There Are No Monsters Now

On one hand, immersion into the waters is a symbol of death, which recalls the death symbolism of the annihilating, destructive power of the ocean flood. The ancient mind perceived the ocean as a permanent threat to the cosmos, to the earth; it was the primeval flood that might submerge all life. The river could also assume this symbolic value for those who were immersed in it. But the flowing waters of the river are above all a symbol of life. The great rivers are the great givers of life. The Jordan, too is—even  today—a source of life for the surrounding region. Immersion in the water is about purification, about liberation from the filth of the past that burdens and distorts life—it is about beginning again, and that means it is about death and resurrection, about starting life over again anew… all of this will have to wait for Christian baptismal theology to be worked out explicitly, but the act of descending into the Jordan and coming up again out of the waters already implicitly contains this later development.

Jesus of Nazareth Part One, 16

Reflection – The profundity of today’s feast, the Baptism of the Lord, is hard to grasp. This event inaugurating Christ’s public life is little emphasized in the Western Christian tradition; in the East, it is much more prominent, as I mentioned yesterday.

Water is so symbolic on so many levels, that Christ plunging into the waters bears meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning.

He identifies himself with sinful humanity, for starters. The immersion ritual of Judaism practiced by John the Baptist was a sort of Jewish ‘altar call’ – come, you sinners, repent and believe in God. And there’s Jesus, the sinless one, taking his place among all the prostitutes and tax collectors and drunks and thieves.

Water is also life and death. No water, we die—and people living in a desert climate are acutely aware of that. Too much water, we die—sailors and fishermen know that all to well, too. So Christ who is God, the deathless one, is plunging into the whole human scene of life and death, our perilous contingent reality where we need in order to live, but our very needs make us so very vulnerable.

And water has all these cosmic associations—the waters of creation, of the flood, the whole sense of plunging into the depths of created reality. And water is chaos—the waters are the place of Leviathan, the sea monster who is the Jewish symbol of creation as chaotic and unmanageable. The world where it stops making sense, where the ways of God with his creation are unfathomable and frightening, as the book of Job so powerfully conveys.

Jesus goes there, too. Into the heart of all hearts of all created reality, into the very depths of life, death, suffering, chaos, weakness, helplessness, humility… into the waters plunges the Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, God Himself become man for precisely this purpose.

I remember hearing an Orthodox priest preach a homily on this feast once, and saying very simply, “There are no monsters now.” The light of God has penetrated the outermost depths of the universe, and the deepest depths of the ocean, and the innermost depths of the human heart.

Because of this, even in the face of the most horrible violence or atrocity, of suffering and death, we believe (with fear and trembling) and we assert (with shaky voices, perhaps) that God is bigger, that Christ is there, that the power of love is stronger than all the hate in the universe, that the light of God does shine in the darkness, and the darkness can not overpower it. That’s what the Baptism of the Lord means. Happy Feast Day.

Into the Darkest Places

At Christmas we encounter the tenderness and love of God, who stoops down to our limitations, to our weakness, to our sins -- and He lowers Himself to us. St. Paul affirms that Jesus Christ ‘though He was in the form of God ... emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men’ (Philippians 2:6-7). Let us look upon the cave of Bethlehem: God lowers Himself to the point of being laid in a manger -- which is already a prelude of His self-abasement in the hour of His Passion. The climax of the love story between God and man passes by way of the manger of Bethlehem and the sepulcher of Jerusalem…

Let us live this wondrous event: The Son of God again is born "today"; God is truly close to each one of us, and He wants to meet us -- He wants to bring us to Himself. He is the true light, which dispels and dissolves the darkness enveloping our lives and mankind. Let us live the Lord's birth by contemplating the path of God's immense love, which raised us to Himself through the mystery of the incarnation, passion, death and resurrection of His Son… Above all, let us contemplate and live this Mystery in the celebration of the Eucharist, the heart of Christmas; there, Jesus makes Himself really present -- as the true Bread come down from heaven, as the true Lamb sacrificed for our salvation.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – “The climax of the love story between God and man passes by way of the manger.” Today the magi come to this manger. They represent us—all of humanity, coming from the ends of the earth, to behold and adore, fall down and worship this baby in the manger.

In the Eastern Church (and in Madonna House this day we celebrate the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Church) the focus is on the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. But this too is part of the same mystery—the true light dispelling the darkness. In the visit of the magi, we see the light dispelling the darkness of paganism, all of humanity separate and ignorant of the God of Israel. In the baptism, we see Christ plunging into the depths of darkness, the darkness of sin and death, symbolized by the waters that cleanse even as they kill.

We could almost legitimately put the feast of Corpus Christi right after this Epiphany-Baptism cycle. Christ shines light to the gentiles; Christ shines light to the sinful heart of man; Christ in the Eucharist shines light into the depths of your heart and mine.

This is our God—a light shining in the darkness. And what a light! Gentle, unassuming, non-violent, non-aggressive. God the baby, God the man humbling himself to be baptized by John, God giving Himself as food and drink to all who receive Him.

In MH today, after the divine liturgy we will process to the Madawaska River and throw in a crucifix. This is a ritual found throughout the Eastern Christian world. Symbolically, all the waters of the world are blessed in this simple rite, since of course all waters flow to the ocean and are connected together.

God has penetrated his world. The depths of the ocean, the innermost heart of reality, the darkest places of human sin and depravity, the hidden recesses of the human soul and everything that is found there—God has permanently and wholly immersed himself in our world.

His presence is hidden and gentle. He forces Himself on no one. But He is there, He is here, and because He is here, we have hope. Hope for everyone; hope for the silly people who have given up on any depth of meaning in life and plunge themselves into ephemeral pleasures and trivia; hope for the power brokers, the movers and shakers, the people who ‘count’ in the eyes of the world; hope for the evil-doers, the ones who embrace the path of violence and crime and hate. Hope for everyone—even hope for me and you, eh? The baby, the man in the water, the man on the Cross, the bread and wine which is not bread and wine at all—hope! So, once more for this Christmas season, O Come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

What is Reality Again?

There is a second aspect [of Christmas] that I would like to touch upon briefly. The event of Bethlehem should be considered in the light of the Paschal Mystery: The one and the other are part of the one redemptive work of Christ. Jesus' incarnation and birth invite us to direct our gaze to His death and resurrection: Christmas and Easter are both feasts of the Redemption. Easter celebrates it as the victory over sin and death: It signals the final moment, when the glory of the Man-God shines forth as the light of day; Christmas celebrates it as God's entrance into history, His becoming man in order to restore man to God: It marks, so to speak, the initial moment when we begin to see the first light of dawn.

