Good morning. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. The reading of the Gospel of today fits so very well into the context of our approach here during this retreat. I connected with a story by Father Anthony de Mello. I suppose you know his book. This comes from the book The Song of the Bird. And I'm referring to the confession of Peter. Jesus asks his disciples, what do people say? Who do people say I am? And then they give him various answers. And then he asks, and you...

[01:01]

Who do you say I am? And Peter says, You are Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus praises him and says, Oh, Peter, son of John, you are blessed because flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven has revealed it to you. And Anthony de Mello says, Today is a different situation. Jesus asks me, Anthony, who do you say I am? And I say, you are Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus says, oh, Anthony, you poor fellow. flesh and blood have revealed this to you, and you didn't have the patience to wait until my Father in heaven would reveal it to you.

[02:01]

This is a very important insight. We have to find it by ourselves, and this is why we... Take every word, and that was also, of course, Father Damus' approach. Don't just mouth it. Don't just say what you have heard and then repeat it. Every parrot can do that. Ask yourself and wait and have the patience to wait until God will reveal it to you, but ask, ask. And so we took these two steps basic words, God and I, human. And we try to do what St. Benedict also says in the rule, that we should think what words mean.

[03:06]

When he speaks about the oratory, for instance, he should He says, it should be what it's called. What is it called? Oratory. So it's not a store room. It's a place for prayer, oratory, or rather to pray. Don't store anything. And he says to the abbot, The abbot should remember what he is called, Abba's father. So it always goes back to the word, what does this really mean? This is what we are asking ourselves here. That's really the whole, that's all we are doing. These two basic, big, big words are much too much for a week, God and I. but at least we try to think them through. What does it really mean? And in asking about the human being, we have these two great questions.

[04:16]

Who am I? And there we talked about the myth of creation and... What is life all about? And there we talked about the hero myth. And the hero myth tells us, very prosaically put, that life is about dying into greater life over and over again. And now we make a step about a further step, which the myth makers already made. Thousands and ten thousands of years ago when these myths were first told around the campfires, they felt that telling was not enough. Obviously, what is life all about?

[05:20]

It has to be translated into life. It means a translation. At the time of Father Damasus, that was sort of the heydays of what was called demythologizing. Rudolf Bultmann, a great Protestant theologian, was particularly promoting this. The great and legitimate concern of demythologizing was, don't just let it sit there in the myth, applying it in your life. But then it often went really the wrong way, where they just simply tried to say it in other words, and if you say it, if you... tell a good story, it is much better than if you try to say it in Hussain words.

[06:27]

But this concern, how do I now bring the message of this myth, and in our case particularly the hero myth, how do I bring this answer to the question what is life all about into my daily life how do I translate it into my daily life and there they invented something which is called ritual ritual is the translation of the myth into daily life that is why it is so important and The particular ritual, which is really the ritual of all rituals, the sort of epitome of ritual, is sacrifice.

[07:32]

It is what is called a rite of passage. Rites of passage were these rituals that were celebrated whenever In the course of a life, a young man or woman was passing, so the passing into life is already a passage called the birth, and puberty is very special. There were many puberty rites celebrated. and the introduction into society or into a particular part of society was celebrated and, of course, marriage was celebrated as a rite of passage. Now we become a father or a mother and then death was celebrated by rites of passage. But at the heart of every rite of passage, typically, is sacrifice.

[08:40]

so that's why we have to say more about sacrifice today and what helps us understand sacrifice is that sacrifice translates the hero myth into ritual sacrifice is the translation of the hero myth into ritual now One can show this this way. We saw that the hero myth has three phases. The first phase was that the hero who tells us what life is all about, if we identify with the hero, is singled out for our identification with the hero. And then the hero goes out

[09:40]

into the encounter with mystery, and that is the second phase. It's the encounter with mystery, with which we as human beings have to deal, which we cannot comprehend, cannot control, but can and must understand by undergoing it. Understanding and undergoing belong together. Comprehending and overstanding belong together. That is the middle and the most central and important aspect of the hero myth, that dying. It's dying, but a dying into fuller life. And therefore the third phase of the hero myth, where the hero returns to the community as life bringer. greater fullness of life, celebration of life, even in such simple forms as Little Red Riding Hood that follows this pattern.

