Saturday, October 11, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014
Mary, and The Symphony of our Redemption
Even though we celebrate the birth of Mary today, the Gospel reading is about the birth of Christ. Why is that? One answer is that everything about Mary is not about her, but about Christ, including her very birth. That’s true, but hardly enough. Perhaps the best way to enter in the mystery of Mary’s birth is by using the metaphor of a symphony.
Think, for example, of one of Beethoven’s musical masterpieces in all its complexity and beauty. First of all, a symphony has to have a composer who writes down on paper all the notes and chords he wants played. Thus he creates music, developing an ongoing theme and variations on it in different ways for all the instruments in the orchestra. The melodies and variations he develops are not merely nice sounds with no purpose or direction but are building up to something. The music is going somewhere, to a resolution or conclusion that is fulfilling. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In order for the symphony to be played, in addition to the composition, the various instruments, the various musicians and orchestra, also needed is a conductor who understands knows how to conduct the orchestra so as to interpret the mind of the composer who wrote the work to begin with.
How does this help us to celebrate the mystery of Mary’s birth? Today’s short Gospel reading skips the long genealogy, or family tree, that Matthew begins with. In our culture we think a geneology or family tree is a long list of ancestors. Scripturally, it is much more. We need to think of all the persons Matthew mentions as notes which God plays as chords to make music, so that he can compose a Symphony of Redemption. The music is not haphazard, random noise, but leads up to something, or rather Someone, according to the plan of the composer. In any composition, the right note has to be played at the right time, the right way, and in the right place. If it is played out of place, too soon, or too late, it is no longer part of the harmonious whole, but a jarring noise that does not fit in. God, the Divine Composer of the music, calls all the people on Christ’s family tree into being, in the right place, and the right time, to be the notes and chords he needs them to be. He also creates good music out of the dissonant notes they have made out of their lives. He does all this so that he can introduce Mary into the score, and through her, Christ. Without Mary, the music has nowhere to go. With her, through her, and because of her, the music is endlessly fulfilling.
God is not only the composer of the music, he is also the Creator of the musicians, and the Conductor of the orchestra, leading the music where he wants it to go. Even more, with the birth of Christ God becomes part of the orchestra! The Creator jumps into his creation. He becomes one of the musicians. He becomes the very music played, the full melody with its endless richness and infinite variations. He is also the culmination, the purpose and fulfillment of the whole symphony. In fact, all of us are part of the Symphony of Redemption which began with the act of creation and will reach its conclusion in the Parousia or Second Coming.
However, the one note, the most sorely needed, irreplaceable and inevitable human note, that has to be in the right place at the right time for the symphony to work is Mary. Without her the music goes nowhere. Without her, there is no music. Without her, there is no Christ, and all crash into a chaotic cacophony.
She is “only” one note, but what a note! Her life was a gift, something she received just as you and I receive the gift of our lives through our parents. When she was born, she did not know her part, her purpose, in the symphony. Only God did. Her birth, her life, is God’s gift to her, but also, God’s stupendous gift to us. Because of her, each of us is privileged to be an individual note played into a chord as part of the universal music God is composing, directing and playing in the ongoing Symphony of Redemption.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
River of Words and Straw of Silence
The text which follows is an informal, but profound meditation on the importance of silence for our spiritual life. It is taken from a homily given by Pope Benedict XVI when he concelebrated mass with the members of the ITC, (International Theological Commission), on October 6, 2006. The saint of the day was St. Bruno, a man noted for his life of silence and contemplation. I have taken the liberty of removing those remarks that are exclusively for theologians in an attempt to make the universal relevance of the pope’s message stand out for us “ordinary” Catholic Christians.
“…silence and contemplation have a purpose: they serve, in the distractions of daily life, to preserve permanent union with God. This is their purpose: that union with God may always be present in our souls and may transform our entire being.
…since we are part of this world with all its words, how can we make the Word present in words other than through a process of purification of our thoughts, which in addition must be above all a process of purification of our words?
How can we open the world, and first of all ourselves, to the Word without entering into the silence of God from which his Word proceeds? For the purification of our words, hence, also, for the purification of the words of the world, we need that silence that becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born.
….In this context, a beautiful phrase from the First Letter of St. Peter springs to my mind. It is from verse 22 of the first chapter. The Latin goes like this: Castificantes animas nostras in obedientia veritatis. Obedience to the truth must purify our souls and thus guide us to upright speech and upright action.
In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.
The “purity” to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth.
And I think that this is the fundamental virtue…this discipline of obedience to truth, which makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators of the truth, mouthpieces of the truth, for it is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us, who are really purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth. So it is that we can be harbingers of the truth.
This reminds me of St. Ignatius of Antioch and something beautiful he said: “Those who understood the Lord’s words understood his silence, for the Lord should be recognized in his silence.”
….Only when we attain that silence of the Lord, his being with the Father from which words come, can we truly begin to grasp the depths of these words.
Jesus’ words are born of his silence on the Mountain, as Scripture tells us, in his being with the Father. Words are born from this silence of communion with the Father, from being immersed in the Father, and only on reaching this point, on starting from this point, do we arrive at the real depth of the Word, and can ourselves be authentic interpreters of the Word. The Lord invites us verbally to climb the Mountain with him and thus, in his silence, to learn the true meaning of words.
…..We are silent before the grandeur of God, for it dwarfs our words. This makes me think of the last weeks of St. Thomas’ life. In these last weeks, he no longer wrote, he no longer spoke. His friend asked him: “Teacher, why are you no longer speaking? Why are you not writing?” And he said: Before what I have seen now all my words appear to me as straw.”
Fr. Jean-Pierre Torrel, the great expert on St. Thomas, tells us not to misconstrue these words. Straw is not nothing. Straw bears grains of wheat and this is the great value of straw. It bears the ear of wheat. And even the straw of words continues to be worthwhile since it produces wheat.
For us, however, I would say that this is a relativization of our work; yet, at the same time it is an appreciation of our work. It is also an indication in order that our way of working, our straw, may truly bear the wheat of God’ s Word.”
Fire of Mercy, Heart of the World, Vol. III Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, pp. 863- 865
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Mary, in Time and Eternity
The Assumption presents us with Mary mothering us, both in time and eternity. This is possible only because she is everywhere God is. Were that not true, she could not be on earth and in heaven. In the first reading we see Mary first of all in the eternal heavens: She is the “great sign that appears in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars”.
Then the image shifts, and we next see Mary with us on earth: “She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth”. Time and eternity intersected in her womb as she birthed Christ into our history, bringing the Father's Son into our world. As Mother of the Church, she continues to birth us into the People of God, the Church, generation after generation, until the end of time, and into eternity. She does the in the face of all present and future dangers, all the suffering and evil we face while we journey through life towards God.
As the reading tells us: “the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth.” That child is now every one of us born into time from the beginning of the world to its end. Mary is the New Eve, the Mother of all the living, Mother on earth of the New Creation's beginnings and its cosmic fulfillment in the age to come.
When the Christ child “was caught up to God and his throne” where now in glory he “rules all nations with an iron rod”, “the woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God”. Until the end of time, the Church remains under Christ’s and Mary’s protection as it wanders in the desert, this “valley of tears”.
Mother Mary remains with us, her children, even as she reigns with her Son in glory. His most precious possession, she was given to us by him before he died, when he also gave us to her. Christ told John “behold your mother”. And he told Mary: “behold your son”. He did not also need to tell her that she is to love us as his precious gift to her. She knew the price he paid for us, and so cares for us with very love, intensity, and total devotion she poured out on him. Could she do less with the gift that cost her Son his life?
She mothers us now, we sinners, part of the old creation groaning and struggling on the way to becoming the New Creation. Mary mothers us from both perspectives, that of the Resurrection in which she shares, and that of the Cross which she helps us carry.
She sees us from eternity and from time. She rejoices with those of us in glory as she also helps us who are on the way.
She sees all of us in our individual, unique, lives, in our isolation and loneliness. She sees us in our timid, weak, and fearful attempts at communion with one another. She sees us growing in our identity as Church, as the Body of Christ her Son on earth. She also sees us as the New Israel, the Heavenly Jerusalem, participating in His Risen Life of Glory.
