Walking By Starlight

With a hymn composed in the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”: Ave maris stella.

Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope.

Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).

Spe Salvi 49

Reflection – With this entry I will have now successfully blogged the entire encyclical Spe Salvi,  on the salvific nature of hope. I’ve taken this last week or so to revisit and finish my blogging on this encyclical because it seemed timely. The world is in some very difficult and sad times—yesterday’s second beheading of an American journalist is one more movement towards what seems almost certainly a renewed military engagement in Iraq, and of course that is only one small corner of the world that is in great turmoil and distress—Eastern Europe and Western Africa are in sore need of prayer and aid now, too.

The sea of history is indeed ‘dark and stormy’ and it is all too easy to lose sight of the destination of the journey in these times. The passions—anger and avarice, gluttony and lust, despondency and sloth, pride and vainglory—all too easily beckon us when the world is in turmoil. They seem to offer us a way through these dark stormy waters, but to what end?

We can strike out against our enemies in anger, tightly cling to our own wealth, drown ourselves in physical pleasures, collapse into despair, or exert our mastery to put everyone else underneath us—but to what final end? What good is it, indeed, to gain the whole world and lose one’s soul?

And so we have the stars of hope, the light shed by the saints in glory, and above all by the great Mother of God who lights the path to the true end of humanity. It is so crucial in these days when the world does seem to be blowing up just a bit (and, we’ll see, perhaps quite a lot), to know that this world and our life in this world, good and precious as it is, is not the destination of the journey, not our ultimate home.

‘The true stars of our lives are people who have led good lives.’ What a lovely and simple sentence to explain the devotion to the saints which has been part of the life of the Church since its very beginning. This is why it is so important to read the saints and know something of their lives, the choices they made, the sufferings they endured, and what it was all about for them. So many genuinely foolish mistakes about Christianity and what it means to live as a Christian in the world would be avoided if we would let ourselves be taught by our betters, the men and women who have done this thing, lived this life, and whose lives serve as brilliant guides to us along the ways of the world.

Mary is supreme among the saints. She shows us that, no matter what the circumstances of our lives, no matter what is going on around us, inside us, in our world and in our own little worlds, the road to the good end of life is the road of fiat, of faith, of humble obedience to God. That the whole purpose of God in creation and in humanity is to make of us an open door for Himself to enter in, that the world’s salvation and ours does not come through human power and mastery, not by violence and not by sensuality, but through the work of God transforming our flesh into His, our lives into His, our humanity into His divinity, as His Spirit overshadows us as it did Her.

Our Lady is the star shining brightly in all the world showing us that this is the path of life and that it leads to a brilliant and glorious end. I don’t know what the great political and (possibly) military solutions are to the very real problems we are facing in the world today. I do know that we haven’t a chance of finding our way through these times if each of us personally does not set our course by the stars of hope the Lord has laid out in the heavens for us, and that the true way of peace in the world comes only through walking the path God opened up for us and that Our Lady reveals to us in its fullness and its beauty.

Losing Hope, and Finding It

For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly.

Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, in his book of spiritual exercises, tells us that during his life there were long periods when he was unable to pray and that he would hold fast to the texts of the Church's prayer: the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the prayers of the liturgy. Praying must always involve this intermingling of public and personal prayer.

This is how we can speak to God and how God speaks to us. In this way we undergo those purifications by which we become open to God and are prepared for the service of our fellow human beings. We become capable of the great hope, and thus we become ministers of hope for others. Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well. It is an active hope, in which we struggle to prevent things moving towards the “perverse end”. It is an active hope also in the sense that we keep the world open to God. Only in this way does it continue to be a truly human hope.

Spe Salvi 34

Reflection – We jump ahead in our reading of Spe Salvi now to the section on prayer. I have now done almost the entire encyclical on this blog now, and the whole thing can be found here.

The power of purification in prayer that Pope Benedict writes about here is explained beautifully in the previous paragraph: “When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment—that meager, misplaced hope that leads us away from God. We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves.”

The Cardinal Van Thuan he refers to here was the Archbishop of Saigon when it fell to the Viet Cong, who spent 20 years imprisoned by them, much of it in solitary confinement. He is the great apostle of hope in our times, and should be much more well known than he is. His books Testimony to Hope and The Road to Hope are modern spiritual classics. 