[10:46]

There is the celebration of the grandmother and the hunter and the little girl and all the neighbors with that cake that she was originally bringing to the grandmother and a bottle of wine. And now we see, and this is the important step, that sacrifice. Of course, again, thousands of different forms of sacrifice, and I will illustrate it by telling you about a few. But sacrifice always has that same three-step pattern. And the first one is the offertory. We know that from the sacrifice of the Eucharist. The first is the offertory in which gifts are singled out for identification, exactly what we said about the pyramid, fruit of the earth and work of human hands.

[11:50]

We bring ourselves to the altar when we bring bread and wine in the Eucharist. This represents us, and it represents nature, fruit of the earth, and it represents culture, work of human hands. So everything that human is represented thereby, and we are identified with. Then comes the consecration, and in the consecration it is made over to mystery, consecrated, made, put together with the sacred, consecrare, it's made sacred, it is handed over, and the gesture for this making over is the lifting up. See? we have the instinctive notion that the sacred is higher than the other things, higher things.

[12:59]

So this lifting up of the host, this lifting up of the chalice is a very important gesture in it. And of course, the connection with the death of our hero to the words. In the night before he died, before I was handed over. He gave himself. He gave himself in the form of bread and wine. The reference to the death. The death of Christ is remembered, as St. Thomas Aquinas says. So that's the looking back to the history. It's remembered, it is celebrated, that's the present, and it is a token for our everlasting life, that's the future. And all of this comes together in this present moment of the consecration.

[14:01]

And then that leads over to the communion, and that corresponds to the hero coming back to the community As life-bringer, this feast, we celebrate this feast together with Christ, in Christ, and with one another, and with the whole world, with everything that was represented in the offertory. Work of human hands and nature, our nature, our culture, everything is included in this celebration. And it is a real celebration, and it's a communal celebration. To see this only as I am now privately, so to say, receiving the body of Christ. Well, yes, I am receiving the body of Christ because God loves me as if I were the only one there is, as Father Danverson used to stress. But there's more to it than my personal desire.

[15:03]

communion with God in and through Jesus Christ. There is communal celebration and we should not forget that and we should always try and find also ever better ways to make this a communal expression of our celebration. Of course the kiss of peace is one of those It's right very close to the communion, comes directly before the communion, and expresses. We celebrate together, just like at a birthday party you give one another hugs, so at this party it's a party. We give one another hugs as part of this celebration. And now it helps us to see may help us to see that this Eucharist is really a sacrifice if we look at other sacrifices.

[16:14]

Because very often in Christian theology, not in Catholic so much, not in Catholic at all, but in Protestant theology, and after all, there are Christian brothers, and they are also trying to go deeply into the mysteries that we worship. It was and is denied that the Last Supper, as they call it, or the celebration of Christ's Last Supper, is a sacrifice. A sacrifice, that's what these heathens do, and we don't want to have anything to do with that. And that's one of the aspects of the beauty of the Catholic approach. We include all that. Yes, of course, it's a sacrifice. And I hope that any... A tribal member who would come in here would recognize it.

[17:17]

I hope we celebrate it in such a way that they would recognize, yeah, this is a sacrifice like we sacrificed. It would be much more Catholic than if we just do some hocus-pocus. And you know that the word hocus-pocus comes from hocus corpus. It was a taunt to this kind of... magic that was celebrated there in the Eucharist. No, it's not magic. It's worship, it's sacrifice. So maybe I tell you about a bloody sacrifice I witnessed. Actually, in Calcutta, in India, in a place, in a temple, in the Kali temple, in which not very long ago, Still in the 20th century, I was told, human sacrifices were performed on that same altar.

[18:20]

Well, thank God I didn't see a human sacrifice, but it was a very important experience for me to see a goat being sacrificed there. increased my appreciation of sacrifice. And it had exactly that same pattern. First you saw the family arriving on the rickshaw. That poor rickshaw carrier had to carry this whole family plus the goat. They were all sitting on the... little wagon, father, mother, one or two children and the goat. So they came to the temple and then they arranged themselves and they stood there. The goat was in front. The father stood behind the goat and put his hands on the back of the goat. All the family stood around. You couldn't express the identification with this goat better.