She sends us the graces we need on the way to become the New Jerusalem that her Son is transforming us into. She sees the interconnections between all our lives and destinies, as we grope to work them out, confusedly helping one another as we fall and rise on the way, and she sees our lives purified, perfected and fulfilled, as we celebrate the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb who was slain.
She walks with us in time, and she glories in the embrace of the triune God who holds time, cosmos, and his Church in his hands as we travel to him.
Mary is the living memory of the Church on earth and in glory. A mother never forgets the details of her children’s lives. Mary loves each child as the individual, unique person it is, and ponders her Son’s workings in that child’s life. She mediates his graces to each and every one of us and watches over us as we grow in the awareness of our new identity as Christ’s little ones and children of the Father.
She witnesses our many failures and falls as she mercifully inspires us to turn and return to him. She is the Mother of all grace, Mother of every yes we say to her Son, mother of our conversions and continued growth, mother of our repentance and contrition, mother of our on-going, inner purification and transformation, mother of our prayer and contemplation, mother of our spiritual life.
All of our lives, the life of every one of her children, is part of her living memory. She is the living memory of the Pilgrim Church and the Church in glory. She is the live, divine history book, the repository and record of the all the Trinity’s actions and graces which brings her Son’s sheep into the one sheepfold of heaven.
Mary is prototype and exemplar of all consecrated religious. Her motherly body that has birthed so many children into the kingdom is ever young and endlessly fruitful because of her consecrated viginity. Completely surrendered, body and soul, flesh and spirit, to God alone, He has used her as the infinitely fertile vessel of his Holy Spirit and the free-flowing channel of his graces to all mankind.
Monday, August 4, 2014
Clericalism, Modern Gnosticism?
....Our age seems to have specialized in God-management - the absurd endeavor to keep functional some respectable notion of "God" and yet at each step to neutralize any divine reality that interferes with the way in which we have constructed the world. The domestication of the Almighty. The relativizing of the Absolute. The taming of the Fire of divinity into a porcelain cup of lukewarm tea.
The chief culprits have been certain ideological clerics and professional religious, who knowing from the inside both the terminology and the dynamics of theological systems, have subtly turned the truths of revelation against themselves in the construction of a subtly nuanced yet anodyne "Christianity" without tears and without passion. Without Truth....
We deny God most radically, not by becoming atheists, but by a more effective method: we ban him from our lives as an active burning presence, and construct for ourselves instead a poetic phantom that cannot be distinguished from a pleasing landscape or a pleasurable stimulus vibrating through our nerves. We make God so grand and sublime that that his relevance is reduced to that of background music, to be switched on and off at will. Whatever else God may be, he is not allowed to become active Center, Source and Goal, Father, Lord, and Judge. Lover. "Too anthropomorphic", cries purely critical reason of such names for God. Yet would not "too close for comfort" be a more truthful appraisal?
The Fire of Mercy by Erasmo Levia-Merikakis Vol. III, pp. 315 - 316
Sunday, July 13, 2014
His Yoke
A Meditation on Matthew 11: 25 - 30
25 At that time Jesus exclaimed, "I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little ones:
"At that time" refers back to what Christ just recently experienced, namely his rejection by the towns that should have received him with open arms. It amazes me that along with the frustration and grief of unrequited love the Lord carries within, he also pours out real joy in his prayer to his Father, the Father he knows as Lord of heaven and earth. He exclaims, i.e. cries out in a loud voice, from his heart, praising God the Father, and expressing the gratitude he feels for the the little ones who have received him, in spite of those who have not. That heartfelt exclamation is heard by the disciples around him.
What they do not hear with their ears, (what we also do not hear with ours, nor see with our eyes) is that he is always speaking within himself, without audible words, as well as with his physical voice. He is quietly expressing himself to the Father, whose self -expression he is as Son; the Father whose Living Word he is, and from whom receives the gift of his being; the Father whom he is one with; the Father without whom he could not exist, nor be the Son. In short, the Father to whom he is inseparably yoked because they share the same divine nature.
Who are the little ones? The disciples and other followers. They are the merest children, infants really, even though they are adults. But they are newborn, since they have new life in them, thanks to the Father who has entered their minds and hearts and enabled them to believe in his Son. How grateful Christ feels to the Father for them, for revealing his identity to them, while hiding it from the wise and the learned! But we who consider ourselves his little ones have yet to realize how completely we are yoked to him.
Who are the wise and the learned? In addition to the towns that have rejected him, they would certainly be the power elite: the professional religious leaders of the day, the Scribes, Pharisees, Sanhedrin, temple priests, and rabbis who controlled and directed public opinion. These men had everything to lose if the people went over to Jesus. Everything in the way of status, power, authority, popularity, wealth, etc. would be taken from them if the townsfolk embraced this false messiah who was trying to mesmerize the people. Naturally the wise and the learned experience Jesus as threat and not as fulfillment.
Who are the wise and the learned today? Anyone who believes in his personal autonomy, but especially we clergy, of course. We who are the professional religious leaders can still experience Jesus as threat to our self fulfillment, when we make the perennial error of looking for our fulfillment outside of him. No matter who we are, we most experience Christ as enemy when we fail to recognize the ego-centrism and sinfulness which make us our own worst enemies.
The more my self-image matters to me, i.e. the more I seek absolute freedom to define or invent myself, then the more I see Christ as extraneous and invasive. The more I make my thoughts and feelings the definitive measure of everything and everyone, then the more I instinctively reject him to protect myself and hold onto what I already have. Sadly, my desire to control, to impress, and be autonomous, is precisely what prevents him from giving me what I really do need, and what I can receive only from him: the gift of himself that I have to receive as gift and live with as a little one, in faith, hope, and charity.
Today, who are his little ones? Those of us who put our faith, hope and love in him, and not in ourselves, nor in some idol we create and serve. Little ones are any and everyone who is honest enough to face our common state as creatures, i.e. the basic neediness and powerlessness which constitutes our being. Christ's heart goes out to us because of our structural helplessness. Our very neediness as creatures is what irresistibly moves him to pour himself out in a gift of endless, sacrificial love for us.
But Christ's self-gift faces us all with a crisis of identity. Isn't it ironic to think we can be a self-made creature? Something in the order of being a square circle or a fire that burns cold? Consciously or unconsciously, we decide if we want to be among the wise and the learned who are dumb enough to think they are fulfilled without Christ or the little ones who are smart enough to realize that fulfillment comes only from him. No matter what group we choose, we adults each remain as big a bundle of needs as is an infant. That humble status of need never ceases to exist, no matter how much autonomy we think we achieve. As creatures before God we are always and only receivers, receivers who are always in total need of all the gifts that comes from his hands.
26 Yes, Father, such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been given to me by my Father...
Our Lord is thrilled with the gracious will of his Father He is overjoyed by the divine wisdom and goodness that revealed the mysteries of the Godhead to those who would receive them as a gift, and not as our mental construct or imaginative projection. And he, Christ, will continue his Father's work, relating to us in the same way the Father relates to him.
For all things have been given to him by his Father. The Son who receives his being as gift can only communicate by giving himself as gift. The Father's gift is meant for all of us. All means not only the little ones, but also the wise and the learned, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the sheep and the goats. All of us without differentiation are the Father's gift to the Son, which once again is why Christ loves us all to death and beyond. How could he not treasure all that is precious to the Father? How could he not love all that the Father has given him?
No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to who the Son chooses to reveal him.
In revealing himself to us, he also reveals the Father. In revealing the Father to us, he cannot help but reveal himself. The one is the inner content of the other.
Thus Christ lead us to what comes next: the double yoke he simultaneously embraces: his union to the Father and us.
Christ is united to us, whether we like it, know it, or hate it. He is there, or if you prefer, here, present in the present, with a presence that is real, no matter how unaware of it we may be. My recognition of him is not what determines his presence and companionship throughout life, because his presence is gift. He is inescapable, inseparable from us, even when we fancy that we walk and work by our own power, or feel alone and abandoned. He is Word-made-flesh. He shares our human nature, he is a human being. He accompanies us even when we defy him, ignore him, or run from him. It is true to say he "pursues" us, but not by chasing after us as if we had gotten away. His pursuit is within. He pursues by illuminating our minds an enlivening our hearts to his presence.There is no getting away from him to whom we are yoked from our mother's womb.
