Fulfilling The Curse

Tonight we observe the Mass of the Lord's Supper.

Jesus is fulfilling the Passover sacrifice starting with the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, crucifixion, death, and resurrection on the third day. He purposefully leaves the fourth and final cup of the Passover un-drunk until his death on the cross when His love of His Bride is consummated.

[Scott Hahn] "After this" - at the very end of his cruel sufferings - "Jesus, knowing that all was now finished said, in order to fulfill the scriptures, 'I thirst.'"

When Jesus had received the sour wine he said the words that are spoken of in the fourth cup consummation, "It is finished."

The entire Triduum is replete with imagery and fulfilling of all the covenant curses up to this point in history as The Q Continuum explains:

Exodus 12:22 commands that on the night of the Passover all were to stay indoors lest they succumb to the angel of death. Our Lord purposefully goes out into the night to confront that ancient serpent to secure what Adam lost.

The first battle in the original garden was an epic tragedy – the Garden of Eden. In Eden, we find Adam failing to obey the command of the Father to shamar (protect) and adovah (work) the garden and all its inhabitants. (Gn 2:15) In this garden, Adam should have contended with the nahash (dragon – usually translated as serpent) but instead said nothing. The result was staggering. He saved his physical life and lost eternal life; He allowed evil to enter into the garden, to dominate it and his bride; and He should have been working but was standing doing nothing next to Eve.

Tonight, our Lord goes out singing into the darkness and we find Him in another garden. Only the victors sing. Think of the Song of Roland, The Ballad of the White Horse, or the Lord of the Rings – only the victors know how to sing. Our Lord knew He had already won the battle but no soldier or commander underestimates his enemy. For this reason, Sacred Song is so important to our liturgies. The music reminds of the victory our Lord will win for us through this Blessed Triduum. And the story continues…

He enters into the garden; cares for His future Bride, the Church (embodied by His Apostles); and obeys His Father’s perfect will. (Lk 22:42) He desires them to tarry with Him so they will not be put to the test (Lk 22:40) but gives them their rest anyway. He kneels to adovah (means both work and pray). And the battle begins…

Over the next three days, we enter into the Paschal Mystery of our Lord. He will fulfill the curses of all the covenants but tonight provokes another battle to win back Eden. The curses of Eden for Adam are three-fold:

• 1) “Cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life.” (Gn 3:17;
  
• 2) “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, as you eat of the plants of the field.” (Gn 3:18); and
  
• 3) “By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.” (Gn 2:19).

Jesus answers these curses by:

• 1) Toiling (remember prayer and work are the same word) on the ground and yielding the fruit of the vine that becomes the fruit of our salvation;
• 2) His work is so successful that He will be crowned with the work of His hands – thorns and thistles; and
• 3) His work/prayer is so intense that He sweats blood, provides Himself as the Bread from Heaven and conquers death.

Continue reading the whole thing.

Tenebrae

Soon all will be as shadows. The darkness comes and seems to overwhelm all in the Church - all is sorrowful. We know that this is not the end, that the light is only hidden and that Jesus rises from the dead.

But for now - shadows.

Mrs. Nod and I were able to get to confession one last time before Easter; Wynken and Blynken went on Sunday at the Grotto in Emmitsburg. From that perspective, I'd say we were ready for Easter.

Here is how the Sisters of Carmel celebrate Tenebrae.

“Tenebrae” is the name given to the service of Matins and Lauds belonging to the last three days of Holy Week. It differs, in many things, from the Office of the rest of the year. All is sad and mournful, as though it were a funeral service; nothing could more emphatically express the grief that now weighs down the heart of our holy Mother the Church. Throughout all the Office of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, she forbids herself the use of those formulas of joy and hope wherewith, on all other days, she begins her praise of God. Nothing is left but what is essential to the form of the Divine Office: psalms, lessons and chants expressive of grief. The tone of the whole Office is most noticeably mournful: the lessons taken from the Lamentations of Jeremias, the omission of the Gloria Patri, of the Te Deum, and of blessings etc., so the darkness of these services seems to have been designedly chosen to mark the Church’s desolation. The lessons from Jeremias in the first Nocturn, those from the Commentaries of St. Augustine upon the Psalms in the second, and those from the Epistles of St. Paul in the third remain now as when we first hear of them in the eighth century.

The Agony in the Garden The name “Tenebrae” has been given because this Office is celebrated in the hours of darkness, formerly in the evening or just after midnight, now the early morning hours. There is an impressive ceremony, peculiar to this Office, which tends to perpetuate its name. There is placed in the sanctuary, near the altar, a large triangular candlestick holding fifteen candles. At the end of each psalm or canticle, one of these fifteen candles is extinguished, but the one which is placed at the top of the triangle is left lighted. During the singing of the Benedictus (the Canticle of Zachary at the end of Lauds), six other candles on the altar are also put out. Then the master of ceremonies takes the lighted candle from the triangle and holds it upon the altar while the choir repeats the antiphon after the canticle, after which she hides it behind the altar during the recitation of the Christus antiphon and final prayer. As soon as this prayer is finished, a noise is made with the seats of the stalls in the choir, which continues until the candle is brought from behind the altar, and shows, by its light, that the Office of Tenebrae is over.

