A Caress of the Cheek

No one saw the hour of your victory. No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday’s hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn.

Asleep it was that we were carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter. And no one knows how it happened to Him. No one knows which hand it was caressed his cheek so that suddenly the wan world beamed with a thousand colors, and he had to smile involuntarily over the miracle that was realized in him.

Who can describe what it means to say ‘The Lord is Spirit’? Spirit is the invisible reality that asserts itself more manifestly than all that is sensible. Spirit is the invisible fragrance of the Paradise that has arisen in our very midst. Spirit is the great invisible wing which we recognize by the blowing of the wind and by the keen desire that overflows us when we are grazed by its down.

Spirit is the Paraclete, the Consoler, whose tenderness makes the world of remorse be muted unsaid, absorbed like a drop of dew in the sunlight. A great white mantle, light as silk, is laid about your body, and under it the clinging garments of despair fall to tatters of themselves.

Spirit is a sorcerer: it can create in you what does not exist; it can make disappear what appeared to be irremovable; in the midst of a wilderness it creates gardens, fountains, birds; and what it conjures is no specter: it is sheer truth.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World

Reflection  - This is another great classic of contemporary spiritual reading. Those who have heard of von Balthasar, are a bit intimidated at the prospect of reading him, especially since he tended to write his books not so much by the word as by the pound, may find this title a good introduction to his thought. It is (relatively) short, accessible to the normal literate reader, and (oh yes) also stunningly beautiful and shattering in its insight into God’s love and human sin, mercy and what our need for it is.

As we start to draw our attention more towards the other pole of the Easter season, the great feast of Pentecost, it is good to meditate some on this reality of ‘Spirit’ in our lives. What does it mean, anyhow, that God is Spirit, and that, as in John 6, ‘it is the Spirit that gives life’?

Well, it means a great deal, and hopefully none of you expect me to comprehensively treat it in a blog post. What strikes me on this early morning hour is this business of the hand brushing the cheek of the dead Christ, leaving in its wake a flush of warmth and color on that pale fixed visage, stirring to motion and vitality the dead God of the world.

This is the great action of the Spirit in time and history, the raising of Christ from the dead. But it is also the great action of the Spirit in the history of all humanity. The Church, understood at its deepest reality, is this very resurrection of man from the dead, the whole human race stirred to new and everlasting life by the brush of the hand of the Holy Spirit.

It is also the great action of the Spirit in your life and mine. Whenever there is a stirring to life in us, whenever ‘love is come again’ just when we thought it couldn’t possibly, whenever repentance cracks our hard shell, and hope awakens in us, when faith blossoms after a season of doubt and near-despair, whenever forgiveness happens, whenever gifts flower, whenever good triumphs, even in some little way that nobody else even notices—whenever any of this blooming into new life happens, the Spirit is acting.

And it is the ‘personal touch’ that I want to highlight. The action of the Spirit is not some wholesale thing – like a big fire hose of water being poured out on a bunch of people. The Spirit is given to all, but to each it is that hand caressing the cheek, that personal intimate and very loving contact with God.

Spirit is deeply personal, deeply a matter of communion, of freedom, and of a great encounter of love with Love, of person with Person. And it is this encounter that rebirths a world in peace and in joy, and that rebirths you and me into sons and daughters of the Father of us all, by the saving work of the Risen Lord, Jesus Christ.

Leaving the Funhouse

Prayer that is spiritual and genuine is both a call and a response: a divine call and a human response.

The definition of prayer rests on an important fact: prayer does not reach its power and efficacy as an actual communion with God until man is fully aware that his soul is created in God’s image. He should feel that it derives its very being from him. In this being, nothing is more vital than this self-awareness. Once man’s soul becomes sure of this, it will have laid hold of the source of such awareness—which is God. Thus the soul realizes, sees, and touches God’s self.

There is only one true, realistic, and honest way for man to be aware of himself. It is to first be aware of God. For it is God who created man’s soul in his own likeness. When man then becomes aware of himself, he finds himself at once facing God’s likeness.

Even self consciousness, a faculty that God has granted to man’s soul, is but an image of God’s consciousness of himself. And so the way leading man to a true and honest awareness of himself is a simple one. It is the same way, and the only way, which leads to his awareness of God.

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – Well, here I am, finally back from my unexpectedly long hiatus from blogging, and charging ahead with bloggy business as usual on my brand spankin’ new MacBook Pro ™. I am not insensible of the irony that the author of The I-Choice: Staying Human in a Digital Age (publication pending… soon) has now joined the Church of Apple. I am a mass of contradictions.

Meanwhile the above quote is from a book I used on my five-day poustinia retreat, along with the Philokalia which is the great treasury of Eastern Christian wisdom, to supplement my reading of Scripture. And I was so enraptured, really, by Matthew the Poor’s wisdom and insight that I wanted to share a bit of it with you on the blog, from time to time.

Matthew is a contemporary monk of Egypt, and stands at the heart of a revival of Egyptian monasticism in our times. He is a Copt who has eaten and drunk deeply of the wisdom of the whole Christian tradition—Byzantine, Catholic, and his own Egyptian forebears. He is also a member of a persecuted Church, and his wisdom no doubt derives in no small part from the sufferings of his people, for whom he is great spiritual father.

These words above are from the beginning of the book I was reading, and strike directly to the heart of the matter. What does it mean to ‘know ourselves’. Who are we, anyhow? What is a human person? Do I know myself by virtue of knowing that I like chicken and dislike brussel sprouts, that I enjoy blues and folk rock a la Mumford and Sons, and detest rap music? Do I know myself by virtue of knowing my own personal history, family, friends, episodes? My gifts and strengths, and my weakness and failures?

