Memory and Praise

The history of the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus follows in the wake of Abraham’s faith. Faith once again is born of a primordial gift: Israel trusts in God, who promises to set his people free from their misery. Faith becomes a summons to a lengthy journey leading to worship of the Lord on Sinai and the inheritance of a promised land. God’s love is seen to be like that of a father who carries his child along the way (cf. Dt 1:31).

Israel’s confession of faith takes shape as an account of God’s deeds in setting his people free and acting as their guide (cf. Dt 26:5-11), an account passed down from one generation to the next. God’s light shines for Israel through the remembrance of the Lord’s mighty deeds, recalled and celebrated in worship, and passed down from parents to children.

Here we see how the light of faith is linked to concrete life-stories, to the grateful remembrance of God’s mighty deeds and the progressive fulfilment of his promises. Gothic architecture gave clear expression to this: in the great cathedrals light comes down from heaven by passing through windows depicting the history of salvation. God’s light comes to us through the account of his self-revelation, and thus becomes capable of illuminating our passage through time by recalling his gifts and demonstrating how he fulfils his promises

Lumen Fidei, 12

Reflection -  Tuesdays with Francis time again! I have never made an Ignatian retreat, although I know many members of Madonna House who have, and have seen the excellent good fruit a 14- or 30- day retreat with the Spiritual Exercises can do for a person. I understand that one of the early days of the retreat consists in making a sort of inventory of one’s life, not from the point of view of what the retreatant has done or failed to do, but of every grace, every gift, every action, every manifestation of God’s presence, power, and love in one’s life, from the time of your conception to the present day, leaving nothing out however trivial or fleeting.

This sounds to me like a very powerful exercise – certainly on odd occasions when I’ve even begun to do it in my own personal prayer life I have quickly been overwhelmed at the goodness of God to me. But this is exactly what the encyclical is talking about here in bigger and broader terms. Faith as remembrance, faith as holding fast to what God has been and done, not as a pathetic clinging to the past, but because this is our surety for the future. The God who has been this for us will be this for us, because He is faithful and unchanging.

From this remembrance, so much at the heart of our whole Christian faith and worship, comes praise and thanksgiving. If we hold in our minds and hearts the great deeds of the Lord for us personally and for all mankind in Christ, praising and thanking God has a way of emerging almost spontaneously from us.

We all have troubles in our lives, big or small. I certainly do, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. Things that make us cry, or want to cry, or get mad, or want to run away. We all got that stuff going on somewhere in our life. It’s because of the bad stuff that we have to hold fast to the memory of God and his faithfulness and praise and thank him for it, and for his present and future grace which may not be so readily apparent to us at this moment.

Remembrance and thanksgiving: the life of faith begins to look quite a bit like the Eucharist then, doesn’t it? We remember the great deeds of God, hold them before our minds, and give thanks to Him in a sacrifice of praise. And then… God comes, mysteriously. God acts, invisibly. God loves, hiddenly. 

And God is present, miraculously. Bread and wine become His body and blood. Your life and mine become… something other than what our own efforts and plans and best wishes can make them. Our whole life has a eucharistic character, but central to that character is the remembrance, the telling, the celebrating of God’s faithful love as it has come concretely and truly to you and to me. So let’s try to live this day doing this, a little bit at least.

Living in the Resurrection

I think a wrong idea is around that stressing the resurrection means bypassing a great deal of human suffering, much that, in the cold light of day, brings us face to face with the pettiness, the sickening pettiness and futility of our human lot, the sordid pettiness of our own being, a suffering utterly lacking in nobility, grandeur.

This is false. Jesus delivered us from suffering in the sense that he has given it meaning, not in the sense that it is no longer there. Dying will feel like dying and yet it won’t be real dying because Jesus has destroyed death. So suffering feels like suffering and nothing else. To live in the risen life of Jesus is to accept the human lot in all its bitterness as he did, and surrender to the Father in it and through it. It does not mean trying to live in a state of emotional elation which takes the edge off human suffering.

Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 5-6

Reflection – OK, on to something completely different! I’ve had quite enough engaging in controversy for a little while. When I was 20 years old, I was entering what proved to be the most wretchedly unhappy year of my life. I had just spent my first summer at Madonna House, and had returned to university to finish my undergraduate degree.

I was living alone, in a city where I knew nobody, in a remote corner of the city (it was an hour by bus to the nearest Catholic church). In the face of this difficult situation—it ended up being the year that confirmed for me my absolute need for Christian community—I knew I at least needed some good spiritual reading.

Off I went to the Mustard Seed, the local source of good Catholic reading. And among the few books I bought was this little gem: Ruth Burrows’ Guidelines for Mystical Prayer. As it turned out, in my utter misery of loneliness and isolation that year I read, re-read, re-re-read, and practically committed to memory this book, and it has proved to be one of the seminal graces, the foundational texts of my own spiritual life. And so I would like to spend this next week sharing some of Burrows’ insights with you all, since this book helped me so much at such a young age.

It saved me from a lot of false starts, blind alleys and mistaken ideas about the spiritual life: that is probably the book’s great quality. This text, for example, really clarifies what it means to be an ‘Easter people,’ a people who live lives focused on the Resurrection of Christ and its utterly central place in human history and human meaning.

We think it means being on a permanent emotional high, of being ‘cheerful’ all the time, bubbly and smiley and happity-clappity. ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice!’ Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians, so you better never feel a little sad, better never be ‘down’, or else you’re betraying the Resurrection!

Burrows to the rescue! She herself, a Carmelite nun, has suffered all her life from depression, yet what emerges from her writings is luminous faith and radiant joy. But it is a joy not confined to the shallows of emotional excitement which comes and goes and comes again… and goes again. Emotion is all well and good; so is the tide; but you cannot build your house on the tide, and you cannot build your life on your emotions.

Instead of emotion, we have Jesus to build our life on. And this is the great theme of all Burrows’ writings. It is all about Jesus, about nothing except Jesus, and there is no ground for joy, for hope, for faith, for prayer, for holiness but Jesus.

And in Jesus, everything is not so much changed—as she says, death feels like death, suffering feels like suffering—but receives a new meaning. Suffering and death without Jesus carry within themselves a terrible futility, an end to hope and to all human striving. But in Jesus, something new happens, even as our emotions register nothing, perhaps, of this change. And so it all comes down to acceptance, surrender, obedience, detachment from our will and embrace of God’s will.

But this surrender and detachment is not a mere passive fatalism, a mere yielding to the inevitable ravages of time and matter, a mere sinking into the grave because there is nothing else for us. It is a falling into the arms of the Father. It is a deep choice to believe that His love is real, His providence is good, and that His Son has opened a door at the far extremes of suffering and death that leads us into a new and glorious life, and that we have only to cling to Him to get through that door. And in the meantime, all of life is subtly changed, illuminated, transformed, turned bit by bit into love, peace, and joy by this clinging and this surrender.

I am so glad I read this book when I was 20 years old. It helped me then and 27 years later, it’s still helping me. And I’m glad to share this treasure with all of you over this next week or so.

The Scourge of Clericalism

Pope Francis:

… Our Lady, Mary, was more important than the Apostles, than bishops and deacons and priests.  Women, in the Church, are more important than bishops and priests; how, this is something we have to try to explain better, because I believe that we lack a theological explanation of this.  Thank you.

Press conference on plane returning from WYD Rio

Reflection – I quoted this same passage yesterday, and getting to the end of my blog post realized that I have a lot more to say about this subject of priests and the priesthood, their relative importance and the role and mission of women and the laity in general in the Church. I realized yesterday that this whole subject and the questions it raises are very much at the heart of my own vocation in Madonna House, and in fact I believe MH has a significant contribution to make to the conversation in the Church about men and women, priests and laity, and their proper ordering.

I won’t repeat everything I said yesterday and in my prior post ‘A Theology of Woman.’ Scroll on down, or click on the relevant links in the ‘Most Popular Posts’ on the right hand sidebar. Today I want to talk about what I think the Pope is critiquing here, that is, the scourge of clericalism in the Church.

