You Want Me To Do What?

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you. Our weekly journey through the Little Mandate of MH, the core words we believe God gave our foundress Catherine as the guiding spirit of our community, is winding to a close.

These sentences of the mandate were the ones above all that, when I first joined MH, seemed like essentially a dead letter to me. Go… where? And without what… fear? Why? How? For what good purpose? Mind you, I was 22 years old when I became an applicant here, and somehow not too many people want a socially awkward, barely out of high school young man blundering around in the depths of their hearts. I would have just broken something in there, which come to think of it was more or less of a leitmotif of my early years in the apostolate.

And ‘I will be with you’… well, Jesus, since you’re in there already how’s about I just let you handle it, then! And so it was, with only the most mild and moderate growth in the matter for the longest time, for the first ten to fifteen years in the community. In the meantime, though, and this is the important thing, this line was working on me in a way that was most necessary for my being able to live it in any meaningful way.

Namely this line pushed me to go into the depths of my own heart in a consistent, deep, and often very painful way for the longest time. The long work of coming to know myself, what was going on inside me, and what I needed to do and be to be healed and freed to love and serve God and neighbour. And this was what was needed—we cannot go into the hearts of other people if we have not dwelt at some depth in our own hearts, confronted to some degree at least our own darkness, brokenness, sin. And come to know that, miracle of miracles, He is with us there and has been with us there all along.

When Catherine De Hueck received the Little Mandate in the 1930s, she had already been forced deeply into her own heart of suffering and darkness by her life experience. Her painful marriage, the horrors of war, the nightmare of the revolution, exile, starvation, being a stranger in a strange land—all of this had pushed her at a very young age deeply into the depths of her own being. And it was through all of that pain and suffering that her faith, always strong, grew to its fullness.

So as a young woman in her late 30s she was well prepared to receive this word of the Lord, and in fact had been living it for some years, as hear large and loving heart was a refuge and consolation for many people already at that time.

And this is how it is in life: we have to go through the things we have to go through—it is utterly different for each person—and out of this come to be able to console others in what they are going through. We are pushed into the depths of our own hearts, meet Jesus there, and then have the capacity in this to accompany others into the depths of their own hearts so that they can meet Jesus there, too. Mostly by just listening and praying, praying and listening, occasionally offering a word of advice or two. But mostly, listening.

What I am describing is so much the daily work of a seasoned member of MH, so much what we are really doing while we are doing all the humble ordinary tasks of our daily life. In Combermere it is the hidden fabric of the place, and in our mission houses the constant work, whatever else they are doing.

And of course, 25 years later, as a priest in this community, I am simply more and more given over to my daily work being precisely here in this line of the mandate that, when I joined the apostolate, seemed to be utterly beyond me and completely irrelevant to my life and capacities. Our God is an awesome God.

The beautiful thing we learn in this is that Jesus really is with us, in our own hearts and in our efforts to love and serve others in the depths of their hearts. And that the simple act of listening to a person with profound respect, praying with them in a spirit of faith, and blessing them is powerful beyond measure. We don’t have to solve people’s problems—most people know what they are supposed to do, I have found—but the very act of listening and loving helps give people the clarity and the courage to do what it is they need to do next. It is light to our neighbours’ feet, and it is the deep work of this apostolate, a work that has benefited thousands of people over the years.

Playtime is Over

As I mentioned yesterday, I am heading out to Cana Colony later today for a week of ministry to families. So I won’t be blogging this week. I did want to post this, though.

I am thinking particularly of my many American readers who of course have had to face the Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage earlier this week. My own thoughts on this issue I have expressed extensively on this blog, and have no need or desire to go into all over again.

Rather, I want to share this article from 1966 by Catherine Doherty, which I think takes the whole question to a much deeper level, a much more vital and essential point than this or that social issue or moral crisis. So I leave this with you as I leave to go and serve the families at Cana, asking for your prayers for them and for all families trying to live the Gospel in these difficult days:

Vocation Recruitment

My ongoing research in Catherine's writings, in service of a book I hope to write over the next year of so, is turning up forgotten gems on various topics. From time to time I like to 'hand over' the blog to her and share some of these treasures.

This article is from our newspaper Restoration, from November 1964. It is on the difficult subject of vocation recruitment. Catherine has her own ideas about this topic, and is happy to share them here, after the break. Enjoy!

How Can One Be A Pacifist?

I am doing a tremendous amount of research in Catherine Doherty's writings these days for a project I'm working on (OK, it's my next book, but I'm not able to say what it is yet!). As a result, I come across gems from her now and then that seem worth sharing, so I'll do that from time to time.

This article is from 1970, and of course her specific examples and some of her vocabulary are slightly dated. Don't let that distract you--the woman is saying something here that badly needs saying in our own time and place, with our own issues and problems. She is deep, and is going deep in this article. Enjoy!