Consider the image of a farmer's yoke that he presents to us. The material, exterior yoke is meant to symbolize workings of the interior, deeper, meta-physical union. A yoke was a wooden frame with two openings, or a bar, usually of wood, to which a permanent, double harness was affixed. The yoke conjoined a pair of oxen together at the neck, so they had to work cooperatively, side by side, to plow a field. There was no way one of the pair could go off in a different direction and do his own thing, even if that animal felt tired or lazy. The smartest thing to do was plow on till the work was done. Anything less just prolonged the work and inevitably made it harder. When we resist Christ's presence, we only make matters more difficult for ourselves.
Christ is yoked both to us and to the Father. As the man Jesus, a man united to all of us by his human nature, Christ acts from the core of his divine personhood, i.e. out of his eternal oneness with the Father. He, Jesus the God-man, carries his divine and human natures not as equal halves that he somehow fits together into a kind of artificial hybrid. Instead, with infinite humility he takes our created human neediness into the structure of his divine being. He makes his oneness with us part of his oneness with the Father. He takes us into the deeper unity he has/is as Son of the Father.
28 Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.
We usually find life burdensome, and expend a lot of energy simply in pressing on, because we consider ourselves the wise and the learned. Christ is not inviting us intelligent and autonomous persons to come to him for a breather, a temporary time of rest and relaxation, before we continue our separate struggle. He is calling us to be his little ones and receive rest from him by opening ourselves to his presence even as our burdens wear us down. This gives us a taste of the rest that is ours in eternity. It is akin to the resting the Creator does on the seventh day when he relaxes and enjoys the beauty of his creation, or the rest of the Sabbath when a man looks to where his labors are taking him, the life of Glory. As Paul urges in Hebrews 4: "Let us therefore strive to enter into that rest." This is a rest in the embrace of the Trinity and the glorious enjoyment of their divine life. Christ calls us to come to him for no less than that. But he gives it as a rest that begins here.
29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
How do we answer his call to come to him? By taking his yoke on our shoulders. Note, the yoke is not ours but his. We have to stop thinking that we walk alone and that he is there only when in desperation we call out to him for help. Because he is yoked to us from our beginning, he is already there. He is never not there. We are present to him, he is conscious of us, even when we are blind to that fact. Again, he makes the point: when our mood or negativity makes us imagine ourselves alone and desolate, or our feelings tell us we are unloved and forsaken, our very unawareness of him calls forth his heartfelt compassion.
30 For my yoke is easy and my burden light."
What exactly is his yoke, or as he calls it, his burden? We are. That is why it is such a surprise for me to hear him say his yoke is easy. To me it seems hard and heavy. He is yoked to us in our sinfulness, our individual and collective evil, with all the quasi-infinite suffering that comes from it. On Calvary the yoke grows into the cross. There our sinfulness hangs and and is crucified in the Innocent One, as the endless ocean of our evil down through the ages sweeps through him, and hurls him into the abyss of death itself. How can he call that yoke easy and and that burden light, especially when what he suffers is a horror beyond our comprehension?
I don't think any one person can fully answer to that question. It is almost a cliche to say "Love does such things". Only an insane, infinitely incomprehensible love does such things. Still, Christ actions and words give us dull creatures partial insights into the mystery of his sacrificial love. On the cross, as he cries out in desolation and forsakeness, he trusts in his Father, and offers his life to redeem us. His whole life was destined for that hour. What was his "raison d'etre", why did he enter our world and become a man? To be forgiveness. That is why he was born. To be divine love poured out as endless love upon humanity. To catch that instant and make it eternal. To make the Father's mercy present in his own suffering flesh and blood, and make it ever present to us as a continuing gift in the host and chalice. His act of forgiveness constitutes us as a people, his people, his little ones. Without that act of loving mercy, all human life would forever remain incomplete and unfulfilled. With it, we are continually launched and relaunched forward on our journey to the Father. Receiving the gift of him who is forgiveness of my sins is the concrete act that catches me up in him as he is raised by his Father.
Monday, June 30, 2014
"Giussani" Questions
I thank my father for having taught me to ask for the reason behind all things. Every night before tucking me in bed, he would tell me, "You must ask why. Remember to always ask why..."
Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education, p.10
Matt. 8:18 "When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other shore."
So, why? Why that order?Usually the dynamic between Our Lord and the crowd is very different. Even when he is tired, the sight of the crowd awakens his compassion. He sits and talks to them, preaches and teaches, reaches out and heals the sick who have been brought to him, even feeds everyone on more than one occasion. Why in this situation does the Lord who sees the crowd as his sheep, seemingly act out of character and tell his disciples to get the boat because they are going to cross over to the other shore? Why not attend to the crowd since they are curious enough or interested enough to be there? What was the disciples reaction when they heard his command? Were they too stunned to react?
The problem with asking these things is that they are "Giussani questions", i.e. questions of a special category, and not the simple, natural whys we automatically ask. We can never fully know why another person acts as he does, much less can we fully know the why of acts of the One who is An Other. To ask why of Mystery is fruitful and frustrating at the same time. The answer(s) we receive illuminate us by opening up to yet more Mysteries, and leave us in a more deeply illuminated darkness.
Since Christ is Teacher par excellence, his deeds are as instructive as his words. What is he teaching us and the crowd by withdrawing from them? Perhaps that our curiosity and or/interest are not enough. In order to follow him, one has to make the effort to get to the other shore, and our own resources are never sufficient to get us there. Only a Faith that is lived out in Love and Hope on an ever deeper level is able to reach the other side.
Verse 19: A scribe approached and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go."
As his disciples go get a boat, two men who already consider themselves disciples speak up. The first is a scribe who boldly asserts that he will follow Christ anywhere and everywhere, no matter the difficulty. For the scribe to say such a thing presupposes a great conversion has taken place in the man. Scribes lived, ate and breathed the words of Scripture. Their very lives centered on pondering the sacred texts; studying the various interpretations offered by individual rabbis, rabbinic schools and different branches of Jewish tradition; Scribal lifetime consisted of studying, discussing and arguing about the opinions each personally favored. For a scribe to give up his professional status as an expert theologian and state publicly his willingness to become a disciple of a penniless, travelling rabbi was stunning. This scribe sees Jesus as the Living Word, as He who is the fulfillment and the surpassing of all the sacred words of which his scribal life had consisted. I wish Matthew, the Gospel writer, had noted the crowd's reaction for us, instead of leaving it to our imagination. Still, the crowd's reaction would have been nothing compared with Christ's terse response.
Verse 20: "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head."
As the Son of Man, as one of us humans, Christ doesn't even have the limited comfort and security that the animals enjoy. An incredible statement! But that's what it means to be the Word made flesh, or Son of Man. Jesus the human being , is dispossessed of everything except his relationship to the Father. True, that relationship is everything. True, all creation has been made in him and through him. True, he is Lord of everything since everything has been given him by His Father. But as one of us, he is as limited as we are: he is wayfarer, wanderer, an exile, as much as we are. Would it be fair to say "even more so" since all of the human limitations he experiences as a man, he experiences out of his divine capacity and not merely to the finite extent we do? How else could he experience the total desolation of forsakenness? As Son of God, he comes as gift to us, as the Father's love made man. As Son of Man he continues to pour himself out at every moment in everything he says and does. That is his way back to the Father, the way that takes us with him.
Does this not mean that the only way we can receive him in faith, hope and love, and truly reverence him for who he is, is by making a gift of our lives to him, thus joining him in his insecure state of homeless wayfarer? Make that state of being ours? Is that the cost of discipleship? The security of living with him is the tension and insecurity of self-surrender? This is why I love/hate Giussani questions. The answers take me beyond my comfort zone, where my desire to measure, grasp, understand, and control does not want to go.
In addressing the second man, Christ states the challenge more extremely:
Verse 21: Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord let me go first and bury my father." But Jesus answered him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead."
