That's right, another feast! Who says the Church is only about fasting - the rhythm of the Church is a balance of fasting and feasting, a discipline of feasting without slipping into self-indulgence, and fasting without slipping into self-abuse. Or maybe to put it another way, the fasting prevents us from too much feasting, and vice versa.
So today, September 14th, is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. This feast actually commemorates three historical events:
1) When the emperor Constantine's mother, Helena (known to us as St. Helena), identified the actual place of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. This wasn't difficult because the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem knew exactly where they were, and in fact an earlier emperor had tried to obscure them by paving over them and building a pagan temple there. The new self-identified Christian emperor, Constantine, had the temple torn down, and excavated the sites, and there they found the tomb of Jesus, which contained the True Cross - the cross-beam of Christ's Cross. (The way crucifixion actually worked was that the vertical beam was permanent in the ground outside the city gate, and only the cross-beam was carried by the condemned, and so to take a person down from a cross - especially one who was nailed to it - you had to take the cross-beam down, too, and then pull out the nails on the ground, or if the tomb is very close - which it was - you carry the person and the cross-beam into the tomb to stay out of sight, and you remove the nails there, presumably setting the cross-beam aside to care for the body, and the cross-beam gets forgotten there. Tradition says Helena also found the nails.).
2) St. Helena commissioned (and her son Constantine paid for) the building of two basilicas right next to each other, which is now the whole complex of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (it includes a basilica dedicated to the crucifixion, a central courtyard over the exact site of the crucifixion, and a basilica over the tomb, which of course is also the site of the resurrection). So September 14th is the date of the dedication of the Church complex. Both of these events took place in the 4th century.
3) The relic of the True Cross was divided into pieces, but the piece that was left in Jerusalem as the main relic at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was stolen by Muslim invaders in the 7th century. September 14th also commemorates the day it was recovered and brought back.
By the way, it is not true that Christians waited until after Constantine had discontinued crucifixion as a method of execution to use the cross as a symbol for the Church. It was there much earlier, though often disguised within other symbols, like ships, anchors, and monograms. Early scribes even wrote little crucifixes into texts to abbreviate words like "cross." Here's a photo I took of a funeral marker with an anchor (which by itself is a sign of faith). But notice that the anchor is upside down, so that it also forms a cross.
Here's a short (about a minute) video I took going around the Holy Column in the church of Santa Prassede. This is the column that Jesus was tied to when he was scourged by Pontius Pilate. They don't always have the barrier down, so you usually don't get to see it from all the way around. I wanted to get video of the whole thing all the way around because I ran across a note in an ancient document that said that those who made a pilgrimage (at that time to the Holy Land, since it was still in Jerusalem) could visit the Holy Column, and could see marks left from the hands of Jesus where he gripped it as he was being whipped. I assume that this is pious legend, but I figured since the column has that dark & light marble, maybe there's a place where the dark parts look like hands. I did not see it, but if you do, let me know!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
My voice was still recovering from a bad cold, so not sounding my best, but this was a great conversation about pilgrimage, for the Jubilee year - more of this coming in other interviews! (FYI, I think I was the third of three guests that day, so you will have to fast forward to find me)
It seems that one way or another we need to talk about different kinds, or different levels of heresy. What I have been calling heresy vs. heterodoxy, others call heresy on fundamental doctrines vs. heresy on less fundamental doctrines. In other words, Heresy with a capital H (over fundamental doctrines like the Trinity and christology) are the kinds of heresies that move one outside the boundaries of what Christianity is, and that's because the very definition of Christianity is defined according to these fundamental doctrines. To refuse to sign the Creed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, or the Council of Constantinople in 381 - and indeed to reject any of the contents of the Creed today - means that a person is NOT a Christian.
So are the non-chalcedonians, such as the miaphysites (including St. Gregory of Narek, and today's Coptic Christians) - are they heretics? Well, like it is with a lot of things, that depends on your definition of heresy. If you include in your definition of ...
As promised, I thought that this would be a good discussion starter here in the community - this is from a conversation I had with my producer at Catholic Culture, around the podcast episodes on St. Gregory of Narek. If you've listened to the first episode on St. Gregory, you know that he is the first and only Doctor of the Church who was not Catholic! What are we to make of this? How do we explain it? Well, it was within the context of me trying to explain it that two really fundamental questions came up, and had to be hashed out between me and my producer. The first question - and this was surprising, given that we had a whole series on The Heresies - the first question is: What is a heresy? And how you answer that has serious implications for the second question, which is: What is the Universal Church? And that has serious implications for ecumenical dialogue, not to mention how we think about our fellow Christians who are not Catholic. So let's take the first question first (and here's ...