But just as dawn precedes and already heralds the day's light, so Christmas already announces the cross and the glory of the resurrection. Even the two times of year when we mark the two great feasts -- at least in some parts of the world -- can help us to understand this aspect. In fact, while Easter falls at the beginning of spring, when the sun breaks through the thick, chilly mists and renews the face of the earth, Christmas falls right at the beginning of winter, when the sun's light and warmth seek in vain to awaken nature enwrapped by the cold. Under this blanket, however, life throbs and the victory of the sun and warmth begins again.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – Ah yes, a reminder here that the Pope is not, in fact, Canadian! December 25 as the ‘beginning’ of winter? Hah!
That said, we do have this beautiful opportunity in this part of this talk to reflect on how the seasons of the earth reflect the liturgical calendar. People often get this wrong, of course. Oh, Christians just put Christmas near the winter solstice so as to take over the pagan feast of Sol Invictus… and it’s all just paganism redux, taking over the cycles of earth and sun and giving them a superficial Christian gloss. We’ve all heard that kind of thing.
It’s entirely wrong. It turns out that the Roman pagans invented or located their big feast at the end of December precisely to counter the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, which dates to centuries before the Roman feast is ever mentioned. Christmas is where it is because the Annunciation is where it is, and that is because of the ancient tradition that the Incarnation and Jesus’ life began the same day as he died, which was March 25 according to the primitive Church’s calculations.
But even beyond the historical facts, which are indisputable, there is a deeper point. We Christians do not look at the birth of Christ and say, ‘oh yeah, that’s like winter and the way life and light are present in the midst of death and darkness.’ We look at the winter and we say, ‘oh yeah, this is just like what God did in Christ.’ Jesus is not a symbol of nature; nature—the earth and what fills it, the sun, the stars, the heavens—is a symbol of Jesus.
He is the center; all of reality points towards him. The sun rises every morning as proclamation of the Resurrection of Christ. Flowers receive light and give forth perfume and beauty as a proclamation of the fruits of redemption. The modern world says that the real things are the immediate visible things, the measurable, the prosaic, and that we humans just dress them up with a glossy religious sheen, in which case who cares if it’s Jesus, Mithras, Baldur, or Pan? Christians say that the reality is Christ, and all the visible objects surrounding us are his heralds, signs telling us of his goodness and beauty.
There is a blanket of snow on the earth right now where I am: all creation is wearing its baptismal robes. The sun is shining where I am right now: the light of Christ makes all things radiant. The birch tree outside my window is slender and elegant, a thing of beauty even though it is bare of its leafy raiment: so are our souls naked before God beautiful in their simplicity. On and on and on: this is not pious fiction or sentimentality. The reality is God in Christ, and every atom of creation proclaims that reality to us. Come, let us adore Him.

Just in Case You Need One

Modern man -- a man of "the sensible," of the empirically verifiable -- finds it increasingly more difficult to open his horizons and enter the world of God. The Redemption of mankind certainly took place at a precise and identifiable moment in history: in the event of Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus is the Son of God -- He is God Himself, who not only spoke to man, showed him wondrous signs and guided him throughout the history of salvation -- but became man and remains man. The Eternal entered into the limits of time and space, in order to make possible an encounter with Him "today."

The liturgical texts of Christmas help us to understand that the events of salvation wrought by Christ are always actual -- the interest of every man and of all mankind. When, within liturgical celebrations, we hear or proclaim this "Today a Savior is born for us," we are not employing an empty, conventional expression; rather, we mean that God offers us "today", now, to me, to each one of us, the possibility of acknowledging and receiving Him like the shepherds in Bethlehem, so that He might be born in our lives and renew them, illumine them, transform them by His grace, by His Presence.

General Audience, December 21, 2011

Reflection – We see in this lovely and rather simple passage one of the true greatnesses of Pope Benedict. He is so alive to the modern world and its challenges, understands the philosophical and intellectual struggles of the modern world as only a European of his generation can, having lived through so much of the bloody consequences of these struggles. But his greatness is that he brings to bear on these complex and tangled intellectual difficulties a childlike faith and expectation.

Modernity is mired in positivism and intellectual reductionism. The Pope says, “A child is born for us today, so we can meet Jesus here and now.” Modernity is mired in skepticism and disbelief. The Pope says, “Come, let us adore Him.”

I believe firmly that this is the answer to our modern world and its terrible confusions, terrible errors, terrible deeds against human life and dignity. To simply say, ‘we have a savior, you know.’ Just in case you’re ever looking for one. Just in case you ever decide you’re not doing so great without one.

We have a savior. His name is Jesus. Want to come meet Him? To the atheist, the Marxist, the scientist, the hedonist, the young barbarian who chooses to simply ignore all the deep questions of life. We have a savior – you know. His name is Jesus. He’s waiting for you and for all of us, when we decide we need one.

It’s like these wise men coming to this baby. What were they coming for? What did they expect? They were the intellectuals of their own day, the ones who knew whatever there was to know, and I’m sure it all was complicated and tangled up, as all human knowledge tends to be.

And they found… what? A baby? A mother? Some straw and animals, and good old Joseph in the corner keeping everyone comfortable? What did they find? They bowed down and worshipped him. And all their complexity was made radiantly simple in childlike wonder and awe.

This is the answer for all of us, whatever complexity and tangles we find ourselves in. We have a savior, his name is Jesus, let us go and worship Him. Let us pray that all who desire Him in their hearts, whether they know it or not, find him this year of 2012.

A New Softness Enters In

Today, anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus’ Nativity in Bethlehem will find that the doorway five and a half metres high, through which emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled up. Only a low opening of one and a half metres has remained. The intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from attack, but above all to prevent people from entering God’s house on horseback. Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our ‘enlightened’ reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis – the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby. In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart. And let us also pray especially at this hour for all who have to celebrate Christmas in poverty, in suffering, as migrants, that a ray of God’s kindness may shine upon them, that they – and we – may be touched by the kindness that God chose to bring into the world through the birth of his Son in a stable. Amen.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – The Holy Father, having laid out a lovely vision of the child, the manger, the stable, having invoked the great and very beloved St. Francis of Assisi and his love for Christmas and the crèche, now does what every good homilist does.