It seems like such a cold response. So unfeeling, so lacking in compassion. Just an absolute no, without any explanation. Why? Is it because the man is already a disciple, has already said yes to a relationship that trumps all human bonds? Is the conflict the man goes through, his love for his father, his felt need to bury him, the guilt and pain he experiences in not burying him, - is all that part of following the Lord? Was it all implicit included in the first yes? It certainly seems to be.
But it seems extreme, no? Elijah let Elisha go and say his good-byes, break with his past, his family and friends, and then follow him. Why doesn't Mystery explain itself? Perhaps because we could never fully understand or completely accept the answer. That explanation seems appropriate, especially since the yes to Christ is one of Faith, Hope, and Love, which makes our yes as total as his call. Perhaps Fr. Giussani's human father was saying more than he realizes when he told his son to "ask for the reason behind all things." He didn't know he was setting his son on the way to Christ.
Monday, June 23, 2014
The Heart of the Gospel
36. All revealed truths derive from the same divine source and are to be believed with the same faith, yet some of them are more important for giving direct expression to the heart of the Gospel. In this basic core, what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council explained, "in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or a 'hierarchy' of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith." This holds true as much for the dogmas of faith as for the whole corpus of the Church's teaching, including her moral teaching.
The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, par. 36, p. 19
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
The Joy of the Gospel
3. I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this message is not meant for him, since "no one is excluded form the joy brought by the Lord." The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step toward Jesus, we come to realize that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms.....
7. ....I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: "Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction."
(So why do so many of us Christians still presume our religion is basically a matter of adhering to free-floating moral standards and doctrinal truths disconnected from the person of Christ?)
The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, pp. 1, 4
Monday, June 2, 2014
Spouse of the Lamb Who was Slain
Saint Joan
You felt so afraid,
so all alone
in the dungeon
of disbelief
mistrust,
daggers thrust
into your confidence.
Your cheek
you turned
against the splinters
of the stake
and there it stayed
and burned.
Charred body's
what was left
to tell the story of your death.
But of your life,
what could we say?
Not a fallen soldier
but a burnt and blackened bride
went to paradise
that day.
Rita A. Simmonds, Magnificat, pp.424, 425
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life: a meditation on John 14: 1- 5
This meditation comes from reading Adrienne von Speyr, and Dom Luigi Giussani. In my opinion, these two spiritual giants compliment and bring out the depth of each other's gifts. As you go through Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, I hope you will take off in the direction the Spirit moves you, and feel inspired to add your own personal reflections. The text is long and wordy, but, I hope, worth reading slowly and responding to, not in one prolonged sitting, but in bits and pieces.
I believe all of us experience the tensions of living the human adventure and journeying towards God. The tension of being finite and hungering insatiably for the Infinite; of being limited and yet wanting to be the measure of the Unlimited One; of feeling the urge to surrender to God and yet remain independent of him; to have his Divine Life in us, but have it on our own terms and under our own control; to possess God without giving ourselves to Him; to follow Christ, yet be in charge of the way we go. This tension comes from living in the Spirit, under the influence of Grace, in virtue of faith, hope, and charity instead living by our natural inclinations to see, feel, taste, figure out, understand, enjoy, and digest everything we experience according to our human capacities and limits. How could we not experience this tension, when we inevitably reduce the Christ to what little we are open to receive from Him who wants to take us over completely? How could we not perceive his generous offering of self as an invasion of our freedom and autonomy. But we can't have it both ways: we can't belong to ourselves and belong to him.
(Where Christ says “you” in the singular or plural, personalize his message by speaking out your name. His revelations are to all of us, as the different, unique persons we are, and as a common family, who share all his gifts with one another.)
Jesus said to his disciples:(including all us who follow him today) Let not your hearts be troubled.
Do not let all your worries, fears, anxieties and insecurities overcome you, nor your ideas and feelings. None of that is the measure of who you are. The measure of who you are is your relationship with me in faith, hope and love. I am the measure of who you are. Get yourself out of the bio-dome, or ego-bubble inside which you live, that ego-bubble where you need to stay in order to feel secure, safe, and in control, that bio-dome where you imagine yourself autonomous and free. Get yourself outside of that artificial environment, that comfort zone, and into the supernatural life that flows from me to you. Live in that ever-deeper, always developing, ongoing relationship with me.)
Believe in God; believe also in me.
Put the same faith in me that you have in my Father. That is going to be difficult for you, because soon I am not going to look like my Father’s Son to you. When I am hanging on the cross, helpless, dying, and forsaken, I will look like anything but the divine Son of my Father in your eyes. Yet that will be when I am most perfectly the Son He eternally calls me to be, for I will be giving myself to Him for all of you. I will be pouring out on you all of the Life and Love the Father eternally pours into me. I will be absorbing the sin and evil of all mankind, and cleansing you of your sins. That is my mission, my purpose in life, my destiny: to give myself away, give myself in sacrifice to you, for you, in order to bring you back to the Father.
You can trust that gift I am making of myself, even though you cannot comprehend it. You can trust me and my Father. We know what we are doing, even though you are not capable of understanding it.
In my Father’s house there are many rooms.
So many rooms, many places. As many places as there are persons, and there are so, so many of you. Here on earth, you have no place that is really yours. Whatever home you have is temporary. Your real home, the place where you finally settle down, is with me and my Father. On earth your whole life is a journey home. As long as you are here you are a person-the-way; to be a wayfarer is who you are; it is your identity on earth. You don’t become your full self until you arrive home and are in my Father’s embrace. Here you cannot be your full self, your definitive self, because you are not with Him. What you are on earth, who you are on earth, is a continual growing towards him, an on-going movement towards Him. That’s why wayfarer is your identity in this world. This identity gives your life meaning and purpose. Here as you journey you start discovering who you are, you develop self-awareness, in your relationship to me and my Father. How could you know yourself any other way, since you belong to us?
If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
Who you are, your personal characteristics, would get lost in the immensity of the Kingdom, if there were not a special place in my Father’s house for the unique person that each one of you is. If there were only one huge dwelling place, I would have to reduce you all to one common denominator, and level you all down to single manageable mass. But no, this is not the case. Here on earth, I have a specific purpose for each person, including you, a calling, a mission, a vocation that no one else can fulfill. I guide you principally by my grace in the sacraments. What you do on earth is not a matter of indifference or unimportance. I call no one to exist, no one to follow me, without a purpose. Each one has a different part in my divine plan for the Kingdom. What makes you all different on earth will continue to make you all different in heaven. Hereafter, all the differences will all fit together into the beautiful, harmonious, glorious Kingdom of my Father, where He is all in all. Then you will be fully yourself and finally be his child forever. This is why I have told you over and over I am going back to my Father. I came from him by myself. But I will return to him with all of you. And my Father will accept you, because he will recognize me in all of you. You have already been sealed as mine in Baptism. In the Kingdom, you will be stamped with the final form my grace gives you. You, in all the richness of your differences, will mirror me to my Father and give him glory. I do not go back to him empty-handed.
And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may also be.
My going to the Father is part of my mission, as is my coming from the Father. This commission from him is my path, the Way that I have received from my Father. It starts and ends with Him. You see my going to him begin with the Cross, and continue in my Resurrection. From you I go in suffering and to him I return in glory. And I take with me all who believe in me. I will be beyond your eyes with the Father, and carry you who love me to him. As the Risen Son, I am no longer limited to one place. I am with, and in, whoever believes in me and loves me, in every place, at all times. So you do not have to be afraid because your eyes do not see me as before. When I am with the Father I am also with you in the world. I, the Unlimited One, am with you who are limited. You are everywhere I am, because I am everywhere you are, whether you see me, or feel me, or not. I am not reducible to your senses, your emotions, or your ideas. Always remember: I want you with me and my Father once and for all.
When the Father and I are One forever, beyond my mission, beyond any more possibility of separation caused by sin and suffering, then the final stage of your redemption will be achieved. My coming again in glory at the end of time will not be because the Father has sent me to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, but to bring you whom I have redeemed into the fullness of His Kingdom. I will come as the One who lives with the Father and dwells in him. You will have eternal life in us. You will live in our reciprocal love. And that love will fill you with the intense, divine life of the Spirit. Your very self will be the dwelling place of our glory.