Why Did Jesus Die?

Do you sense something so far beyond mystery that you almost feel as if you were teetering at the edge of the universe? Last night in Gethsemane God the Son took upon himself my sins and yours—the sins of all the world. He took them on himself and lifted them up, or rather, he was lifted up for them on a cross. He died to atone for them.

Before our eyes this simple wooden cross holds the absolute forgiveness of God for us. Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy! A thousand languages repeat it, and he has pity on us because he has been lifted up and from him came pity, compassion, tenderness, understanding. Can we comprehend what has happened? God, the Almighty, the All–Powerful, the One who has no limit to his power, limited it. It is incomprehensible…

Today is the day of an examination of conscience, and yet somewhere deep within us joy rises like the sun. However it is still dark and the darkness is I, looking at myself. The darkness is also sorrow that he had to die for me. The joy is that he did! Now I am whole and healed and all is well! My separation from God, the original one, is wiped off.

Now I walk in the mercy of God; we live in his mercy. Now the moment of guilt is gone. Man must not feel any guilt anymore, only a terrible sadness when he once again breaks his alliance with God, the alliance of love. Whenever you feel that you have broken it, pray, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!” and it is forgiven!”

Catherine Doherty

Reflection – Happy Palm Sunday to you all, and a blessed Holy Week. This excerpt from a talk by Catherine Doherty on Good Friday 1973 seemed a fitting way to begin our week of the Lord’s Passion and love this year. The talk itself is part of my book Going Home.

I have been trying to do a bit of catechesis on Sundays here and there. This Sunday, let’s talk about the catechetical matter that is perhaps the one above all others, namely the death of Jesus Christ and its saving power in our lives.

For those who have simple faith, this matter poses no problem, and perhaps that is the best way to be. We know Jesus died; we know He died because He loves us; we know His loving death has saved us, won us forgiveness of our sins, opened heaven’s doors, reconciled us to the Father. For many people, that is all we need to know—we don’t get troubled by questions of how and why and what is the meaning of all this.

There are those who are so troubled, though, and it is good to have some kind of answer worked out for them. We cannot precisely ‘explain’ our faith—it is a divine revelation and ultimately transcends the powers of human comprehension—but we can talk about it, clarify it, make it a bit more understandable even if we cannot (and should not) eliminate the mysterious aspect of it.

And so many theologians over the millennia have given some account or other of ‘how’ Jesus’ death saved us. The Church has never adopted any one of those explanations as its own dogma. The dogma of the Church is precisely what I laid out two paragraphs ago, that this death happened and that this death has had these effects for all who are saved, and that the salvific fruits of this death are offered to all men and women.

In the Western Church, the most influential theory has been that of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the ‘substitutionary’ theory of salvation. Humanity, in committing sin against God, ran up a debt that was infinite, since our offense was against an infinite majesty. Being finite we could not pay that debt; but since it was a human debt, a human being had to pay it; but only an infinite being could make the infinite satisfaction of the debt; so only a God-man could pay that debt, and the wages of sin are in fact death, and so Jesus paid the debt for all of us.

With all due respect to St. Anselm and the many holy men and women who have accepted and taught this theory, I have never cared for it. It is too much rooted in categories of law for me—yes, this is an aspect of life and of our relationship with God (Scripture would collapse into incoherence if all notions of law were eliminated from it)—but law is not the heart and the whole of our life with God. And since this matter of Jesus’ death is at the heart of our faith and our life with God, it seems to me that casting it in wholly legal terms impoverishes our faith.

This is the theory I prefer (I offer this bearing in mind that this too is merely a theory, and that our Catholic faith is the simple faith that Jesus saved us by dying for us, period): Sin is fundamentally death, the undoing of creation. Creation in its deep heart is being flowing from Being, being ordered and shaped and given life from Being. This is the deep meaning of obedience, that our whole existence is from Another, the Uncreated One.

Sin rejects being, life, creation, and so sin is death. Jesus, being God the Creator, enters the reality of sin without sinning (which is metaphysically impossible for God) by entering the reality of death in his sacred humanity. His motivation is love—love of His Father, love and mercy to us poor sinners.

And so, in the very place of sin, the place where sin does what it does—kills us—the Creator God establishes a new creation. That which had been the great monument of destruction and uncreation—the tomb—becomes the place of personal encounter with Life. That which had been the fruit of our tragic and terrible disobedience and selfishness becomes transformed by obedience and selfless love.

It is not on the level of law and debts, but on the level of personal encounter, personal love, personal communion—a communion of love that is forged at the very place where all relationships are destroyed and sundered. And so—sin is forgiven, heaven opened, we are reconciled and saved.