I think we all sense, dimly perhaps, that there is something left out of all these and any other kind of ‘self-knowledge’ conducted along strictly humanistic and natural lines. Namely… ourselves.

Matthew, then, plunges to the heart of the matter. We do not know ourselves until we know ourselves as made in God’s image and according to his likeness. We do not know ourselves until we know the self that God knows. We do not know ourselves except and unless we pray.

We live in a circus funhouse, distorted reflections of our own visage wherever we turn. We know what we are like… but not quite, not really. We know ourselves, but not as we really are. We can strive to bang away at the mirrors to straighten them out, clear out the distortions, smash the ones that are warped beyond repair, constantly correct our perception for accuracy (no, my face is not actually as long as my body… no, my legs are not actually six inches long).

Or we can forget about it all, and turn our whole attention to God, to Jesus, to the true mirror and the One who tells us the truth about ourselves and about everything else we need to know. Prayer is not some little hobby spiritually inclined people can engage in, or some desperate last-ditch clutching at divine succor in times of crisis.

Prayer is the deep truth of our being, the only real truth of our being, and the only way to abide in deep truth and out of that deep truth, communion and love. So that’s what I bring you out of my five days in poustinia, and we will just see where else Matthew the Poor and all my other friends take us as we reflect on truth together in prayer and in love. 

Back From Retreat, But...

Hi, everyone! Well, I am back from my five-day poustinia retreat, much refreshed and recollected, alleluia, and ready to resume full apostolic life, blogging included.
But... my trusty and long-suffering lap top computer, which has long been showing signs of it, chose this very week to go on a permanent retreat, being unceremoniously demoted in the process from 'valuable piece of information technology' to 'scrap metal and plastic.'
I am going computer shopping Monday, but in the meantime don't really have an easy way to write and post to my blog without that particular piece of hardware. So, the blog remains on hiatus until Monday. Talk to you then, with lots of insights from my time away, no doubt.

The Fear to End All Fears

Finally we will come in an offertory procession, and our procession will meet God’s procession, and he and we will be one. This offering of ourselves, if and when it comes, must come out of our own freedom. When it comes it will change everything.

Fear will depart. Whereas before, the poustinik was often beset by fears and the devil was sniffing all around the poustinia, now it no longer matters because the poustinik knows he has power over the devil. Where there is kenosis there is no fear.

I meditated quite a bit on fear when I lived in Harlem. Was Christ afraid? In Gethsemane he certainly should have been. If he was like us in everything except sin, I can’t imagine that he was without fear. He prayed that the chalice would pass from him, but only if it was in accord with his Father’s will. You sense some kind of fear there, and you are glad in a way. Glad because he is so very much like us. It makes you feel good. In the same breath, however, we must remember that he got up and went on to Calvary. His fear did not stop his accomplishing his Father’s will.

I remember that when I finished this little meditation in Harlem those many years ago, I ceased to be afraid. I ceased to be afraid because I faced the fact that I might really be killed any day. Perhaps it’s when we have accepted the reality

of death, like Christ did, that fear ceases and we reach a real depth of kenosis.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia

Reflection – It is a worthwhile meditation sometimes to look at this whole reality of ‘fear’ in our lives – our own personal life, and in the general life of humanity.

How much of human life is driven by fear? Quite a bit, I suspect. It’s not a question of overt quaking terror, living in a state of constant trembling panic. Of course not. But an awful lot of people (and I hardly excuse myself from the list) seek out their comfort zones pretty adamantly, and work very hard to stay in those comfort zones.

So people who are afraid of not being in control of everything expend huge energy manipulating, controlling, bullying everyone around them. People who are afraid of intimacy and emotional vulnerability expend huge energy building facades of cool ironic detachment or chilly impersonal efficiency. People who are afraid of want of any kind spend their whole lives amassing personal fortunes beyond anything they actually need. People who are afraid of being done in physically or psychologically by others expend great energy on aggression and dominant behavior. People who are terrified of being alone half kill themselves to stay sexually attractive and break the moral law without scruple if only to have that little bit of validation and intimate companionship.

It’s all fear-based behavior, isn’t it? All based on the idea that the most terrible, the most evil thing that can happen to me is ‘________’ (insert your answer here). And so do anything, spend anything, sacrifice anything to avoid _________.

It is all fear, and it is all essentially the worship of a false God. Because of course the worst evil, ultimately the only true evil, is to lose our communion with God. To sin, to cease to love in truth and in whole, and in obedience to how God has taught us to love, which is His moral law. This is the only real and lasting evil in our lives, and that is indeed the only thing we should fear.

This is the ‘fear of the Lord’ that is the first stage of wisdom. Not a cringing fear of a punitive God who will send us to Hell if we displease Him. It is a fear that comes out of true love of God, a true apprehension that God and our communion with God is all what most matters in life, that any other good only remains good if it is grounded in this primary Good, and that all lesser goods are echoes, reflections, and preparatory stages for this one lasting and eternal good.

So of course we should be willing to die, and certainly willing to suffer, for the sake of this one true good. Willing to do anything, spend anything, sacrifice anything for it. And all the other fears are driven away by this one fear, which is not really fear in essence, but love.

 

So I leave you with that to ponder for the next week. I am going tonight into silent retreat from Monday to Friday. God willing, I’ll be back on the blog Saturday. Pray for me, and know that I will be praying for you in the grand silence of the poustinia, where (please God) perfect love will wash away all fear, and ‘God alone suffices’ for life.