He now brings this around to us, lowering the boom on us with his typical direct gentleness. Our ‘false certainties, our intellectual pride’ – this can take many forms, you know. It is not only the pride and certainty of the scholar, the theologian, the academic. There is the false certainty of the shrewd person who ‘knows how the world is.’ The intellectual pride of the one who always has everyone figured out, and knows just what end is up. The false certainty of the mover and shaker, the intellectual pride of the competent sensible person who knows exactly what to do in most situations.
Out with it all, when we enter the stable! No room at this inn for any of that intellectual pride or false certainty! When we bow down to enter Bethlehem, we enter into a totality of mystery, a reality that surpasses all human understanding.
I don’t care how smart you are, how knowledgeable you are, how old and experienced you are, how shrewd and jaundiced you are, how competent you are. There is a baby lying on straw here, and that baby is God Almighty. No room for human intellect and its calm ascendancy here, no room at all. All of that falls away in the presence of this little one who is immense, this weak one who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, this poor one to whom all heaven and earth bows in worship.
So if we don’t park our high horse, the symbol of mastery and control, outside the stable, we simply will not find the God who came to us this way. We simply will not find God, period. There is something greater here, and we must bow very low before this greatness.
It seems to me that, as we bow down low before this, there is a great blessing for us. All of that false certainty and intellectual pride, even if it is relatively benign, sort of hardens us, don’t you think? The person who always knows the answer, always knows what needs doing, always knows which end is up, tends to become a bit hardened, a bit closed to anything outside of that knowledge. So when God smashes all our pride and certainties, painful as that may be, a new softness enters into us, a new openness to what is not us.
I’m not so smart, after all. This little baby is so far beyond my comprehension, that I’m just not such a smart capable guy… and out of this bowing, this mystery, I become more childlike, more open, more receptive. Humbler. And this is joy and wonder for us, awe and delight. Not just a smashing of pride, but a gift given to us. The permanent Christmas gift of God to the human race—‘give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out.’

Don't Throw the Tree Out

Saint Francis of Assisi called Christmas the feast of feasts – above all other feasts – and he celebrated it with unutterable devotion. He kissed images of the Christ-child with great devotion and he stammered tender words such as children say…

For the early Church, the feast of feasts was Easter: in the Resurrection Christ had flung open the doors of death and in so doing had radically changed the world: he had made a place for man in God himself. Now, Francis neither changed nor intended to change this objective order of precedence among the feasts, the inner structure of the faith centred on the Paschal Mystery. And yet through him and the character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The Resurrection presupposes the Incarnation.

For God’s Son to take the form of a child, a truly human child, made a profound impression on the heart of the Saint of Assisi, transforming faith into love… In the child born in the stable at Bethlehem, we can as it were touch and caress God. And so the liturgical year acquired a second focus in a feast that is above all a feast of the heart.

This has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is right here, in this new experience of the reality of Jesus’ humanity that the great mystery of faith is revealed. Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth. God became poor. His Son was born in the poverty of the stable. In the child Jesus, God made himself dependent, in need of human love, he put himself in the position of asking for human love – our love. Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity. Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – Now, I realize that for almost the entire secular world, the ‘superficial glitter’ of Christmas is a remote memory by now. We remain in the liturgical Christmas season while the culture has moved on to… well, what, now? Come to think of it, early January is a bit of empty space, culturally.

Actually this disjunction between cultural Christmas and liturgical Christmas may be a blessing in disguise for us Christians. It can be distracting, all the superficial glitter of the season, especially since more and more people are determined to separate the celebration of Christmas from anything to do with Jesus and his birth. The tired (and utterly false, by the way) trope that Christians took a pagan holiday and Christianized it continues to be used to justify neo-pagans taking Christian Christmas and paganizing it. Even if we know how spurious that claim is, it can be an effort to swim against the tide and really celebrate Christmas as a Christian feast.

And so we have the opportunity in this period from Dec 26-Jan 6 (or 8 if you are in a country where Epiphany is moved to the nearest Sunday) to truly focus ourselves on the mystery of this child in Bethlehem, the awesome coming of God to us in such humble and poor garb. God making himself something we can pick up and caress, God making himself something needy, a being we can love and care for. Everyone else has forgotten about Christmas, and so we have the joint to ourselves for this time, and can relax and do what we like with it.

So let’s stay with baby Jesus for a while yet – until this Sunday, anyhow. He may not be done with us this year; he may have more Christmas gifts to give us, still. There might still be a package or two under the tree with your name on it. Don’t throw the tree out just yet!

Shock and Awww

In all three Christmas Masses, the liturgy quotes a passage from the Prophet Isaiah, which describes the epiphany that took place at Christmas in greater detail: ‘A child is born for us, a son given to us and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give him: Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace. Wide is his dominion in a peace that has no end’ (Is 9:5f.). Whether the prophet had a particular child in mind, born during his own period of history, we do not know. But it seems impossible. This is the only text in the Old Testament in which it is said of a child, of a human being: his name will be Mighty-God, Eternal-Father. We are presented with a vision that extends far beyond the historical moment into the mysterious, into the future. A child, in all its weakness, is Mighty God. A child, in all its neediness and dependence, is Eternal Father. And his peace has no end. The prophet had previously described the child as ‘a great light’ and had said of the peace he would usher in that the rod of the oppressor, the footgear of battle, every cloak rolled in blood would be burned (Is 9:1, 3-4).

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – You know, there is an element of Christmas, understandable and really quite appropriate, that one could term the ‘awww’ factor. The cute little baby, the mother, the ox and ass, shepherds carrying little lambs. All very lovely, like a Christmas card or a snow globe or something.

And this is truly part of the picture. Babies are cute—ain’t no denying it. But of course we cannot stay there – God became cute for our sake. He didn’t become cute; he became weak, helpless, poor, naked, cold. He took to himself a body to be pierced and crushed, a heart to be broken, a soul to descend to the dead.

This Christmas mystery, if it is more than just a cute tableau at the local grade school Christmas pageant, is the most central reality of human history. God did this for us. God, in a manner beyond all understanding, became one of us. The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace shivers on straw and needs to be carried from place to place. It is a shocking picture.

And we are plunged into mystery within mystery in this. The historical fact of the Incarnation is deep mystery, and then within it is the deeper mystery of just how this is breaking any rod of any oppressor, how this removes any burden off of any shoulders.

