What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

For weeks now I have been pretending to know what a "Crunchy Con" is without really having the slightest idea of what people were talking about.  I finally took the advice I give everyone else and looked it up.

I went to the site of National Review Online, which I really do read on occasion.  How I didn’t actually click the section that said CRUCHY CON right in front of my eyes until now is something I will never be able to explain.  Let’s chalk it up to have too much and too many things to do at the same time?

Anyway, I have discovered that I am a Crunchy Con.  Here is Rod Dreher’s Manifesto:

A Crunchy Con Manifesto

....  Sounds about right to me!

St. Polycarp (+156) was Bishop in Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey).  When young he was a disciple of the elderly St. John the Apostle and Evangelist.  He knew St. Ignatius of Antioch.  When Ignatius was being conveyed to Rome for his exectuion, he met Polycarp at Smyrna and later, when Ignatius was in Troas wrote Polycarp a letter which has survived.  We have one letter written by St. Polycarp and that to the Church in Philppi of Macedonia.  That Polycarp was a key figure in the ancient Church in that area is made evident by the fact that he was involved with the Bishop of Rome, Pope Anicetus in trying to determine the Easter celebration in Rome itself.  

Polycarp was martyred, with twelve others, when he was an old man, 86, during a time of persecution.  We have the "acts" or legal proceedings and description of his martydom.   On Holy Saturday, he was threatened with death in the fire if he would not abjure the Christian faith.  Polycarp responded that the fire here would last only a a short time, but the fire prepared for the wicked in hell lasted forever.  They burned Polycarp.  At the stake he thanked God for letting him drink of Christ’s chalice.  Miraculously the fire didn’t burn him, which seemed to happen a lot with martyrs.  So, they stabbed him to death and burned his body afterward.  The writers of the acts of his martydom say that they gathered his remaining bones, "more precious than the richest jewels or gold" and interred them. These acts have an incredible description of Polycarp’s body turning golden like baking bread, a connection between martydom and the Eucharist: 

"When he had said, "Amen" and finished the prayer, the officials at the pyre lit it. But, when a great flame burst out, those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum."

In life Polycarp defended the Church against the gnostic sect of Valentinians and also against the Marcionite who denied that the God of the Old Testament was also the same God of the New Testament.  To give you something of the character of St. Polycarp, when he ran into Marcion in Rome, Marcion asked Polycarp if he knew who he was.  Polycarp responded: “I know you for the first-born of Satan.” Far from being a simple insult, these words were spoken in charity, to shock the man into repenting his sinful positions and actions.  

COLLECT:
Deus universae creaturae,
qui beatum Polycarpum episcopum
in numero martyrum dignatus es aggregare,
eius nobis intercessione concede,
ut, cum illo partem calicis Christi capientes,
in vitam resurgamus aeternam.

WOW…. fantastic prayer!  Note the references to Polycarp’s martyrdom.

Aggrego means "to join to a flock".  The amazingly polyvalent capio, in addition to its basic meaning, can also have the overtone of accepting and enjoying, cherishing.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God of all of creation,
who deigned to join blessed Polycarp the bishop
to the number of the flock of martyrs,
by his intercession grant to us
that, grasping with him a share in the chalice of Christ,
we shall rise again unto life eternal.

This is from one of my favorite sites: spaceweather.com What we see is a transit across the face of the moon by the International Space Station (ISS) .  You can see clearly the solar panels and the body of the station.  Very cool.  The ISS is going to be passing over North America these days.  You can engage a telephone service to phone you before the ISS is suppose to pass over where you live.  It is a very interesting thig to see the ISS pass over.  With strong binoculars you can get a great view!  You just have to know when to look.

Spaceweather also, as you might guess, gives tips about when you might see auroras and other astronomical events.

Great theologians and thinkers of the Church believed that angels guided the heavenly spheres and the objects in them according to God’s plan.  By studying their movements we could discern something of God’s will and plans for us.  I don’t know about that, but surely God communicates something to us through what we see in the heavens and on earth.  Surely these are also part of the "signs of the times" He wants us to pay attention to.  If nothing else, the sheer size of the universe we live in gievs us some sense of the infinite grandeur of the Creator.