Ultimately all we need to know is that God loves us so much that He died for us, and simple faith is satisfied by that answer. But it is good to meditate on just what Love does, and just how much Love has shown itself to be stronger than death, isn’t it? Happy Passion Sunday, and may we all enter into the victory of Christ and know his joy this Easter.

Not a Devotion, But a Reality

Happy feast of the Annunciation to you all! In lieu of my usual blog post, I thought in honour of the feast and of Our Lady that I would share this snippet of my book The Air We Breathe: The Mariology of Catherine Doherty, which seems to me to summarize the main theme and spiritual focus of this day. So... here it is!

For Catherine, Mary was simply a reality: ‘you don’t have devotion to reality, you embrace it.’ So what was this ‘embraceable’ reality of Mary? While Catherine had come to know Mary so deeply through the circumstances of her life and how Mary had come to help her in them, the reality of Mary was much deeper than her own subjective experience. More fundamental to her was the objective and awesome fact of Mary’s role in salvation:

I don’t think I have a “devotion” to Mary. I have something far greater, more immense, far more beautiful. I have an unshakable faith that she is the Mother of God, and hence, the Mother of men. I believe that she fashioned the body that has become to me the Body of her Son in the Eucharistic Sacrifice… Mary said one little word: fiat. She said it in faith, in God. She asked one or two questions, but immediately she accepted the will of God. She accepted without understanding…[i]

This is the heart of Marian reality according to Catherine: Mary gave her flesh to Jesus, and this Flesh is truly the salvation of the world. She did this by saying fiat – let it be done to me according to Thy will. She did not understand, at least not fully, what she was saying yes to.

This basic Marian fact, which is a simple fact of scripture available to anyone who believes in Jesus, is utterly central to the life of the Christian disciple. For we too are to give our flesh to God. Christ wills to be born in our souls by faith and come to maturity there through hope and love, the work of his Spirit in us who comes to us through the sacramental life of the Church. Our fiat is essential to this giving over of our flesh to en-flesh the Word in the world today. 

And we too do not understand much at all what our choice of saying yes (or no) will mean for us, what it will cost us and what the stakes are for ourselves and for others. Mary did what we are to do. Certainly she did it in a unique way and with a perfection and beauty that we can only admire, but nonetheless, Mary’s life and mission is precisely that of the Christian in the world.

For Catherine, Mary stands as the shining icon of the Christian, the clearest and best picture of what it means to be a follower of Christ. The awesome dignity of it, the mysterious depths of it, the frightening totality of it, the beautiful fruit of it—Mary is the figure who reveals all of this. But she does not reveal it to us simply as an exemplar. 

Mary is not just a symbol or pattern of Christian discipleship. She is not merely the sum total of some list of qualities that we are to memorize and imitate. She is not only a beautiful picture that we can admire.

Mary comes to each one of us, personally. Mary ‘takes us on’ individually, teaching us and helping us. Mary is really the spiritual director of the whole human race. She gives us courage when the way is dark, guidance when the way is twisted and confusing, joy when the way is sorrowful. She whispers in our ears, constantly, the word of hope and consolation that we need if we are to persevere in our own fiat. She can do this because she walked every step of this way, knows every inch of it, and knows the glory to which it leads.

---

[i] “I Live on an Island,” in Restoration, June 1968.

Heart of My Heart, Heart of the Gospel

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me. We continue to spend our Tuesday’s going through the Little Mandate, the core words we believe God gave to Catherine Doherty our founder, which define our spirit and way of life.

Today we wrap up the first paragraph. Catherine has called this first paragraph the ‘heart of the Mandate’, and said that the rest of the Mandate is essentially commentary on it. I would say that these last words of the paragraph are the ‘heart of the heart’, then.

Certainly she experienced her original call as precisely that: she was to go and live in the slums of Toronto and be poor with her poor neighbours, to live as they lived and love and serve them in simple ordinary ways. She didn’t know much of anything beyond that, only that she was to do that thing, that after the selling of all she had, she was to go and be one with the poor, and in that, one with Jesus.

From the beginning, then, MH has been almost allergic, in terms of our own apostolic work, to anything partaking of professional social work or any other ‘professional’ model of service. Not for us the detached clinical objectivity of the therapist or case worker, the careful delineation between the ‘client’ and the ‘qualified expert’. We are not against that sort of thing in its right place—obviously psychiatrists and social workers need to be that way—but it is not for us, not at all.

We run soup kitchens… and we live in them. We teach catechism to children, mostly poor and disadvantaged, and live on the same street as they do, where they can run in and out of our house all day (and do). We have houses of prayer and listening—friendship houses, really—but present ourselves not as experts or spiritual directors (priests aside), but as, well, friends.