God does this mighty deed to save us, and it baffles us. What difference does Jesus make, anyhow? Wars and hatred and oppression have gone on quite nicely for the last 2000 years, after all, and Christians have not been noticeably absent from the field.

What does Jesus liberate us from? What did his coming as man change? It’s all about this blasted will to power, this terrible dynamism in humanity that drives so much, if not all, of the hatred and violence and exploitation that makes life on earth hell on earth.

God strips Himself of power, and in that stripping recreates the universe. And in that stripping, and that recreation, we human beings are, if we choose, freed from the horrible slavery of power and its ruthless demands. I do not need to manipulate, control, exploit, use you. You do not need to manipulate, control, exploit, use me. God opens up, in Christ, another path to walk. A difficult path, a true via crucis, and it is no great wonder that so many have declined to follow Christ down that path. But it is a path that leads to life and glory, where the other path (the way of the world) leads to death and degradation.

God is born among us, and in Him we have a different way to live. That’s all. But that’s everything. God is born among us, and so we have hope that love is stronger, that mercy is deeper, that life is victorious. That’s all.

Stop and Stare

The reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to Titus that we have just heard begins solemnly with the word apparuit, which then comes back again in the reading at the Dawn Mass: apparuit – there has appeared.

This is a programmatic word, by which the Church seeks to express synthetically the essence of Christmas. Formerly, people had spoken of God and formed human images of him in all sorts of different ways. God himself had spoken in many and various ways to mankind (cf. Heb 1:1 – Mass during the Day). But now something new has happened: he has appeared. He has revealed himself. He has emerged from the inaccessible light in which he dwells. He himself has come into our midst. This was the great joy of Christmas for the early Church: God has appeared. No longer is he merely an idea, no longer do we have to form a picture of him on the basis of mere words. He has appeared. But now we ask: how has he appeared? Who is he in reality? The reading at the Dawn Mass goes on to say: ‘the kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed’ (Tit 3:4). For the people of pre-Christian times, whose response to the terrors and contradictions of the world was to fear that God himself might not be good either, that he too might well be cruel and arbitrary, this was a real epiphany, the great light that has appeared to us: God is pure goodness. Today too, people who are no longer able to recognize God through faith are asking whether the ultimate power that underpins and sustains the world is truly good, or whether evil is just as powerful and primordial as the good and the beautiful which we encounter in radiant moments in our world. The kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed: this is the new, consoling certainty that is granted to us at Christmas.

Homily, Midnight Mass, December 25, 2011

Reflection – God really is mysterious, isn’t He? I see this more and more clearly as life goes on. So many things happen, both in the world at large and in our own personal lives, that make the whole business of God, and hence Meaning, Truth, Goodness… well, very mysterious, to say the least.

It’s not a question of constantly having crises of faith, of being beset by doubts and constantly risking a lapse into atheistic nihilism. In some ways, that’s a cheap path out of the mysteriousness of life. After all, to simply throw up one’s hands and say, ‘well, there is no God then, and hence no real Meaning to it all!’ is one way to ‘solve’ the problem. There is no solution.
Or we can just not think too hard about it, not pay too close attention to it all. This is easier to do when one’s own immediate life is going all right; not so easy to do when sorrow and distress bust through your front door and stage a home invasion of you and yours. For many who choose the path of superficiality and unthinking, this is when faith fails.
It is really mysterious. As the Pope so beautifully reflects, and will continue to reflect in this homily, the mystery is not so much solved as deepened and made into a mystery of beauty, a luminous mystery, by this baby, this child, this strange Jesus who presents himself to us in this feast.
God has appeared—and his appearance makes the whole business of life, the world, pain and evil, sorrow and darkness, love and loss more mysterious. But a mystery in which we can find hope. We stare and stare at the little baby in the crib, in the manger, and something happens to us. We start to know that God is with us.
We still don’t know much. We don’t really know ‘what’ God is, or how his goodness and light are making their way through our lives and the life of the world. But we stare and stare at the baby, and we come to believe that He is here, anyhow. We are not alone, anyhow. And something is happening—slowly, strangely, in a fashion hard to see, hard to discern, but it is happening. Love grows, as we stop and stare at this strange appearance of God in our midst. Love grows, and with love, peace, joy, hope, and trust that as we stay with Him and keep staring, He will finally make all things well and gather all creation to Himself.
“Look towards Him and be radiant.”

The Lengthy Way

Jesus Christ is the proof that God has heard our cry. And not only this! God's love for us is so strong that he cannot remain aloof; he comes out of himself to enter into our midst and to share fully in our human condition (cf. Ex 3:7-12). The answer to our cry which God gave in Jesus infinitely transcends our expectations, achieving a solidarity which cannot be human alone, but divine. Only the God who is love, and the love which is God, could choose to save us in this way, which is certainly the lengthiest way, yet the way which respects the truth about him and about us: the way of reconciliation, dialogue and cooperation.

Dear brothers and sisters in Rome and throughout the world, on this Christmas 2011, let us then turn to the Child of Bethlehem, to the Son of the Virgin Mary, and say: "Come to save us!" Let us repeat these words in spiritual union with the many people who experience particularly difficult situations; let us speak out for those who have no voice.

Urbi et orbi  message, December 25, 2011

Reflection – The Pope went on in this address to mention the nations and peoples of the world suffering especially in this time—the litany of trouble spots that is all too familiar to those who follow the news closely.

When we contemplate the world as it is, with all its war and hunger, disease and oppression, and when we contemplate the sufferings that may come more close to ourselves personally and those we love—illness and death, marital breakdown and financial worries—the temptation is always there to at the very least question God’s care and presence, perhaps even his reality.

For many today, it is more than a temptation—the suffering and ugliness of the world seems to make faith difficult to the point of impossibility. To us who have faith, and to those whose faith may be shaky, the Pope calls us to contemplate this mysterious baby in the manger, this mysterious coming of God into the world, not as a mighty warrior to put all the armies to flight, not as an all-powerful king to take command and dispense perfect justice, not as an all-encompassing wonder worker taking all our afflictions away, but as a baby.

‘The lengthiest way’ of salvation – what a nice turn of phrase that is. God chooses to save us by entering into our woes with us, not by taking our woes away. There is such a deep reality at play and at stake here.

