Tag: christian

Apart From Me, You Can Do Nothing: Christ the Metaphysical Vine

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Echoes of the Mountain

In a previous post, I wrote about Moses and the elders of Israel climbing Mt. Sinai and seeing the God of Israel standing above a sapphire sea. I said that what they saw wasn’t some vague, symbolic presence of God. They saw the Lord Jesus Christ, resurrected, enthroned, and whole.

That sounds strange because Jesus is born in Bethlehem long after Sinai. But God does not watch the story unfold as we do. Bethlehem, Golgotha, and the empty tomb stand present to him. That is why I believe Moses sees not a vague symbol but the risen Christ. Had Moses looked closely, he might have seen the nail scars already there.

If the risen Jesus is not confined to temporal sequence, what does that mean for the world we live in: for our choices, suffering, and joy?

John records Jesus saying, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from Me, you can do nothing.”

We usually read that as a spiritual principle. I think it reaches deeper.

“Apart from Me you can do nothing” concerns salvation, morality, and existence itself.

Israel and the Church belong to a cosmos rooted in him like branches in a vine.

Christ Before All Things: The Gospel as the Shape of Creation

We tend to imagine that Jesus entered a world already in motion. But the world exists through him and for him. I do not mean Christ as an abstraction. I mean Jesus of Nazareth: the man who preached the Beatitudes, wept at Lazarus’s tomb, bled on the cross, and walked out of the grave. His life is the original pattern of creation. The Gospels show us reality’s grain.

If Christ’s life is the pattern, then sin is a refusal of reality itself. The world trains us in self-preservation, control, transaction, and instant gratification. Fear of lack, pain, or insignificance begins to govern our choices. We may prosper for a time, but we cannot build durable lives against the one through whom all things were made.

Christ’s pattern is self-emptying love, forgiveness, patient endurance, and trust in the Father even unto death. A relationship built only on exchange becomes hollow. A career climbed through ruthless ambition cannot satisfy. An image built on concealment eventually cracks. These are not arbitrary punishments attached to a list of rules. They are the consequences of living against the grain of a creation patterned on Christ. “Apart from Me, you can do nothing”: nothing lasting or fruitful.

To live by this pattern is not to add a few “Jesus things” to an otherwise unchanged life. It is to ask, in work and relationships, “Does this choice resemble Christ?” Does it move toward service, forgiveness, truth, and dependence on the Father? Suffering remains evil and painful, but in Christ it need not be meaningless; it can become participation in the Cross and deeper dependence on the Vine. Work can become service. Possessions can become gifts. Relationships can move beyond transaction into burden-bearing love.

The Only Path That Is

Good behavior alone is too small. We must recognize the pattern and choose, moment by moment, to abide in the Vine.

To abide in him is to stand on the reality of the resurrected Christ, through whom and for whom all things were made. The Christian life is not an escape from the world. It is life in the world as it truly is, patterned after the Man on the mountain and the Lamb upon the throne.

Why Our Family Prays the Liturgy of the Hours

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Why We Pray the Liturgy of the Hours

When we became Catholic, we fell in love with the Mass. It was plainly the center of the Church’s life. The harder question was what should anchor the rest of the day.

Before Catholicism, I was a pastor in evangelical churches. Prayer was usually spontaneous and often followed the devotional reading or sermon theme of the day. It was not bad prayer, but it had no common daily rhythm. The Liturgy of the Hours gave us one.

For our household, the Hours has proven better than the Rosary as the main form of daily prayer. That is not an argument against Mary or against repetition. It is a judgment about what most fully joins our ordinary day to the public worship of the Church.

What the Hours Gives Us

The Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office, is built around the Psalms prayed at set times. It also includes Scripture readings, hymns, intercessions, collects, and, in the Office of Readings, texts from the Fathers and saints. Clergy pray it as an obligation, religious communities pray it according to their rule, and lay Catholics are invited to take part.

That distinction matters. The Rosary is a private devotion, even when people pray it together. The Hours is liturgy: the official prayer of the Church. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer do not simply give us material for reflection. They place our morning and evening inside the Church’s calendar and common prayer.

The Hours is thoroughly biblical without being nothing but biblical text. Day after day it gives us the Psalms, canticles, readings, and the story of Christ across the liturgical year. The Rosary also contemplates Christ through its mysteries, often from Mary’s vantage point. Our preference for the Hours is therefore not a choice between Christ and Mary. It is a choice to make the Church’s public prayer the spine of our day.

How to Begin

Start with Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. The Church calls them the hinge hours because the daily office turns on them. Do not begin by trying to master the entire cycle.

We use the Divine Office app. It places the right texts in order and includes audio, which makes it possible to pray while commuting or folding laundry. A book can come later if you want one.

Then give the prayer a fixed place. Pray before the day scatters the household and again when it gathers. If a parish or group prays the Hours together, join them. If not, praying alone still joins you to the Church’s common act.

The Mass remains the source and summit of Christian life. The Liturgy of the Hours carries that worship through the days between one Mass and the next. That is why it has pride of place in our home.