The Offertory Procession

The desert is an altar on which, moment by moment, you bring the offering of yourself. For self–will is the obstacle that eternally stands between me and God. We decide that we are going to do such and such a thing. God comes along and says, “No, do this.” It’s a matter of doing what he wants, not because we are afraid of him, or afraid of dying, but because we are in love with him, and because we enter the poustinia to really do his will and not ours. The poustinia is there to form that attitude in you. The poustinik must finally understand that he has to become as empty as his God became for him.

There will come a moment when the offertory procession of man will touch the offertory procession of God. Then the poustinik can go anyplace. Then he  doesn’t need to stay in the poustinia. Then he can pilgrim; he can stop being in one place. He has become so empty that he is simply one who carries God. Now all his ways are straight and plain, ready for the Lord to walk on. It is an  awesome moment when a person realizes that, by the grace of God, this has taken place in him.

When we hear the parable of the seed, we should think of God becoming a seed in the womb of Mary. He was a good seed. His roots went deep. If ever we can come to dimly understand this mystery of God becoming a fetus, a child, a

youth, a man, we will begin to understand God’s love for us. Then we will begin to understand the emptiness which must take place in us, the depth of surrender of our will to God’s.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia

Reflection – There are times, I admit, when I am afflicted just a bit by doubt. Not doubt in God, the Church, Jesus, or faith in general. But there are times when I slip up a bit about Catherine Doherty, the woman who founded Madonna House, and to whose vision of life, God, faith, the Church, the Gospel I have dedicated myself. Is she really all that great? That is the question I occasionally ask myself.

And then I read something like the above passage and snap out of it. In a few short paragraphs—one small excerpt from one of her many books—Catherine goes to a depth of reflection on what the ways of God with man are and the ways of man towards God, and keeps us there, in simple everyday language that a child could understand, to a degree that few authors indeed are capable of doing.

It is important to realize that, while she writes the above words in the context of poustinia, a particular practice of life that may or may not be possible to the general reader, for Catherine ‘poustinia’ referred always and primarily to an interior reality, an inner experience of being. She learned the above spiritual attitudes, as she will go on to say tomorrow, not by spending days in a hermitage kneeling before a cross in silence and solitude. Rather, she learned it in the crucible of Harlem with its sweltering heat, endless noise, and 16 hour work days. Poustinia is not a question of log cabins and the silence of the wilderness. It is a question of where our inner being is being held.

Essentially, it is a question of whose will are we concerned with doing; ours or God’s? If it is God’s there is an interior drawing towards silence and stripping, emptying and listening, praying and fasting. If it is ours, we will run towards noise and distractions and entertainments and lots and lots of busyness inward and outward.

We live in a world of ‘busyness’ – everyone is busy, busy, busy, all the time. I don’t really buy it, you know. There are people whose lives are truly consumed with crushing work loads—parents raising young children, for example. But many people simply fill a great deal of their waking hours with noise and stimulation. It is not a matter of busyness but oddly enough of sloth.

It is sloth, defined in the spiritual manuals as a sadness regarding the spiritual good, then sends us spiraling off into workaholism and ceaseless activity and distraction. Because we want to do our will and are repelled at the prospect of doing God’s, we make ourselves very very busy, fill our days with noise and confusion, all to drown out the persistent voice of the One who loves us and calls us to life.

Well, only you know if that’s true for you to some respect. Only I know if it’s true for me to some respect. Or really, only God can really know how much we are avoiding him, how much we are seeking Him. Personally, I’m looking forward to five days of silence and prayer in retreat (starting Monday!) to find out just how full I am of myself, and perhaps to empty some of that nonsense out of me.

Because however we get there, that’s what we all need to do. Empty ourselves, so that God can fill us as He did Mary, so we can carry Christ to the world that is dying for lack of Him.

The Royal Ball

The poustinia is a kenotic way of life. The very fact that you are in poustinia means that you are tending toward a complete self–emptying… You gradually realize that if you are going to stay in the poustinia, you will have to empty yourself.

This self–emptying has many strata and many dimensions. Its final goal is a holy indifference. These are just two words, but to reach them will take a lifetime. Emptiness is one aspect of kenosis. It involves the constant struggle with one’s imagination, one’s dreams, plans, desires, needs. St. Therese, the Little Flower, gave an example which comes very close to the Russian idea. She said, “I am a little ball. You throw me someplace in a corner. Maybe ten years later you pick me up again.” A Russian staretz said that one should be like a rag doll which can be picked up by the hand, foot, or head, now thrown in the bushes, now hugged, now thrown in the toy box. Two saints had a similar idea.

What does it mean to be a ball, a rag doll, having no desire to get up, to move, to do anything that one desires to do? It is something similar to what happens to us when we are told that we have a terminal disease and have only a short time to live. Of all the things that we have dreamt about or desired, perhaps 98 percent of them fall away in an instant. When you are face to face with the stark reality of death, your whole life changes in a few minutes. The poustinia is like this. When one is visited by God, a kenosis takes place, and all our plans and projects perish before our eyes.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia

Reflection – I want to spend a few days going through this little section—just a couple of pages, really—of the book Poustinia, the classic work by Catherine on prayer, silence, solitude, and the desert. Poustinia is simply the Russian word for desert, and in Russian spirituality is the place of silence, prayer, fasting—similar to a hermitage but with an accent on hospitality and availability that may or may not be present in a Western-style hermit.

In Madonna House, Catherine introduced the custom of poustinia, the withdrawal into a cabin or a prayer room, bare and stark, for a 24 hour period, with only bread and water to eat, and only the Scriptures to read. This aspect of MH life began around the time of the Vatican II council—her response to this movement of God was to deepen the contemplative prayer life of the community.