What is our central illness, our central affliction, the passion that drives all passions, the poison that blights everything it touches? It is that we want something other than God, or want something in preference to God, or in place of God. This is how wars start, how poverty and oppression thrive, how relationships are fractured, and how even our bodies are damaged and so break down and perish. The poison is universal; it is in all of us, and so all of us share in its effects.

So God comes to us—and we see in this Christmas mystery He offers us nothing but Himself. If He had come in might and power immediately, solving all our problems and curing all our ailments, he would have, in fact, solved nothing and cured nothing. We poor benighted human beings would have simply welcomed all the gifts and blessings He was giving us… and turned our backs on Him, as we do.

God made us so that we will never be truly well, never truly happy, never truly free, until we love Him, turn towards Him, seek Him, worship Him. This is the order of all created reality, and we are His creatures. He is our happiness, our health, our freedom, our joy, our peace.

And so He embarks on the lengthiest path of salvation, but the one ‘which respects the truth about him and about us’. And He remains so present in each of our lives, helping us, yes, healing us, yes, in so many mysterious and often hidden ways. But always, in His presence, His help, and His healing, drawing us to the deep healing, which is to love Him and seek Him and follow Him with all our hearts.

How does this play out on the world stage, in Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, North Korea, and in the myriad personal tragedies each of us is bitterly acquainted with in our families and loved ones? I don’t know.

But I know the truth of what I have written above in my own life. I also know that I am nothing special, just another sinner in need of mercy and salvation. So I know that God must be doing for each human being what He is doing for me, or at least wanting to.

This is the deal God offers us, though, to enter and share our human condition Himself, and in that to transform it from within, to make it a sharing in the mystery of love and grace. And each of us must decide if this is true, this Christmas present, this gift of God to us.

Is You Is or Is You Ain't?

Christ is born for us! Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to the men and women whom he loves. May all people hear an echo of the message of Bethlehem which the Catholic Church repeats in every continent, beyond the confines of every nation, language and culture. The Son of the Virgin Mary is born for everyone; he is the Saviour of all.

This is how Christ is invoked in an ancient liturgical antiphon: "O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver, hope and salvation of the peoples: come to save us, O Lord our God". Veni ad salvandum nos! Come to save us!..

This is the meaning of the Child's name, the name which, by God's will, Mary and Joseph gave him: he is named Jesus, which means "Saviour" (cf. Mt 1:21; Lk 1:31). He was sent by God the Father to save us above all from the evil deeply rooted in man and in history: the evil of separation from God, the prideful presumption of being self-sufficient, of trying to compete with God and to take his place, to decide what is good and evil, to be the master of life and death (cf. Gen 3:1-7). This is the great evil, the great sin, from which we human beings cannot save ourselves unless we rely on God's help, unless we cry out to him: "Veni ad salvandum nos! – Come to save us!"

The very fact that we cry to heaven in this way already sets us aright; it makes us true to ourselves: we are in fact those who cried out to God and were saved (cf. Esth [LXX] 10:3ff.). God is the Saviour; we are those who are in peril. He is the physician; we are the infirm. To realize this is the first step towards salvation, towards emerging from the maze in which we have been locked by our pride. To lift our eyes to heaven, to stretch out our hands and call for help is our means of escape, provided that there is Someone who hears us and can come to our assistance.

Urbi et orbi address, December 25, 2011

Reflection – Now, just so everyone is clear, you all know that Christmas is not over, right? Christmas starts, not ends, on December 25, and extends to Epiphany (in Canada this year on January 8). One of the true benefits of living in Madonna House away from the secular culture more or less is that we are insulated from the modern notion that Christmas (meaning the shopping season) starts somewhere around Hallowe’en and ends on Christmas Day, by which time everyone is heartily sick of the whole business.

No – we have just completed Advent, and now are basking in the glow of the stable at Bethlehem, and so this blog, written from Madonna House, will be reflecting on the Christmas mystery and the Pope’s 2011 reflections on same.

Here we see one of his constant themes applied to this mystery: that in Christ the true healing, the deepest salvation we receive is being delivered from our self-sufficiency, our deadly egoism, our tragedy of being locked into our own self, the futile effort to be the source and summit of our own existence.

To know our need for salvation is, in itself, salvific for us… provided (of course) that there is Someone to save us, as Pope Benedict so ably points out. And that always is the question, isn’t it? So many of our other questions—all the hows and whys and whats of life, resolve around this: is God with us, or not?

The old song asked the question ‘is you is or is you ain’t my baby?’ We ask Jesus the question ‘is you is or is you ain’t my savior?’ And do we need the salvation He offers? This is the pressing question, I believe, for many. So many in the world today seem to be unaware of their need for salvation. I’m doing just fine, they say. I don’t need God. ‘Jesus is for poor people, Christianity is for losers,’ is the common attitude.

It seems to me that one of the pre-evangelization needs in the world today is to bring people to know their own need for salvation. In other words, you are a loser. You are a poor person. If you don’t know this, you are lost in delusion, building your life on sand, trapped in this maze of self the Pope speaks of.

People are very afraid to confront their own poverty, and hide from it behind a whole series of subterfuges and distractions. So much flight into drinking and drugging and vacuous entertainment culture is based on this. Let’s just think about something else, or not think at all.

But we have a savior. We are not alone. God is with us—Emmanuel. We have nothing to be afraid of. This is the constant message of Christmas, the constant hope held out for us by the baby in the manger, the man on the cross, the God who is made manifest in Jesus Christ.

Christmas Vacation

Christmas is a time for family, for festivity, for frolic, and for worship, as I wrote yesterday.
It is not a time to be staring at a computer screen… so this blog is going on Christmas vacation, starting now. I will probably check in a few times between Christmas and New Year’s, and resume regular blogging in January 2012.
May every good gift from above and every blessing of God be upon you and yours as we gather around the manger to worship the baby who brought us eternal life and bliss. Merry Christmas, and a happy new year to you all.

