Where We Learn to Be Human

Despite all impressions to the contrary, the family is still strong and vibrant today. But there is no denying the crisis that threatens it to its foundations – especially in the western world. It was noticeable that the Synod repeatedly emphasized the significance for the transmission of the faith of the family as the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence.

This is something we learn by living it with others and suffering it with others. So it became clear that the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold.

First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for?

Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.

Address to the Roman Curia, 21 December 2012

Reflection – Well, it is time to wade into the field of controversy again. These remarks by the Holy Father before Christmas occasioned a fair amount of heat and not too much light these past weeks. A group has petitioned the White House to name the Roman Catholic Church a ‘hate group’ on the strength of them, and the chattering classes have been… well, chattering away about the Pope and his horrible hateful words.

My take on it is to actually present what the Pope said in full, and talk about it. And this is what I will do for the next few days or so on this blog. I call this method of presentation ‘journalism’, which is an increasingly rare commodity in the world today. So here we see that the Pope upholds the family as the fundamental place where human beings learn to be human beings, by living and suffering with others.

And what does it mean to be a human being? To commit oneself to the task of love and laying down one’s life for others. By entering into commitment, opening oneself up to real risk, to real self-giving where there is no ‘escape clause’, no easy out. To open oneself up to other people and really throw one’s lot in with them.

All of this is essential to the nature of humanity, and to the nature of ‘family.’ And when commitment vanishes as a real aspect of marriage and parenthood—when no fault divorce is the norm, or common law arrangements—then the vital core of our humanity is lost.

Freedom only attains its goal when we use our freedom to freely bind ourselves to the other in love. Freedom is only ‘free’ when it is consummated in this binding in love. One might say, with full Chestertonian paradox, that freedom is perfected by slavery.

It is in the family, with all its human wounds and human imperfections and sufferings, that we learn this basic structure of human life, that we learn that we are made to give ourselves to the other and not take that gift back no matter what. And that is why it is so crucial to defend and uphold the life of the family in the world today.

Making Haste

Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another, along with the shepherds, we should not only think of the great "crossing over" to the living God, but also of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there today. Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbors: that there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side by side in God's peace.

The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.

Homily, Midnight Mass, 2012

Reflection – I’ve got a doozy of a cold right now, which drains one’s creativity like nothing else, I have noticed. At the moment, with all due apologies to the Holy Father,  the only thing I’m ‘making haste’ for is my bed, as soon as I can reasonably get there.

 

But I did want to finish this wonderful homily, as the Christmas season does officially wrap up with the feast of the Lord’s baptism this weekend. And so I simply, and mercifully briefly, leave you with Pope Benedict’s words, in hopes that I will feel better tomorrow and in consequence have something to say about something! (I really do feel lousy right now...) God bless you.

How Far is it to Bethlehem?

Once the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Savior, Christ the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given them wings.

Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church's liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go "across", daring to step beyond, to make the "transition" by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.

Homily, Midnight Mass, 2012

Reflection – Going across ‘the purely material world into the real one’ – I do love this Pope and his way of putting things.

We were just talking a little bit about this at MH yesterday. We are reading, as we often do at this time of year, the classic book The Reed of God, by Caryll Houselander for our post-lunch spiritual reading. She was writing about how we don’t know Christ, even after 2000 years, how we tend to cut him down to a size and shape convenient or fitting to us. How, of course, what we then have is not Jesus but an idol made in our own image and likeness. How we have to be vigilant to read the whole Gospel, not just the parts we like, and continually allow ourselves to come before this Christ who is not comfortable and convenient, but who is the real God.

She puts it all with much greater elegance and beauty, of course (if you haven’t read that book, you have really missed out on a gem, by the way). But it seems to me that this is what Pope Benedict is saying when he talks about ‘going across’ to Bethlehem.

God is real – reality Himself – but to enter that reality always is an ascetical act on our part. It always implies the simple, frank acknowledgment that our own reality is partial, limited, bound by our own subjectivity, insufficient for our needs. To go across to Bethlehem means to enter into mystery, to bow before a Reality that is not ours, that we did not make, that we certainly do not understand all that well, and to allow that Reality to shape our reality, instead of the other way around.

I don’t think any of us would really have done it that way, if the world’s salvation was up to us. We would have gone for a show of power—shock and awe them into repentance!—or perhaps just a simple unveiling of God’s infinite beauty—we’ll make ‘em love God!

But… a baby born in hiddenness? A child growing up in an obscure village? A man hanging on a cross? A Church made up of sinners and fools, carrying this salvation to the nations? A host and a chalice holding the very life of God under the appearance of bread and wine?

No… we wouldn’t have done it that way. Too hard. Too mysterious. Too much can go wrong (and has!). But God did it that way. And this is the real world, the Bethlehem to which we are to continually go across to. The path of childlike faith, abandonment, obedience, and suffering love. God’s path, not ours. How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far, if we choose to go there.

If God's Light is Extinguished

Linked to God's glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone.

Now it is true that in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God's cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred. While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace.

If God's light is extinguished, man's divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God's image, to which we must pay honor in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, who belong to one another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century.

Only if God's light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is "Emmanuel", God with us (Is 7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – Well, this is all so very well put and clear (and longer than usual!) that perhaps my contribution is not so needed today. We do see here a very clear, very straight-forward answer to the commonplace observation that religion causes violence and war.

Namely: so what does the absence of religion cause? And this is not just a tu quoque argument (translation: you guys are just as bad!). Rather, it is a strict logical analysis. People say that monotheistic religion causes violence and hatred. When monotheistic religion is removed from the picture, there should be then reduced violence and hatred. This is simply not the story of the 20^th century, certainly not in Europe. Atheistic communism and Nazism killed tens of millions between them.