[19:23]

in this way, and the priest stood on the other side and held the head of the goat, and then they brought the goat to a little kind of little guillotine, and it was chopped off, but not very quickly. There was a whole buildup, like in a circus where they have drums, and there were drums there, and they had this drum roll that got louder and louder and louder as it was building up in this chopping thing. In my case, it was particularly emphasized by the fact that right next to me was a little pickpocket. And another man, whom I didn't know, who had a bag, and I saw the hand of this little pickpocket going into this bag. why this drum roll was because everybody was watching the sacrifice so he thought that was a safe time to go and then bang and the head chopped off and falls off and the big pocket the man had noticed it too and grabs the head of the bag and is written inside of the bag so it was a real big bang but

[20:47]

But the encounter with death, the encounter with mystery there. And then the next step is that even though the Hindus are vegetarians, immediately they hang up this coat right then and there. They bleed it, they skin it. They cook it right there in the temple and they have a big feast with it. So the communion meal takes place right there with the blood on the floor all around. But they celebrate. And this communal celebration was equally strongly expressed. But it isn't always so obvious. And so I would like to call your attention to two other... sacrificial gestures that you would really recognize as sacrifice if you are alert to it, but they are barely noticeable.

[21:51]

And one of them is in China, a thousand and a hundred thousand times you can see that when people start eating what we would call prayer before meals, they have their rice bowl, and everywhere they would do that, they take a little bit of rice, with three fingers they take a little bit of rice, so that's... The offertory is taking it, you know, because it is singled out as representing all that's in the bowl and representing all that feeds us. Take this little rice, then they lift it a little above the rim of the bowl, lift it up, make it over to the sacred. You might hardly notice it, but that's what it means. And then they eat it, and that's the communion.

[22:53]

So in this very little gesture you have already at the entrance, and that is particularly good because it doesn't have to be a big bang sacrifice somewhere in a temple. It's what you do every day, right? At every meal you do it. So that brings it already much closer into your daily life. Or in Greece, you will see, and maybe some of you have seen that, When anybody, before they drink, while we would kind of lift up the glass with chia or chin chin, they would lift up the glass and flip it a little bit, and a drop of wine falls to the ground. Greek people would always do that, or at least any traditional people. Maybe not in the big cities. I don't know that. But in Greece, they would always do that. And the drop that is jumping out of the glass when they make that little flip, that is the offertory.

[23:59]

You see, this little drop is set aside as representing the whole wine and everything that brings joy to us. Then it falls to the ground. In this case, it's not lifted up to the sky, but the ground is also sacred. Take up your shoes. This is holy ground. It is the ground from which mysteriously this wine grew. And then just as mysterious that... wine should grow out of the earth, you know? So it's made over to mystery and then they drink and that's the communion. Then there's this joy of communion. And Father Damascus used one of his favorite passages that he came back to many times was the second verse of

[25:00]

the first chapter of Leviticus. And there it says, when a man brings a sacrifice, when a man brings a sacrifice, and Father Damasus used to say, the Jewish sages say, unless a man brings a sacrifice, that is not a man. not a human being. That makes us to human beings that we bring a sacrifice. And that was very important to him, that whole notion of sacrifice and making us human through sacrifice. And he would very often say, and of course that In the context in which we have presented this here now and seen it in how it belongs together, unless a human lives what life is all about, you can barely call it a human.

[26:13]

That's what makes us human, that we live what life... that we realize in our own lives and live it, what is life all about. And the Hieromist tells us that. It's through dying into life. And the sacrifice makes it a reality in our daily living. It ritualizes it. And one aspect under which Fr. Damasus was also frequently speaking about sacrifice was, he would tell us, you must sacrifice your Isaac. You must sacrifice your Isaac. And that is, of course, the story of the sacrifice of Abraham. How much more could somebody identify with the

[27:15]

a sacrificial gift than a father with his son. And that is why, and Father Damasus stressed that aspect very much when he told the story of Abraham, that the voice of God says to Abraham, take your son. And that is not enough. It has to be rubbed in. Take your son, your only one. Abraham had already two sons, we were told at that time, but when it comes to sacrificing, when one child is in such danger, that is the only one that the father can even think about. Take your son, your only one, the one you love, Isaac. And when this name is out, every time we read it, that should really shake us almost the way it must have shaken Abraham, you know.

