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The Depth of the Rosary: Anamnesis

Margaret Schaut — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:31:02 +0000

While I was in Medjugorje, one of the wonderful people I met there, a fellow pilgrim, mentioned that he had asked Our Lady for a particular gift. He asked her to feel joy when he prayed the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary, to feel sorrow when he prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries, and so on.

He was asking for the gift of anamnesis.

At the Last Supper, Jesus told the Apostles “Do this in memory of me.” (“anamnesis“)

In our modern world, the translation of the word ‘anamnesis’ as ‘memory’ loses virtually ALL of its impact, all of its meaning, though in fact it is the primary act of the Holy Mass which is the Eucharist.

This is one of the areas in modern life that is very, very different from any other time in history. For us, memory or remembering is an intellectual recall of an experience we participated in ourselves, or the recall of something we need to do, like ‘pick up the dry cleaning.’ We remember to go to church, we remember that Jesus is our Savior, we remember to call our mothers, we remember to mail the phone bill by the second of the month.

We have a great need for a good memory- how embarrassing is it to forget someone’s name?

Yet an exercise in memory is not the point of the Holy Mass, and remembering the scene of the Last Supper from the movie ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ gets us no closer to either anamnesis nor our salvation.

A pure exercise in memory makes the mass seem boring, the scripture readings seem like a meaningless monotone, and deaden the activity of the Holy Spirit within us. Untold numbers of people have left the Church, and their salvation, for no other reason.

What exactly IS anamnesis?

Anamnesis is a Greek word. During Jesus’ day, and in the life of the Hebrews, the word meant the universal experience of every soul, a ‘redivivus‘ which is a ‘re-living’ of the important events during which God interacted in powerful ways with humanity. It was the position of those alive at the time that these events were available to every soul.

This is why Jesus asked the Apostles “who do people say that I am?” He was not surprised when the Apostles related that people were thinking that he could be Elijah returned, or John the Baptist returned. Those answers made perfect sense to him. Jesus knew that they would ‘return’ at the end of time to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ and announce to humanity the final end and the Last Judgment. Redivivus is profoundly and only an Act of God. God DOES act in that way. He is not ‘God of the dead, but God of the living.’

Therefore, it was proof to Jesus that His Church was truly ‘established’ when he asked the Apostles, “who do YOU say that I am,’ and Peter said, ‘You are the Christ. The Son of the Living God.’

Peter’s anamnesis, the gift the Holy Spirit had given Peter, was deeper and went further back in history than that of other Jews, farther back than Moses. Peter KNEW Jesus, in the depths of his soul, from creation onward. Therefore Jesus spoke the Word over Peter: “You are Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail over it.”

The fruit of this spectacular anamnesis would come, for all time, through the ‘re-presentation’ of the ONE SACRIFICE OF THE CROSS, the ONE LAST SUPPER OF THE TRANSFIGURED DIVINIZED FLESH OF CHRIST, throughout time and eternity, through that one precious gift given to Peter.

Hell itself wouldn’t prevail over this anamnesis in the Church, but Jesus didn’t say hell wouldn’t TRY.

By the Lord speaking the WORD over Peter, it was established forever, and would prevail over every device, deceit and seduction of the devil.

The Lost Gift: Anamnesis

For us ‘moderns’ there is a great difficulty in connecting with so great a ‘heritage’ as has been provided in our Church. It doesn’t ‘feel’ like we’ve gotten anything much. Our parents run around with bumper stickers that say ‘I’m spending my children’s inheritance’ and somehow we KNOW that whatever inheritance we were supposed to get has been lost or squandered.

We believe that Christ is our ‘personal savior’ and Lord, because something inside of us recognizes that this is the TRUTH, but we can never ‘come to an accurate knowledge’ of it. We also know there is much more to us than we have understood or experienced so far, but again, it is illusive and impossible to capture, let alone make live and breath in the world. We know we are told to ‘be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect,’ but our experience of ourselves and our world make this seem to be the impossible dream.

Without studying the entire bible continuously, studying all of church and world history, without being completely torn from our lives and world as we know it, is it even possible to become ‘perfect’?

The Rosary is the Most Direct Path to the Gift of Anamnesis

The prayer of the rosary cuts through any and every impediment to our holiness and lack of knowledge, and does it for everyone- from the smallest and untutored child to the most wizened, ancient, most knowledgeable of individuals. You do not need to have every verse of scripture memorized, every chapter of the catechism at your instant disposal, you do not need to have made a pilgrimmage to the Holy Land for it all to become very real.

Our very beginning is as the Apostle Paul tells us- to ‘put on Christ’ by making the sign of the cross. The first prayer is the direct teaching of the Apostles from the beginning- the Apostle’s Creed.

We invoke the anamnesis of Peter by praying the first few prayers for the Pope and the Church.

Then we are taken, step by step, through the life of Jesus from the Annunciation onward, each decade either planting the seed of ‘Holy Memory’ or giving those seeds and shoots ‘water and light’ making them grow. The more frequently we pray the life of Christ, the more water and light are given to those seeds in our soul.