Human dignity rests on our divine origin and goal, or it does not rest securely at all. And where human community and human decency fail, as happens constantly in this fallen world of ours, divine grace must come to our rescue. And it has, repeatedly and beautifully, in the lives of nations and of individuals.

 

And this is Christmas, in depth and in essence. Not the ‘cute’ story of the baby and the shepherds; not the trimmings and tinsel; not (certainly) the frenzy of buying and consuming. All of that is good and proper, but in depth and in essence it is God coming to be with His people to redeem us from the sword, from hatred, from violence. This is our hope; I argue most sincerely and seriously that it is our only hope. But it is a secure and certain hope, so we can have great joy in this. See you tomorrow.

Overflowing Happiness

There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you - the angels' hymn of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased." God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God's glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God's truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – Oh, this is truly a lovely homily! From the reflections on ‘no room’ at the inn, no room for God, no place for God in our lives and hearts, now we move to what it looks like when God is given room, given His full room, when God is worshipped.

It is joy, beauty, song, goodness. Too often we (and I most definitely include myself here) get a bit racked up with the suffering and sorrow aspect of life. We can easily place just a leetle too much emphasis on the reality of the cross, of death to self, of the struggle with God and with neighbor, the passion of love.

It’s understandable – all that is real, after all, and nothing quite grabs our attention like suffering. But we have to remember that these are not the ultimate realities. And the whole business of giving our lives over to God, of echoing Mary’s fiat, of giving Christ room to grow to full stature—this is not so we can live our lives nailed to a cross!

It is so we can live our lives in perfect joy and gladness. It is so that we can move steadily towards that day ‘when the whole world sends back the song, which now the angels sing.’

Heaven is all joy, all song, all light and love. It is so utterly crucial for us to get this: a life lived for God and God alone is a good life. It is a joyous life. It is a beautiful life. This is so utterly opposite to so much of our modern thinking. To many, the happy joyful life is the life immersed in sensual pleasures or wealth or the exercise of power. But none of that really delivers joy, not real joy, not for long.

Joy comes with love. Joy and peace are the fruit of love, and the only way to live a life of joy and peace is to live a life of love. And yes, in this world love means sacrifice and at least some suffering, but that’s not the point of the exercise.

God is good for us. To worship God is good for us—factually, it is our good. And the song of the angels, the beauty of the manger scene, the adoration of the shepherds and the magi all show us the beauty and goodness of this truth. As we move on from Christmas into the following weeks, let’s not fail to learn what all these mysteries are trying to teach us.

Making Room

There is no room for God. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so "full" of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger.

By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul's exhortation: "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality.

Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.

Homily, Midnight Mass 2012

Reflection – I want to reflect a bit personally today on this section of the Pope’s homily (and the peanut gallery says, ‘And this is different from your usual blogging how?’). My life as a priest in Madonna House, on top of the normal and utterly central sacramental and liturgical ministries every priest does, is in this year of 2013 basically divided into two works.

I am a writer, and I am a spiritual director. In my latter capacity I simply spend an awful lot of time sitting and listening, listening and sitting. The joys, the sorrows, the everyday problems and the life-shaking crises, the spiritual questions and problems of a wide range of people come to me in this daily work that the Lord has asked me to do.

What’s it for? What good is it? People come, they tell me their problems, I might give a little bit of advice, and I pray with them and bless them. I don’t have a magic wand, or a medicine cabinet full of appropriate drugs, or a bank account full of money to throw at the problem (like that always helps). And indeed it is not unknown that people will come to a director month by month, year after year, with roughly the same problems and struggles. Even the most self-assured and faith-assured spiritual director is occasionally going to wonder just what the point is of this particular exercise.

The Pope’s words in this homily struck me in this personal way because I think he precisely expresses what the point is, at least as I understand it, of spiritual direction, but then in the larger sense, of spiritual life, spiritual growth, spiritual striving. It is this: ‘that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing… that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.’

It is not about getting all our problems solved. It is not about getting our act together. It is not about ‘shaping up.’ It is not about any of that. It is about growth in vigilance to hear God, to see God, to recognize Him and respond in love to Him. It is about making room for God in the inn of our hearts.

Sometimes in spiritual direction a primary task is identifying the clutter that is crowding out the manger and suggesting some basic culling and rearranging to free up some space. It is a matter of making a little bit of space so that the baby Jesus can slip in there… and once in there, start to grow, start to take up more space. Next thing you know, more culling and rearranging is needed. A child, a youth, an adult takes up more space than that little baby.

At each step, the heart must be emptied, and only what is still of value put back into it. Finally that baby, that man, that Christ is crucified in the person. A crucified person takes up the maximum space—stretched out, fully extended. Sooner or later, God asks for all the room in our hearts. We thought we could give Him a little corner, a manger to rest in, but now He’s taken over the joint. He wants it all, and will not rest until He has it. He’s like that.

It seems to me that the role of the spiritual director is primarily to help move furniture around, haul things off to the dump, knock down the occasional wall, and constantly and at all times remind the person that it’s all about Jesus, all about making room for Him in our hearts, our lives, and learning to see Him in all things, all situations, all people, especially the ones who demand our love and call us to sacrificial generosity and service.

This is what spiritual life is all about, and this is what I try to serve in my priestly ministry and life.

No Room at the Inn (and, Yes, It is Still Christmas)

Again and again the beauty of this [Christmas] Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.

I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer's almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: "he came to his own home, and his own people received him not" (Jn 1:11).

The great moral question of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have.

And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the "God hypothesis" becomes superfluous.

Homily, Midnight Mass, Christmas 2012

Reflection – Well the secular world has long moved on from Christmas, which ended at midnight December 25. There was nothing more to buy at that point, and buying and selling is the true driver of secular Christmas. But in the Church we have one more week of the Christmas season, so let’s keep the holly and mistletoe up here at LWAGS and pour another round of eggnog. It is still Christmas.

