If Only We Knew the Gift of God

Certainly we cannot “build” the Kingdom of God by our own efforts—what we build will always be the kingdom of man with all the limitations proper to our human nature. The Kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely because of this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to our hope. And we cannot—to use the classical expression—”merit” Heaven through our works. Heaven is always more than we could merit, just as being loved is never something “merited”, but always a gift.

However, even when we are fully aware that Heaven far exceeds what we can merit, it will always be true that our behavior is not indifferent before God and therefore is not indifferent for the unfolding of history. We can open ourselves and the world and allow God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is good. This is what the saints did, those who, as “God's fellow workers”, contributed to the world's salvation (cf. 1 Cor 3:9; 1 Th 3:2).

We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces. So on the one hand, our actions engender hope for us and for others; but at the same time, it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad.

Spe Salvi 35

Reflection – Happy Pentecost Sunday! It is good to reflect on this day on the whole notion of ‘gift’. In the medieval church, the primary title of the Holy Spirit was Donum Dei – the gift of God. The whole dynamic of this day, and this mystery is gift and reception, the Spirit coming down and our hearts opening to receive Him. "If only you knew the gift of God..." (Jn 4)

We of North America are deeply rooted in an economy and culture of production and accomplishment. The gift of the Spirit, the dynamism of God which we see in this feast, which is the true story of the world and of salvation, leads us to build our life on something very different.

Before we ‘do’, before we ‘accomplish’, before we produce—we are. We are constituted, made, blessed, given, conformed, shaped, empowered by the action of God. All nice passive verbs, and how important that proper passivity is for us.

The great project of modernity in all its manifestations was about man taking hold of the world, taking absolute charge of it, and making it exactly what he thought it should be. The Great March of humanity, as I read in a rather brilliant newspaper column this weekend (sorry I can't locate the link)—the triumphant procession towards the glorious kingdom of man where we finally stretch to our full height of power and majesty.

Well, the Great March led to the Gulag, to Auschwitz, the Killing Fields, and the abortion clinics of our society. It was no march at all, but a lemming-run off the cliffs of war, terror, and death.

Gift, reception, listening to the Spirit, letting God unfold His kingdom, opening up to cooperate in that Kingdom—this is the desperate and urgent need of our times. We are running out of money, running out of virtue, running out of patience. Young people are rioting in our cities; the world is writhing and twisting under the knife of want and austerity.

God has a way out for us; God has a plan. And He has a gift for us—the life of God, the power of infinite love and generosity, the ability of God to penetrate our hearts, wash them clean, set them on fire and strengthen them to live and die for love’s sake. That is the Kingdom of God; that is the Holy Spirit; that is what God wants to give you and me today.

Happy Feast Day.

Adventures in Social Media

Well, with the permission of my lawful ecclesiastical superior, I've decided to try out Twitter. It is, definitely, an experiment. If it turns out to be pointless or time-consuming I will drop it - the blog is getting good traffic as it is.

The Madonna House community is slowly learning about social media and feeling out its apostolic possibilities. I am one of our digital pioneers, tracking the e-regon Trail in my covered cyber-wagon, herding my stray thoughts along down the trail (get along, little dogies! Yah!).

Anyhow, my Twitter name is Fr.Denis Lemieux, if you want to 'follow' me. Now, I know nothing - nothing whatsover - about Twitter (hence the experiment). If anyone reading this knows anything that might help me, and wants to give this poor techno-Luddite a helping hand, feel free to comment below.

Learning to Listen

In silent contemplation, then, the eternal Word, through whom the world was created, becomes ever more powerfully present and we become aware of the plan of salvation that God is accomplishing throughout our history by word and deed. As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, divine revelation is fulfilled by “deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them” (Dei Verbum, 2).

This plan of salvation culminates in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the mediator and the fullness of all revelation. He has made known to us the true face of God the Father and by his Cross and Resurrection has brought us from the slavery of sin and death to the freedom of the children of God. The fundamental question of the meaning of human existence finds in the mystery of Christ an answer capable of bringing peace to the restless human heart. The Church’s mission springs from this mystery; and it is this mystery which impels Christians to become heralds of hope and salvation, witnesses of that love which promotes human dignity and builds justice and peace.

Word and silence: learning to communicate is learning to listen and contemplate as well as speak.

This is especially important for those engaged in the task of evangelization: both silence and word are essential elements, integral to the Church’s work of communication for the sake of a renewed proclamation of Christ in today’s world. To Mary, whose silence “listens to the Word and causes it to blossom” (Private Prayer at the Holy House, Loreto, 1 September 2007), I entrust all the work of evangelization which the Church undertakes through the means of social communication.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – So we wrap up this little document, which took us a full blog-week to get through. ‘Learning to communicate is learning to listen,’ leaps out at me as a good sentient to ponder in this, although the whole passage is very beautiful.