Some of our members were called in those years to adopt a poustinik lifestyle—living in poustinia for three, four, or five days a week as a sort of modified hermit in community. This section of the book Poustinia is from a series of talks she gave to these first poustiniks of MH. In these talks she really delves into the depths of spiritual life, not just for poustiniks but for all of us.

Probably I am blogging in this direction for purely selfish reasons: I am going into poustinia on Monday for a five day silent retreat, and blogging about prayer, silence, and kenosis is the only way I can find time to prepare myself for this upcoming adventure with God. Sorry, the truth comes out—this blog is completely self-centred!

Meanwhile we have this beautiful presentation on the heart of the matter, spiritually speaking, which is this holy indifference. Therese of Lisieux put it perfectly: being a little ball that the Child Jesus can throw in a corner, pick up, pull apart. Letting God have his way with us, not because He is God and we are afraid of Him, but because He is Love and we trust Him. He is our King, and our loyalty is to Him in toto.

The trouble is self-will, and this self-will takes the form of all our projects and plans, our ideas and opinions, our agendae and schemes. I suppose we’re allowed to have such things, as long as they are not overtly sinful (e.g.: I am scheming to murder my boss!). But really, if we are serious about God and about being a Christian, all that stuff just gets in the way sooner or later. We have to give it up. ‘When you were a young man you put your own belt around you and went where you pleased. When you are old, someone will put a belt around you and take you where you do not want to go.’ Jesus’ words to Peter in John 21 say it all.

Kenosis: it’s not just for poustiniks. Holy indifference: it’s not just for Carmelites or other monastic types. It’s for you and me, and it is utterly necessary if our lives are going to be at all useful for God in this world. Our own ideas and plans don’t do anything worthwhile, and we have to get that straight. It is God’s ideas and God’s plans that establish his kingdom on earth, and God’s kingdom on earth is the only thing worth giving our lives for.

As If!

The attempt, carried to extremes, to shape human affairs to the total exclusion of God leads us more and more to the brink of the abyss, toward the utter annihilation of man. We must therefore reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment [to live by only those truths that would be true even if God did not exist] and say: even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist.

This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice that I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe.

Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 51-2

Reflection – OK, let’s have some vintage ‘Benedict blogging’ today. Ratzinger here offers a conclusion to what has been a fairly lengthy argument. He is not simply making a bald assertion here; he has argued his way towards this rather dramatic statement of the need to live ‘as if God did indeed exist.’

What does he mean by the total annihilation of man coming from the exclusion of God from human affairs? A few obvious things pop to mind. Nuclear devastation is back in the forefront of our minds these days, for example, with the threats emerging from Pyongyang of late. Environmental degradation is a reality, even if specifics around anthropogenic global warming are hotly disputed.

Abortion and contraception have pushed a great deal of the developed world into a demographic spiral that, in some countries at least, seems irreversible. To annihilate the human race does not require a hydrogen bomb; it simply requires one generation to refuse to produce the next one.

Well, those are the big three, the actual human choices made in a context of godlessness (I speak here not polemically but with precise objectivity) that lead us to annihilation. There are other, more attenuated forms of annihilation that afflict us. Consumerism and materialism drive our economies into increasingly unreal contortions, ensuring the steady flow of cheap consumer goods today at the expense of our children and grandchildren’s future poverty.

Creeping socialism refers more and more control of daily human life to an increasingly powerful central government and hosts of petty regulations that curb initiative and freedom of action. Moral anomie afflicts us more each year, as each generation is increasingly educated to have no moral standard whatsoever except non-judgmentalism and a pseudo-tolerance of vice. The fruits of this are evident in such tragedies as the recent rape case in Steubenville, which is far from being an isolated incident.

And in that light sexual license continues to detach the genitive acts of the human body from any context of commitment, procreation, or indeed anything except the immediate exigencies of the pleasure principle.

All of these bear witness to a great hegemony of acedia – that terrible haunting thought bedeviling humanity that says monotonously, droningly, repetively, ‘What’s the use? What’s the use? What’s the use?’ There is no point, no larger reality, no grand destination to human life except the rot of the grave, so what’s the use? Grab what you can and make your own life as pleasant and trouble-free as possible, because you will be a moldering corpse soon.

This is the deep affliction of our modern world, all of which traces immediately to the loss of a sense of God. Ratzinger realizes and understands well this loss of God in the modern world, and so contents himself with pointing out that godlessness is dragging us all down into a tragic state of civilizational collapse. To put it in gloriously non-technical language, acedia, besides being a lie, is also a bummer, dude. It brings us down and makes everything suck.

So, to act as if God exists, to act as if there is indeed a point to life and a direction and a coherent world that comes from a coherent World Maker—all of this is conducive to human happiness and human survival. Frankly, practical atheism is not showing itself to be a great path towards human flourishing, while Christian civilization, though always marked and marred by human sin, produced art, music, philosophy, architecture, poetry, literature, philosophy, science and technology that has enriched the whole of humanity.

 

Acedia can do none of that, and indeed has never tried. So… today, act as if God exists, OK?

Everything Else is Froth

The whole thing was to happen secretly. There was to be no announcement. The psalmists had hymned Christ’s coming on harps of gold. The prophets had foretold it with burning tongues. But now the loudest telling of His presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child.

It was to be a secret and God was so jealous of His secret that he even guarded it at the cost of His little bride’s seeming dishonor. He allowed Joseph to misjudge her, at least for a time. This proved that God knew Our Lady’s trust in Him was absolutely without limit. Everything that he did to her in the future emphasized the same thing. His trust in her trust in Him.