And so this beautiful homily from midnight Mass, which I would have gotten around to blogging earlier if I hadn’t been away so much this season, is still quite topical. I love the way Pope Benedict links the ‘no room at the inn’ with our modern world’s studied indifference towards God. One of the pitfalls of living in a place like MH is that the young people who come here already, by definition, have an interest in or at least an openness to God. He has a  place in their thinking, or they wouldn’t have found their way to us. We can forget how very foreign all that is to so many today.

On the long train ride back from Halifax I picked up a copy of ‘Canada’s national newspaper’ – essentially our version of the New York Times for youse Americans (and no, I’m not going to dignify it with a name). Faced with 30 hours of traveling, I’ll read anything. On one of its back pages it has a regular feature anyone can write for, a sort of do-it-yourself column. The author of the one I read was a young man essentially agonizing over the meaning of life and his long (25 year!) quest to discover this meaning. He detailed all the different ideas he had come up with for what life might be about, and the inadequacy of them all. He was in a state of some despondency.

Now, at no point in the column—not even in passing, not even to dismiss it—did he so much as broach the idea of God, of religion, of Christ. It was as if that dimension of the question didn’t even suggest itself to him. It was really very striking to me, coming back from a university student conference where 200 of his peers had just given their lives to Jesus. Talk about no room at the inn!

Some of my younger directees have assured me that this is fairly normal. For many young people, God and religion just are not on the menu, not something to even be considered. Even driven by despair, even seeing the futility of all human quests for meaning, as this young man had, there is no room for God. Better to despair than bow down in worship, I suppose.

Meanwhile it is Epiphany, when these wise men, these masters of human learning and lore, did just that—bowed before the foolishness of God which surpasses all human wisdom, the day when ‘those who had worshipped stars learned through a star to worship you, O Sun of Righteousness,’ as the Byzantine hymn puts it.

 

So it is worth taking this last week of Christmas to ponder with the Pope these matters, and in that to make room for God in our own minds and hearts. And that’s quite enough—too much, really—for one day. See you tomorrow!

Comments Moderated Now

I meant to mention that I've had to install comment moderation on the blog now. There was an abusive profane comment posted over Christmas which I didn't catch for a couple of days because I was travelling. I really cannot have such material appear on the blog, so comments will have to pass my sharp moderator's eye now before appearing.
Anyhow, I don't get that many comments on this blog, and I will try to check them regularly. I apologize for the inconvenience to my regular commentors who I enjoy and appreciate very much. It is unfortunate that this is necessary, to say the least.

Faith Gives Us Something

[This follows up on yesterday’s post on faith as substantial reality]. To Luther, who was not particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a disposition of the subject.

In the twentieth century this interpretation became prevalent—at least in Germany—in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of “proof”…

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – This is really so very beautiful, even if we have to wade through unfamiliar Greek, Latin, and German vocabulary to get to it. Sometimes, it’s worth it.

Faith gives us something. That alone is worth pondering, eh? What does faith give you? Not on the level of subjective feelings, but objective reality. Not the promise of pie in the sky tomorrow and forever, but here and now today—what does faith give you? I think this is one of those questions we should have a ready answer for. Do you?

Because, of course, the world may question this, and may at times deride this idea. To it, faith can be either an irrelevancy, an exercise in juvenile magical thinking, or a heavy moralistic burden. What objective reality—what earthly good—does faith deliver to us?

Faith gives us the living presence of God, a substantial reality that comes to us daily, Who we can touch and embrace and be embraced by. Faith gives us God as food and drink in the Eucharist, and as mercy poured out in Reconciliation, and as the very life of the soul continually through the indwelling of the Spirit.

Faith gives us, then, an orientation of our life towards this God and His kingdom. Faith shapes every action we take, every day of our lives, towards this kingdom. In other words, faith gives us hope, and hope is not some airy-fairy yearning for an imaginary cloud-cuckoo paradise. Hope gets us off our duffs and into the fray of life, to lay our lives down for the sake of this kingdom which is not ours yet, but which the presence of God assures us will be one day.

Faith gives us, then, a way of life that is already an extension of this future kingdom. The kingdom begins now, today, in you and me insofar as we receive the gift faith brings. In other words, faith brings us love, a life lived for others, laying down our lives in service and friendship, in works of mercy and in compassion for the ‘least of our brothers.’

Not one bit of what I am describing here is abstract or subjective feeling or some ethereal hocus-pocus. Because of faith our lives can be transformed, here and now, into an expression of the Gospel, ordered towards the eternal reality of heaven but lived in such a way as to bring the heavenly life down to earth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ as we pray every day.

This is what being a saint is all about, and faith ultimately delivers to us the road to holiness. Insofar as we believe, receive faith’s gifts, and live from those gifts, we become saints, and the light of God shines forth anew in the darkness of the world. There’s nothing else worth doing in this life, you know. So let’s try to live our faith today and let hope and love guide all our choices today.

Intensely Advent

In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews (v. 1) we find a kind of definition of faith which closely links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase, but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen”. For the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium—faith is the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo”—and thus according to the “substance”—there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.

Spe Salvi 7

Reflection – OK, this may seem all very technical and dry, full of obscure points about language and long quotes in Latin and references to (horrors) Thomas Aquinas. The blog reader may be tempted to come back tomorrow when I am doing something simpler. Despair not – I come to make all things clear, if they are not yet so.

Basically, it means that we all live our lives in Advent, even as we celebrate the season of Christmas, prepare now to celebrate the Epiphany (the feast of the ‘appearing’ of God), and from there launch again into Ordinary Time and before we know it the Lent-Easter cycle.