There is such an anguish in the world today—at least I experience it as such—of miscommunication, failure to communicate. In matters political and moral, opposing camps generally talk past one another. Slogans are chanted. Invective is hurled. Straw men are constructed and destroyed in such volume one wonders where all the straw is coming from.

‘Learning to communicate is learning to listen.’ And this is important for those engaged in the task of evangelization. Certainly this is so because many of the Church’s teachings these days are hard ones for people to hear, and also because people have terrible misunderstandings and deep wounds around authority, the Church, ‘law’, that make it difficult if not impossible for them to sit still for a catechism lecture. We have to get where people are coming from and how they are hearing us if we are to be able to put our Catholic teachings into better language that has a chance of being heard.

But I think there’s something even deeper than those very real considerations. Learning to listen is vital to the New Evangelization for a more central reason. When I choose to listen to you, really listen to you, what I am communicating to you is that you are important to me. You matter. You are not just a passive audience for my doctrines and ideas; you are not just a scalp for me to hang on my convert belt; you are not a thing for me to manipulate and control by force of argument or personality.

You are a person. At the moment I am really listening to you, I am communicating in that listening that you are the most important person in the world to me. And this is a vitally evangelical act.

Because that’s how God is with each one of us, all the time. We have no idea, really, just how much God loves us, each one of us—you, me, your spouse, your neighbor, your best friend and your worst enemy. How much He loves us! And this love has to be communicated—that is the heart of the New Evangelization, without which all the doctrines and dogmas and moral laws are (literally) heartless.

We communicate God’s love by loving people, and it seems to me that to truly love people we have to listen to them. So we communicate love, the Gospel, and God Himself in a primary and indispensable way by listening to people. Learning to listen is learning to communicate

And so much happens in that listening. The Word blossoms in the other—God is already present there in that person, you know, somehow, in some fashion. It is our silent listening that fosters the life of God in that person—love grows, God grows in them. The Word becomes flesh—my flesh, your flesh, the flesh of the other person. It happens; I have seen it happen. And this is what we must do, it seems to me, if we want the Gospel to truly find a home in the hearts of men and women today.

Adult Conversation

If God speaks to us even in silence, we in turn discover in silence the possibility of speaking with God and about God. “We need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born” (Homily, Eucharistic Celebration with Members of the International Theological Commission, 6 October 2006). In speaking of God’s grandeur, our language will always prove inadequate and must make space for silent contemplation. Out of such contemplation springs forth, with all its inner power, the urgent sense of mission, the compelling obligation “to communicate that which we have seen and heard” so that all may be in communion with God (1 Jn 1:3). Silent contemplation immerses us in the source of that Love who directs us towards our neighbours so that we may feel their suffering and offer them the light of Christ, his message of life and his saving gift of the fullness of love.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – Yesterday we looked at how God’s deepest revelation of Himself came to us, not in words, but in silence. Today we look at how our deepest coming to God is as well a silent, not a spoken one.

This has always been the movement in prayer, throughout all the strands and traditions of Christianity. I suspect it is so in other religions, too.

In lectio divina (for example) the movement is from the lectio, to the ruminatio, to the meditatio, to the contemplatio. In other words, from reading and pondering and thinking about a passage to the silent contemplation of the received truth. The latter stages of oratio and actio—prayer and action—are simply what the Pope mentions above, that out of silent contemplation springs urgency of mission, movement outwards towards God in loving surrender and neighbor in loving service.

My own experience of silence in prayer, such as it is (I make no claims to mystical depth, and I sure ain’t no Carthusian monk) is that a certain leap of faith is required in it. It’s not like this time of contemplatio in prayer is uniformly and assuredly filled with all sort of deep sentiments and soul-shaking revelations. It can be pretty empty, sometimes. Pretty dry, often. Pretty boring, even.

And so to stick with it takes a certain amount of self-discipline, for sure, but even more a certain degree of faith. What is really happening to us when we pray occurs at such a depth of our soul and inmost heart that both our conscious mind and our emotions are left in the dust, so to speak.

They are kind of like small children present while adults are having a serious adult conversation. They get bored, they get fractious, they want to go out and play and run around. God and the human soul are the ‘adults’ having an encounter that is truly beyond words; our minds, emotions, and bodies are restless toddlers.

So faith and self-discipline are needed here. And giving your mind something to do, like a mother might give her toddler a toy or game to distract it so she can talk to her Visitor. So… the rosary! Or… the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner”). While the mind engages in some simple repetitive prayer, the heart, the soul can expand to meet its God.