Running through all the apostolic works of MH is this thread of identification, of just living wherever the people we are serving live, and approaching them without any trappings of office or formalized arrangements. We are just people helping other people, and we’re all poor people trying to love one another, anyway.

Underneath how this line of the Mandate shapes the structure of our apostolate there is a truly profound spirituality, a whole vision of life and what it means to be human, what it means to be blessed and fully alive and in Christ, one with Him. I am always amazed—I suppose because my entire spiritual formation from the age of 19 has been at the feet of Catherine Doherty—at the purchase ‘prosperity Christianity’ has on people’s minds and hearts.

The idea that a really blessed and godly life will be a life where everything is rich, rich, rich—where you have lots of money, radiant good health, perfect emotional stability at all times, and a continually cheery disposition—this is entirely foreign to me. This is not how Jesus lived, and His is the one truly Godly life we know of, isn’t it?

He was a poor man, living and moving among the poor. How on earth do we his disciples expect that our lives should not be as His life was? This has always seemed utterly incomprehensible to me, this ‘prosperity Gospel’ form of Christianity, based on a highly selective reading of a few scriptures and a resolute ignoring of many hundreds of others.

Going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me. It is the experience of our own poverty, whether we are talking economic poverty, psychological poverty, poverty of aptitude, helplessness, whatever, not just experiencing that but knowing that this is the place we are to live as human beings, the place where our human limitations are keenly felt and cause us some degree of discomfort or distress, knowing that this is precisely where we enter the heart of the Gospel and thus the heart of Christ, and it is all tied up with our love and compassion for our neighbour—this is what real Christianity consists of.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The kingdom of heaven is union with Christ, and the doorway to that union is the willing embrace of our own poverty, our own profound need in whatever form it manifests in our life, and our glad choice to live in that need, that poverty, and get on with the real business of life of loving those poor people the Lord has surrounded us with by his providence, a poor man or woman loving poor men and women, all poor together, and in that, all one with Him in His radiant glorified poverty, the Risen Body of the Crucified Saviour.

The Personal Touch

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Give it directly, personally to the poor. – Tuesdays we are going through these words that we here believe God gave to our foundress Catherine Doherty to be the guiding and essential spirit of our apostolate.

This phrase, which I touched on last week, bears further reflection. In particular, the word ‘personal’ defines so much of the MH approach to apostolic work. While we are not opposed to programs and projects, in our hearts we know that these are of little use if they are not imbued with the personal touch—warmth, friendship, hospitality of home and heart.

When Catherine began in Harlem, New York, the pastor asked her what her program was. She replied, quite honestly, the she didn’t have one. She would just go and meet the African-American people of Harlem one at a time, and go from there.

Another story she loved to tell was of the wealthy woman who was a benefactor of the apostolate. One time a poor family needed help at Christmas-time, and this woman took it on, sending them a lavish Christmas—food, presents, tree, decorations, everything. And it was all profoundly appreciated by the family. But… she sent it with her chauffeur. The woman herself never met the family, and they had no chance to thank her, she no chance to learn who they were and what they might have to offer her in return.

Catherine always stressed the love, charity, had to be given personally. And this conditions our whole MH approach to apostolic life. We run soup kitchens in Edmonton and Regina, and we live in the same building, right there in the same neighbourhood as the men and women we serve. And so it goes through all the houses of our apostolate.

But as always this is more than a physical arrangement or a specific technique. And it is never just about the obvious material poor, as much as they are always central in our concern. But there is a whole way of life implied in the lines ‘sell all you possess, give it personally to the poor.’

At every moment there is a person before me, who has at least some poverty somewhere in their person—we are all poor, in some way. At every moment, I ‘possess’ something, anyhow. A certain amount of energy, a certain amount of this or that thing, talent, time. And this first line of the Mandate bids me to take whatever I have and do whatever I need to do with it (symbolically, ‘sell it’), so as to give it directly to this person who is before me now. In concrete terms, it means doing a lot of listening to people, lots of careful attention to find out what the need may be. 

It may, often, simply be the need to be listened too—loneliness is one of the greatest poverties of our time. It may be something else—time spent, knowledge shared, food given. Some days we may have a whole three-course banquet to give people—‘Christmas with all the trimmings’—other days we may seem to only have a few crusts of bread. Regardless, we are to give it all.

It’s a whole way of life, not just something to practice for a little while. And a most challenging way of life, not one I would make any claims to doing especially well. But this is certainly what we want to do, try to do at MH – receive each person as a person, personally, and share with them whatever we have at any given time. Our experience has been that the fruits of this way of loving and serving go far beyond anything else we could do. Our firm belief is that this personal love and friendship is the only real way to communicate the Gospel in the world today.