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 

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. 

"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.

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

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

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