The one thing that He did ask of her was the gift of her humanity. She was to give  Him her body and soul unconditionally, and—what in this new light would have seemed absurdly trivial to anyone but the Child Bride of Wisdom—she was to give Him her daily life.

And outwardly it would not differ from the life she would have lived if she had not been chosen to be the Bride of the Spirit and the Mother of God at all! She was not even asked to live it alone with this God who was Her own Being and whose Being was to be hers.

No, He asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child. On the contrary, the hands and feet, the heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form Him in service to Joseph.

Yes, it certainly seemed that God wanted to give the world the impression that it is ordinary for Him to be born of a human creature. Well, that is a fact. God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it is His will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the human love that people give one another.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – This is such a great book! I can see that my temptation will be to just keep excerpting it until the whole of it has been published on this blog (which probably wouldn’t please whoever holds the copyright to it too well). I will wrest away my fixation with it tomorrow and move on to something else.

If yesterday’s excerpt was a fine corrective of our activism and utilitarianism in favour of passivity, response, and prayerful contemplative surrender to God, today we see a great celebration of hiddenness and ordinariness as opposed to the ethos of publicity and glamour.

We are so sure, so very, very sure, we modern human beings, that we have to make a splash, have to break out the brass bands, the advertising campaign, have to fire up all the social media and launch a full-court press of publicity: press releases, gala premieres, all the fanfare and hoopla the budget will allow.

This is what you gotta do if you’re going to have an impact in the world. This kind of thinking can be just as prevalent in the Church as outside of it, and is just as common among people who are really good at the whole publicity game and those who are no so adept at it. The movers and the shakers are the ones whose names are on everyone’s lips, who have publicists and command the center of attention wherever they go.

So we think, but we are wrong. Utterly, completely, totally wrong. What makes a lasting impact in this world is not buzz and headlines, but opening the door of one’s heart to God. The person in the headlines may well have done just that: Mother Teresa and John Paul II come to mind here. But their effectiveness did not come from their worldly success, such as it was. It came from their fidelity to Mary’s hidden fiat.

 

Politicians come and go; celebrities and activists and pundits of all description come and go. They are famous in their day and forgotten in the next. It is this hidden mysterious reality that Houselander describes so beautifully that makes our lives real, meaningful, powerful. The daily choice to love God and to love the people in our lives, the daily choice to give our humanity, body and soul, to God, to receive His life and bring forth His life in the life of the world. This is what counts, the meat, the core of life. Everything else is just froth.

Being Comes First

Christ’s insistence on the power of children is very striking. Almost more than anything else in the Gospel it proves that in God’s eyes being something comes before doing something.

He sets a little child among his apostles as an example of what he loves. He says that heaven is full of children. Indeed, the Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, he goes in on his knees.

How consistent it is with the incredible tenderness of God that His Christ, the Immortal Child, should be conceived by the power of the Spirit in the body of a child. That a child should bear a Child, to redeem the world. Our Lady was at the most fourteen when the angel came to her; perhaps she was younger.

The whole world trembled on the word of a child, on a child’s consent. To what was she asked to consent? First of all, to the descent of the Holy Spirit, to surrender her littleness to the Infinite Love, and as a result to become the Mother of Christ.

It was so tremendous, yet so passive. She was not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She was not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift. She was not asked to lead a special kind of life, to retire to the temple and live as a nun, to cultivate suitable virtues or claim special privileges.

She was simply to remain in the world, to go forward with her marriage to Joseph, to live the life of an artisan’s wife, just what she had planned to do when she had no idea that anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to her.

It almost seemed as if God’s becoming man and being born of a woman were ordinary.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – I’m spending a few days on the blog honouring yesterday’s solemnity of the Annunciation with these powerful meditations by Caryll Houselander. I mainly do this because I find I cannot do fitting honor to Our Lady in one blog post on her actual feast day—there’s too much to say about her, really. Also, I want to spotlight this author and this book, written in England in the midst of World War II, which is one of the truly great Marian texts of our day, and which deserves a place on every book shelf.

For those reading this who know Catherine Doherty and Madonna House well, we can see here how influential Houselander was on her. ‘Being is more important than doing,’ for example. Also, ‘the door to heaven is so low you must go down on your knees.’

It is this whole business of Our Lady’s passivity that I would like to highlight, though. Mostly because in North America at least, we really, really hate this. OK, maybe hate is a strong word. But we are culturally ill disposed towards passivity of any kind.

No way! We are activists. Tell us what to do! Give us some practical pointers! Give us a program! We’ve got to get up off our duffs and do something if we are going to heal the culture, restore the world to Christ, rebuild a Christian society, renew the Church, etc., etc.

This is so built into our very cultural and spiritual DNA in North America (the Protestant work ethic!), and there is enough of a grain of truth in it, that it is very hard to show what is off about it all. After all, we do in fact have to do something. Our Lady did, too: she had to do the duty of the moment like everyone else.

But receiving comes first. Listening comes first. Passivity comes first. Being comes first. If it doesn’t, then all our dashing about and doing, doing, doing does nothing of any permanent value. And indeed, our modern world is very busy, very active, very rushing about. We live our lives timed down to the second, on the clock every waking minute, our hours and days packed full of action and stimuli. And what good is any of it?