Adult conversation. And out of that adult conversation, the capacity for truly mature adult engagement with the world: loving without counting the cost and bearing the joyful burden of the Gospel to the ends of the earth, according to what God has given us to do.

Words Fall Away When Truth Itself Comes

Attention should be paid to the various types of websites, applications and social networks which can help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning, as well as making space for silence and occasions for prayer, meditation or sharing of the word of God. In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives.

It is hardly surprising that different religious traditions consider solitude and silence as privileged states which help people to rediscover themselves and that Truth which gives meaning to all things. The God of biblical revelation speaks also without words: “As the Cross of Christ demonstrates, God also speaks by his silence. The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word …. God’s silence prolongs his earlier words. In these moments of darkness, he speaks through the mystery of his silence” (Verbum Domini, 21).

The eloquence of God’s love, lived to the point of the supreme gift, speaks in the silence of the Cross. After Christ’s death there is a great silence over the earth, and on Holy Saturday, when “the King sleeps and God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages” (cf. Office of Readings, Holy Saturday), God’s voice resounds, filled with love for humanity.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – First, I have to note: Pope Benedict XVI endorses my blog! Wooo! After all, what else do I do here but “help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning.” That’s my bag! That’s what I’m all about! Thanks, Holy Father!

It is interesting that he dives right from this somewhat prosaic matter of what websites we should frequent into a deep and powerful meditation on the role of silence in the giving of revelation. One minute we are talking about the excessive verbiage of the information age and its impact on our social life, and then all of the sudden we are at the foot of the Cross, with Christ crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and in the silence of the tomb.

Clearly the Pope is calling us to really deepen this understanding of silence. It is not simply a matter of taking a break from TV, music and the Internet so as to process things. It is a question of God and how He comes to us, and our ability to receive Him in totality and in depth.

God spoke so much to His people: through the patriarchs, the prophets, through his Only Son. Words of wisdom and light, words of admonition and rebuke, words of consolation and hope. We have a whole Book full of the words of God, right?

But the deepest revelation of God was not done in words, but in deed and in silent suffering. God entered that realm of pain and death where words fall away and all that remains is love. And this is the fullness of revelation of God to us, the showing of his love to the end (cf. Jn 13). Both in Christ’s own silence in the face of his persecutors, his agony on the Cross, and in the tomb’s deep silence, and in God the Father’s unfathomable silence as his human children kill his only begotten Son, there is a deep—beyond deep!—revelation of God’s love for the world and exactly how far that love goes to save us.

And indeed these are not events of the distant past. The Eucharist, our most intimate encounter with Christ in this world, is given to us in silence. Jesus comes to the altar, enters our human body and soul in Holy Communion, is adored and worshipped—all in a totality of silence.

All this tells us that words have their place, words are necessary, words surround and cradle the Truth of things, but the heart of it all is silence. Words have their place, but their place is limited and partial. When Truth comes, words fall away, and silent adoration and loving union is all-in-all.

And with that, I will follow the Pope’s recommendation and stop writing now, so as to invite you to “make space for silence and occasions for prayer” today – right now, if you can.

Looking Into the Maelstrom

The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.

Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.

Ultimately, this constant flow of questions demonstrates the restlessness of human beings, ceaselessly searching for truths, of greater or lesser import, that can offer meaning and hope to their lives. Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of sceptical opinions and experiences of life – all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever: “When people exchange information, they are already sharing themselves, their view of the world, their hopes, their ideals” (Message for the 2011 World Day of Communications).

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – You know, it takes a great man to see into the maelstrom of the Internet and its ceaseless chatter and recognize the fundamental human restlessness, seeking for truth, looking for meaning, hunting for answers.

Underneath the opinionating, the endless debates,  and the wrangling lies the quest for what is real, what is valuable, what is good and will make our lives good. It can be hard to see this basic and deep human drive in the midst of the tremendous noise, the sound and fury of our information culture, not to mention its sillier and more superficial aspects.

This is where silence enters in. The work of sorting through the surfeit and excess of words and data, the work of determining what is the truly essential matter and what is distraction, the work of getting to the bottom of a question to reveal its deepest implications and extensions—all of this is work that requires silence, contemplation, a rest from the constant in-flow of fresh stimuli.

And this is precisely what is lacking in the current information technology culture. The tendency of so many, especially the young, to get on-line and stay on-line, to live constantly surfing the digital wave, to be surrounded with noise stimulus from morning to night, precisely robs us of the ability to make any sense of any of it, to understand anything.

When we lack this necessary silence, this stepping aside from the onslaught of words and ideas to process and ponder, I think that’s when the terrible polarization, tribalization into ‘camps’, knee-jerk reactions, and re-hashing of slogans and shibboleths takes over, as opposed to real conversation.