Properly we examine each individual and each event as we pray the ‘Hail Mary’s’ during each decade. We meditate upon what it would be like to be the Angel Gabriel, with the incredible honor and task of seeking ‘the woman’s’ agreement to become the mother of the Savior of the world. We consider what it would be like to be Mary, a very young woman just come into the flower of fertility, who finds in front of her the Angel asking her to be ‘the Woman’ prophesied in Genesis- the woman who’s seed would battle the seed of the serpent. Recalling the great darkness and evils of human history, all of which began at the fall of Adam and Eve, ponder the magnitude of God Himself ‘humbling himself and taking the form of a slave’ in order to grant, FINALLY, a release from the prison of hell that every single human soul has been sentenced to since the beginning of human history.

Yes, indeed, a GREAT LIGHT was born into the world, giving up all glory, all omnipotence, all power, just for His great love, just to save us the lost.

Step by step, praying each decade, each event of the life of Christ, from the perspective of the people in each mystery, your soul begins to reawaken within itself the memories of the activities of God with humanity. We begin to experience the fact that we are CREATED by a God who loves us; who understands our lives, our hearts, our predicaments. A God who loves us despite our sinfulness and distance, who Himself ‘goes the distance’ to save us and prove His love for us.

The Seeds of the Holy Garden

The entire rosary is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the seeds that came from the garden of the Psalms, which have always been known as ‘the prayer of the Holy Spirit.’ Hundreds and thousands of years of praying the psalms have created such fruits of the Holy Spirit, have so powerfully nourished and sustained the people of God, that the seeds and pits of those fruits are gifts to the Spouse of God, the Church, Our Lady spouse of the Holy Spirit itself, bearing its Son.

The Holy Spirit wed himself to Mary, impregnating her with the Son of God, the bread of Life, the rivers of Mercy. As in the Song of Songs, Mary the Spouse, God’s enclosed Garden, shares those fruits and seeds with all of her children, the Church.

The Greatest Reality

The most powerful experience of anamnesis I’ve ever had was to pray the first three sets of mysteries- the Joyful, the Luminous and the Sorrowful, just before Holy Mass. Doing that, my experience OF the mass, of the sacrifice itself, brought PRESENT TO MY HEART AND SOUL the power, the impact and the REDIVIVUS of the one sacrifice, making it a profound and REAL experience for me. To complete the final set of mysteries, the Glorious ones, immediately after, brought home to my soul the PROMISE and reality of what God has done, for ME, and for YOU, in time and in eternity.

A TRUE Inheritance

Praying in this way, each soul can experience for themselves the inheritance of the Church, the inheritance that can never be squandered, the wonderous gift of our salvation and the glory of God.

From our very hearts and souls then, we experience the true JOYS, the true LIGHT, the true SORROWS, and the true GLORIES, of all of God’s actions for the human soul in all of history. Our hearts are profoundly changed. We learn what true worship really is and we can finally participate in it.

One Wise Man’s Advice for these Uncertain Times

John_Fenzel — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:50:23 +0000

We live in uncertain, turbulent times. Increasingly, one question–previously unheard of–has taken on a kind of clarion tenor: Over the past several years, is it possible that the United States has been laying the foundation for its own demise? A subprime mortgage crisis, corruption on Wall Street, an unprecedented credit crisis, trading in securitized derivatives, a trillion dollar bailout for failed corporations and banks–the litany of events strongly resemble a perverse kind of downward spiral for a country that only a year ago was seen in terms of an all-powerful unipolar empire, standing watch over a “new world order.”

Indeed, the developments of the past year are difficult for even experts to fully comprehend. In real terms, the scale of our problems is historically unprecedented–even when compared to the Great Depression of the ’20s and ’30s. By any measure, we’re in the midst of a hundred year flood, and we’re all standing on our rooftops as the waters steadily rise around us.

We’ve routinely relied upon the wisdom of our Federal, state and local government officials to manage the affairs of our state at each level. That reliance, it now seems clear, has been misplaced. Perhaps unwittingly so, but assuredly nonetheless.

In the inevitable quest to make sense of it all, we may go to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or we may listen to the political pundits on the Sunday morning news shows. In the end, the theories of what went wrong abound–corrupt and incompetent CEOs, corrupt hedge fund managers, no-doc loans for people who could not afford them, politicians who were either over exuberant, on the take themselves, or simply asleep at the switch….

Take your pick.

The solutions for our nation’s severe economic crisis are equally divergent…and elusive. On the left, you have the Keynesians who believe that “economic stimulus” is the answer to the economy’s downturn and that low interest rates and mass bailouts are needed to stem a global panic and cascading banking failures. On the right, are the monetarists who believe stability can only be achieved through free market principles (read: freedom to fail), a strong dollar and rebuilding faith in the United States as an investment partner (I confess that I fall in on the side of the monetarists).

Admittedly, all of this is a gross oversimplification of positions, but if you can accept the charicature for just a moment, please bear with me….

