+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

The reading at Mass today is (in part) about identifying people. Jesus asks for some polling data: who do “people” say I am? Maybe a prophet, or Elijah, or John the Baptist returned from the dead. Okay, forget the polling data; here’s a different question: who do YOU say I am? Peter responds, explaining who he believes Jesus to be. And promptly, Jesus re-names Peter, and clarifies his – Peter’s – identity and role. We don’t know who we are in a vacuum. We figure out who we are in a context, in some social matrix or other. I would argue that we know ourselves best when we see ourselves in a social context that includes the Person who created all Contexts. But still – with or without a personal relationship with God, a relationship in which we know somebody and sense that this person knows us – we fill in details about our identity by moving in and out of a variety of social contexts. Me: I like bright eyes. Bright, lively, dancing. I’m not always able to tell the difference...

Wrestling to adapt and adopt I follow the teaching of the Catholic Church – like Walker Percy, another bad Catholic. I’m working on how to incorporate parts of Muslim prayer into my own prayer. So: thoughts on a phrase and gesture. The phrase Allahu Akbar. To the Western ear, that’s a war cry, and in fact it’s usually the violent shriek of a terrorist. But to a Muslim, it’s the most common phrase in prayer, repeated over and over all though all the five prayers of the day. At Mass in the Maronite Rite (in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church), God is addressed in Arabic, as “Allah.” So we can (and I do) incorporate the words that are precious to our Muslim brothers and sisters into our Christian prayer. It’s really pretty urgent that Christians stop associating Muslim prayer with terror. So TRY! Consider, for example, the refrain in the great Swedish hymn, “How Great Thou Art: Then sings my soul, my savior God to Thee, How great thou art, how great...