And you know the way where I am going.
I am going to the Father. Since you know I am going there, now you know how you will get there. You know the path that leads you there because you know me. And you know there is no other Way to the Father. So you know enough, even though you have not seen the Father for yourself. You know where I am going, you know the Father is love, you know He sent me to show you what the way of love is by walking it ahead of you. Now you know how to follow in my footsteps. My Father infinitely surpasses what your eyes can see and what your minds can imagine. So you cannot get to him without me, without the way I give you, without the Way that I am.
True, the way of love is the way of suffering. That is the path I walk, the Way I am. True also, that you will only know this way when you travel it, when you experience it. Suffering will persuade you to hesitate on the path, to refuse to go on, to stop and then go in the wrong direction. All that happens because of the pain involved in loving others and suffering for them. Even though Baptism has set you on the right path, even though Penance and Communion will bring you back to the path again and again, you will never reach the point where you walk the path steadily and unhesitatingly without failure. Just because one day you are ninety does not mean you have made more progress than someone who is forty. My grace will be working in you, molding you and conforming you to me all the time, but you will not be able to measure it. Nor will you ever stop being somewhat reluctant to receive it, no matter how old you are. Your progress, growth, lies in my hands, not yours. I am impatient for you to grow and progress. But mine is the impatience of divine love which will seem like endless patience to you, endless opportunities which you fail to respond to, opportunities you perceive as challenges too surprising and unexpected to recognize and accept. In my divine impatience I will patiently keep on teaching you that you must let my love, my sacrificial self-giving, find a place in your heart now, instead of later, today instead of tomorrow!
Thomas said to him: Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?
You are like Thomas. Every person is. You want clarity. With your limited heart and mind you want to comprehend me completely. You want to know the whole way even before you start out. You can’t help trying to grasp and measure me with your human senses and abilities. That is impossible. Even if you had physical contact with me in the flesh as the Twelve had, even if you had been in the upper room with them and could both see and touch me as Thomas did! You would never be the measure of me, just as they could not. Like the Twelve, you have to stop being so small-minded; stop making the mistake they did.
The only path you know is one that your feet walk on. My path is greater than that. You cannot understand my plans, my destiny, even though I have told you everything. The reason why I came into the world, the only purpose that I have, is to bring all of you back to my Father. Doing his will, giving myself away for you in love, pouring myself out in sacrificial love, that is my path back to the Father. All that is my will; all that is my way of love.
Of course you can’t picture and grasp this path, no matter how you try. You hear what I say about the Kingdom, and you learn the truths about eternal life, but it is abstract theory to you, because all you can see is that human life always ends in the disaster of death. In one sense, that perception is right. The life of my Father, the place where he is, the way to him, all remain totally incomprehensible to you, for they are beyond human reaching. You need, you want, a concrete goal you can see, perhaps a marker that is a mile away. That’s the way you are. But there is no way to take the infinite, and make it quantifiable, clear, and certain. Everything you humanly know and do during your whole lifetime is only a passing moment of your already unending life in me. That’s why you have to put your faith in me and realize I am the way to the Father, the only way, your way, and everyone else’s. Only by believing in me and following me can you become part of the Always More and Ever Greater Way that I am.
Jesus said to him: I am the way, the truth and the life.
I understand how discouraged you feel at times and how blind you usually are. I know you crave security. That’s why I am revealing my deepest secrets to you and all the others. Even though I reveal my secrets to you, they remain mysteries, however. They can only be grasped in the dark light of faith. You cannot yet see my mysteries in all their light and clarity. Nor can you help reaching out and trying to measure to what I say by means of your limited capacity to receive. Your very lack, your neediness, is why I will infuse in you the gift of the Holy Spirit. That will enable you to get beyond yourself and operate out of the gifts of faith, hope, and love, which unite you to me. The Spirit who come from the Father, he will receive my call in you, the call to follow me back to the Father. The Spirit will get you beyond your human limitations and enable you to enter into the mystery of who, and what, I am. The Spirit will teach you what it means to believe. Then you will hold to the mystery without trying to measure it.
You will begin to understand that I am the Way: the-way-to-the-Father. I am the only Way, and the whole Way. The whole Way is everything I am – my conception, birth, growth, manhood, work, suffering, and death. All of that is the Way that I am. So it is the way you have to travel. You do not have to see the whole way; you do not have to survey the entire journey to know you are on the right path. I give you the grace to go step by step, then more grace for the next step you are to take. That’s what it means to walk with me in the light of faith.
I am the Truth. I cannot be anything but truth, because I am always witnessing to my Father, the whole truth of who he is. I am that Truth, his Truth, the Truth that comes from him. I only speak of what I have seen in Him. I am no empty word, no meaningless verbiage; I am the fullness of his Truth. I am not some changeable or temporary message. I am his eternal, living, always new Truth. All other truths you know are only partial, and therefore deceptive. Nothing else you know can exhaust nor grasp the all-embracing Truth I am.
I am the Life. His life, I am the Life that comes from him. All the divine life he is, he pours into me. I am his Son, his very substance. His is movement-to-me, and I am movement-back –to-him. That movement-from-and-to the-Father is who I am on earth. That life is what I pour out unceasingly on the Cross; that is what I give you in every Eucharist – the self-gift of the Father to me and of me to him, the donation we endlessly make of ourselves in the perfect communion of the Trinity. In every Eucharist I am bringing you back to the Father in the one reciprocal movement of life and love that the Three of us is.
No one comes to the Father but by me.
How do you go to the Father? The way the Father has prepared for you: The Way that I am. By following me, by living in union with me in this life through faith, hope and love, you are on the way back to my Father. You have to walk the way that I did, by receiving from me the grace to make an offering of yourself to my Father. When you do that, my whole life will envelop you. That is how you live in me, and at the same time go beyond me to him. I will go with you all the Way, and I will hold you out before me to present you to the Father. You need not be afraid. He will see my life in you. So he will take you in his arms, just as he takes me. He will love you as totally, freely, joyously as he loves me.
That is what my Mother did when she and Joseph joyfully held me up and first presented me in the temple. She was unaware then of all that was ahead of her at the presentation. She was innocent of what she would suffer. At the end, when they took me down from the cross and placed me in her arms, she offered me to the Father again, this time in the joy of faith and yet the agony of presenting me to him as the sacrificial victim of your sins.
I carry you the way my mother first carried me: not at all naively, but knowing fully the cost of all sin and every evil, having borne it joyously. My Mother went beyond her pain and agony at my death and offered me to the Father for you. In the same way I forget my pain, because of the joy of redeeming you and bringing you to him. You need not to be afraid to be in my arms, or in hers. You need not fear even death. Let me give you over to the Father as my Mother did with me, so that I can fill you with his life.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Bergoglio and Giussani
A few weeks ago I read an article on the CL website entitled Bergoglio and Giussani. It was by Massimo Borghesi, and explained not only why Bergoglio like Giussani so much, but also showed some of the influence Giussani has had on then Cardinal Bergoglio's (and now Pope Francis') thought.
Cardinal Bergoglio's esteem began back in the nineties when he first started reading Giussani's works. In 2001 Bergoglio publicly offered two main reasons: "The first, more personal, is the good that this man has done for me, for my life as a priest, in the last ten years, through my reading of his books and articles. The second reason is that I am convinced that his thought is profoundly human, and reaches even the most intimate part of human yearning. I would daresay that it is the most profound, and at the same time, most comprehensible phenomenology of nostalgia as a transcendental fact."
Bregoglio was explaining and deepening what had said in 1999, when he commented on The Religious Sense "For many years, Monsignor Giussani's writings have inspired my reflection...The Religious Sense is not a book for the exclusive use of those who are part of the movement, nor is it only for Christians or believers. It is a book for all men who take their own humanity seriously. I dare say that today, the question that we must primarily face is not so much the problem of God - the existence of God, the knowledge of God, but the problem of man, the knowledge of man, and finding in man himself the imprint that God left there, in order to meet him...If a man has forgotten or censored his fundamental 'whys' and the longing of his heart, the fact of speaking to him about God proves to be an abstract, esoteric discourse, or a push toward a devotion with no bearing on life. One cannot begin a discourse about God without first blowing away the ashes that suffocate the burning embers of those fundamental 'whys'. The first step is to create the sense of those questions that are hidden, buried, perhaps suffering, but that exist."
