Well,
the week that is called ‘holy’ is intensifying itself, and today pain and joy
meet. It is a strange meeting point. An apex of sorts, a fantastic mountain of
the Lord. Moses climbed a mountain and God spoke to him, and he returned and
his face was so shiny that people could not look at it. He had to put a veil
over it.
But
today God who has incarnated himself, who came down from the mountain through
his Incarnation, lived amongst us, strangely enough today he is lifted up again
on such an unspeakable, incredible mountain that anyone who thinks about it
feels a strange tension - a sort of feeling of total incredulity - that for me,
who am so poor, God sent his Son to climb this mountain which is just a Cross.
A plain, wooden, unplaned cross!
To
think about it holds you tight. Not in the sense that people say - I am
uptight. It holds you close. It holds you close to a love that is
incomprehensible, incredible, but so true!
Now,
this God of ours was born like all of us, naked. But he chose to be naked on the
wood. When I say he chose, that is what happened to him, and probably to all
those who were crucified.
Now,
the meditation of Good Friday goes in depths. It does deeper - in some sort of
depths of my heart that perhaps I have never looked into before. To be naked
for the reasons of poverty - total poverty - of total surrender - even unto the
clothes that I possess, is something that shakes you.
We
are supposed to understand that God came and took upon himself the shape of a
servant, a slave... us, the body. But he went further. He surrendered
everything including that body for the love of us. He emptied himself.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Spiritual Reading, Good Friday, 1974
Reflection – I won’t be blogging during the Triduum and over the Easter
holiday, but I very much wanted to share with you this magnificent talk
Catherine gave on Good Friday, a mere three days from now. Certainly all of
Holy Week is meant to be a prolonged meditation on this mystery of what our God
has done for us to save us.
The theme of poverty has
been much to the fore in the Church since Pope Francis was elected, and this is
a very good thing. It is, by definition and strict necessity, an uncomfortable
topic, and that is good, too. Why should we be comfortable, in a world where so
many of our brothers and sisters are without?
So often in our discussions
about poverty, the subject is cast solely in terms of social justice—we who
have much should have less so that the poor of the world have more,
essentially. And of course this is very true—the requirement to share the
world’s goods fairly and to not be living in luxury while people are starving
in shacks is plain to see.
But Catherine—who had a
great sensibility around that and could talk very passionately about that
aspect of it—always went somewhere else in the poverty question. Namely, for
her it was inextricably and intimately bound up with her love of and union with
Christ. God was born naked and died naked, chose to be born in the lowest of
circumstances and chose to die the contemptible death of a condemned criminal.
Poverty for her was always
a question of just how many layers of padding and fabric and belongings, how
much sumptuous food and how much comfortable surroundings we could surround
ourselves with, wrap ourselves tight with, and still be passionate lovers of
this naked man, this naked God.
On one level, for her it
was never about quantities and dollar figures—it was about love and union and
caring about nothing so much as whether or not we are one with Christ in his passionate
love of the world. She would happily send members of MH off on trips to the
ends of the earth to learn this skill or gain that experience that would help
them be better lay apostles… and she would be very disturbed to see someone
take a second cup of coffee or a third helping.
It was never about the
thing, it was about the cling—our hearts grabbing onto that cup of coffee, that
piece of cake, that material reality as if that was our life and our security.
But Jesus, the Son of God, was born naked and died naked—his life and his
security was to do the Father’s will, his food and drink, his only home was the
call to love and to die for his people.
So this is Good Friday and
its depth of meaning, and I want to spend the next couple days before the blog
goes dark listening to what Catherine has to say about it. It’s not
comfortable, not easy, and I make no claim to my own living of it very well at
all… but it is very beautiful, and above all it is true. It is Truth, and it is
the truth we are to contemplate in this Holy Week.
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