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"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, con
cerning the word of life -- the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it ...." I John 1:1-2 (RSV)

"After his resurrection the disciples saw the living Christ, whom they knew to have died, with the eyes of faith (oculata fide)." Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, 55, 2 ad 1, as quoted in D. M. Stanley, Jesus in Gethsemane (New York, Paulist Press 1980).

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Ps. 82 NABRE Notes

 

The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE),  is a  Bible translation made available online by  the  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their footnotes to Ps. 82 echo Divine Council teaching which we get from Michael Heiser and others, as you see here, where I quote from the NABRE footnotes:

Footnotes

Psalm 82 As in Ps 58, the pagan gods are seen as subordinate divine beings to whom Israel’s God had delegated oversight of the foreign countries in the beginning (Dt 32:8–9). Now God arises in the heavenly assembly (Ps 82:1) to rebuke the unjust “gods” (Ps 82:2–4), who are stripped of divine status and reduced in rank to mortals (Ps 82:5–7). They are accused of misruling the earth by not upholding the poor. A short prayer for universal justice concludes the Psalm (Ps 82:8).

a.     82:5 The gods are blind and unable to declare what is right. Their misrule shakes earth’s foundations (cf. Ps 11:375:4), which God made firm in creation (Ps 96:10).

b.     82:6 I declare: “Gods though you be”: in Jn 10:34 Jesus uses the verse to prove that those to whom the word of God is addressed can fittingly be called “gods.”

c.     82:8 Judge the earth: according to Dt 32:8–9, Israel’s God had originally assigned jurisdiction over the foreign nations to the subordinate deities, keeping Israel as a personal possession. Now God will directly take over the rulership of the whole world.


Ps. 82 footnotes, New American Bible  (Revised Edition) (NABRE),   © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Kathleen Norris - Psalms

 The Jewish believers sang the Psalms.  Jesus sang the Psalms of ascent with his disciples (Matt 26:30). The Apostles sang Psalms (1 Cor 14:26). That was also the practice of the ancient Christians.  

Kathleen Norris in her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Biography (1993) describes her time praying and singing Psalms at Benedictine monasteries.  The pace of life is too fast, and as Norris wrote in 1993 she saw that people were coming to recognize that time at the monastery just might slow us down.  Norris says:  


The attraction is real. For all our secular preoccupations, our fascination with lifestyles of the rich and famous, twentieth-century Americans are flocking to monasteries for retreats in record numbers. The poor and humble are so popular, in fact, that when I tried a few years ago to arrange on short notice a retreat at a monastery in New England, I was told an apologetic monk that the guest facilities were booked solid for the next six months.    

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The Psalms are the word of God, which is alive and active. It's not  surprising that for Norris the experience of the monastery is  life changing:
She says: 

Often, when I’m sitting in a monastery choir stall, I wonder how I got there. I could trace it back, as I can trace the route from back East to western South Dakota. But I’m having too much fun. The words of Psalms, spoken aloud and left to resonate in the air around me, push me into new time and space. I think of it as the quantum effect: here time flows back and forth, in and out of both past and future, and I, too, am changed