Nonetheless, our Christian life here and now is intensely an Advent matter. Advent is the shortest of all seasons, yet it is the whole season of our life. That is, we are all pregnant, be we male or female. We all bear within us a life, an embryonic life, a beginning of a life that is very real, as real as can be, but very hidden. The condition of Mary in her nine months of pregnancy is a close analogue to the condition of the Christian through our years of life on this earth.

The ‘thing’ is already present—this thing which is the life of Christ being lived in our own lives. But it has not appeared yet, except in the precise same sense that those who have eyes to see recognize the life of the child in the swelling of the womb of the mother.

It really is the same sort of thing. Those who have eyes to see can recognize the signs of Christ’s life in the life of a disciple as it grows. Charity, mercy, generosity of heart, quickness to forgive, courage in bearing witness, steadfastness in bearing burdens, peace, joy—all of these are sure signs of Christ’s life growing in a human heart. When someone has been ‘very pregnant’ in their lives—showing!—we might call them a saint after they die.

But of course those who do not have eyes to see can deny all of the above, just as those who (alas!) do not wish to acknowledge it can deny the life of the child right until the moment it is born. I don’t mean to blog about abortion in this post, but we can see here an added dimension to the already tragic assault on human life: to refuse to admit a reality until it is seen in full blocks us off from the whole life of faith in its essential nature.

The life of faith, this hidden interior life of God in us, is so very much like pregnancy. We bear within us a life that is not our own, that our own autonomous will did not create of itself, that is a fruit of God’s coming to us and his faithful love for us. This life will appear in the fullness of time in the blessed life of the saints in heaven. But it is already real, already wanting to grow and expand and stretch us, perhaps cause us some discomfort and pain, even, but always in service of this new life blossoming in us.

 

Let us long, then, for the appearing of God in our lives and in our world, and in the world to come when all shall be made manifest, the eternal epiphany of our God in glory and joy.

The Truth of Man

To bow low before a human being to win his favour is indeed unfitting. But to bow low before God can never be unmodern, because it corresponds to the truth of our being. And if modern man has forgotten this truth, then it is all the more incumbent on Christians in the modern world to rediscover it and teach it to our fellow men.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 206

Reflection – Well, it’s good to be back, both in MH Combermere where real winter arrived in my absence (-21 C today!), and at LWAGS to resume a new year of blogging for the glory of God. Happy New Year (belated) to everyone, and let’s pick up where we left off, eh?

It’s nice when my Randomized Ratzinger Quote Generator™ coughs up a quote that is so perfect liturgically and in view of my own recent activities. Here we are approaching Epiphany rapidly, and we have a quote about bowing low before God. I am just coming back from a conference that was intensely missionary in spirit, calling the young attendees to become missionaries to the modern world, and here we have a quote about being just that.

So, CCO RiseUp was quite the experience. I came back from it rather sick and croaking at everyone (‘for someone who’s lost his voice, you certainly are talking a lot’ was a comment made to me by one of my travelling companions. It takes a lot to shut me up.) 30 hours travelling each way by train and car was a bit exhausting, and the days were full of talks, worship, ministry and lots and lots of personal encounters. We all got back tired but happy.

It was fantastic. Anyone out there reading this who has any presence of CCO in your vicinity (this is Catholic Christian Outreach, a Canadian Catholic university mission group, for those in the rest of the world), get involved with them. Help them, financially if you can, since each CCO missionary has to raise his or her own salary. Send searching young people their way. If you are a searching young person, look for them. They have a simple, brilliant, proven-to-work way of introducing the basic Christian proclamation to young people, bringing them to commit their lives to Christ, and then calling them to embrace the missionary call of the Church. They are, truly, awesome.

Anyhow, the whole experience was very much about what Ratzinger writes of so powerfully above. The truth of our being, which never changes from age to age, and which we urgently need to embrace ourselves and communicate to others. Bowing down low before God in worship, and out of that bowing low, receiving his Spirit so as to go out to the ends of the earth to bring his love and mercy to the world, starting with our next door neighbours, preferably.

But it starts with bowing down low. It starts with a communion of love that is not a relationship between equals, but an encounter of our littleness with his greatness, our weakness with his majesty, our nothingness with him who is everything.

This is the profound core truth of humanity, and the one who shows us this truth is Mary, the Mother of God. The modern world wishes to establish a mode of human life without God-we call it secularism; she is our response to the modern world in this fool’s dream it has. As De Lubac put it in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”

When we lose our core human reality of being open to the Absolute, to that which utterly transcends not only ourselves but all created reality, that opens us up to eternity and infinity, that which is above and before and beyond all that is—when we lose that, we are reduced to nothing more than an animal that can do sums and build stuff.

It is the very act of worship, of bowing down, of humbling ourselves before God, of abasing ourselves before the Mighty One that paradoxically establishes us in our human dignity, the true greatness of the human person, the reality of who we are and what we are made for—communion with the One who is Lord of all and who desires to establish us in royal dignity in his eternal kingdom.

So… come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

The Facts of God

The basic form of Christian faith is not: I believe something, but I believe you... faith is not primarily a colossal edifice of numerous supernatural facts, standing like a curious second order of knowledge alongside the realm of science, but an assent to God who gives us hope and confidence.

Faith and the Future, 20-1

Reflection – Well, here I am in Halifax, after 30 hours of marathon traveling by car, train, cab, train, and car. The highlight of the trip was our train running out of gas in Montreal (I didn’t know they could do that!), and a wild cab ride through the city to (barely) make our connecting train to the East coast. The CCO Rise-Up conference begins this afternoon, so as promised, here I am resuming regular blogging in the meantime.