The point is, economic theory leads you only so far. It’s cited ad nauseum in our political discussions, and it’s been used to generate support for economic policies that are untenable at best. In the end, though, I believe we may very well be looking in the wrong places for our solutions.

Over the years, when caught under very dark storm clouds myself, I’ve sought out the advice of a very wise man I came to know. He’s from Algeria and always available to talk. Always ready to listen. Always has the expertise (if not technically, at least philisophically). And, without fail, he brings incisive, well though-out solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems.

I recently asked him what he thought the solutions were for our current economic debacle. Here’s what he had to say in his characteristic, thick Algerian accent:

Before we can even begin to talk about solutions, you must understand the problem. How it began. And who was responsible for causing it…perpetuating it. You have a big problem in the U.S. But it’s not only yours–what started there, is now affecting many other countries around the world. For years to come, you can print money by the billions or continually press “send” on electronic deposits to bail out your banks, your credit card companies and your automakers, but it won’t solve the problems. It may postpone them for a while, but ultimately it will likely exacerbate them. As Hippocraties said, “first, do no harm.” If it’s a lifeline you want, do your first aid before you start looking for ropes. So, your second step, is to determine who caused it and what regulatory loopholes may have allowed the behavior. Make those people publicly accountable–the confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works. Punishment is justice for the unjust. I confess my own amazement, though–rather than make people accountable, you re-hire them to manage your problems, and you give them multi-million dollar bonuses! Rewarding leaders for failure represents a special kind of insanity, I think. In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery? You see, charity is no substitute for justice withheld. Your third step: pay down your national debt. If you want to rebuild your country, rebuild the credibility that previously existed in your institutions, and in your currency. Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? First, lay humility as the foundation. I’ve always believed that the higher your structure to be, the deeper its foundation should be. .Fourth, don’t allow your political processes to become hijacked through unilateralism. Because one side may have a majority, doesn’t mean that you should not listen to the other. Hear the other side. Listen to your citizens. Demand accountability from your representatives at all levels. Given the severity of your economic problems, you shouldn’t expect to see dramatic improvements overnight. Patience is the companion of wisdom. Your Baby Boomer Generation is coming of retirement age. What will you do to take care of them–to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent? You are fighting two wars–one in Iraq. The other in Afghanistan. You might just check to ensure they are the right wars to fight at the right time–just wars. The purpose of all wars is peace. Your salvation from these problems can only be achieved through discipline and hard work: will is to grace as the horse is to the rider. Finally, pray. Pray as though everything depended on God. But work as though everything depended on you. Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

So, you want my advice? Here’s the best I have to give to you, your politicians, your CEOs, your bankers: If we live good lives, the times are also good. As we are, such are the times.

My friend– the wise man? St. Augustine of Hippo.

Give him a call.

BTW, the more direct quotes from Augustine (above) are in bold–with some contemporary variations.

Catholics and Holy Scripture

Margaret Schaut — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:15:24 +0000

A serious criticism leveled at Catholics is that they know little or nothing about scripture. While there are a lot of reasons for this that we plan to go into, it is truly an impoverishment of an individual’s faith to be unacquainted with the Holy Book.

The bible is, in truth and in fact, a riveting story. To be ignorant of scripture is to be ignorant of the astonishing love story of God with humanity. It is to be ignorant of how God works, through his people and through His church.

There are some great ‘gems’ in scripture, even in the most boring parts. Genealogies are definitely boring on their first read, especially for a new reader. However they are also very revealing for those who are more acquainted and comfortable with bible reading.

Here is an example of a surprise in a genealogy, one that made the rounds a couple of years ago on the email circuit, which pointed out the story that the meanings of the listed names carry:

Genesis ch 5 genealogy:

Adam means ‘man’
Seth means ‘appointed’
Enosh means ‘mortal’
Kenan means ’sorrow’
Mahalalel means ‘the blessed God’
Jared means ‘will come down’
Enoch means ‘teaching’
Methusaleh means ‘his death shall bring’
Lamech means ‘the despairing’
Noah means ‘comfort’

Putting together the meanings of those names in order, we get the statement

“Man (is) appointed mortal sorrow (but) the blessed God will come down, teaching (and) his death shall bring the despairing comfort.”

The bible IS the great love story of God and humanity. The spiritual lives of saints and the church have been fed for 2000 years by the beauty and activities of God and man in scripture.

We hope to help you get a good start on a private study!

Welcome to Catholic Concepts!

Margaret Schaut — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:28:10 +0000

Yes, living out the concepts of Catholicism can enrich your life in a big way. No, it probably won’t make you materially rich, but it will enrich your material experience.

Our site is being built on the sharing and information that Catholics, living their faith, have found to be so helpful, so useful, so spirit-filled that God has become central to their lives and experiences.

We will have bible studies, information about liturgy and music, devotional information, prayers, sacramental teachings and miracles!

Jesus is living, a personal savior for each individual yes, saving us into the community of fellow children of God, the church, the bride of Christ.

Let us help one another, pray for one another, assist in each other’s salvation, and encourage one another on the most magnificent of all journeys- Heirs of the Living God!

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