the friars at the celebration. It was for this last miracle that she has been named patroness of television.
Matthew 17:14-20:
A man came up to Jesus, knelt down before him, and said, "Lord, have pity on my son, who is a lunatic and suffers severely; often he falls into fire, and often into water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him." Jesus said in reply, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you? Bring the boy here to me." Jesus rebuked him and the demon came out of him, and from that hour the boy was cured. Then the disciples approached him in private and said, "Why could we not drive it out?" He said to them, "Because of your little faith. Amen, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."
The Gospel of the Lord.
Einstein: "Either nothing is a miracle or everything is."
The Queen in Alice in Wonderland used to believe, she said, six impossible things before breakfast. With Lewis Carroll you can always expect sense behind the nonsense. What is impossible, and who says so? No boundaries of any kind are pushed out by people who are always declaring things impossible. Sir Thomas Brown, the 19th-century Manx poet and scholar, said, “I think there are not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.”
You will see with Protestants. In general, they do not believe in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, but they do profess that Jesus is God. If you can believe that Jesus is God, why is it so difficult to believe that the bread of the host and the wine in the chalice become the Body and Blood of Jesus? Similarly, Protestants do not believe in the Virgin Birth. But if you believe that Jesus is God, why is the Virgin birth the sticking point? Why quibble over the details? If you can believe the big picture, the details become easy.
Rationalism is no friend of faith, it is one of its biggest enemies because it looks so…rational. If you meet a religious rationalist you see that everything is on narrowly limited terms, everything is clear, everything is man-made; there is no grace, no depth, no sense of wonder. For all its apparent rationality it is a kind of blind faith in a status quo.
But when you meet a genuinely religious person there is always a sense of grace or effortlessness. Such a person is able to take life as it comes from the hand of God at each moment, without being consumed by suspicion or the will to control. You will never know what is possible while you sit there doing nothing but declaring impossible everything you haven’t seen before.
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