I have often been put against a wall and,
like St. Sebastian, filled with arrows of hate. I can tell you that they hurt.
Many years of my life have passed that way. When I look back on my past, I
marvel that I am alive today. But God’s grace is infinite; my mind is clear and
my heart is open to him. I have to proclaim him!
Can anybody realize the torture, the
pain, the sorrow of seeing so many who do not love him? If you are really in
love with God, if he is your Absolute, then the pain becomes excruciating. And
you must go, without ever resting, to impart the Good News. For this you
have been created. For this you have been baptized and confirmed; for this the
Eucharist is your food.
“Awake,” I would shout from immense towers;
“Awake, Christians! This is the hour! This is the time! The world that we know
is crumbling because we are selfish, self–centered. Can you understand this
tremendous hunger? It is a hunger for God, the kind of hunger that tears you
apart. All I want, all that I exist for, all I desire with my whole self is
that God be loved. I cry bitter tears in the night because so many do not
listen to him. He is God!
Catherine
de Hueck Doherty, Urodivoi
Reflection – I’ve been wanting to do a series from Catherine’s writings for a while
on the blog, and last night as I poked around I remembered that I had a whole
series of quotes from her book Urodivoi in my files.
‘Urodivoi’ are fools for Christ,
a type of saint popular in Russian Christianity. In Russia they are people who
feign mental illness, essentially living as ‘crazy street people’ as a path of
atonement for the pride and vanity of the world, and as a path of
identification with Christ who was ‘rich, but became poor for our sake’, and
who ‘did not cling to his divinity, but emptied himself and became a slave.’
Russian hagiography is filled
with examples of truly great saints of that mold, who often were blessed with
all sorts of spiritual charisms: healing, words of knowledge, exorcism. The
irony of their situation was that the very life they embraced as a path of
humility and degradation would often end with them being celebrated and sought
out as counselors and wonder-workers.
Urodivoi was almost the last book Catherine wrote. In it, as we will see in the
posts ahead, she takes the idea of being a fool for Christ in the Russian sense
and applies it freely to the call to live passionately, recklessly in love with
God, and to do anything whatsoever to proclaim that love at any personal cost.
On a personal note, this was
among the first books of Catherine that I read, when I was a mere lad of 19 in
my first summer at Madonna House. I believe that the seeds of my own MH
vocation were planted in that reading. I remember being a bit flummoxed by the
book (it is a strange book, highly symbolic and without much linear
development of ideas, and full of passages like the above, passionate anguished outpourings). I also remember thinking as I read it, “Boy, Jesus is
really important to this woman! He’s worth suffering for! He’s worth living
for! He must really matter.”
That’s about as far as I could
get with it at age 19, and maybe that’s as far as we need to get. Jesus
matters. He is worth living for, worth suffering for, worth loving with every
bit of strength and passion we possess. He is important. And we live in a world
where He is not important, where He is ignored, outright denied, made into a
punch line or a political ploy or a dozen other things which He is not.
Or, worse yet, where He is met
with an indifferent shrug, sometimes by those who claim to bear His name. Urodivoi
was Catherine’s last ditch effort to break through that sort of
indifference in particular. He is God; He became man, lived, suffered, died,
and rose from the dead and this is the salvation of the world. He holds in his
divine and human hands, pierced with nails, the answers to all our problems personal
and social, the deep healing of our souls and the refashioning of our humanity
into a community of love. And this is what the Church is meant to be, and yet
so often fails, hampered by the mediocrity and indifference of its members and
even its leaders.
When we see, even catch the
slightest glimpse of, who Jesus is and what His true relationship is to the
world and to ourselves, then the path of the fool for Christ makes perfect
lucid sense. Of course we should dress in rags and sleep on the streets and eat
crusts of moldy bread, if that is what He bids us do. Of course we should do
anything and give up anything, if that is what He bids us do. Of course we
should have simply no other concern but to do what He bids us do.
And of course our principal
concern in life should be to proclaim this Jesus and His love by our own life
of love and obedience. That is what He has bid us all to do, after all. And
this is what Catherine means in her use of the word urodivoi, her own
call and her call to us to live foolish lives spent for the Gospel.
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