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

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.

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