Deprived of his ability to function as a bishop, only able to even celebrate Mass with great difficulty and at great risk, and with little prospect of ever seeing the world outside his prison, he chose to simply live as a Christian within the circumstances he had been given. He strove to love the only neighbors the Lord had provided him with—his jailors. And he strove to pray as best he could each day, and in so doing to deeply entrust his life to the Lord each day. He emerged from his long imprisonment a man transfigured by grace, and ended his years in Rome, a living witness to the power of Christ to redeem the worst and most hopeless situations.

And so we need to really apply this to ourselves, don’t we? Most of us are not so badly off as Cardinal Van Thuan (well, really all of us, since anyone reading this blog post is not languishing in solitary confinement as a victim of religious persecution). But we all can choose to in some way or other lose hope, to focus on those elements of our life that are difficult or painful, that do not seem to be conducive to health and happiness. We can all choose to turn from God, stop praying, despair in His power to redeem our situation. We can all be so sure that the only way we can become joyful is if the painful and difficult things go away, that we miss the gift of God that He is trying to give us in the midst of these painful and difficult things.

And this is losing hope, when we are so determined to find our happiness in this life and in having things as we want them in this life. Meanwhile, God is continually opening us up to this much bigger, much deeper, much more enduring happiness. And it is prayer, the choice to perpetually and continually turn our face and our heart toward God, be it in the liturgical and Scriptural and devotional prayers we have learned or in the simple outpouring of our hearts to God, that continually purifies our hope and makes it grow stronger and more well founded.

And this is our call today—to pray and to let God purify our hearts to seek Him in whatever circumstance we are living in today, good, bad, or something in between. So, let’s get on with that.

Weeding the Garden of the Heart

Let us now consider a more or less randomly chosen episode from the Middle Ages, that serves in many respects to illustrate what we have been saying. It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation. Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different perspective on this.

In his view, monks perform a task for the whole Church and hence also for the world. He uses many images to illustrate the responsibility that monks have towards the entire body of the Church, and indeed towards humanity; he applies to them the words of pseudo-Rufinus: “The human race lives thanks to a few; were it not for them, the world would perish...”

Contemplatives—contemplantes—must become agricultural labourers—laborantes—he says. The nobility of work, which Christianity inherited from Judaism, had already been expressed in the monastic rules of Augustine and Benedict. Bernard takes up this idea again. The young noblemen who flocked to his monasteries had to engage in manual labour.

In fact Bernard explicitly states that not even the monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of practical and spiritual “tilling the soil”, it must prepare the new Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish. Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?

Spe Salvi 15

Reflection – This paragraph of the encyclical follows upon the previous, asking whether or not hope of salvation and the care of the soul are essentially selfish and individual concerns, and whether or not Christianity is thus essentially a selfish religion. In this historical example of Bernard of Clairvaux’s vision of monastic life, we see the fullest answer possible to this.

Namely, that without the care of the soul, without a concern for one’s own interior purification, the restoration of Paradise within oneself, no real social good or social justice or social restoration can happen. The whole monastic movement in the West was a sort of 'from the inside out' affair—the monks seeking to belong to God and God alone, to dedicate themselves to prayer and work, a consecrated life of virtue and holiness, and from that going out in missionary or apostolic life.

This was, in fact, the way a certain tarnished and abandoned artifice was fashioned in the first place. I refer, of course, to Western Civilization. It was the monks, first from Benedict and then from Cluny and Citeaux, who cleared the land, planted crops, copied ancient manuscripts (both sacred and secular), established schools, cared for the sick, brought the faith to all corner of the Continent and the British Isles—on and on and on. All flowing from this life of intense spirituality and depth of prayer. 

There is very little about the heritage of Western Europe, of which virtually everyone reading this blog has been touched by if not wholly shaped by, that does not have a monastic foundation to it. So much for the idea of monks living selfish lives contributing nothing to the great society!

These celibate men are, in fact, the progenitors of our whole civilization. And this is the chaste fecundity that can be seen over and over again—a life wholly given over to God and to humanity is a life that bears fruit. In fact, it is the only way a life can really be said to be fruitful, regardless of one’s vocation.