When Ratzinger writes the above reflection on the nature of faith as opposed to science, we have to be careful that we understand him rightly. There is a whole approach to faith, which in this same book he explicitly rejects, where religion has nothing to do with facts or historical events, but is simply a matter of emotion or ethics or aesthetics. All the dogmas and creedal formulations are mere symbols that help us towards an ethical or beautiful way of life.

No – God has indeed communicated to us certain things about Himself, and these are essential to faith. His triune nature, His action of incarnation ex Maria virgine, and all that Jesus said and did in His life, the whole historical fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection and its effect on humanity, the reality of the ascension and the gift of the Spirit to the Church—all of these are facts, not mere symbolism or myth. The human language we are necessarily required to us to express these facts is, of course, inadequate to the nature of God, but nonetheless, the revelation is real and the facts are facts.

Ratzinger’s point here is that all of these facts are not merely given to us in the sense that scientific data is given to us, as bare statements about the world which we either find useful or not, but which are nonetheless given to us as information about reality.

This is not the dynamism of faith. Faith is all about making a choice about this core relationship with this One who reveals Himself to us. God reveals Himself as Father—my choice is to trust Him and base my life on His love. God reveals Himself as Son—my choice is to recognize in the Son the way to the Father and the pattern of my own life as a son of the Father. God reveals Himself as Spirit—my choice is to cry out ‘Come, Holy Spirit’, to know and live my life out of the surety of God’s action and gift to me of His own self.

And so it goes. Every little bit of the facts, the data God reveals to us is for the sake of eliciting a response of trusting love and joyful obedience in us. Now at this point a voice from the peanut gallery can perhaps be heard. ‘Yeah, right!’ it seems to say.

Because of course it is the feast of the Holy Innocents today, isn’t it. And with that feast, right in the heart of all the joyful facts about baby Jesus and mother Mary and the noble awesome doctrine of the Incarnation—God becoming man, the Word taking flesh—well, suddenly we have a lot of other facts to contend with.

Dead babies. Murdered children. Lots of them. A violent, brutal world in which the weakest and most innocent, the vulnerable and the small are run over and torn apart by the cruelty of wicked men and the selfishness of our modern ‘civilized’ way of life. We look to our Church, where the facts tell us the Spirit has been poured out, and alas! More abused children, a betrayal of trust, and deep sorrow and rage.

These are all facts, too. And so we have the facts of God and the facts of man. That which God has shown us, and that which humanity shows us. And of course world and church are full of goodness and kindness and sympathy—it’s not all wicked cruelty. But there it is, and we all know it.

It seems to me that in the face of what we all know about the world and what happens to people, especially the small and weak in the world, we can choose to despair in God, in the ‘facts of God’ which at any rate do not seem to be strong enough to stop human evil from propagating. Or we can choose to take our stand on these facts of God, the promises of God, the action of God, the love of God in the world. Ally ourselves to it, commit our lives to receiving it, following it, and imitating it, and so become ourselves a ‘fact of God’ in the world. A saint, in other words.

Or we can cry and scream and curse the darkness and curse or deny God. We may need to cry or even scream at times, in the face of terrible evil and suffering. But always we are confronted with the choice to love, to turn to God, to take up the task, the burden, and the glorious mission of love in the world, and so be one with the One who bore that burden in full and has carried the whole world—all the suffering children, all the abused and the abusers who make them suffer—in his Sacred Heart to the heart of the Father, to be healed and raised up with Him in a new world where such things are no more, and every tear will be wiped away.

 

Happy feast day, holy innocents, and all us less-than-innocent ones, too.

Update: It appears that wifi access is going to be very limited this week, and the schedule rather full. I am currently working from a nearby Tim Hortons! So... talk to you all in the New Year, and meanwhile keep CCO Rise-Up in your prayers.

Tonight in This Stable There is Peace

The great men and women of prayer throughout the centuries were privileged to receive an interior union with the Lord that enabled them to descend into the depths beyond the word. They are therefore able to unlock for us the hidden treasures of prayer.

And we may be sure that each of us, along with our totally personal relationship with God, is received into, and sheltered within, this prayer. Again and again, each one of us with his mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son. In this way his own heart will be opened, and each individual will learn the particular way in which the Lord wants to pray with him.

Jesus of Nazareth 1, 133

Reflection – I have set myself the challenge this week of relating every post and the randomly generated passage I select from Ratzinger’s writings to the Christmas mystery. This rather beautiful passage about prayer lends itself to this in a strange kind of way.

Christmas for most people can become a frenetic time. Lots to do—decorating, cooking, shopping, traveling perhaps—and lots of activities and events: parties, meals, caroling, family rituals, maybe even the odd church service.

While that is the nature of festivity and as such is right and proper (if a bit fatiguing), it can get us a bit out of balance if we are not careful. Prayer is needed at all times to put us back into reality and into interior peace and stability.

To pray at Christmas, in the midst of all the noise and rush and celebratory fuss—this is a great gift. And I think there is a special grace of prayer at this time of year, if we look for it. God comes to us with such delicacy and beauty at Christmas, the little baby lying on straw in the manger, his lovely mother hovering over him, the star shining and the angels singing, the kings and shepherds adoring.

There is trouble and fuss beforehand—getting to Bethlehem was a terribly busy rush for Mary and Joseph. There will be great trouble and fuss and much worse—tragedy and loss—afterwards. The flight into Egypt with a newborn baby must have been a great suffering for them. But here and now, this night, in this stable, there is great peace, great beauty, great silence, deep prayer. And I think this silence and prayer is waiting for us in the Christmas season, perhaps at the crèche set, perhaps before the Lord Himself in the tabernacle, perhaps in the silence of your own heart. Sometimes we do need to step away from all the noise and fuss of the feast to find that silence.