[28:20]

Imagine that. And then Twilight of Damage is this. And that is what is the dearest to us, the nearest to us, what we most love. That needs to be again and again... made over to God, made over to mystery. Because death means being made over to mystery. And so healed. Because that is another aspect that we need to take into consideration that sacrifice heals. Sacrifice is healing. In what way is sacrifice healing? First of all, we have to distinguish healing from curing.

[29:29]

Curing moves on a different level from healing. Curing is something external. We certainly, when we have physical disease, pain or impairment, we certainly pray that that will be healed, our leg or our foot or our tendon or whatever it be, or our stomach ulcers or whatever. We pray that it be cured, not only healed. But the cure may or may not take place. The healing can always take place. Prayers for cure are not always literally answered by curing. They're always answered. Prayers are always answered. The story of the little girls, one of whom prayed for a particular doll,

[30:42]

for Christmas. She wanted exactly that doll for Christmas. And she told it all her friends and all the girls knew she was praying to get that doll for Christmas. Well, Christmas came and went, and she did not get this doll. So the other girl said, well, God didn't hear your prayers. But the little girl said, yes, he did hear it. He just said no. And this is what we always have to take into consideration. When it comes to curing, God sometimes says no, and that has reasons which we cannot fathom. But when it comes to healing, it always hurts. Healing is always hurt. Because healing is not a state. You see, health is not a state. It's nothing static. But healing... is a way of living, a way of living and dying, living and dying.

[31:43]

There is no living without dying, no true living without dying. Living and dying, and that process is healed, that process, because if through sacrifice we enter into a deeper understanding again and again of this die and live, which we had in the hero myth and acted out in sacrifice, then we are healed. Then we are healed. It's a walking. To be healthy is a kind of walking. And walking... is the process of losing your balance and finding your balance. If you do not have the courage to lose your balance, you can never walk. Because the moment you lift up one leg, you lose your balance. And then you put it down, and you're a little further ahead, and you lift the other one, and you lose your balance, and you put it down.

[32:49]

So walking, or living in the sense of being on the way, is always a losing and finding your balance continuously. And in this sense of healing and sacrifice as healing, Father Damasus was very frequently referring to this, or at least I remember that it was very important, I don't know how often, but to me this really stuck in my memory, to the chapter 47 of Ezekiel. And we had that this morning, a reference to it this morning in the reading at Vigils. So I thought, this is really, for the time it was breathing down my neck here, it couldn't fit better. I had planned to speak about this.

[33:50]

He would speak about this story. The healing water is flowing out of the temple. Sacrifice, the temple, the altar, our chapel, that is what he saw as the temple. It was very important. Another passage was very important to him from the Psalms. I didn't understand anything until I entered the temple of the Lord. And when we enter the temple of the Lord, everything falls into place. We understand everything. And out of this temple, over the threshold, flows this healing water. And then the angel tells Ezekiel to measure it. And first it's only ankle deep. Then it is knee-deep. Then again a thousand measures. And it is waist-deep.

[34:51]

And then another thousand measures. And then it is deep enough so that a human being has to swim. And this was Father Damas's interpretation. At that point, you are in deep water. You are deep in water. And you have to, in order to swim, you have to lay down. So it's like a prostration. You have to lay down. You can no longer stand. You have to entrust yourself completely to the water when it is that deep. And only then, when you get into it and when you give up, so to say. You're no longer standing on your own two feet, but you entrust yourself fully to the water. Then comes the next step, and you are led to the shore, and there is then paradise. First of all, fish everywhere in the water, food on the trees, trees full of fruit, and

[36:04]

Their leaves are for the healing. Leaves are for healing. So there is this healing through the water that flows from the temple. Healing comes through the life-giving power that emanates from the place of sacrifice, from sacrifice. And when the Damascus... very often spoke about this healing and there were three stories that he was coming back to often that I remember and the first one was in John 5 5th chapter verse 6 in the 5th chapter John tells about the healing of the paralytic at the Sheep Gate, the ponds, the pond of Bethesda.