Brogoglio found in Giussani's writings a God whose grace, ( i. e. whose unpredictable, always new, action in man), comes first. Grace is always the source, as well as the sustenance, follow-through, and fulfillment of man's hunger for the Infinite. Man today doesn't see Christ as the satisfaction of his human aspirations because his religious sense has been blunted.
Bregoglio continues his commentary on The Religious Sense: "...in order to interrogate ourselves when faced with signs, a extremely human capacity is necessary, the first one that we have as men and women: wonder, the capacity to be amazed, as Giussani calls it, ultimately , the heart of a child. Only wonder knows. ... The cultural opiate tends to obliterate, weaken, or kill this capacity for wonder. The beginning of any philosophy is wonder. There is a phrase of John Paul II that says that the drama of contemporary Christianity lies in the fact of putting categories and norms in place of wonder. Wonder comes before all categories. It is what brings me to search, to open myself; it is what makes my response possible, and it is neither a verbal nor a conceptual response. Because if wonder opens me as a question, the only response is the encounter - and only in the encounter is thirst quenched."
When Bergoglio presented Giussani's book The Attraction of Jesus, he confirmed: "Everything in our life, today as in the time of Jesus, begins with an encounter, - an encounter with this man, the carpenter from Nazareth, a man like all others, and at the same time different. The first ones, - John, Andrew, Simon, - discovered that they were looked at in their very depths, read deep down, and a surprise was generated in them, a wonder that made them feel tied to Him, a wonder that made them feel different. ... One cannot understand this dynamic of the encounter that arouses wonder and adhesion without the "trigger" of mercy. Only those who have encountered mercy, who have been caressed by the tenderness of mercy, get on well with the Lord. ...The privileged place of he encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ toward my sin."
In Borghesi's article, Bregolio then cites another book by Giussani, Something that Comes Before, to explain what an unmerited gift the encounter with Christ is: "the 'something that comes before' is the encounter with Christ, even if unclear, not truly aware - as for John and Andrew, it was something astonishing, not definable by them. The thing that come first, grace, is the relationship with Christ: Christ is the grace, it is this Presence, and it is your relationship with it, your dialogue with it, your way of looking at it, thinking about it, focusing on it."
This encounter is the essential form in which Christianity has to manifest itself today! The Cardinal's understanding of this profound insight is what influenced him to say a some years later as Pope Francis that "The dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent. The Church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focus in essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts us more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall as a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow." Without the encounter, the moral behavior has no foundation. If it is Christ that attracts us first, and encountering Him comes before all else, there is no danger of falling into moralism, dogmatism, or any form of Christian fundamentalism which reduces Christ to an ideology!
Bregoglio wrote in 2001 :"This Christianly authentic conception of morality that Giussani presents has nothing to do with the seemingly spiritual quietisms of which the shelves of today's religious markets are full. And neither does it have to do with the Pelagianism that is so popular in its various and sophisticated manifestations. Pelagianism, at bottom, is a new version of the tower of Babel. Seemingly spiritual quietisms are efforts at prayer or immanent spirituality that never go beyond themselves."
Pelagianism and Quietism are two ways we can reduce Christ and Christianity to a this-worldly equivalent but still deceive ourselves into thinking we are being religious and spiritual. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis continues and deepens his explanation of how and (more importantly) why we still try today to reduce Christ to what our Ego can control and manipulate instead of losing ourselves in the wonder of who He is. The pope says: "This worldliness can be fueled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of Gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings. The other is the self-absorbed promethean neo-Pelagianism of those who ultimately trust in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyses and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. These are the manifestations of an anthropocentric immanentism. It is impossible to think that a genuinely evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity," (94)
Wow! After reading that a few times and chewing on it over again, I have to conclude that Pope Francis is every bit as deep a thinker as Pope Benedict! Praise God that in his everyday preaching, Francis knows how to say profound things in an evangelical, missionary style!
All quotations are from the article Bergoglio and Giussani, by Massimo Borghesi, which can be read in its entirety on the Communion and Liberation website.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Jesus Christ, Door to the Sheepfold and Master of Dogma
John 20:19 "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them: Peace be with you."
Man never has the whole truth at his disposal; a portion of it always remains with God. In all communication of truth, there is a kind of reservatio mentalis. This reserving , however, is not done by us, but by God. When arranging matters as we think best, we must always say: assuming that God does not arrange things otherwise. For man to make use of reservatio mentalis is all right provided he reserves something not for his own advantage, but for God's advantage. In belief, the reservatio of truth occurs on the part of God, who perhaps holds it back for communication to us at a later time. In belief there is a foregoing of complete understanding of truth, an abdicatio of truth, which is based on the recognition that everything we know and love has, in God, the form of the ever-greater.
But this foregoing does not apply in the case of dogma. Here, nothing is relativized. Dogma is the door that is closed against everything non-Christian outside of it. As directed to the outside, the dogmas are rigid and uncompromising. We must regard the door that the Lord closes behind him as closed for as long a he does not instruct us to do otherwise. And he himself does not open the door anymore , but goers right through the closed door. For him, the rigid closedness does not exist, for him every truth is open. But for us the closing must be regarded as final, as absolute. If we were able to add something to the Lord's truth by our own thought, the everything would be repeated called into question, including within the confines of the Church. Then, however, the door would not longer be the Lord, but rather, man and his truth.The Lord alone has the freedom to enter, from the outside to the inside, through the closed doors. What is closed for us is open for him. In heaven there will no longer be any unclosed doors because there will no longer be any unbelief.
Dogmas are securings of belief against outside dangers, not closures for the sake of closure. Dogma has a basis of immovable truth , but it opens itself out from that basis into the unlimitedness of living, inexhaustible truth in God. Objectively, it has an absolute point of departure; but it is also relative in each person who subjectively assimilates it, because here absolute truth is grasped only partially and imperfectly, and exists within an open movement of belief toward the Lord. The framework of the dogmatic truth is unshakable, but within its confines, the infinite truth of the Lord moves in sovereign freedom. God's truth is infinite, and is therefore always just outlined and suggested in dogmatic precepts. The measure of dogmatic truth remains the Lord himself; and the Lord can see everything differently, and infinitely more fully than any particular believer can see it. Neither individual believers nor the Church as a whole have any authority to make changes in dogma; but they are also not allowed to do so, because it is the Lord alone who comprises the truth of dogma.
From the way that the absolute and relative are intertwined, we can see that whereas man may regard himself personally as the greatest sinner, he nevertheless has no right to regard someone else as more guilty than himself. Another person could, perhaps, by citing different reasons, prove to him that he is wrong; an he too, in a certain respect, could be right. But in the end, both would be wrong, because the Lord alone holds in his hand the measuring stick of sin. All human judgments must, in the end, yield before his exclusive judgments. Similarly, the Lord remains the master of dogma, whose entire depths, which men do not plumb, are his own depths, which he avails himself of in freedom.
Adrienne von Speyr John vol.4, pp. 200, 201
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Von Speyr: On Scandal
John 13:11 For he knew who was to betray him. That is why he said: You are not all clean.
The Lord knows his betrayer, but he does not point him out, for outwardly he still belongs to the community, although inwardly he has turned away from the Lord. The Lord does not expel anyone; a person who goes away has excluded himself. Before the community, the Lord does not give a hint as to who will leave it soon, for the scandal is not yet public. So, too, the Church will not bring scandals to light before the instigators themselves give occasion for it.
The scandal of Judas was one that had to happen, but many another scandal in the Church has no visible cause. Yet the Lord does not spare her such scandal. Is it because the Lord himself took upon himself the scandal of the Cross? Is it because through one person's scandal the other members of the Chruch are horrified and thus strengthened in their loyalty to the Church? In any case, the offense is tolerated, even if it affects the Church's holy of holies. The Lord endures it in the room at the Last Supper. The Church must endure scandal; she may not circumvent or deny it, or act as if it were not there, or distance herself from it. Nor is it said that the Church should immediately and by all means stifle the scandal by eliminating the evil, for perhaps the sinner may still repent. Nor does the Lord cast Judas out - it can be better to let an abscess ripen than to put a knife to it too soon and kill it in its early stages. Not every scandal rousing book needs to be immediately banned, even if it may not keep the Church's doctrine intact. Perhaps it is better to talk first and to clear up misunderstanding by the light of day, and fairly. Many in the Church are sinners. and every sin is a tacit scandal and a heresy. But the Church is held together by love.