It is Merry, and It is Christmas

Mary, saying Yes to the birth of the Son of God from her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, places her body, her entire self, at God’s disposal as a place for his presence.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 49

Reflection – There is a mysterious reality of Christmas captured in this quote from Ratzinger. Christmas is such a very festive time, with all that makes up the reality ‘festivity’ for us: food and drink, friends and family, gifts and parties… and maybe, just maybe, the occasional church service!
But at the core of this merry jovial and hopefully fun time is this deep mystery. The mother. The child. God taking flesh. A womb, and what issues forth from it: God, salvation, eternal life.
And this mystery of Mary’s freely participating in this, her free consent, her fiat. And this is where and how God becomes present.
And out of this flows, then, song and dance, wassails and eggnog, tinsel and tarts.
The two must be held together: depth of mystery exploding in silence and beauty from the heart of God, the womb of Mary, the manger surrounded by stars and angels and wonderment; silliness and nonsense and excess and laughter, laughter, laughter.
Without the mystery, the silliness and excess degrades into a mere bacchanal. Without the frolic, the mystery becomes something beyond us, something we poor little humans cannot quite get to.
Merry Christmas. It is merry, and it is Christ’s Mass. It is a time for turkey and stuffing and good wine and song and laughter; it is the self-offering of the God-man, in humility on the straw.
And this becomes our mystery. We can be joyful, laughing, singing, full of jokes and nonsense… and daily lay down our lives for God and one another. And God is present, in that place.
Merry Christmas.

Truth is a Child

Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like that child that knows all its questions answered in the ‘You’ of its mother.

Introduction to Christianity, 48

Reflection – As Christmas draws near we can all easily contemplate the image of ‘mother and child’ Ratzinger references here. It is indeed the feast of Christmas when we see most clearly that not only is God real, not only is there an Ultimate Reality that is behind everything, but that this reality ‘knows me and loves me’.

‘Truth is a child,’ wrote Catherine Doherty in one of her Christmas-centered poems. Truth is a child; God made himself a baby, a child, a helpless creature, for love of us. God put himself into our hands so that we could do with him what we will. Herod tried to kill him; Pontius Pilate succeeded a few years later.

‘Truth is a child, bread and wine,’ is the full first line of the poem. This ‘helpless God’ we behold in the manger in our crèche scenes and carols comes to us in fleshly reality at every Mass.

“Truth is a child, bread and wine/Truth is fed by the breasts of Mary/Truth is cradled by the hands of Mary/Truth is helpless as only a child can be/Truth is helpless only as bread and wine can helpless be/The keynote of Truth is helplessness.”

So runs the first stanza of this remarkable poem. It is an unfathomable mystery of God that He makes Himself so for us. For God is not helpless – He plays with the stars and the galaxies, and holds every quark and quanta in its place – but this God perpetually presents Himself to us as a beggar, as a poor man, as a helpless baby, as bread and wine. We can receive Him in faith and love, or cast Him on the ground and tread Him underfoot.

There’s something very deep going on here about the mystery of love, the mystery of generosity, of mercy. And because it is about those things, all this ‘helplessness’ business has to be reflected in our own lives somehow.

“Unless [truth] becomes as helpless as a child/Or piece of bread that is lifted up, or cup of wine/It will not be the perfect love that I am./When you have become as utterly helpless/As I became for love’s sake/Then you will be like I Myself.”

It all comes back to this child entrusting himself to his mother. To knowing that objective reality, ultimate reality ‘knows me and loves me.’ So I can abandon myself to Him who so abandoned Himself to me, allow myself to be borne along by His will in my life, gobbled up by the demands of love, cast aside by the heedless or loveless, disregarded and forgotten, or drowned in a sea of obligations and hard labor.

Bread and wine. A child. A Christian. Such is the truth of our faith. Such is the quality of perfect love. And in Christmas, beholding the beauty of the manger, the mother, the child, such is the renewal of our hope that in this faith and love, we enter a realm of light and joy, smelling of straw and animals, but filled with the sound of angels’ wings and song.

See you there.

We Must Celebrate

Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgment is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfillment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's return and for new life become fully convincing.

Spe Salvi 43

Reflection – It’s always good, as we get ready to celebrate the Christmas feast on Sunday, that our looking back to the coming of the Christ child in Bethlehem 2000 years ago is also a looking forward to the final coming of Christ in glory.
Catherine Doherty found Christmas a painful time of year, often, precisely because of what the Pope is talking about here. The joy, the beauty, the promise of peace and love—all that we rightly associate with the child of Christmas—for her was sharply contrasted with children being bombed in Vietnam, starving in Biafra, shivering in the cold of the inner cities of America.
It is painful. The world goes its own way, ‘silent night’ notwithstanding. People are cruel to each other, and the poorest are the ones who inevitably pay the highest price of this cruelty. In Catherine’s day it was Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland. Today we look to Egypt, Syria, North Korea, Somalia. So many victims, so much suffering.
So if our Christmas feast does not in some fashion look to these suffering ones, there is something a bit unreal about it. Certainly this means that Christmas is a time for charity as well as (if not more than) consumption; but it also means Christmas is a time when, as we look to this Baby in the manger, so beautiful, so peaceful, we cry out to Him for all these other babies who are robbed of their peace—the ones torn to bits in the womb, the ones born into situations of desperation and great evil.
We cry for Him to come and complete the work He has begun. We do believe he has begun this work; we long for Him to come and finish it. It is this sense of incompletion, of a job not yet finished, of a world yet to be transformed by love and grace, that spurs us on both to actions of love and mercy, and to ceaseless prayer.
And in the midst of all this, we can celebrate, you know! We can eat turkey and sing carols and frolic as we wish. We must celebrate, or else the darkness will overcome the light in us, and that would be tragic.
And we can celebrate, because He came, you know. And because He came, no child, no baby anywhere in the world is truly left alone. He came for them, for us, for you, for me. And nothing is the same because He came, not really, not forever. And so, even in the dark and cold of the world as it is, we light candles and decorate our homes and laugh together at the feast.
Christ is born, and the world begins to be reborn in Him. This is joy, and this is hope.

For Now

Christians likewise can and must constantly learn from the strict rejection of images that is contained in God's first commandment (cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature, the dissimilarity between them is always greater. [However] God has given himself an “image”: in Christ who was made man. In him who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer who shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself. This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive, yet we can begin to grasp it through faith.

Spe Salvi 43

Reflection – One of the true markers of greatness in a thinker or a human being is the capacity to recognize and freely embrace that which is true in the positions of one’s opponents. And as everyone has some little bit of truth somewhere in their thought (it is psychologically impossible to be wrong about everything), this gives the great thinker the ability to agree with and affirm everyone… while still advancing his or her own argument.