“What you do matters, but not much. What you are matters tremendously.” Catherine Doherty said it as well as anyone ever has. It is the great paradox of our faith and of our humanity that unless we tend that garden within, the innermost chambers of the heart where pride and greed and vanity flourish, or faith, hope, and love take root, we cannot tend the garden without—the greater good of society, the needs and challenges of our times—with any success.

That which seems most selfish, most self-seeking, the pursuit of virtue and the battle against vice, is factually the most selfless thing, the necessary work if we are to do any good for anyone ever. A dirty rag cannot clean; a broken tool cannot build. So many efforts to save the world and build a new world order of peace and justice founder because the people doing them are not tending to the weeds of their own hearts’ gardens.

All of this is so utterly relevant to my own MH vocation and how we understand our life here in this corner of the Lord’s garden that I could go on (and on, and on, and on) about it. But that’s quite enough for one day. Let’s go weed our gardens instead, within and without.

Is Christianity a Selfish Religion?

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of a “city” (cf. 11:10, 16; 12:22; 13:14) and therefore of communal salvation. Consistently with this view, sin is understood by the Fathers as the destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and division. Babel, the place where languages were confused, the place of separation, is seen to be an expression of what sin fundamentally is.

Hence “redemption” appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to take shape in the world community of believers. We need not concern ourselves here with all the texts in which the social character of hope appears. Let us concentrate on the Letter to Proba in which Augustine tries to illustrate to some degree this “known unknown” that we seek.

His point of departure is simply the expression “blessed life”. Then he quotes Psalm 144 [143]:15: “Blessed is the people whose God is the Lord.” And he continues: “In order to be numbered among this people and attain to ... everlasting life with God, ‘the end of the commandment is charity that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith' (1 Tim 1:5)”[11].

This real life, towards which we try to reach out again and again, is linked to a lived union with a “people”, and for each individual it can only be attained within this “we”. It presupposes that we escape from the prison of our “I”, because only in the openness of this universal subject does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself—to God.

Spe Salvi 14

Reflection – One of the criticisms of Christianity in recent centuries has been that it is a selfish, individualistic religion. It is the isolated person who is saved and enters into the joy of eternal life—the life of humanity, of the community, of society, of the world is of little to no importance. It is all about the cultivation of one’s own soul like a rare hot-house flower and a disregard for building a world of justice and peace. The world can, in fact, go to hell—such is the understanding of Christianity in this critique.

While some forms of Christian theology may well be guilty at least in part of this individualism, Catholic Christianity properly understood has little of it. We are, of course, saved as individuals because that is what we are—each of us stands before God with our personal freedom to say yes or no, to receive or refuse the gift of grace.

But God saves us, as Pope Benedict so surely shows here, by incorporating us into the life of a body of people, into a community, a society, what humanity is made for in the beginning, what has been shattered by sin and selfishness, what He heals and restores in Jesus Christ.

And this is what we really mean by ‘the Church’. It is not some stale institution, some cold bureaucracy, some artificial solely human accretion onto true Christianity added by Constantine or some other caricatured historical villain. The Church is the formal cause of salvation—that is, Jesus saves us by making us members of the people of God, and He sanctifies us by asking us to love one another as best we can in this body of believers.

And of course this body of believers is, by its very nature as Christ’s Body, not concerned only for its own interior life and health. It is a missionary body, at the service of the world and deeply concerned to extend the saving work of Christ, the work of peace and love and unity and justice and mercy, beyond its own visible borders to all lands, nations, to every individual.

Yes, it is a messy business, this Church business. We are all sinners, from the Pope down to the youngest member, and so we hurt one another and make a proper hash of things much of the time. This is part of the sanctifying reality of God’s saving plan. He draws us together into a Body, into the Church, knowing full well that it will be hard exacting work for us to really love one another and really believe, even, that this is what He had in mind.

There will always be the temptation to withdraw into a individualistic and isolated faith, always the temptation to reject the essentially communal and ecclesial nature of salvation. Injured pride and anger—unforgiveness—will always be a wedge the devil is happy to use to separate us from the Body.

We have to be so clear in our minds—God saves us by making us part of the Church; He sanctifies us by calling us to love and to lay down our lives in, for, and with the community. There is no other way, and we reject this plan of God, and the life of the Church, at great and desperate peril to our own salvation, and at a great loss to the mission of Christ and the Church in the world which needs that mission to flourish so badly.