This Week in Madonna House - February 14-20

This week in Madonna House was anything but uneventful—indeed, it will be a challenge for me to remember everything about it. For the first thing, I have been mentioning regularly in this column that we have had a dearth of guests with us since after Christmas. Well, forget about that—the dorms are filling up with a mix of short and long term guests. I’m not sure if people consciously think ‘What will I do for Lent? Oh, I know – I’ll go to MH!’ But that is in fact the normal pattern each year… and it is indeed a pretty good place to spend part if not all of Lent.

Last weekend was our MH version of Mardi Gras, which happened to coincide with the celebration of Harlem Foundation Day—the second phase of our apostolate when Catherine pioneered in the civil rights movement in the States. So we had lovely displays of all that, and a simple presentation of her work in that field.

That very day, though, we went in the pre-Lenten festivity mode. A home-made pizza supper brought delight to our palates, and then a home-made variety hour, with a strong element of comedy, brought delight to the rest of us. This is our annual ‘Pre-Lent Event’, which inevitably and invariably gets referred to colloquially if somewhat irreverently as the ‘Ash Bash’.

I missed it this year, being away at that vocation fair I mentioned last week, but people appreciated in particularly a certain priest of ours of Irish extraction, advanced in years but young in spirit, who lip-synched with high drama and panache to the three tenors recording of the Irish folk ballad Purple Heather (that’s the one with the ‘will ye go, lassy go?’ bit). This is always a great evening of fun and family, homemade entertainment for a community known for making everything by hand, anyway.

The traditional pancake supper on Tuesday ended our pre-Lenten blowout, and so we all gathered bright and early on Ash Wednesday for Mass and ashes. We don’t exactly do much communally in Lent that is different from the rest of the year—there is far too much variance in age, health, physical activity, spiritual maturity to have a communal program of fasting or penance.

We do have as our Lauds hymn each morning the great Byzantine hymn Open to Me the Doors of Repentance, which lays out in graphic strong language our profound sense of sin, and more profound sense of God’s mercy. And Lauds each morning ends with the Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, about which I may blog this Lent at some point. Particularly salient in that prayer is the call to ‘be aware of my sins and not judge my brother.’

For spiritual reading we are doing one of our standbys – Great Lent by Alexander Schmemann, which has some of the best teachings on the fundamental Lenten attitudes and practices that I have ever encountered. His chapter on fasting is alone worth the price of the book.

Meanwhile, while Lent feels like an interminable season of 40 weeks, not days, it is in fact short enough, and so the Easter preparations have already begun. The Easter sweet bread koolitch, and the special Easter confection paska, both given to us by our Russian foundress, are being made, pysanky is being done in every corner of the house (that’s the elaborately dyed Ukrainian Easter eggs), the paschal candle is being carved and painted (yes, we make our own here).

All of which is happening as winter continues to bite deep. We haven’t had the huge snowfalls that Eastern Canada and the US have had, but we sure have had the severe cold. One of our favourite hymns here is ‘The Lenten Spring has come’ – it’s been hard not to sing it a bit ironically so far, as the wind howls and the mercury plunges low each night.

And of course all this is happening while cold winds and stormy weather beset our world in other ways too—we are conscious in this Lenten season of the great battle of good and evil, dark and light that marks our times. We believe our little lives here—pizza and frolic, repentance and prayer, ora et labora, are the best response we can make to hatred and violence, and we unite with all of you in praying for the world and offering our lives for the healing of the nations, in and with Jesus Christ who made that offering for all of us.

And that’s what happened in MH this week.

Madonna House Movie VI: Light From the East

It is Thursday, and so we have the sixth instalment of the Madonna House video series, the twelve short films about our apostolate that we made just this past year. Here it is, with some thoughts following:

Now, I have to say for the first time in these videos that I don't think this one quite nailed it. This is not a criticism of the film makers, really: the subject of MH and its relationship to the Eastern church is a big one, perhaps not possible to cover in a seven minute You Tube style video. Film is a necessarily visual medium--this is its great power and beauty--but I think (I may be biased in this by my own authorial avocation) that something more needs to be written about this topic.