Pope Benedict is a great thinker. Here, he gladly affirms the element of truth in the iconoclast heresy of the eighth century, that heresy which denied any use of imagery whatsoever to depict God. The Pope here points out that the iconoclasts were concerned rightly to preserve the mystery of God, His supreme unlikeness to anything material or visible, His transcending of all categories of time and space, extension and hence depiction.

Affirming the truth of this, the Pope then says, essentially, “Yes, but…” And this ‘but’ is what we are all gearing up to celebrate this coming weekend. God made an image for Himself. God the invisible made Himself visible. God the utterly transcendent, the immense one, made Himself very small. God the All-powerful, the All-mighty, the All-knowing and All-judging one, made Himself very weak, very poor, very helpless.

A baby on a bed of straw. A naked man on a Cross. This is the face of God.

And this is, then, hope. There is so much about the world we do not understand. So much about the world that seems just wrong to us. It seems unjust; God seems unjust to many. No need to rehearse all that here.

But then we have the ultimate revelation of God, and it’s as if He says in the language of the poker table, “I see your mystery and I will raise you a mystery beyond it.” The world is cruel and cold; God is born a baby shivering in the cold. The world is unjust; God becomes victim of an injustice. The world is dying, and this death makes everything in us cry out to God in fear, in anger, in despair; God, in response, dies.

And in this all is reborn. All enters into the passion of the infant Christ, the passion of the man Christ, this mysterious unfathomable pity of God which ‘stoops from the heights to look down, to look down upon heaven and earth.’ (Ps 113). And all is mysteriously touched, changed, reshaped, refashioned from its most interior reality outward.

We are in an in-between time, which is always difficult for human beings. The transformation has begun, but it is still largely hidden from view. God is working this mysterious change in all reality, has worked it essentially in depth, but we await the final eruption of this transformation to appear so that all flesh will see it.

For now, we have a baby lying in a manger. We have a man hanging on a cross. We have a host in a tabernacle, a ciborium, a monstrance. We have Jesus. For now, we have Jesus, and in Him we have hope.

One Simple Sentence

The maker is the opposite of the wonderer. He narrows the scope of reason and thus loses sight of the mystery. The more men themselves decide and do in the Church, the more cramped it becomes for us all. What is great and liberating about the Church is not something self-made but the gift that is given to us all. This gift is not the product of our own will and invention but precedes us and comes to meet us as the incomprehensible reality that is ‘greater than our heart’. The reform that is needed at all times does not consist in constantly remodeling ‘our’ Church according to our taste, or in inventing her ourselves, but in ceaselessly clearing away our subsidiary constructions to let in the pure light that comes from above and that is also the dawning of pure freedom.

Called to Communion, 140

Reflection – There are probably few subjects Ratzinger has given more attention to than the ongoing reform of the Church. As a young theologian, he was among the periti of the Second Vatican Council; as a bishop, archbishop, Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as the bishop of Rome, he has labored unceasingly for the proper understanding and implementation of the reforms of the Council, and endured with considerable grace and charity the opprobrium and slanders of those with a different understanding of what this would mean.

We see in the above passage the central attitude he assumes towards this whole reform business. The Church is not something we make, not our creation, not our work fundamentally. It is a gift coming to us from above. The fundamental structure of the Church, its essential being and purpose and action, is given to us, is the work of God, the action of the Holy Spirit coming to us from above that gives light and freedom to our eyes.

This is so crucial. It’s not just matters we may think of as relevant to Church reform: can women be ordained priests? What about celibacy? How should the liturgy be celebrated? What about structures of authority? What is the proper role of the theologian? What about dissent? What is the mission of the laity? What about sex???????

All that stuff has its importance and place. But there is a fundamental attitude towards all reality that I believe must come before any of these matters, and indeed any matter at all can be properly understood and lived.

It’s this whole business of reality coming to us ‘from above’, of truth coming to us as a gift from God, of life being something to be wondered at before it is to be made. Wonder, awe, gratitude, contemplation—without these, we are in a sorry state of affairs. God unfolds around us moment by moment, day by day, his awesome and mighty works. The beauty of the world he made, the strange actions of love and mercy that attend all of our lives (although we miss so much by our inattentiveness), the most mysterious dispensations of his will unfolding around us moment by moment in his providential disposal of the world—all of this is to be wondered at, received, contemplated. And then, surrendered to.

It’s this whole business of Mary, you know. And the angel, and this unfathomably mysterious event in Nazareth 2000 years ago or so. “Let it be done to me according to your word.” A whole way of life, a whole approach to reality, an entire anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, ecclesiology, psychology, younameitology emerges from this one simple sentence.

It is to be our sentence, if we are to be Christians. If we want to be something else, we can say some other sentence, but this is the sentence of the Christian. “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your word,” and then this mysterious gift, this mysterious action, this mysterious Word enters our flesh. What is this? We cannot encompass it or comprehend.

We can fall down and worship, though. And this is Christmas. This is faith. This is life. Without this, we will never know how to ‘be Church’, or ‘be human’ or be much of anything worth being.

Mary, teach us.

Humble Exaltation

[In some strands of modern theology] an exaggerated solus Christus compelled its adherents to reject any cooperation of the creature, any independent significance of its response, as a betrayal of the greatness of grace. Consequently, there could be nothing meaningful in the feminine line of the Bible stretching from Eve to Mary.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 43

Reflection – When I get to blogging about Ratzinger’s Marian writings, something in my heart sings for joy. Not only because I love Mary and Pope Benedict so much, but because this was my thesis for my licentiate, a thesis which became this book.

So the subject is near and dear to my heart, having filled my little brain for over a year of my life. In this passage we see Ratzinger’s contemplation of the feminine line in the Old Testament – that line stretching from Eve to Sarah to Rachel to Hannah, with Deborah, Judith, Esther thrown in for good measure, and personified Wisdom—Sophia!—coming in at the end as an emphatic affirmation of what had gone before.

All of this feminine line, which then bears fruit in a wholly new and extraordinary way in Mary, is about response, about participation, about the total engagement of the creature in the work of the Creator. The barren women who miraculously conceive, the weak women who lead Israel into battle, and the Woman Sophia who accompanies God in every moment of his creative worked—these all communicate to us that the creature is called into an engagement with the Creator in his saving acts. We creatures are always in the mode of response and receptivity, but nonetheless an active receptivity, a passionate response.