We are not listening. We are not receiving from God, and so our lives do not bear great fruit. Prayer, silence, daily coming into God’s presence to receive his word and his life—all of this is so deeply neglected in North America, even among good Christian people. And so we get embroiled in the controversy of the day, swept up in the shallow currents of pop culture and political life, frenetic in our ceaseless, and so often pointless, activity. Our Lady stands as the great sign against all this. She is the great contemplative, the great receiver, the great listener, the pray-er, the one whose whole being and hence whose whole activity comes from God and so is directed towards God and his perfect will.

If we fail to emulate her, our lives will be very busy, very stressful, very action-packed, and wholly fruitless. It is God who makes our lives fruitful, not our own action, and that is the great lesson we need to learn in North America in the year 2013.

Always a Love Story

The Church keeps the feast of the Annunciation on the 25^th of March. There is still a touch of austerity upon the earth, there is still a silver emptiness in the skies, but expectation of spring is already stirring in the human heart, the bud is beginning to break on the tree, the promise of blossom has quickened the spirit of man.

This is the season when we celebrate the wedding of the Holy Spirit with humanity, the wedding of Spirit of Wisdom and Love with the dust of the earth . I think the most moving fact in the whole history of mankind is that wherever the Holy Spirit has desired to renew the face of the earth he has chosen to do so through communion with some humble little human creature.

In the  instances we know of, it has not been to great or powerful people that the Spirit has come but to the little or the frightened, and we have seen them made new, and known that the subsequent flowering of their lives was nothing else but Christ given to them by that sweet impact.

It is always a love story, a culmination of love between the Spirit of Light and the Bride of the Spirit. This is something which can happen to everyone now, but it could not have happened to anyone but for the fiat of the peasant girl in Nazareth whom the whole world calls Our Lady.

It is in Our Lady that God fell in love with Humanity… in the virginal emptiness of the girl, Mary of Nazareth, Christ was conceived; it was the wedding of God to a human child, and the wonder of it filled the earth for all time.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – Happy feast day to you all! It is moved this year from March 25 to April 8, the first day after the Octave of Easter, but Solemnity of the Annunciation it is, nonetheless. A joyous day to you all. We have just finished celebrating Christ saving us in the Paschal Mystery of his death and resurrection. This saving work could not have been accomplished as we know it has unless this little girl had consented to bear Him in her womb, to give her flesh to become His Body.

This chapter from Houselander’s masterwork—a book to be owned, read, cherished if you have not already done so—is such a profound exploration of this mystery that I think I may excerpt bits and pieces of it for the next few days on the blog. It is incredibly relevant in this Easter season that we contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation and how God chose to do it.

The reason it is relevant in Easter in particular is that this is the very way in which all the power and glory and might and workings of Christ’s death and resurrection become operative in our lives. Mary said fiat—let it be done to me according to your will. The Word was made flesh, was born, lived, suffered, died, and rose again. But now this same angel, this same God stands before you and me and says ‘will you?’ And it is our fiat that opens our own hearts and lives to this same Word and this same God, who now (because of Mary) has a human face and a human heart and a human name, Jesus of Nazareth.

And has human wounds and bears the mark of human suffering. God did all this for us, but He did it through and with the co-operation of a human creature named Mary. And His ongoing work, His work here and now in the world to extend the kingdom of love and joy, of beauty and truth, rests on the co-operation of a human creature named (insert your name here).

Christ is risen from the dead, and now he walks the earth looking for souls who will give their living bodies to Him to imbue with his Spirit, so that His love can flow freely in all the rivers and streams of the human world, can be that seed planted deep in the human field, can bear fruit as rich ripe grain to feed the human table.

So the mystery of Mary and the Incarnation is deeply related, vitally related to the mystery of Easter and the saving work of God in Christ’s death and resurrection. You and I need to say ‘yes’ to God, and this yes to God makes the love of the Cross and the joy of the empty tomb visible in the world, so that the world can come to believe, so that other people too can come to say yes to God and so make him visible in their turn. Isn’t God wonderful to involve us so intimately in his saving work?

Say yes to Him, today, alleluia.

The Last Word

Happy Mercy Sunday! Also, the 2^nd Sunday of Easter, Thomas Sunday, Low Sunday, White Sunday, Quasimodo Sunday… did I leave any out? It is one of the most ‘named’ days of the liturgical year.

But Mercy Sunday it is, the Divine Mercy devotion of St. Faustina growing exponentially in recent years. And as I said yesterday, I sometimes wonder about that ‘devotional’ habit in Catholicism. As much as it can enrich and make alive the mysteries and beauty of our faith, I think it can sometimes keep those mysteries at a distance, somewhat, keep them codified in set forms of prayers, novenas, images, and vocabulary.

God’s mercy is our all-in-all, not simply a devotion. And so here below the jump is the rest of the chapter I began yesterday from my book Going Home, which finds lots to say about the divine mercy without ever broaching the devotional horizon of the Divine Mercy:

Too Good to Be True?

Well, it is Mercy Weekend, so to speak. This whole Divine Mercy devotion has grown dramatically in recent years, and has been a true gift to the whole Church. One thing I wonder about sometimes, though, contrarian that I am: are we at risk of ‘devotionalizing’ the mercy of God?

I mean, God’s mercy is something more than an image, a chaplet, a Polish nun’s diary, and a prayer, right? It is, in fact, the very form of love that God shows to us always, and the mystery of love into which each of us is to be drawn and transformed into merciful lovers.

Sometimes we Catholics can ‘devotionalize’ our faith—it is a bit easier to have a devotion to the Divine Mercy than to receive it and live it. In service of a deeper understanding and entry into the mystery, then, I want to take a couple days to excerpt a chapter from my book Going Home, which has nothing at all to say about St. Faustina, and tons to say about God’s mercy. So here it is, below the jump, as it is a bit lengthy:

Events, Dear Boy, Events

There is one last little element that I would like to emphasize in the Gospel for this Easter Vigil. The women encounter the newness of God. Jesus has risen, he is alive! But faced with empty tomb and the two men in brilliant clothes, their first reaction is one of fear: “they were terrified and bowed their faced to the ground”, Saint Luke tells us – they didn’t even have courage to look.

