Episode 13 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living– the spiritual life and moral living… understanding the journey through the Purgative and Illuminative Way and their role in the moral life.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 12 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living– The Liturgy of the Eucharist part 4: the Communion Rite…The moment of radical surrender…can we do it? When we come forward to communion, what are doing…what are we saying? Will we allow ourselves to be transformed? The moment of silence…will we allow ourselves to be transformed within so we can go out to transform the culture for Christ?
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 11 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living– The Liturgy of the Eucharist part 3: The Eucharistic Prayer…God teaching us to pray. What are we doing in our participation and are we truly ready to receive the Body of Christ? Should we, in integrity, receive the Truth of Christ in Communion…do we really believe?
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 10 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living– The Liturgy of the Eucharist part 2
The True Meaning of “Full and Active Participation”…The Purpose of the Eucharistic Prayer
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 10 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living– The Liturgy of the Eucharist part 2 : The True Meaning of “Full and Active Participation”…The Purpose of the Eucharistic Prayer
Deacon James Keating, PhD, the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha, is making available to ”Discerning Hearts” and all who listen, his series of programs entitled “The Way of Mystery”.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 9 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living–
The Liturgy of the Eucharist part 1: The offertory and the priesthood…what is the role of the priest in the sacrifice of the Mass and what are some of the challenges faced by the priest today.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
Episode 8 -The Way of Mystery: The Eucharist and Moral Living–
The Liturgy of the Word part 2: The role of the lector, the role of the deacon, and the role of those who receive the Word.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
The Vatican II documents remind us that the spiritual journey is not made in a vacuum, that God has chosen to save us, not individually, but as The People of God. The Eucharist must help Christians to make their choices by discerning out of Christ’s paschal mystery. For this process to take place, however, Christians must first understand how the Eucharist puts them in touch with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, and what concrete implications being in touch with this mystery has for their daily lives.
During this podcast, Deacon Keating will offer his insights on the mystery of this Easter.
Here a few of his comments:
God always is faithful to himself. He is always choosing life. He is always choosing creating. He’s always choosing a way around the obstacles that we put up to him so that he can be faithful to himself. So the greatest obstacle obviously is death and sin. And he’s always found a way around those two to keep finding us. And that’s why hope is such a great theme on Easter Sunday because there’s no one who can stop God from being God.
All the conversion stories of the history of Christianity, 2000 years of God finding the lost sheep, God going around the obstacles that we have put up to his own nature of being a creator who gives. And that’s our great hope. Not us, right? It has never been us. Oh, you’re a good man. Oh, you’re a good woman. Oh, you can do this. No. I am a disaster. I’m a mess. I’m weak. I am vulnerable and I need to stay in a stance of vulnerability so that God can actually go around the obstacles I’ve been throwing at him for decades and find me. Reach out to my hand like he did to Adam in the afterlife and take me out of death and keep me in creation and keep me in the cycle of giving and receiving. That’s divinity, creating and the reciprocity of giving and receiving.
And he wants us to get into that with him. That’s why he’s always reaching out to us. Easter Sunday is the greatest celebration of that hope. God will always be God. We cannot make him other than what he is. And what he is, is someone who finds us no matter what obstacles we put up.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
During this podcast, Deacon Keating will offer his insights on the mystery of this Good Friday.
Here a few of his comments:
Deacon James Keating:
John is the one who gives us that famous line. It is finished. It is finished. What is finished? This creation, creation is finished. Everything after the crucifixion, the resurrection, everything after that is creation, a sort of groaning as Paul says, to catch up to what Jesus has already done, that perfect man, that perfection of God. And again, perfection is not as we understand it perhaps mathematically with no errors or faults, but scripturally, perfection is what Jesus said it was, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And then he contextualized that within the sense of welcoming your enemies, welcoming the other, welcoming those who are not you. And of course, that’s what Jesus was literally doing on the cross. He was welcoming those who were the enemy, who were not him, in other words, were against him, and this is what perfection is for the Christian.
