Welcome to New Folks / Q&A Time

After going on a short blogger's fast of NOT checking pageviews, followers, and other stats for a few weeks, I was delighted to notice that Coffee&Canticles has five new followers since the last time I checked.

Welcome, Bienvenido!, Bienvenue!, Wilkomen! Karibu! Mabuhay! Yokoso!, Svagat! Dobro pozalovat!, and Salve! to Doug, Wayde, Bruce, Margaret, and Tom. (I just had fun finding translations for Welcome in the languages of the countries our readers live in. Minus the correct diacritical markings over some of the letters. And I ended with Latin since we all inhabit the Catholic Church. Unless I have some non-catholic readers, which is  possible, since the Liturgy of the Hours is starting to be noticed and used by Christians of other denominations.)

As old followers know and new follower may not, the Wednesday Q&A post is for any questions you may have about the Liturgy of the Hours. These might be on the woes of finding your place in the breviary,  wondering why this or that element occurs in the Hours, questions about group vs. individual recitation rules, or, well, just about anything.

I have a sort of question  this week, after wrestling with the Office of Readings' passages from the Book of Revelation. I always find this a difficult and mostly unrewarding part of the Bible to read. Yes, there are glimpses and hints of the eternal liturgy in heaven--I've heard the Scott Hahn lecture. But all the apocalyptic stuff: the miniature- horse stinging bugs with men's heads and other assorted signs,beasts, plagues, symbols, punishments, etc. It often sounds like St. John is trying to re-tell a bad dream, with one fantastical, crazy thing happening after another.   I've heard that some of it applies to things that have already happened, such as the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of the early Church, and that some applies to the end of the world. But which is which? I would just like to know what God is telling us and why the Church wants us to go over it all each year in the liturgy. Assuming the world is not ending in our  lifetime, what exactly is the point of all of this for us? I have a hard time even considering the hyper-literal "Left Behind" view of it all (even aside from the "Rapture" heresy), because God has never acted this way anywhere else in history.

In other word,  I need some good Catholic commentary on the Book of Revelation.  If any of you can recommend one, please let me know.

Theodicy and My "duh!" moment.

Here are my favorite verses from psalm 34, which appeared   in this past Saturday's Daytime Prayer:

The Lord is close to the broken hearted
those whose spirit is crushed he will save.
Many are the trials of the just man
but from them all the Lord will rescue him.

Theodicy is a fancy word for what C.S. Lewis called the problem of pain. How can a  loving God permit blah, blah, blah, to happen? Much ink has been spilled over this. The least unsatisfactory answers are: 1. God brings good out of evil and 2. We can't possibly comprehend God's plan for the universe, let alone for our lives. This, the answer the Lord gave to Job, is supplemented by the New Testament, which tells us that eventually, "every tear will be wiped away."

I have no great wisdom to add to this theological conundrum. In fact, I am embarrassed to admit it, but years ago  I was shocked, shocked! when some trials  entered my own life. Although I'd studied enough theology to know better, my reaction the first time my husband lost his job, was, "Wait! No! You have the wrong family, Lord.  We're the ones who keep the laws of the Church, who never use birth control and have generously accepted seven children into our lives. We homeschool! We pray as a family!"

So even though I knew on one level that God permitted people who were much holier than I to be imprisoned,martyred, suffer from horrible diseases, etc., on another level I had the odd notion that I would be rewarded with a minimally painful life, here in this world, if I maintained a certain level of comittment to faith and morals.   Quid pro quo. Silly, silly girl.

I'd never really gotten the message of psalm 34, despite having read it many times in my breviary over the years. But eventually, it dawned on me:

It doesn't say your heart will never be broken, but that He is close to you when it is.

 It doesn't say your spirit will never be crushed, but that he'll save you when it is.

It doesn't say the just man won't have trials, but that God will  rescue the just man from those trials. (And as we know, the rescue occurs according to God's schedule, not ours. That's the hard part.)


How on earth did I miss that for so many years?  That's why it's so good to pray the psalter year after year. Eventually, what our Father is trying to tell us starts to sink in.