John, Adrienne von Speyr, vol III, p.29
Sunday, April 13, 2014
The Mystery of Christ reflected in the Sacrament of Confession
...Divinity and humanity are not separate spheres within the Son. Everywhere we try to penetrate into his humanity, we encounter the mystery of his being more than a man, that is, his divine sonship. He is not beyond all understanding, and yet precisely in our understanding, the incomprehensible overwhelms us; rather than being able to see him in his entirety, it is we who find ourselves seen by him and drawn into his ever greater dimensions. Because we are incorporated in this way, we lose any overview of our own situation. It is he who contains us in his perfect openness both to the Father and to the world.
Whenever we confess according to his will, we must consider his double attitude so that we, too, may learn the correct attitude. He shows us who he is by opening himself to us: he is the one open to the Father, who in disclosing himself to us, also shows us the Father, also glorifies the Father.
...confession is the fruit of the divine human life. The Lord's turning to us, the form bequeathed to the Church, would be the...legacy that in some way is comprehensible in itself, and the turning to the Father would be the unsurveyable sphere of inspiration. We can understand a great deal about confession, just as we could about miracles. We know, for example, that before, the woman was hemorrhaging, and now, she is healthy. Only the nexus between these two facts remains incomprehensible. Or we understand that our Lord was dead and now lives, but we do not understand how that is possible. We do understand, however, that the things extending into the sphere of understanding are related in the sphere of the incomprehensible and are its manifestation. We understand a great deal about confession in the same way: for example, that there must be penance, that it is advisable for a person to admit his errors, and that there must also be an an authority and a judgment upon good and evil on earth. We also more or less understand many things about faith: that the God-man did penance for our sins on the cross and for that reason the penance we accept for our guilt acquires somehow a symbolic character. Yet all the comprehensible elements are integrated into a whole which as such remains beyond our vision. In the course of the centuries the Church may acquire an increased understanding both of many individual elements and of the incomprehensibility of the whole, and with both of these an understanding of the mystery of Christ, the way he wished to remain alive for us in the vitality of the Father.
Confession Adrienne von Speyr pp 148, 149
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Christ:God and Man
Colossians 2:9 "For in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily."
...Christ is God and man, but in such a way that this meeting of the divine and the human in him does not impose the slightest limitation anywhere. God is not in the least restricted by the Incarnation; it neither hinders nor weakens him; it does not put him in a state of unconsciousness; nothing is lacking to him of his divinity, his eternal life and omniscience. But nothing is lacking to Christ the man, either, as a result of his being God; he does not run up against his divinity as though encountering an obstacle to his genuine, full humanity; it is not as though he skipped right over finite human feelings, knowledge and experience and rushed like a stream into his divinity, finding therein a support for his existence that is unavailable as such to any other man. Rather, he is God and man in a union that leaves both natures intact and binds them together in their perfection, not making them merely run side by side. Only such a union can bring it about that in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily, that deity actually accompanies this human life and has a share in this genuine human experience...Divinity and humanity are so intimately bound together in his being that they interpenetrate, with the exception of only those places where the fulness of one would constrain the fulness of the other and would cause harm to it. Aside from that, the two live in one another in a perfect vitality; God takes on perfectly the man united with him, and he who was made man is permitted to live in God.
Letter to the Colossians, commentary by Adrienne von Speyr pp 77. 78
Saturday, March 22, 2014
The Use of Philosophy
....Philosophy, taken in itself, is above utility. And for this very reason, philosophy is of the utmost necessity for men. It reminds them of the supreme utility of those things which do not deal with means, but with ends. For men do not live only by bread, vitamins, and technological discoveries. They live by values and realities that are above time, and are worth being known for their own sake; they feed in that invisible food which sustains the life of the spirit, and which makes them aware, not of such or such means at the service of their life, but of their very reasons for living - and suffering, and hoping.
The philosopher in society witnesses to the supreme dignity of thought; he points to what is eternal in man, and stimulates our thirst for pure knowledge and disinterested knowledge, knowledge of those fundamentals - about the nature of things and the nature of the mind, and man himself, and God - which are superior to, and independent of, anything we can make or produce or create - and to which all our practice is appendent, because we think before acting and nothing can limit the range of thought: our practical decisions depend on the stand we take on the ultimate questions that human thought is able to ask.
Jacques Maritain, On The Use of Philosophy, pp. 6, 7
Friday, March 14, 2014
The Risk of Education
Recently a provocative question came up: "What would a classroom like that look like?" I have been wondering about the answer ever since. The that under question is clear and specific, so that is easy to explain, but the question itself is impossible to answer. This is how the question came about: I was with a small group of teachers discussing Giussani's book The Risk of Education, and one of them wondered out loud: "Imagine how marvelous it would be if all teachers actually taught the way Giussani proposes." Then from another person came the question: "Yes indeed, what would a classroom like that look like?"
Those of us who admire Giussani can make the mistake of idealizing him, and regard his book on education as the solution to all the problems we have in our schools today. In a general sense, it is, because the book analyzes our educational situation accurately and gives the correct directions we should go in. However, the book is no quick fix. Our concrete educational problems are infinite in variety and depend on the right use of personal freedom on the part of all involved, especially teacher and student. That is why no book in itself could resolve our educational problems.
Giussani's slim volume is the distilled wisdom of a lifetime in the classroom and presupposes that teachers accept the living martyrdom they must necessarily endure as they risk themselves trying to communicate truth to their students. While Giussani states the risks of educating accurately and concisely in the book, he also says that the heroic sacrifice of real educators is the only road to success. Such dedication will not guarantee success that is absolute, however, since not all students will be open to the gift the teacher is giving them.
Giussani's message could be taught and applied as a technique. His method could be reduced to a formula, an ideology, or a closed system. But teaching is not a matter of learning the Giussani technique, and then communicating it in bits and pieces to students till they have digested all the information offered. Teaching, or education, from Giussani's perspective aims at opening students up to all of reality. Reality as a whole? How many students have teachers who see reality that way?
Also, teaching and learning are an joint experience. It should be a truism to say that an experience can only be lived. In the teaching, truth come alive, the student's mind and heart come alive, and this lived experience occurs when the teacher communicates not just data or information but something of himself.
Himself? (Or herself?) Why? Why does a teacher have to communicate himself? And what of that self exactly? Why not just the material he (or she) is teaching? Why is the person of the teacher so important? Because of the relationship that only persons can have, a relationship with one another and at the same time with Goodness, Truth and Beauty that is greater than they are. No matter how ably the specific material is communicated, if the link to the "greater than" is not present in the teacher, the teacher does the student an injustice.
Suppose I am a music teacher. I can teach a child what a scale is, and how to play the scale correctly on the piano. I can then move on to teach the student how to form chords, how to read notes on a staff, and also keep time. But scales and notes and chords are boring. These are all "bits and pieces", or rudimentary information a student must have to play music, just as a student must learn how to write the alphabet, print words, and write sentences. As an educator, I can teach the skills involved in writing, or in piano playing, but I have to have a love of music, or a love of language , to inspire passion in my students and wake them up to what miracles language and music are. If I don't communicate the passion I have in me for what is greater than I am, if that passion is not in me to begin with, what right do I have to be a teacher?