So, while I wish you all a most merry Christmas, I also want to wish you a prayer-y Christmas (ouch). After all, He came for this, that each one of us could find Him readily and certainly and come into this deep and total union of love with Him, and so be conformed to His life and love in the world, and be happy with Him forever in the next world.

This will be my last blog post for at least a couple of days. My own Christmas will have a different kind of ‘fuss’ to it this year. On Boxing Day (that’s December 26 for you Americans), myself and two of the Madonna House lay staff will board a train for Halifax to attend the Rise-Up event hosted by Catholic Christian Outreach, a wonderful Canadian university evangelization group. Since I have no idea whatsoever what will be the schedule, the accommodations, the internet access, or much else indeed about what the next week has in store, I don’t know when regular blogging will resume. Might be December 27, might be January 3!

 

So I do indeed wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, beg your prayers for me and mine and assure you of my prayers for all of you. I look forward to another year of German Shepherding with you all!

Christmas, Calvary, and Holy Communion

The life of the liturgy does not come from what dawns upon the minds of individuals and planning groups. On the contrary, it is God’s descent upon our world, the source of real liberation. He alone can open the door to freedom. The more priests and faithful humbly surrender themselves to this descent of God, the more ‘new’ the liturgy will constantly be, and the more true and personal it becomes. Yes, the liturgy becomes personal, true, and new, not through tomfoolery and banal experiments with the words, but through a courageous entry into the great reality that through the rite is always ahead of us and can never quite be overtaken.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 168-9

Reflection – Well, the Christmas hits just keep on coming here at LWAGS, from all kinds of unexpected directions. Yesterday modern mistaken notions of freedom took us right to the foot of the cradle, the cross, and the tabernacle. Today a wrong notion of liturgy and creativity therein leads us to this luminous statement: ‘it is God’s descent upon the world [that is] the source of real liberation. He alone can open the door to freedom.’

This idea of the ‘descent’ of God upon the world is so charged with meaning and beauty. We think of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, and the hidden invisible life beginning in her womb, soon to come forth in radiance and wonder. We think of the hills of Bethlehem and the angelic choirs giving those shepherds the shock of their lives, of the running to the stable, the silent adoration, the marvel of it all.

We think of stars leading the wise and kings being disturbed and frightened for their power as this new and strange power arises in the land. We think of their lashing out with intensity by the murder of children—a terrible and heart-breaking Christmas resonance this year. We think of so many things, all in this phrase, the descent of God into the world.

God has come; God is coming; God is perpetually descending, perpetually entering into our human sphere, like a pirate on a raid, an invading army landing on our beaches, a colonization program perpetually subduing the natives—us—and bringing the divine culture and ways into our savage humanity.

It is Sunday, and most of you readers will go to church some time today, I hope. There is God, coming, descending, invading, raiding, conquering: on the altar, and in your heart as you receive communion. This constant reality that is always greater than us, always surpassing us, always more than what we bargained for, more than what we thought would happen.

God always give us more for Christmas, which is every day, than we asked for. Most of us want a peaceful content life, largely pain-free, with some outlet for creativity perhaps, and at least a few people around to love and who love us. This is the normal desire of roughly decent human beings, and indeed it is a faint echo of the longing for heaven.

We have to realize, though, that God brings us to the heavenly life, not by giving us a nice little content life here and now, but by pouring his Spirit upon us here and now, filling us with his divinity here and now, summoning us into the adventure and grandeur of divine charity here and now, beckoning us to love the world as he loves the world here and now, even though that love will break our hearts at times and certainly never allow us to relax into complacency and ease.

God comes into the world, into the liturgy, into our hearts, and bursts all of it open into true freedom which is the life of love in the world. That is his constant desire and his constant action. That is what Christmas is for, and Calvary, and Communion. In the face of this strange and overwhelming action and love of God, what are we to respond? With tomfoolery and banal improvisations, bringing all our ‘brilliant’ human ideas to God to improve his divine program? This can happen in life as well as in liturgy, you know. Or are we to essentially fall down and worship and adore him, and surrender all our ideas, our words, our hopes, our plans, our dreams, our cleverness, our relationships, our culture—everything, everything, everything to Him.

 

To the One who has come, is coming, and will come perpetually descending upon the world to bring the world of man up into the life of God. Come let us adore Him, and come let us do whatever He bids us do.

The Baby Jesus and Modernity

The implicit goal of all modernity’s struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no none, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another. Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its influence wherever such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are even rejected.

“Truth and Freedom,” Communio 23 (Spring, 1996), 28

Reflection – We had a major blizzard here last night, along with (apparently) a significant swath of North America, which of course knocked power out and generally wrought chaos of various winter-themed varieties. In consequence, this post will be a bit on the short side—we are all a bit boulversé at the moment.

Here, though, we see another Christmas-themed reflection from Ratzinger. Eh? What’s that, you say? You don’t quite get the connection with this abstract philosophical statement about freedom and modernity and the baby Jesus? Haven’t you been paying attention here?

The whole thing is our human idea, not just modern, but human, that freedom means being unbound by any restriction, unfettered, uncontrolled, unconstrained whatsoever. This is our great grand idea of what it means to be free.

We don’t know what we’re talking about. God shows us what true freedom is, and he shows us that by being bound in swaddling bands, being carried around by Mary like a package (a beloved, cherished package, but still!), being nailed to a cross and immobilized, lying dead in the tomb, and even now in his risen ascended flesh handing himself to us in the Sacred Host, placing himself at our disposal.

Not a lot of ‘unfetteredness’ there, eh? Fetters as far as the eye can see. And this is God, and this is the perfect man.

Freedom means being unfettered in one thing and one thing only, and that is the unbound freedom to love and to pour oneself out in a constant gift of love, in truth and in justice. Every other freedom—all the freedoms we rightly cherish and wish to preserve as members of a free society—are only fully good, only fully realized if they are at the service of love and of truth.