It is this strain of modern theology (I will spare you details of names of scholars, etc. – it’s all in the book I’m quoting from here) that rejects this, that is so fixed on the masculine dimension of Christ and his initiating active role that any suggestion of meaning and goodness in the feminine dimension is suspect.

To have dignity and meaning, value and weight, in this school of theology, can only come from having power, from being on top, from being the one initiating, the one who is doing. Any kind of ‘submission’ or subjection or obediential path is understood as being totally degraded, an insult to those who are invited to walk it.

Since this is the only deal God offers the human race – the path of obedience and submission to His Holy Will – this school of theology is deeply confused and does great harm to those who are exposed to it.

And so, we have Mary – as always, the great defender of orthodoxy, and scourge of heretics in every generation. The one who shows us what it really means to be human, the lowliness and humility of our condition, but in that and only in that, our exalted role in the drama of creation and salvation. “He humbles, only to exalt,” as one of those bold women of the Bible once said (1 Sam 2:7). “He has looked on his servant in her lowliness; from henceforth all generations will call me blessed,” as She put it.

What's It For?

Freedom can abolish itself. Freedom can weary of itself when it has become empty.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 50

Reflection – Ratzinger warns here of the danger of establishing a morality by consensus. You may be familiar with this approach to moral ‘thinking’. Namely, whatever the opinion poll says is right, is right! Same sex marriage is trending up in the polls; abortion is trending down. So the one is increasingly moral; the other is increasingly immoral.

Morality by consensus: whatever we all agree on, are at least a plurality agree upon, is right. The trouble here is that we can agree on monstrous evils. We can agree to deprive the unborn of the right to life, or Jews, or gypsies, or homosexuals. We can agree to give the state power to arrest people and hold them indefinitely without charge at the whim of those in power. President Barack Obama just signed a law allowing himself to do just that.

‘Freedom can abolish itself.’ The majority can decide just about anything. Human history is filled with example upon example of ‘the majority’ enslaving, raping, murdering, and choosing to live in conditions of profound tyranny and exploitation.

For what? For the sake of security? To make life a little bit simpler, a little easier (freedom is a burden to be borne, you know)? To get rid of undesired elements in the population? Whatever it is, ‘freedom can weary of itself when it has become empty.’

What do we need to do? We need to attain a vision of freedom that is precisely not empty. We need to rediscover, or discover for the first time, what freedom is for, what its point is, what the good of it is. Freedom is for something—it is not just a vacuous ticket to do whatever you please. Sooner or later, it will please us to legislate our freedom away. Sooner, I think.

Freedom is for love. Freedom is for truth. Freedom is for pursuing the deep meaning, the deep goodness, the transcendent value of human life. Otherwise, it is of little to no value. If I use my freedom merely to watch silly TV shows and buy stuff I don’t need, I will quickly trade it away when it becomes burdensome.

Sobering thoughts, sobering words. But such are the times we live in.

What Ails Ya?

Making [Christ’s yes] present and actual is possible because the Lord lives even today in his saints and because in the love that comes from their faith his love can touch me directly.

To Look on Christ, 94

Reflection – In surveying the landscape of the world in the dying days of 2011, one could diagnose many illnesses, many pathologies in what we see. There is fiscal irresponsibility in high places, environmental irresponsibility (perhaps) in other places. There is moral confusion, corruption, and a breakdown of community in almost all places.

But I would say honestly that I think the great poverty afflicting us in the world today is precisely what Ratzinger touches on here. We have a poverty of saints. We need to touch Christ, you see. We need, not an endless profusion of words (hearken, o blogger!), not the endless chatter and clatter and debate of the public square, not more programs in our governments and churches, not even (principally) more services to the poor and needy, good though all these things may be.
We need saints. What ails humanity, always and everywhere and in every age, is the great ‘no’ to God that I have been reflecting on with the Pope this past week or so. This great choice in humanity to go its own way, to make a life apart from God, away from Him, in opposition to Him perhaps, but certainly separated from Him. And this ‘no’ places us in a terrible wilderness, a terrible darkness, a strange sort of hell of the self, an endless hall of mirrors where all we can see is our own egoism reflected back to us.
This is, as I say, the perennial complaint of the human race, our chronic illness. And Christ is the remedy. His ‘yes’ to the Father, made as man, but made an eternally fruitful ‘yes’ by the fact that he is God, this yes is powerful enough to heal all of our ‘nos’.
But we need saints. We need to see that yes. We need to see what it looks like when a sinner like us through some unaccountable miracle says ‘yes’ to God and so is transformed by the power of Christ.
Everything that ails the world—all the fiscal, environmental, moral, communal, etc. failures we see on all sides at this time—traces back to the rampant ‘no’ to God, the endemic choice in our time to build a world apart from and without God. And nothing will ever be made right in this world until we repent of this choice and return to Him without whom the world does not exist and cannot be what He designed it to be.
And it is the saints who in every age show us what this repentance, this return, looks like, and what God want the world today to look like. Only they know, because only they have attacked the problem at its root. The saints are radicals; they attack the problem at the root, and the root of the problem, now and always and forever and ever, is sin. My sin, your sin.
There is a poverty of saints in the world today, a poverty of people who can make visible Christ’s yes to the Father, the human yes to God that is the healing of the nations. A poverty of saints… hmm. Now, where will we find them? Where are they going to come from? Hey! How about you and me! Do you think that could work?

Lest We Forget

Well, we're having a day of recollection today for Catherine Doherty's anniversary of death here at MH. Now, I am not a worrying sort of person, generally, but one thing that preys on my mind is this:
Catherine Doherty is, in my view, one of the great prophets of the Lord of our time. I would rank her, frankly, alongside Maximillian Kolbe, John Paul II, and Pope Benedict.
Problem is, she is slowly being forgotten, I believe. Certainly there is a whole generation of young Catholics who have never heard of her or been exposed to her luminous writings.
Madonna House is a small community, and poor in many ways, financial not the least of them. We are limited in our ability to get Catherine's prophetic words out there to the world.
But hey, the Internet is free, more or less... Here's a thought. My previous blog post, Life With A Russian Bear, had a lovely article by her on proper love of self and the healing of self-hatred. How about if 26 (at least!) of my facebook friends share this post on their wall, in honor of Catherine's 26th anniversary of death?
And if you want, you could invite 26 of your friends to do the same - share it on their wall. That would make 276 people posting something by Catherine on their walls... and who knows where it could go from there?
A modest proposal... to bring a life giving word to the world.