But when they hear the message of the Resurrection, they accept it in faith. And the two men in dazzling clothes tell them something of crucial importance: remember. “Remember what he told you when he was still in Galilee… And they remembered his words” (Lk 24:6,8). This is the invitation to remember their encounter with Jesus, to remember his words, his actions, his life; and it is precisely this loving remembrance of their experience with the Master that enables the women to master their fear and to bring the message of the Resurrection to the Apostles and all the others (cf. Lk 24:9). To remember what God has done and continues to do for me, for us, to remember the road we have travelled; this is what opens our hearts to hope for the future. May we learn to remember everything that God has done in our lives.

On this radiant night, let us invoke the intercession of the Virgin Mary, who treasured all these events in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19,51) and ask the Lord to give us a share in his Resurrection. May he open us to the newness that transforms, to the beautiful surprises of God. May he make us men and women capable of remembering all that he has done in our own lives and in the history of our world. May he help us to feel his presence as the one who is alive and at work in our midst. And may he teach us each day, dear brothers and sisters, not to look among the dead for the Living One. Amen.

Pope Francis, Easter Vigil Homily, March 31, 2013

Reflection – I have to think that at least some of this homily, delivered on the most sacred night of the year, the night of remembrance of the past and encounter with the eternal Present of God, that at least some of this homily springs out of Pope Francis’ own immediate life experiences. His own life has been utterly upended in the past two weeks; he went to Rome no doubt expecting to do his duty as a cardinal, the ‘duty of the moment’ of the conclave… and now look what’s happened!

Many if not all of us watched, or later saw, his first appearance on the balcony at St. Peter’s after his election. To me, realizing of course that we cannot readily read the mind’s thoughts in the expression of the face, he looked like a man who had just received a terrible blow. He looked shocked, stunned, perhaps even a bit fearful. It was actually quite endearing, quite disarming—who wouldn’t be stunned and a bit scared in that position?

And so it is in all of our lives. We go along in life, hopefully trying to do our duty, trying to do our little bit of good each day, our contribution to happiness and peace in the world. And then… it all goes sideways. When the British Prime Minister Disraeli was asked what he most feared in his upcoming term of office, he answered, “Events, dear boy. Events.”

It’s those events that do us in, right? The things we didn’t plan for, couldn’t have seen coming, and throw our day, week, month, and perhaps our whole life into utter turmoil. I think that it is these ‘events’ of life that are the great Jesus moments, the great moments of the encounter that transforms us and sets us on a new course, if we let it do so.

It can happen on a small level—my plans for the day just got messed up!—or on a big level—I just got diagnosed with cancer! But however big or small it is, I firmly believe (I know it to be so, to be quite honest), that it is that moment of ‘eventfulness’ that pulls us into an encounter with Christ that is the newness that transforms our life.

 

And it is indeed the memory of God that aids us in our faith at these times. When it all falls apart, we need to have cultivated the habit of memory, the ready remembrance of God’s fidelity to his people Israel, to his Church, to you and me personally in our lives. This is the purpose of meditation in the Christian tradition, to keep before our minds continually the great deeds and love of our God so that we readily turn to Him in every need and trial, big or small. Meditation purifies and strengthens our memory, giving us hope, so that prayer and contemplation can readily transform our intellect and will, giving us faith and love, all of which work together to transform our whole selves into being true lovers of God and of neighbour, moving through the world in service and compassion for all. That is the whole spiritual life of the Christian, and it happens to us in the concrete ‘events’ of today, if we let it.

Taking a Chance on Love

But let us return to the Gospel, to the women, and take one step further. They find the tomb empty, the body of Jesus is not there, something new has happened, but all this still doesn’t tell them anything certain: it raises questions; it leaves them confused, without offering an answer. And suddenly there are two men in dazzling clothes who say: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; but has risen” (Lk 24:5-6).

What was a simple act, done surely out of love – going to the tomb – has now turned into an event, a truly life-changing event. Nothing remains as it was before, not only in the lives of those women, but also in our own lives and in the history of mankind. Jesus is not dead, he has risen, he is alive! He does not simply return to life; rather, he is life itself, because he is the Son of God, the living God (cf. Num 14:21-28; Deut 5:26; Josh 3:10). Jesus no longer belongs to the past, but lives in the present and is projected towards the future; Jesus is the everlasting “today” of God.

This is how the newness of God appears to the women, the disciples and all of us: as victory over sin, evil and death, over everything that crushes life and makes it seem less human. And this is a message meant for me and for you dear sister, for you dear brother. How often does Love have to tell us: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness... and that is where death is. That is not the place to look for the One who is alive! Let the risen Jesus enter your life, welcome him as a friend, with trust: he is life! If up till now you have kept him at a distance, step forward. He will receive you with open arms. If you have been indifferent, take a risk: you won’t be disappointed. If following him seems difficult, don’t be afraid, trust him, be confident that he is close to you, he is with you and he will give you the peace you are looking for and the strength to live as he would have you do.

Pope Francis, Easter Vigil Homily, March 31, 2013

Reflection – I have little taste for punditry. I don’t really like it when people rush to judgment and issue learned pronouncements about the meaning and import of this or that event or this or that statement, speech, homily. Reading tea leaves to boldly predict the future leaves me somewhat cold – I have noticed over the years that the pundits are, to put it simply, wrong most of the time.