The film covers our celebration of the Byzantine liturgy--three of our priests have bi-ritual faculties, and we have the Divine Liturgy once a month. It also touches briefly upon the presence of icons in our community, interviewing one of our iconographers, and finally touches very briefly on the presence of poustinia in the life of the community. All of these are vast and profound topics in themselves and in the context of our Roman Catholic community, and so in a seven minute video the most that can be said is 'these things exist; they are really beautiful; we really like them!'

Like I say, there's a lot more that can be said on the topic, and it's on my 'long list' of books I would like to write some day. The fact is, Catherine Doherty was Russian, to the marrow of her spiritual bones, and her entire Christian formation was that of a Russian Orthodox lay woman. She had been exposed quite a bit to Catholicism in her childhood, being educated by Catholic nuns in various boarding schools, and her father in particular was very ecumenical in his own person, being a disciple of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev who took a remarkably pro-Roman stance in his writings.

Catherine, then, upon her becoming Catholic as a young woman lived out her Roman Catholicism with a complete interior orientation towards Russian spirituality and piety. Living outside of Russia, she often felt like a stranger in a strange land, and questioned God as to why He was asking her to found a community when she always struggled to communicate her understanding of the Gospel to a Western audience.

It is a long story as to how God answered that question. Part of it was his bringing to MH Fr. (later Archbishop) Joseph Raya whose dynamic charismatic celebration of his Melkite liturgy opened the community up to the beauty of the East. In addition, she discovered, and began to read, a succession of books by Russian theologians who themselves had left Russia in the Communist era and who thus had a Western audience for their Russian presentation. Schmemann, Arseniev, and above all Paul Evdokimov gave Catherine the words to explain what she had always lived, and the 'permission' to use those words to present her deepest spiritual insights to her MH family.

And so besides poustinia, she brought forth in the last decade of her life a slew of Russian words that I believe we are still just beginning to unpack in MH: sobornost (unity); strannik (pilgrim); urodivoi (fool for Christ); and molchanie (the silence of God). All of this (and more, yet) has made MH an odd thing indeed--a Roman Catholic community beating with a Russian heart, a group of Westerners, called to be faithful to our Western traditions and ways, yet illumined by light from the East, and still, largely, striving to understand what that means precisely and how we are to live it fully and faithfully.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, of course, and the beginning of Lent. Happy Lent to you all, and may it help us all grow closer to the Lord, to repent of our sins, and to renew and deepen our baptismal commitment.

It seems appropriate on this day of sober self-reflection to continue the Wednesday series I’ve engaged in, reflecting on the pope’s examination of conscience to the Roman curia and applying it to our own lives. We have come to the seventh of fifteen spiritual ailments, and this one is:

The disease of rivalry and vainglory. When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, we forget the words of Saint Paul: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil 2:3-4). This is a disease which leads us to be men and woman of deceit, and to live a false “mysticism” and a false “quietism”. Saint Paul himself defines such persons as “enemies of the cross of Christ” because “they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19).

Now of course the reference to ‘the colour of clothes’ would seem to have a specific reference to ecclesial careerism, where different ranks of church office are indicated by various shades of purple and red (don’t ask me to explain this, as it is something I have precisely zero interest in). And of course titles of honour also come into play in curial circles, perhaps more than in the general run of secular life for most people.

That being said, let no one think themselves free of vainglory and rivalry. The Eastern fathers of the desert are unanimous that it is a scourge of the interior life that can last long after many of the more gross and carnal vices have been conquered.

What is it, exactly? It is finding our value, not in the just and merciful judgment of God towards us, but in the good opinion of others. It is when what matters is not what you do or who you are, but what people think of what you do and are. And vainglory in its essence is a powerful damaging force in our lives.

Our whole being is to be so utterly God-centred—I think we can have a hard time grasping that and staying true to that. We really are meant to have God as our life and to care for nothing else very much but our life in Him and His in us. Of course when we are faithful to that we become exceedingly compassionate and concerned for our neighbours, since that is the nature of the God who we serve.