The personal relationship between teacher and student is the context in which Truth, Goodness and Beauty are communicated to the student in the present moment. Where the teacher has no relationship to this totality, he has no calling to be a teacher.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
The Nobility of Teaching
"I wanted simply to say what I think are the fundamental factors of the whole educative process. First, the value of tradition, which is the first factor targeted and censured where a power dominates in society, in the family, in civil society, and paradoxically, in religious society. At times, it can happen that ecclesiastical society, if it is lived as will for power, censures its own history. Second, the figure of the educator, which is the place where tradition becomes conscious and becomes a proposal, but it is a proposal that must offer companionship in its impact, and therefore in the comparison, and in the comparison show the reasons for the proposal itself. But this, the third factor, that is to say, the proof, the verification, is not mathematical; it is not a matter of logic; it stops short, as I said, on the threshold of the person's freedom. Here lies the drama of the risk of education. But whatever be the immediate outcome of your own loving passion (because as the Pope says, there is no demonstration of love for mankind like the educative commitment), the living proposal, in other words, the "I" of the educator, must be untiring, an "I"that is not halted by any circumstances of space or of time, nor therefore of age, nor by any exterior situation, not any kid of response."
These remarks constitute the closing paragraph of a conference given by Fr. Luigi Giussani on The Risk of Education in 1985 in Milan Italy, (so the Pope mentioned would be John Paul II.) I think it is a remarkable summation of a conference about an incomparable book. It is a final paragraph that concisely packs in the density and depth of Giussani's wisdom on education with an image of the teacher as sacrificial victim. Educators (teacher, preacher, mother, father, Christian, etc.) are called on day after day to give all they have in them, and give it freely, in the face of rejection, indifference, opposition, and even persecution. It makes me realize that if our teaching is not a "loving passion" that makes us pour ourselves out in self gift, we are doing our students, ourselves, and the Truth we hope to communicate, a tremendous injustice.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Mary's Hidden Words
Mary spoke very little. The silence in which she concealed herself reveals the Son’s word all the better. She lets Him speak, and yet in His Word hers is also hidden.
Mary and her Son walk side by side in such a way that there is always room for both; there is never any need for one or the other to step aside.
Because the only thing I can do is love, I turn my eyes to you sinners, and all I can think of is the birth of my Son, for which I thank you. At the same time I do not see my path or suffering, but only His future path. If it were not for your sin, I would not have had to say my fiat, and so I would have been left without Him. For His sake, then I can look away from Him and look gratefully upon you. And by doing that I can give Him wholly to you, and so, to the Father, so that the Word might be fulfilled.
He came in order to forgive as savior and judge, to give the gift of His grace, to walk the path of suffering, and to take your sins upon Himself. But I can only love, dwell in Him; and because I have received the divine Son through you sinners, on your account, I can love you in God, even as the sinners you are.
Through you I love Him, and through Him I love you.
Lumina/New Lumina, pp.50-51 Adrienne Von Speyr, Ignatius Press
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Man and his activity
....If by the autonomy of earthly realities we mean that created things and even societies have their own distinctive laws and values, which much be gradually identified, used and regulated by men, this kind of autonomy is rightly demanded. Not only is it insisted on by modern man, it is also in harmony with the design of the Creator. By the very fact of creation everything is provided with its own stability, its own truth and goodness, its own laws and orderly functioning. Man must respect these, acknowledging the methods proper to each science or art.
One should therefore deplore certain attitudes of mind which are sometimes found even among Christians because of a failure to recognize the legitimate autonomy of science.These mental attitudes have given rise to conflict and controversy and led many to assume that faith and science are mutually opposed.
If, on the other hand, the autonomy of the temporal order is understood to mean that created things do not depend on God, and that man may use them without reference to the Creator, all who believe in God will realize how false is this teaching. For creation without the Creator fades into nothingness.
Gaudium et Spes, nn. 36
Science is the study of a subject by means of the method required by the subject, not by means of some generally applicable method that undermines its specific character. (Romano Guardini)
So what within science gives it the right or ability to step outside the limits of any particular science and begin its study with a prejudice against the supernatural that posits the impossibility of God and creation by God?
Monday, January 20, 2014
Dialogue on Charity, Part Two
This is the second part of my dialogue with Fr. Giussani's thoughts on charity, love, friendship, and Christ. Although each part can stand alone, it may be helpful to read this in conjunction with Part One, written on Jan 4th of this year. The Bold print is his text, the Italic print is my reflection.
b. Friendship
Using friendship as one's point of departure and as the final goal, with all the ambiguity that this encompasses, is also incomplete.
Ambiguity...What ambiguity? The ambiguity of making too much out of friendship? I never thought about it, but it seems true that making friendship the be all and end all of one's life ("one's point of departure and...final goal") warps friendship. It goes from beautiful to ugly, though it may keep the same name. The beauty of friendship is the love that takes friends out of themselves towards their common passion. Friendship implies an acceptance of the other as the other is, and the sharing of yourself as you are, while each goes beyond the individual self towards that which entrances them both. But if friendship is narcissistic, if I have to buy into your lies and delusions in order to be accepted by you, or you have to swallow mine to be my friend, then at best our so-called friendship is just an arrangement of convenience, convenient complicity, not a mutually enriching sharing of selves. Somehow, love for the true, good and beautiful, love for what is greater than we are, is integral to friendship.
Friendship is a correspondence that one may or may not find: it becomes the road to our destiny, but not the end itself.
Correspondence...again, a word that I did not associate with friendship, but yes, it describes the way two or more genuine friends fit one another. There is a correspondence, a mutuality, a trusting, open communication that cannot be foreseen or planned. They share what they see and in doing so, each sees opens the eyes of the other a bit more. When friendship happens, it is a surprise, a mysterious, beautiful gift. Another provocative idea: "friendship"becomes the road to our destiny".What does that mean? I can say Christ is the "Way", or road to our destiny. So, somehow friendship means we are involved not just with each other, but with a Love and Truth that are greater than we are? In that sense, we who are friends are pulled toward a Love that is our final end. Is that what Giussani means?
2 To freely go out to others, to share a little of their life and to put in common a little of ours, enables us to discover a sublime and mysterious thing (one understands in doing it).
Exactly what "sublime and mysterious thing" is it that we come to understand "in doing it? Maybe this is the response to what I was just asking about the "road to our destiny". It seems to be going beyond ourselves, the freely willed, freely given, gift of ourselves in friendship, that is "sublime and mysterious", because there is nothing artificial about it, nothing coercive, or manipulative. It is given unconditionally, and it is sublimely beautiful in the reciprocation. I think that is what Giussani means.
It is the discovery of the fact that precisely because we love them, it is not we who make them happy. Who is the reason for everything? Who made everything? God.
We find happiness in the gift of friendship, in the entering into it. But we didn't make it happen. God did, when we went beyond ourselves.Or perhaps more accurately: his Spirit opened us to one another so we could receive his love in our sharing, even though we thought we were in charge of the process.
So Jesus is not only He who announces to me the truest word, who explains the law of reality, He is no longer only the light of my mind: I discover that Christ is the meaning of my life.
Again words that have so much packed into them. How does Christ explain "the law of reality"? What is "the law of reality"? The law of the gift. I am gift. My life is gift. At every moment I am receiving the gift of my being. To enter into the reality that I am, I have to give myself away. Christ does more than illuminate and inspire me with his truth. Self gift is what I am meant to be, and the more I give myself I will find that I have more to give. Not because I am inexhaustible, but because the Divine Giver who made me replenishes what little I give of my weak limited self, and makes me capable of more giving.
The witness of those who have experienced this value is very beautiful: "I will continue to do charitable work because of all my sufferings and all of theirs have meaning."
The value is in the giving, whether it is reciprocated or not, whether it brings immediate joy or not, whether it makes me feel fulfilled or not. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. The result is beyond our control.
Hoping in Christ, everything has meaning: Christ.
What matters is that our going beyond ourselves, our self gift, is what conforms us to him. This means that whatever suffering we go through in loving and giving of ourselves will bring us to the fullness of joy in Christ.
I discover this, finally, in the place where I do charitable work, precisely by means of the final powerlessness of my love; it is the experience in which the intelligence discovers wisdom, true culture.
The charitable work done in powerless self-gift helps us see how an environment of goodness and love is created. This "culture" isn't programmable or technologically induced, it is the fruit of love. This seems to be what the apostles did, what missionaries do, what disciple of Christ do everyday. Their self gift proclaims the One who is greater than they, and plants the seed of his presence in the world among different people. In his time, it grows into a sub-culture, then perhaps a culture, an even a civilization of love.
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