This, by the way, is why we are such dire straits in our society today. Some value our ‘freedoms’ more, some less, but few indeed understand that true freedom and true human life only is secured by the gift of love and a passion for justice which is truth. Because there is precious little of this happening in the modern world, society is falling apart, and this is why there is so much violence, killing, madness, evil. Sorry to be so blunt and plain spoken, but there it is. The blizzard made me do it.

The baby Jesus has a deep secret, a deep truth to tell us about all these matters. What is it to be free, what is it to be human, what is it to have a good life, what is it to fulfill our destiny? Look at the little one lying on the straw, the baby at the breast, the man on the cross, the host in the tabernacle. The answer lies there, and until we find that answer and make it our own, we will lurch from one abortive effort at freedom to another which truly make us less and less free all the time.

 

Happy Christmas to you all—let’s all make sure we come to the manger and stay there, so He can give us the Christmas present we most deeply need at this time and in our world. Love, and from love, freedom, peace, and joy.

Season of Matter

The essence of modern materialism… consists in the way in which the relationship between matter and spirit is conceived. Here, matter is the first and original element; it is matter, not the Logos, that stands at the beginning. Everything develops out of matter in a process of contingencies that becomes a process of necessities. Spirit is never more than the product of matter. If one knows the laws of matter and can manipulate them, then one can also change the course of the spirit.

A Turning Point for Europe?, 83-4

Reflection – Well, it is the season of matter, isn’t it? Christmas time, shortly, and hence the great feast of the Incarnation. God becoming flesh; God, pure spirit, assuming to himself matter, taking a body from the flesh of Mary to carry our human flesh to the very heart of the godhead in his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But at Christmas we contemplate the baby, this little creature of flesh lying in the straw, warmed by the animals because he can be cold now, fed by his mother’s breasts because he can be hungry now, soon to be fleeing with Mary and Joseph to Egypt because he can be killed now.

This rather dry (perhaps) philosophical reflection from Ratzinger directly relates to the Christmas mystery, this central dogma of the Incarnation, God become flesh. Matter without spirit, a strictly material universe, is locked wholly into a series of laws and rigid patterns of motion and rest. Even if those laws are complex in their interactions, and so we have things like chaos theory which means we cannot predict the movements of bodies in complex systems accurately, nonetheless matter is entirely constrained by unbreakable laws. You canna’ defy the laws of physics, Captain!

It is only spirit, and Spirit, that brings freedom into the material picture. It is only a person who can make a free decision for or against a course of action. The stars in their courses and the atoms in their vibrations are set, determined.

And it is materialism that more and more yields determinism of various kinds. We are controlled by our genes… or by our environments… or by our brain chemistry. Personal identity is more and more determined by factors outside our choice and control, like sexual orientation or race, and those things we have chosen for ourselves, like our religion, are more and more marginalized as significant considerations for our choices or meaningful human rights to be respected.

The Incarnation—the Spirit overshadowing the flesh of Mary, the very Logos of God becoming flesh in her womb, the very life of God embracing and transforming the whole material universe in this mystery—this is the permanent Christian answer to materialism and determinism. God, in a sense, became man so that man could be liberated eternally from the determinations of matter.

Not so that we become free from matter itself—the resurrection of the body means that we will be physical material creatures for eternity. But we are free from matter’s limits, its exigencies, its finite mortality, its locked-in-to-itself quality. Because of what God did to matter in Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, all of matter is made into a vehicle of God’s grace and God’s life.

All the material universe is made into a vessel for love and communion. It was made to be so from the beginning, but sin and failure frustrated this divine plan. Christ opens the door again, and the divine presence, mercy, love, grace flows forth from his risen body into the life of the Church and its sacraments, and through the Church into the whole cosmos.

Well, that is our answer to materialism: O come let us adore him. God became matter, and so matter is permanently disposed to receive the life of God. And this is the true meaning of Christmas.

A Gamble For Life

Our journey starts from Baptism, the sacrament that gives us the Holy Spirit, making us become children of God in Christ, and marks our entry into the community of faith, into the Church: one does not believe by oneself, without the prior intervention of the grace of the Holy Spirit, one does not believe alone, but together with one’s brethren. From Baptism every believer is called to new life, and to make this confession of faith his or her own, together with the brethren.

Faith is a gift of God, but it is also a profoundly free and human act. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says so clearly: “Believing is possible only by grace and the interior help of the Holy Spirit. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act... contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason” (n. 154). Indeed, it involves them and uplifts them in a gamble for life that is like an exodus, that is, a coming out of ourselves, from our own certainties, from our own mental framework, to entrust ourselves to the action of God who points out to us his way to achieve true freedom, our human identity, true joy of the heart, peace with everyone. Believing means entrusting oneself in full freedom and joyfully to God’s providential plan for history, as did the Patriarch Abraham, as did Mary of Nazareth. Faith, then, is an assent with which our mind and our heart say their “yes” to God, confessing that Jesus is Lord. And this “yes” transforms life, unfolds the path toward fullness of meaning, thereby making it new, rich in joy and trustworthy hope.

General Audience, 24 October 2012

Reflection – Well there’s a lot going on in this text. I want to highlight the Pope’s wonderful exposition of the faith’s involvement with freedom and reason: faith is “contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason… Indeed, it involves them and uplifts them in a gamble for life that is like an exodus, that is, a coming out of ourselves, from our own certainties, from our own mental framework, to entrust ourselves to the action of God who points out to us his way to achieve true freedom, our human identity, true joy of the heart, peace with everyone.”