That being said, I think this Easter homily of Pope Francis gives us a very good idea of what kind of Pope we have on our hands here, and just what his general direction and focus will be. And if I may wax just a bit punditical, I think we could call the Holy Father ‘The Pope of the New Evangelization.’

I am simply, deeply impressed at what he does in this homily. It is a profoundly evangelical homily, utterly focussed on the person of Jesus and the person of his listener, and asking us, as his predecessor St. Peter asked the crowd on Pentecost Sunday, to believe the Good News and entrust ourselves to this Jesus. Life is hard; life is full of problems and burdens and troubles. This is the place of death for us – the place where the heavy burden of life can weigh us down and crush our spirits.

Jesus is the living one, the permanent and eternal breaking in of life, of God, of hope and joy into our death-laden and deathward-driven world. His call to the world is so simple and alluring: just take one step towards Jesus and he will embrace you. Just take a chance on him and his love, just trust him a little, and you won’t be disappointed. It is an intensely apostolic, evangelical, missionary homily.

And I think this is the way forward Pope Francis is indicating for the Church. So often we can get a bit enmeshed in catechetical confusion, political and social turmoil and controversy, and yes, details of liturgical fidelity and ceremonial beauty. All of this has a valid good place in our lives… but we must not forget that our brothers and sisters are dying because they do not know Jesus. All the other stuff, valid and true as it is, can be very off-putting, very alienating to those outside the circle of the Church.

 

Personal encounter, personal friendship, personal coming into this meeting with the risen Lord: all of this is needed before we can explain too much of the niceties of church structures, the intricacies of the sacramental system, the rigor of the hard moral teachings, or the beauty of ritual and rubric. And it is this evangelical energy and vigor, this going out to invite people into an encounter with Jesus, that the Pope is calling us to, I think, at this time. Not a bad program for the Church in the 3^rd millennium, eh?

Something New is Happening

In the Gospel of this radiant night of the Easter Vigil, we first meet the women who go the tomb of Jesus with spices to anoint his body (cf. Lk 24:1-3). They go to perform an act of compassion, a traditional act of affection and love for a dear departed person, just as we would. They had followed Jesus, they had listened to his words, they had felt understood by him in their dignity and they had accompanied him to the very end, to Calvary and to the moment when he was taken down from the cross. We can imagine their feelings as they make their way to the tomb: a certain sadness, sorrow that Jesus had left them, he had died, his life had come to an end. Life would now go on as before. Yet the women continued to feel love, the love for Jesus which now led them to his tomb.

But at this point, something completely new and unexpected happens, something which upsets their hearts and their plans, something which will upset their whole life: they see the stone removed from before the tomb, they draw near and they do not find the Lord’s body. It is an event which leaves them perplexed, hesitant, full of questions: “What happened?”, “What is the meaning of all this?” (cf. Lk 24:4).

Doesn’t the same thing also happen to us when something completely new occurs in our everyday life? We stop short, we don’t understand, we don’t know what to do. Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness which God asks of us. We are like the Apostles in the Gospel: often we would prefer to hold on to our own security, to stand in front of a tomb, to think about someone who has died, someone who ultimately lives on only as a memory, like the great historical figures from the past. We are afraid of God’s surprises. Dear brothers and sisters, we are afraid of God’s surprises! He always surprises us! The Lord is like that.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives! Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if only we open ourselves to him.

Pope Francis, Easter Vigil Homily, March 31, 2013

Reflection – Happy Easter everyone! Don’t forget – it is still Easter Day, the great eight days that are one day only, that are the one great feast of Easter. Don’t fall into our terrible post-modern trap of moving on too quickly from things (Easter? That’s so four days ago!) – it is still Easter, just as much as it was on Easter Sunday.

And so we have this truly luminous homily by our new Pope Francis, and his first appearance on this blog. I have been thinking much about him and his papacy in this past week. Some of you may have heard that there has been some fuss about his decision to wash the feet of two women in the Holy Thursday Mass at the youth prison. Yes, the rubrics do call explicitly for men, but he is the Pope, the Supreme Legislator of the Church, and in his papal authority he is not bound by those rubrics. I am; you are; Fr. Experimento Liturgico  at St. Vatican III parish is, but the Pope is not. Them’s the Catholic rules, and there is really no great ambiguity about the matter. I do realize that there is deep confusion of thought on all sides (the Pope is going to ordain women! The Pope is destroying tradition!), and perhaps a pastoral need for clarification here, but the thing itself is not complicated.

Meanwhile, clearly Pope Francis is a new pope with a new approach to matters. His own life (let’s not forget the human being Jorge Bergoglio here) has taken a radical new turn that he could not have expected, and he is preaching to himself as much as to us. But there is a new tone, a new wind blowing in Rome, a new chapter in the life of the Church.

It is unsettling, but the point is, that’s a good thing. Not because Popes Benedict and John Paul and so forth were wrong about anything—I am the last blogger in the world who would take that position—but because God is always turning pages, starting new chapters, shaking things up.

 

It has always been so, from the time of the Abraham, through the era of the prophets, above all in Christ, and down through the history of the Church. God perpetually stirs up new things from the heart of the old, new responses, new attitudes, new movements of the Spirit. Our call is to have deep hearts of prayer and attentiveness, and deep trust and abandonment to God coming out of that prayer, and the deep charity of Christ that comes out of that trust and abandonment. If we focus on that, then this new Pope and his new ways will find a ready reception in the Church and the new evangelization will be re-vitalized and renewed in our lives.