So what is this thing, clericalism? It’s a bit hard to define, although like the judge in the obscenity case, I can say that “I know it when I see it.” Clericalism is not showing respect to priests because they are priests. That is faith in the presence of Christ in the ordained minister. Clericalism is not recognizing and submitting to the proper teaching authority of pope and bishop in defining Catholic doctrine. That too is faith in the guiding presence of the Spirit in the Church Christ founded. Clericalism is not being properly obedient to the pastor in the matters in which he has been given authority by his bishop. That is simply good order, both natural and supernatural.

So what is clericalism? It’s a bit tricky to define it. It is a losing sight of the human being who bears the grace of the priesthood. It is putting the man on a pedestal, a fawning, cringing attitude that places a vast distance between priest and people. It is being scandalized when a priest does wrong—not only grave egregious evils like sexual abuse, but the normal foibles and failures every human being is prone to. It is a certain immaturity that ascribes, or expects, total holiness and perfection from the priest while not expecting very much from oneself and other lay people. From the side of the priest, it is an expectation of being waited on, served, catered to, a use of one’s office to bully or lord over or to insulate oneself from the hard knocks of interpersonal relationships.

It is also an exaggerated sense of the centrality of the priesthood in the life of the Church. Now this is tricky. Clearly, the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, and the priest is above all a man of the Eucharist, a servant of this mystery. Clearly the forgiveness of sins is necessary to enter the kingdom of heaven, and the priest is minister of forgiveness. Clearly baptism is the very doorway into the paschal mystery and its saving power, and the priest is the ordinary minister of baptism.

All of that is granted, right? But let us be clear—and I think this is where Madonna House really has something to say, based on our 65 years of lived experience—the whole ministry of the ordained priest is at the service of, and ordered to, the sanctification and (hence) empowerment of the laity, of the whole people of God, a ‘holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people set apart.’

Everyone is a priest, by virtue of his or her baptism. The insistence that women cannot be full members of the Church unless they are ordained priests is based on a deeply clericalist mindset, that somehow the ordained priesthood is ‘the real deal’ and this business of lay apostolate and lay holiness and the vocation of the laity in the world is somehow a second-class, second-tier affair. This attitude is the heart of clericalism—there, I finally defined it!

The ‘real deal’ is not the priestly ministry and office. The real deal is that which Mary communicates to us, that mysterious thing I have been trying to articulate in these posts. The reception of grace, the cooperation of the human person in freedom and love with the action of the Spirit. It is not who is up at the altar performing the sacred rite. In a sense, it is a question of who is on the altar, offering their lives through, with, and in the Lord Jesus. That’s the real deal of Christianity, not the clerical structures that exist to serve this mystery. Ultimately the real deal of Christianity is Jesus, and our life in Him, received from Him.

In Madonna House, priests and laity live together in community. It is a lay apostolate—the work of the apostolate is led, ordered, organized and carried out by the lay members who make up the large part of our membership. We who are priests have our proper role to play. The liturgy is our province, and spiritual direction, and to some degree the teaching of Catholic doctrine that goes on in the place. 

Otherwise, we pitch in and help out under the direction of and in obedience to the lay leaders of the place, cleaning toilets, weeding the garden, peeling vegetables, mucking out the barn, chopping wood alongside our brothers and sisters.

The whole spirit of the place is deeply collaborative, familial, with a deep respect and striving to genuinely work together in peace and love. We all rub along together in a communal way of life. Priests are shown respect, not out of subservient cringing clericalism, but because the priesthood of Christ is a holy thing, a beautiful thing.

We’re not perfect—who is?—but I think we have something, a spirit and a flow of life together, a way of living the mystery of man and woman, lay and priest, that is not just for us, but is a gift for the whole Church. Come and see us, and see if there’s something here That’s why I am so passionate about this subject, and why I wanted to take a little extra time to talk about it today on the blog. Tomorrow, onward to something else.

More Important Than Priests (Hurray!)