This is the constant dynamic of faith. The daily Mass readings this last week of Advent show us example after example of people confronted with that ‘exodus’, that gamble for life. Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, Zechariah—each in his or her own way grappling with the deep mystery of God, the action of God leading them to truth, freedom, joy, peace.

It is one thing to see it in these historical biblical figures. It is quite something else to recognize it in one’s own life, or the lives of those we love. When our life does not quite go according to plan, when some affliction or setback or turmoil besets us and bests us, when illness or bad finances or broken relationships or some personal or collective failure throws everything in our life into question, it is far from easy to entrust ourselves to the action of God in this. Yet this is precisely what He would have us do, if we are to ‘achieve true freedom, our human identity, true joy of the heart, peace with everyone.’

It is the life and faith of the Church, the whole body of Christ extended through 2000 years of history and to the ends of the earth, that permanently beckons us on this exodus, this journey out from ourselves into the life of God. This is why, you know, we cannot just cut and paste the Church’s faith into whatever pattern we like or happen to agree with. As soon as we do this, it is no longer a challenge to us calling us out of ourselves. It is ourselves—what we happen to like and find agreeable.

No exodus there, then. Just a collapsing back into our own self. It is the constant surrender of our own certainties and cultural-individual mores to the deposit of faith and morals presented us by the Church that draws us into this deep encounter with God working through his Church, into this deep liberation from our own self-will and self-assuredness.

It is always and at all times a matter of encounter with love, of encounter with the Other who loves us and so tells us the truth about life and about ourselves and how we are to live. A painful and difficult aspect of this for many, I know, is that this Other comes to us through the imperfect and messy human medium of the Church He founded and which he animates and enlightens with the gift of His Spirit. But this is our Catholic faith. And in this, too, we are called to a deep trust that the divine wisdom is at work here, too, healing our human isolationism and division by asking us to surrender to a human institution and its God-given authority.

 

Well, that’s quite enough for one day (a double helping today, since yesterday’s computer glitches largely silenced me!). Peace to you all as we ponder the great mystery of surrender and faith, in Mary, in all these others, and in our life in the Church and in God.

Blogger Up...

My laptop seems to have resurrected from the cyber-dead (no irreverence meant... well, not much!). Back with regular blogging ASAP.

Blogger Down...

Well, blogging may be just a wee bit sporadic these next days, as my laptop (which has been a bit sickly lately) appears to have given up the ghost... or the hard drive, as the case may be.
It is my main tool for blogging, and it will be most difficult to blog without it, so there may be a hiatus of a couple days or so before I can get something else figured out (or buy a new laptop...). Talk to you all later!

Good Seed, Good Soil

Trust in the action of the Holy Spirit must always impel us to go and preach the Gospel, to the courageous witness of faith; but, in addition to the possibility of making a positive response to the gift of faith, there is also the risk of rejecting the Gospel, of not accepting the vital encounter with Christ. St Augustine was already posing this problem in one of his commentaries on the Parable of the Sower.

“We speak”, he said, “we cast the seed, we scatter the seed. There are those who deride us, those who reproach us, those who mock at us. If we fear them we have nothing left to sow and on the day of reaping we will be left without a harvest. Therefore may the seed in the good soil sprout” (Discourse on Christian Discipline, 13,14: PL 40, 677-678). Rejection, therefore, cannot discourage us. As Christians we are evidence of this fertile ground. Our faith, even with our limitations, shows that good soil exists, where the seed of the Word of God produces abundant fruits of justice, peace and love, of new humanity, of salvation. And the whole history of the Church, with all the problems, also shows that good soil exists, that the good seed exists and bears fruit.

Yet, let us ask ourselves: where can man find that openness of heart and mind to believe in God who made himself visible in Jesus Christ who died and Rose, to receive God’s salvation so that Christ and his Gospel might be the guide and the light of our existence? The answer: we can believe in God because he comes close to us and touches us, because the Holy Spirit, a gift of the Risen One, enables us to receive the living God. Thus faith is first of all a supernatural gift, a gift of God.

General Audience, 24 October 2012

Reflection – Well, last time I took the Pope’s invitation to stop and ponder the reality of the rejection of the Gospel in the modern world. Now we have his own short reflection on the matter in this general audience.

So the key point for him is hope. Yes, many people have decided, for whatever reasons, that Christianity or religion is unnecessary or unacceptable to them. But many have not. Many are searching for some deeper meaning in life, some deeper purpose to what is going on around us in the world, some way of engaging life in its tragedies and challenges.

Christianity has, for 2000 years, provided a rich and life-giving way of doing just that. And many people are, all over the world, coming to receive the Good News as if it is fresh news, a new revelation of God, undiminished and unfaded by the centuries.

This is one of the great joys of life in Madonna House. We have the great privilege of journeying with hundreds of people, mostly rather young, as they learn or rediscover the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Gospel of Christ and of the Catholic faith. So we do get to see here that the seed is good indeed and that there is indeed good soil in the world.

In other words, the Spirit is still moving over the face of the earth, and it is lovely to see. It is lovely to see new hope, new joy, new life, new love being sparked in the eyes and faces of so many young people from all over the world who come to share our MH life for a week, a month, a year.

And of course we have to remember that what we experience in North America and Europe—a growing tide of secularism and indifference or hostility to religion—is not the global picture at all. Christianity has exploded in Africa in the past century, and continues to do so today. China has more baptized Christians now than America. There is good seed and good soil all over the world in this year of 2012; we have no reason to be discouraged.

 

So, let’s keep putting the Gospel out there, each according to our gifts and station in life. Personal friendship, works of mercy, words of truth and hope, commitment of life to the love of God and neighbour—all the ordinary-extraordinary ways of casting the seed to the four winds, to the One Wind of the Spirit who alone can make our lives fruitful and bring faith into the hearts of men today. So let’s do our little part for and with Him.