I cry in the night. Wouldn’t you,
beholding a world about to crash? But what is important is that this world does
not love God. Wouldn’t you cry in the night if you knew that your Beloved was
not loved? Wouldn’t you? I want to throw my life at Christ’s feet and sing and
sing that I give him such a small thing! For what is a life in the face of
God’s tremendous gift to us?
Oh, my friends, can you understand this
agony? Come, share it with me. Let us enter into the pain of Christ. Let us go
deeply into it. Even the charismatic renewal, or all the other renewal
movements that float around, are not the essence of what God wants. God wants you.
He wants you to open your heart to him, and what is more, he wants you to
open your heart to your neighbor, to your brother, to your sister, for we are
all brothers and sisters before God.
Here is the mercy of God touching the
heart of man—if he will listen.
Catherine
de Hueck Doherty, Urodivoi
Reflection – So I’m continuing to share little bits and pieces of this book, one of
the last books written by Catherine in the early 1980s before her last illness
and death. As I said a few days ago, this book really was one of the signal
graces of my life, planting the seeds of my MH vocation and directing it in a
particular way that continues to unfold to this day.
I believe one of the besetting
sins of Catholics in our time is a certain superficiality. We are a people in
love with quick fixes, with wanting to get everything sorted out NOW, with
looking for some kind of program of action that will just put everything back
on its track. If we just find the right magic bullet, we can solve the problems
and renew the Church for once and for all.
If you are a ‘conservative’, this
means just preaching on the life issues all the time and cracking down on
dissent and disobedience in the Church. If you a ‘traditionalist’, you firmly
believe that restoring the TLM and having the priest wear a biretta will do the
trick. If you are a ‘liberal’, the Church just needs to change all its
teachings on sex and marriage, ordain women and all will be well.
If you are a ‘pharisee’ (nobody
ever admits to that one), it is simply a matter of keeping all the rules, all
the time. If you are a ‘Saducee’, it is going along to get along, accommodating
to the culture and the spirit of the age.
If you are a ‘charismatic’, it is
enough to throw your hands in the air and pray in tongues. If you are a product
of one of the new Catholic start up colleges, it’s to just get everyone reading
the great books. If you are a product of one of the various ecclesial movements
and communities (ahem), it is to just get everyone reading your founder’s books
and joining your group in some fashion.
OK, so I have now offended just
about everyone with this overly simplistic broad brush presentation. Including
myself! But of course that’s the point – we cannot be simplistic and shallow in
our approach to healing the Church.
The Church is healed and
restored, renewed and reformed in one way only. In the same way, in fact, that
the Church was created and formed in the first place. Christ poured out his
life’s blood on Calvary, and the Church was born from his pierced side. The
only thing that heals the Church, that renews it, is when you and I pour out
our life’s blood in an offering of love and prayer, humble service and total
gift, for humanity.
We have to fall in love with God.
We have to allow God’s love to penetrate us so deeply that we feel ourselves to
be torn apart by it. We have to let God make us cry, and enter into His passion
for the world. We have to be broken open by love, broken up by love, broken
like bread is broken and distributed. Benedicit, fregitque, deditque – He
blessed, and He broke, and He gave – this is the whole pattern of Christian
renewal, the only one that works, the only way our lives have any lasting value
or meaning.
Only when we allow God to bless
us, break us, and give us will we have within us what is needed for the world
to be made new. It is the Spirit of God who hovers over the waters and makes
all things new, and the Spirit can only enter into us if we have been broken
open to that grace.
This is what Catherine Doherty
knew in the marrow of her being. It is not about programs or rules or
ideologies or doctrines. These all have a place. But the hope of the Church has
never lain in these things, but in men and women—saints of God—who allow the
love of God to burn in them like a fire and whose lives are poured out with
Christ’s for the love of mankind. Nothing else, in the end, makes one bit of
difference in this world.
Beautiful!
ReplyDelete"these all have a place," I am inclined to agree with all but 'ideologies.' They (ideologies) have no place at all if it is God's love for mankind that we desire and strive to experience fully our connection with. The absence of ideology does not equal the absence of diversity and uniqueness. It means rather an openness and embracing the reality that the same God attracts mankind toward himself along so many different and beautiful paths. As Jean Vanier says , " God does not leave his people in the dark."
ReplyDeleteI agree - that was sloppy writing on my part. Thanks for the correction.
Delete