[37:06]

To this day, there is the Sheep Gate there, and they have found in relatively recent excavations that there were actually those seven ponds, these ponds were discovered, and they were healing ponds because there was a Roman ponds temple to Escapius, to the God of healing, was there. And apparently that was already there at the time of Jesus. So it's a particularly interesting story. Per Benoit, with whom I had the great blessing of having a tour of Jerusalem, said that Jesus may have actually gone into this Roman sanctuary, into this heathen sanctuary, and there before the ceiling. But The important thing is that Jesus asks the man, do you want to be healed? That is what Thomas emphasized.

[38:10]

When it comes to healing, we should ask ourselves, do you really want to be healed? After all, this man was prostrated by his sickness for 36 years. After 36 years, do you really want to be healed, or are you here so long because you don't want to be healed? He says, I do not have a man, I don't have anybody that carries me into the water when the angel moves the water. That may or may not be an excuse, but the important thing is, do you really want to be healed? And after that comes the story of the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his son and Father Damasus stressed that three times this centurion is referred to in the story and each time with a different title the first time it says the official asked so he comes

[39:23]

in his official position and asks of Jesus. It's very formal, official asks. Then Jesus says, go, just go. He doesn't perform any ritual. He just, go, your son is healed. And the father, in faith, he goes. And then it says, and the man realized... As a man, he realizes. As an official, he asks very formally. As a man, as a human being, he realizes. A man brings a sacrifice. He realizes. And then through this realization, the father believes. The official asks, the man realizes. That's a human reality. And then the father, then he becomes a father. Because when we realize in faith, we become fathers.

[40:28]

It's not just his family, but we are able to propagate this faith. It flows over to others. And the third story was in Mark 2, 11 to 11. 1 to 12, the first 12 verses, and particularly the ninth verse, that is the healing of the paralytic whom his friends let down through the roof, and therefore the Damascus stressed two aspects of the healing. First of all, that his friends brought him there. This man would have never been healed if he hadn't friends. So we... have to help others towards this healing we are responsible for others not just there's not a private affair and that hops back of course to the man at the pool who says I have no man nobody carries me in the water well this one had a man so friends are very important for healing but then the end of it is that Jesus says take your bed and carry it home so

[41:45]

What Dr. Damitz was stressed was that was his problem, that he was lying on this bed, and he doesn't get rid of this bed. This sticks with him. Don't think when you're healed you're really rid of your problem. Only the difference is before that you were helplessly lying on it, and now you have the strength to carry it. don't expect that you walk away from it so you're stuck with it whatever your problem is but now you can carry it that is the healing so that may also have to do with the healing and the healing and in this way we pondered these ways of healing the power of the sacrifice, power of the daily sacrifice that we celebrate in the Eucharist flows into our daily lives.

[42:52]

And so for our homework, I would again ask you to complete a sentence. And the sentence reads, I let the healing power of the daily Eucharist flow into my life, I let the healing power of the Eucharist flow into my life by, then comes, how do I do, how do you do it? Obviously you're doing it, but think about it, how do you really do it? That may help. You may have discovered your own way of doing it, This evening we would speak about ways of doing it, but to prepare, ask yourself, how am I already doing it? So that you don't wait to be told, but don't let the Holy Spirit give this to you.

[44:03]

And of course, this celebrating the sacrifice of the Eucharist daily and this translating it into healing power for our moment living is a realization, is an expression, is a celebration of our life in God, in whom we live and move and have our being. So if we close again with the doxology that expresses that in God we live, we are also reminding ourselves every time we pray this doxology of living out of that mystery and being healed through that mystery. Glory be to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

[45:23]

Amen. Thank you for your visits and thank you for your questions that I have received. And don't wait if you still want to ask a question or visit me. Don't wait for the last moment because on Sunday afternoon I will be tied up. So it's better to do it earlier. Thank you.

[45:47]

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