Vainglory persistently and corrosively erodes that God-centricity in favour of human respect. When we do good, not because it is what God asks of us, but for the sake of being liked or appreciated or noticed. When we pray and fast and live a dramatic spiritual life, not so as to become the saints of God He made us to be but to put on some kind of a holy show.

And of course vainglory is the great driver of compromise, of capitulating to the spirit of the age or of sacrificing one’s moral convictions so that ‘the people who matter’ will approve of us, or of that deadly silence when we really should speak out against some evil that is being done before us.

I admit that I don’t always follow Pope Francis’ thoughts entirely, and of course this is a very concise and brief treatment of vainglory he offers, so I’m not exactly sure what he means by false mysticism and quietism in this matter. I would like to hear him explain that further, to be honest—I’m sure he has something very particular in mind.

Meanwhile, it is Lent, and when we all go to church today to get our ashes we will hear much about praying, fasting, and doing alms in secret (meanwhile getting soot smeared on our foreheads, because we’re Catholics, and that’s just the way we roll!). It is this whole business of God seeing us, God knowing us, and God being the one to reward us—God, God, and God again, as the point of reference of our lives. So we can go unrewarded—unthanked, unnoticed, unappreciated, disrespected—with a peaceful spirit, if vainglory is not ruling our hearts.

The fathers are clear that it takes a long time to eradicate this vice, so we can be patient with ourselves in this matter as in all matters. And as we enter Lent let’s strive to put our minds, hearts, and eyes where they belong—on the Lord and his merciful love—and care for little but being a servant of that love and its recipient in this life and in the next.

The Fire Sale of the Spirit

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

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

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

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

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

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

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

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Tuesday is Little Mandate day at this blog, my chance to go through these essential words we believe God gave to our foundress Catherine De Hueck Doherty as the foundation of our vocation and its spirit.

Today we have what Catherine and we consider to be the very heart of the matter, the call taken directly from the Gospels to sell all we possess and give it to the poor. It was this passage from the Bible, from the story of Jesus and the rich young man (Matt 19: 17-26; Mark 10: 17-31, Luke 18: 18-30)., that pursued Catherine as a young woman in Toronto. Her Bible would fall open at that page; other bibles would open at that page; no matter how often she tried, with Bibles of all shapes and sizes, they would open at that page. She was pursued by the rich young man and Jesus’ words to him.

Finally, and only with the permission of her local bishop, she did precisely that. At the time she was a fairly successful woman with a relatively comfortable life, but within a short time she was living in a little room in a Toronto slum with not one idea in her head about what would happen next except that she was to pray ardently and serve her neighbours generously.

God had other plans, of course, and sent people to join her to form a new type of lay Catholic community—something completely unheard of in those days. And so the story began of our apostolate.

The specific literal reading of this line of the Mandate is not too important, especially to those who may love and want to live MH spirituality but are not called to join us and make the promise of poverty we make. What matters here is the giving, not the selling, if I can put it that way. What matters is that everything in our life be put at the service of Christ and the poor to whom he sends us.

In Catherine’s case, there was a Depression going on, and you didn’t have to be too bright to figure out who the poor were who needed to be given everything one had. Today that kind of poverty certainly exists, and may increase in the years ahead if economists are to be believed, but there are other poverties, too—poverties coming from the breakdown of family life, the painful confusion, divisions, and disastrous compromises and corruptions in the Church, and a general societal collapse that has deeply injured the men and women of our day.

The whole point is that whatever we have, we have to give. The ‘selling’, which may be a literal thing we do, can also be understood as taking whatever steps need to be taken so that what we have is ‘giveable’, is made into something that can be at the ready service of whatever poor God presents to us. It is a 'fire sale' - the fire of love, and everything, indeed, must go.

There is much to this line of the mandate (which is truly a line of the Gospel), much that applies to every human being, every disciple of Jesus. Jesus was ‘all given’, all in for the poor who are us. His divinity was ‘sold’ to human flesh, in a sense (we can hear these words as addressed by God the Father to God the Son before the Incarnation) so that it could be given to us in that marvellous exchange of love.