Our Lady of Sorrows Let us now learn the meaning of these ceremonies. The glory of the Son of God was obscured and, so to say, eclipsed, by the ignominies He endured during His Passion. He, the Light of the world, powerful in word and work, Who but a few days ago was proclaimed King by the citizens of Jerusalem, is now robbed of all his honors. He is, says Isaias, the Man of sorrows, a leper (Isaias 53:3,4). He is, says the royal prophet, a worm of the earth, and no man (Psalm 21:7). He is, as He says of himself, an object of shame even to his own disciples, for they are all scandalized in him (Mark 14:27) and abandon Him; yea, even Peter protests that he never knew Him. This desertion on the part of His apostles and disciples is expressed by the candles being extinguished, one after the other, not only on the triangle, but on the altar itself. But Jesus, our Light, though despised and hidden, is not extinguished. This is signified by the candle which is momentarily placed on the altar; it symbolizes our Redeemer suffering and dying on Calvary. In order to express His burial, the candle is hidden behind the altar; its light disappears. A confused noise is heard in the house of God, where all is now darkness. This noise and gloom express the convulsions of nature when Jesus expired on the cross: the earth shook, the rocks were split, the dead came forth from their tombs. But the candle suddenly reappears; its light is as fair as ever. The noise is hushed, and homage is paid to the Conqueror of death.

Simple Is Best

Sometimes simple is best.

Take graphics programs. I have a number and have used a number. I know people who can make Vizio diagrams look like a Rembrandt. Me, I was just an average student in art.

I just got Visio installed on my work laptop for some diagrams that need to be generated. Well, I've been generating them all week just fine without it. How do I do it?

Cut-and-paste and mad skillz with the Paint program. Yeah, simple is good sometimes.

When God Takes Your Money

I've heard guys complain that their wives are frivolous or spend a lot of money unnecessarily. That may or may not be true, but at least their wives don't just throw the money away -- literally.

A number of weeks ago, Mrs. Nod was dutifully paying the bills, which she had spread out on the counter along with the checkbook. You may have noticed we have a number of Nodlings running about the house and two of them are the toddler variety, which makes for lots of distractions and some unintended "help". Mrs. Nod also pays the bills with a trash can handy so she can pitch the junk mail and stuff that no longer matters.

You can see where this is going.

Fast forward a few days and we need to write a check for something and the checkbook has gone missing. Panic ensues. I say Mrs. Nod is supposed to keep track of the money, she says the toddlers must have moved it when she was wasn't looking. Fortunately the bills have just been paid so we have a little breathing room to find it.

It doesn't turn up; the whole house has been searched multiple times. We decide the only thing that could have happened was that it fell in the trash with a little help from little hands. Feeling only slightly paranoid, we switch to the backup checks and resolve to keep one eye out for random charges on our account.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Nod moves some books that were sitting on the china hutch and the checkbook falls out of our old Bible. (That Bible has seen better days; it used to be my travel copy and got beat up from sliding around my bag for a number of years.) The guys in my men's group use it occasionally if they forgot to bring their own Bible.

How about that? Pennies from Heaven? Saint Anthony interceding on our behalf?

Jokingly, Mrs. Nod said, "The Holy Spirit stole our money!". If He did, nobody could fault him; after all, God is the provider of all good things -- even money.

Me And The Homebrews: Kegging

Making beer is as much about taste as it is about sustenance. Beer, properly made without fillers, is like drinking a loaf of bread. It is the yield of the grain, the staff of life. What can be more basic than wheat beer?

On this edition of Me and the Homebrews, WBN chronicles the making of a Dunkelweizen, or dark wheat, beer.

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Today was kegging day. Our Dunkenweizen has matured in the primary fermenter for a week and the secondary fermenter for 4 additional weeks.

Even after moving to the second carboy, we ended up with a lot of precipitate. Check out the two inches of trub at the bottom of the carboy -- that's what we got after leaving an inch or more in the first carboy.

Still we got a nice wheaty light brown beer. We tasted it and it tastes fine: miles better than last time we did this same beer.

We currently have no CO2 to put in the keg, so the beer is essentially flat. We will rectify that soon enough. More troubling is we performed a leak test on the keg due to the problems we've been having with the pressure. Sure enough, it is not airtight at the top where the lid goes. Not sure if it is an O-ring problem or the keg itself is misshapen.

This leak is the source of the lack of pressure to be sure, and a likely candidate for contributing to the terrible taste last time. This is only the third time we've used the keg, so I don't know if it was defective from the start, since all of us drank the first batch so quickly.

This needs fixing and soon.

Keg goes in the fridge pictured in the background.

The other casualty was we broke the hydrometer while cleaning up. My bad, I put it in the brew pot which was filled with sanitizer for this operation and forgot to remove it before I moved the pot upstairs to clean. The hydrometer is filled with metal at the bottom, not mercury like a thermometer -- thank goodness!

Fortunately, we got a final gravity reading first: F.G. 1.02 (O.G. was 1.044) which gives us an ABV of 5%. That's your average beer strength and this is an average style of beer.