On the cross, Jesus was the perfect man because he was the man who was forgiven, welcoming of the enemy, welcoming of the one who was literally killing him, and still not calling down his angels to destroy them, but actually welcoming the one who is killing into his own heart. As scripture says, “God has the sun shine on the good and the evil”, and that’s what Jesus was doing from the cross. He was saying, “You’re still welcome in me even as you’re killing me because I am love itself.”
And so as we meditate on Good Friday and on the crucifixion, we’re also meditating on our own dignity as Christians. We have, again, through the Holy Spirit, we have that spirit of perfection in us, the spirit of forgiveness, the spirit of welcoming those who are not ourselves. In other words, to no longer live as extensions of our egos, but to literally be hospitable to the other, even the other who would hurt us through the process of forgiveness.
Obviously, great mysteries here that the Holy Spirit must tutor us in real life. We can always think about them and write about them and speak about them, but when it comes to living them, we really need the incredible combustible power of the Holy Spirit moving our will to actually welcome the enemy and forgive those who are hurting us. But it’s all there on the Cross. The perfect man, the forgiven man, the man who is in perfect harmony with God, all of those things Jesus is trying to gift us with as well.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
During this podcast, Deacon Keating will offer his insights on the mystery of this Holy Thursday.
Here a few of his comments:
Deacon James Keating:
So the fullness of Holy orders is there and we celebrate that because obviously without Holy orders, there’s no power of salvation that’s unleashed in the sacramental economy and we would just be void or it would be devoid of his presence and his power through the things of the earth. And that’s the beauty of the sacraments. We get both the presence and the power of Jesus through the things of the earth. That’s what makes the sacrament so accessible. The human body of the priest. Oil, water, wine, bread. So simple, so humble, so accessible. Again, the meditation of God’s great love for us that he is generously available through the things of the earth.
And that’s what makes our sacramental system so mindbogglingly joyful is that when we really are in a sacramental imagination as Catholics, our joy deepens because we realize, Oh my gosh, we are so loved. It’s not like he said, “You have to go up this mountain and find me. I’ll come to you as bread and I’ll come to you in oil and I’ll come to you. My power will come to you through the waving of a hand in a blessing. I will do all that for you and you just have to show up at the corner of Maple and 50th street. Your parish church and I’ll be there through these things of the earth.” It’s very, very humbling and powerfully beautiful to think about how close he wants to be with us and how accessible he is to us through the sacraments. And that’s why so many more people are mourning these days in the midst of the Coronavirus because even that is unattainable. The most ordinary accessible elements of the earth where Jesus wants to give us his power and his presence is unaccessible. Inaccessible these days because of the sorrow that we’re in.
Further in the conversation:
We always say, try to live in the present moment. But that’s a real grace to live in the present moment and to live in the present moment as grace is something we need to be asking for now. It may not be easily attained or easily appropriated, but we will miss something very vital if we’re not going deep and we’re just going towards fantasy to the future and daydream about when this will be over. And even emotionally anticipating it. Thinking that I’m happy now because I’m thinking this won’t last forever. And meanwhile, a lot of goods are present where you should be going deep into the relationships of the home. Even into the relationship somewhat of suffering. But not to utilize suffering, but to just realize that even in suffering there is a presence emerging from him because obviously he’s dwelling within us. And so we never utilize suffering, but within suffering itself, if we can pay attention to it, we may linger there long enough to allow his presence to come.
Whether it’s a suffering of the end of our daily routine, which we’re all suffering now, or the horrific suffering of sickness itself, which is so sacred that only the sick should really talk about it. But we have testimony from the saints that in the midst of sickness sometimes they sense his presence emerging as they pay attention to their own limit and finitude and weakness and he comes from within to minister to them. So the whole theme of are you living in the present moment is truly a contemplative gift that perhaps God is giving all of us now, and we don’t want to miss the hour of our visitation.
Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., the director of Theological Formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation, located at Creighton University, in Omaha.
