We were beat and eyelids at half mast. Staying up over 28 hours always does that to us, especially with the added stress of travel – cooped up on a plane over the Atlantic, waiting around, catching cabs, making and confirming reservations for hotels and rental cars, and eating airplane food. If you ever hear the phrase “airline cuisine” don’t believe it. “Airline cuisine” is an oxymoron – a contradiction of terms.
We are in downtown Milan Italy today waiting for our Turin/Rome group to arrive tomorrow. Augustine once taught here as a pagan. He listened to the Bishop of Milan – St. Ambrose, Doctor of the Church – and through those lectures he was converted to the Catholic faith. Great thing for us, since he was one of the brightest and most influential Catholic thinkers of all time.
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When kneeling in the grotto below the high altar, observing and praying near the bones of St. Ambrose in the glass coffin, I thought “Some people must think Catholics are morbid, putting on display and honoring bones and relics and body parts and stuff that belong to dead people.”
I remembered that as a Protestant I was not concerned with such things. Our religion was one of spirit and propositional truth – not of body parts and morbid bone collections.
But why divide the two? God made us both spirit and flesh and he made a religion to correspond to both. Jesus said we would worship in “spirit and truth”, but he also used mud and spit to heal, and held the physical body to be of extreme importance – so much so that the resurrection of the body was a crucial element of Christian teaching.
And remember, the bones of the patriarch Joseph were carefully brought out of Egypt to his homeland in Israel (Gen 50:25) and Elisha’s bones could raise the dead on contact (2 Ki 13:21).
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As Janet and I sat in the grotto looking at the 1,600 year old bones of a defender of the Faith, we couldn’t help but be proud. We honor and venerate (not worship!) St. Ambrose and desire to be like him. He is in the Catholic Hall of Fame – Sainthood!
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