Ana Fereira:

…I would like to know, since yesterday you spoke to the Brazilian bishops about the participation of women in our Church...  I would like to understand better, what this participation of us women in the Church would be like.  Also, what do you think of women’s ordination?  What should our position in the Church be like?

Pope Francis:

I would like to explain a bit more what I said about women’s participation in the Church.  It can’t just be about their acting as altar servers, heads of Caritas, catechists… No!  They have to be more, profoundly more, even mystically more, along with everything I said about the theology of womanhood.  And, as far as women’s ordination is concerned, the Church has spoken and said: “No”.  John Paul II said it, but with a definitive formulation. 

That door is closed, but on this issue I want to tell you something.  I have said it, but I repeat it.  Our Lady, Mary, was more important than the Apostles, than bishops and deacons and priests.  Women, in the Church, are more important than bishops and priests; how, this is something we have to try to explain better, because I believe that we lack a theological explanation of this.  Thank you.

Press conference on plane returning from WYD Rio

Reflection – Another day, more controversy! The Pope certainly didn’t back off from one second from any of these difficult and painful issues. He is a man without fear and without guile, it seems to me.

A few days ago I blogged about his statement that the Church needed a theology of woman, and threw out some of my ideas about what that could mean, ideas based on the writings of Joseph Ratzinger. I don’t really have anything to add to what I wrote there, at least not at this point.

So here we have the specific question of woman and priesthood. Pope Francis reiterates the definitive teaching of the Church, clarified by Pope John Paul II: that door is closed. But with God, doors are not closed unless other doors are open. God never says no unless there is a deeper, better yes on offer. I think the controversy over the ordination of women has been ultimately a distraction preventing us from articulating this deeper yes, this deeper vision, this deeper (as the Pope says, even mystical) theology of womanhood.

It is not unlike the controversy over same sex marriage (just in case I haven’t made everyone mad at me this week yet). Now, to affirm the goodness and dignity of gay and lesbian people, we are told we must affirm their right to get married to their partners. I believe, firmly and passionately, that there is a deeper goodness and dignity, a positive vision of holiness and beauty, in calling the LGBT community to chastity and continence, that this is a deep and total ‘yes’ to their personal dignity and God-given vocation. But that is a voice that goes unheard these days, and in fact is bizarrely and illogically characterized as ‘hate speech’.

However, that is an aside. Let’s talk about this rather strong statement that ‘women, in the Church, are more important than bishops and priests.’ Hurray! I love this kind of thing. If we take this seriously, grant that the Pope means this and is not just saying it to make women feel better or some such nonsense, then it is a radical statement.

We live in a world obsessed with power: who has it, who doesn’t, how to get it, how to keep it. The most important thing imaginable is to be the boss, the one pulling the strings, whether being the boss occurs through accumulating money, occupying this or that position, or manipulating others through one’s personal gifts and abilities. The subtle hegemony of Marxist thought is evident is our unquestioning assumption that life is nothing but a power struggle and the only relevant concern is who wins, who loses.

By saying that office in the Church (which is the ‘power’ structure in Catholicism) is not as important as this mysterious something else represented by ‘woman’, the Pope is radically overturning the whole model of life-as-power-struggle, the core good of life being the accruing of power to oneself.

As I said a few days ago, I believe this theology of woman is a theology of the primacy of radical receptivity, radical responsivity, radical relationality, radical and total and all-encompassing passivity which paradoxically draws us into the total activity of God’s Spirit in the world. Mary is the great icon of this, but the icon is reproduced in every woman in her very physicality and the psycho-sociological modes and structures woman brings into every situation.

I know it’s more complicated than that, and a blog post can only go so far in addressing those complexities. But don’t forget, I live in a mixed community of men and women, and the feminine genius and gift in the Church and the world is not a remote abstraction to me. I see it at work every day, in a multiplicity of beautiful ways: my MH sisters.

This is actually so important to me (I believe MH in many ways can serve as a model of Church life in this male-female, lay-priest dynamic) that I want to come back to it tomorrow. This post is long enough (and it’s time for me to go to prayers!). Tomorrow I want to talk more about the specific statement ‘women are more important than priests.’ (Hurray!) A demain.