This exchange conditions the whole nature of Christian life and ethics. Everything we have is for others, everything we have is only to be seen as something to be used for loving others, even as we have to discern the wise and prudent way to do that. Sell all you possess and give it directly, personally to the poor—I will revisit those last lines next time, but it is this clarion call that continually makes us arise and go, shakes our complacency and shatters our comfort. May we have the courage and generosity to accept it as a true word from the Lord and beg his help to live it.

The Prayer of the Innocent Man

Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity,

and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.

Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and my mind.

For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness.

I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites.

I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.

I wash my hands in innocence and go around your altar, O Lord,

proclaiming thanksgiving aloud, and telling all your wondrous deeds.

O Lord, I love the habitation of your house and the place where your glory dwells.

Do not sweep my soul away with sinners, nor my life with bloodthirsty men,

in whose hands are evil devices, and whose right hands are full of bribes.

But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity; redeem me, and be gracious to me.

My foot stands on level ground; in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.

Psalm 26

Reflection – The Monday Psalter delivers up to us today for the first time a certain genre of psalm that poses a very specific problem for us in prayer. Namely, the psalm that loudly and long proclaims the total innocence and uprightness of the psalmist, on account of which the Lord simply must deliver him from harm and take care of him.

This is, of course a great challenge for us who know very well that we are not quite so innocent, that we do not always walk in integrity, trust without wavering, and all those other good things the psalmist most sincerely claims for himself here. Alas, sometimes yes, sometimes no, and so we have (among other things) the sacrament of reconciliation to cleanse us of sin.

Well, what are we to do with this psalm, then? Ignore it? Edit it from future editions of the Bible? Scoff at it, deconstruct it, implicitly or explicitly deny that it is an inspired text just as much as ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ or ‘Praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim Him all you people’—the psalms, in other words, that may flow more readily from our mouths?

The Church has never seen fit to do that, and indeed Psalm 26 appears in its allotted place in the Liturgy of the Hours, the second psalm of Friday Daytime Prayer, Week One. It is a psalm, in fact, that lends itself to corporate liturgical prayer more than private recitation, perhaps, and in that calls us to a contemplation of some fairly deep theological and spiritual truths.

Of course we have to start with Christ in this. He, along with His Mother, is the One who prays this psalm without reservations or complications. He is the integrated one, the faithful one, the innocent one, and so this psalm first pulls us into the very prayer of Jesus Christ to God His Father. The only way we can really pray this psalm is to pray it as an expression of our unity with and in Jesus.

But this, then, means that this psalm (which most of us probably are hardly aware of and certainly don’t count as one of our favourites) factually pulls us right into the internal dialogue of the Trinity. It is a very human earthy psalm—as always there are enemies about, and the wicked, and it is all very much a psalm set in the battlefield of the world. But in that—and in the fact that God the Son became an earthy man and entered that battlefield—the very life of the Trinity, the ineffably mysterious and unknowable inner being of God is made present to us. 

And when we come together as the Church, not as simple individuals with our own struggles and failures, sins and virtues, but as the Body of believers, this psalm does become ours indeed, and in fact without reservations or hesitation.

We become innocent and faithful, with integrity and sincerity of heart, not by nature or by our own actions and perfections, but by grace. This psalm is a psalm of justification by faith and by grace—sola fides and sola gratia—but our belief is that it is a real justification, a real cleansing and purification, something that really does change us and is not simply a legal fiction.

This psalm, above all then, calls us to a searching examination of conscience that flows from an awareness of just what a gift has been given us, just how much the life of God has become the life of redeemed humanity, just how much Jesus has deigned to share His righteousness with us. So… are we walking that way? Rather than letting us off the hook or allowing us to be slack and passive in our spiritual and moral life, this psalm is a clarion call to integrity and to purity of heart, mind, and body. 

Let’s pray it, then, and know what we are praying, what gift has been given us, and what standard of life and conduct this gift calls us to, today.