Real communication requires silence. It requires deep listening to the other, to what they are saying and what they are really saying, but it also requires a thoughtful and careful inner work by the speaker, so that what he or she says comes out of real engagement and effort towards the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Our neighbors to the South (who make up most of my readers – hi, Americans!) are engaged in an election year. In Canada, political wrangling and posturing is a permanent reality. I have no idea how political discourse flows in the rest of the world.

We need silence, Lord. ‘Shut us up,’ so that we can delve under the surface of our words and come to understanding and even wisdom, so that our words serve not just our egos and desires, but the task and mission of loving the truth and of loving one another in the truth, so that we can shape our world according to your truth. Amen.

Of Avalanches and Sheep

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested.

In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved.

When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – Well, the Pope says it here all so very well and so very clearly that there’s not too much for me to add, frankly!

It strikes me here that silence serves to deepen our communication. So often we can bob along at the surface of life: stimulus and response, the latest news and buzz, music blaring, the chattering classes chattering away in our ears. Mass culture and its products can easily fill every waking hour if we choose.

And in all this, we can so easily substitute thought with recycled talking points, slogans, catch phrases, and clichés.

Without becoming paranoid or conspiracy-theorist about it, it seems to me that at least some people in high places are undoubtedly quite happy to have us in that state, sheep being herded from one distraction to the next in an avalanche of media words and images while they do whatever they please (wait, do sheep get herded by avalanches? Mixed metaphor alert… oh well, it will make for a good title for the post!)

We have to find silence in our days. We need to be able to think, to sort out, to evaluate and analyze. We cannot do that with music and media of all kinds blaring away at us constantly.

People will often say that silence is impossible in our modern urban world. They might say that it’s easy for me, sitting in a religious community in the Upper Ottawa Valley, where three cars in a row is heavy traffic and our main ‘noise’ is the birds singing at 4.30 a.m., to expound on silence.

But… we all have all these gadgets and gizmos and noise-making machines in our lives, don’t we? And… as far as I know, there’s no federal law so far that mandates they be turned on all the time, right? We have choices, in other words, and we can choose towards silence, even if some noise in our world is not ours to silence.

Our world today, both on the big macro-level, and on the level of your life and mine, has serious problems. Serious problems need serious people to do serious reflection on them. And it is in silence that this reflection occurs, and we can become the kind of people our times require.

Word and Silence

As we draw near to World Communications Day 2012, I would like to share with you some reflections concerning an aspect of the human process of communication which, despite its importance, is often overlooked and which, at the present time, it would seem especially necessary to recall. It concerns the relationship between silence and word: two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved. When word and silence become mutually exclusive, communication breaks down, either because it gives rise to confusion or because, on the contrary, it creates an atmosphere of coldness; when they complement one another, however, communication acquires value and meaning.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – Well, as suggested by commenter Fr. John Flynn, I am going to spend the next several posts discussing this excellent address of the Pope’s for World Communication Day, which is today, in fact.

It is a few years now that I have, by God’s grace and my superior’s permission, been able to spend at least some of God’s time allotted to me working as a writer. I am four books (two published, one coming out soon, one still looking for a publisher), numerous articles, and over 300 blog posts into this little mini-career within my larger and far more important priestly and Madonna House vocation.

So communication is something rather dear to my heart. ‘Words’ matter to me, intensely. Those who know me well know that few things pain me more than when communications break down, when words go awry and wrong messages get communicated.

The connection the Pope makes here of ‘word’ and ‘silence’ is a key one, well worth pondering, and we are going to ponder it together on this blog over these next days. In our own community’s history, Catherine Doherty our foundress presented to us in the 1960s the Russian practice of poustinia. The word means desert; the practice means (in our MH translation of it) taking 24 hours of silence and solitude, prayer and fasting. Only the Bible to read, in a plain sparsely furnished room or cabin. You and God and nothing else, no rules, no horarium—just silence.

In MH we have experienced in the 40+ years that poustinia has been part of our life precisely what the Pope is talking about here. Silence and word complement each other; they are necessary for each other. He will talk about all this at some depth and beauty in the days ahead, and I don’t want to be redundant.

Instead I will offer, below the ‘jump’, a sneak preview of book number four (the one that doesn’t have a publisher yet… say a wee prayer that it will find one, OK?). The book is about technology and its effects on our life and our humanity, and this is from the chapter “Becoming a Person”, which is about, well, silence and our need for it. It’s also nice to find out that the Pope and I are on the same page about something. Anyhow, here it is:

We need silence. Silence is that dark hidden place...