The Great Lenten Dilemma

In this time of Lent, in the Year of the faith, we renew our commitment to the process of conversion, to overcoming the tendency to close in on ourselves and instead, to making room for God, looking at our daily reality with His eyes. The alternative between being wrapped up in our egoism and being open to the love of God and others, we could say corresponds to the alternatives to the temptations of Jesus: the alternative, that is, between human power and love of the Cross, between a redemption seen only in material well-being and redemption as the work of God, to whom we give primacy in our lives. Conversion means not closing in on ourselves in the pursuit of success, prestige, position, but making sure that each and every day, in the small things, truth, faith in God and love become most important.

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – Once again Pope Benedict in a few words lays out a whole program of life, a whole concise and very deep understanding of what we are to do and what it is all about. He truly does have an extraordinary gift for that kind of thing. (Can you tell that I’m really really going to miss him?)

This is the whole business of Lent, though, and we really need to get clear about it. To reduce Lent to ‘giving up chocolates (except on Sunday! And feast days! And… when I’m really desperate!!) is to reduce Lent to something of little if any spiritual value.

It’s not about giving up. We do give up stuff in Lent, but the giving up is only so as to open up, to make room, to get ourselves moving God-ward and out of ourselves.

We make ourselves a bit uncomfortable, a bit hungry, a bit unsatisfied with the fare of life. This is not so we can enjoy some ridiculous triumph of the will (‘40 days without potato chips! I am like unto a god!’), but so that we go looking Elsewhere for life.

Conversion – that is the whole point of Lent. Conversion away from self-centredness, materialism, concern with success or prestige or wealth. Conversion away from gluttony, avarice, sloth, pride, envy, anger, lust—the seven deadlies that all conspire to close us in on ourselves and offer us myriad paths to life which in truth lead nowhere but the graveyard.

In Lent in Madonna House, we pray each day at the end of Lauds the ancient Lenten prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. At the end of each petition, we prostrate before the Lord, expressing our deep humility and contrition and desire to change. This is the prayer:

O Lord, Master of my life, grant that I may not be infected with the spirit of slothfulness and faintheartedness, with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.

Grant instead to me your servant a spirit of purity and humility, a spirit of patience and love.

O Lord and King, bestow upon me the grace of being aware of my sins, and of not judging my brother. For you are blessed forever and ever. Amen.

There is a reason why this prayer is so prominent in the Christian East. It expresses perfectly what Pope Benedict captures of the true Lenten spirit. And it really does all come down to Jesus in the desert, the voice of the tempter and the response of Love Incarnate, and our entry into that mystery. Do we place God first, or ourselves first? Do we turn to God in humble supplication for everything, or charge along living from our own power and lights? Do we simply make Christ the center of our lives, or our own desires and agendae the center of our lives?

 

These are the Lenten questions, the great Lenten dilemma, the Lenten choice. Really, the choice of all our days, no matter what the season, but in Lent we are called to confront it all a bit more intensely. Why? So we can welcome the gift of God at Easter more deeply, rejoice with our brothers and sisters being baptized all around the world with greater exutation, and ourselves receive this eternally new life of God more fully, so that we can bear it into the world which needs it so terribly.

Blind Instinct

The ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: "I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how much searching for myself in all this!".

The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points out: "It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer ... ".God guided her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.

In our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after a Christian education, perhaps a superficial one, moved away from the faith for years and then rediscovered Christ and his Gospel. In the Book of Revelation we read: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then] I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me"(3, 20).

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – It’s kind of nice to have the Pope talking about Dorothy Day, isn’t it? Probably most of the readers of this blog have at least heard of her and of the Catholic Worker movement she founded. She has an honored place in the history of Madonna House and Catherine Doherty’s life. At a key moment of crisis, when Catherine’s work in Toronto had been shut down by a vicious whisper campaign of gossip and the withdrawal of ecclesial support, a devastating blow to her, Dorothy took her in briefly and gave her help re-establishing herself in Harlem.

Catherine always considered Dorothy a true saint of God, and it does seem like her cause for canonization is proceeding nicely. Papal approbation in a general audience certainly carries some weight.

Meanwhile, here’s you and me in the Lent of 2013, with a pope retiring and the world in a mess. What are we going to do about it? The option of ‘politics’ is always before us. By that, I don’t necessarily mean politicking, radicalism, or getting involved in the local branch of your preferred party. I certainly don’t mean obsessing over the makeup of the College of Cardinals and actively campaigning for the papabile of your choice (have you noticed that I have sternly ignored that topic on the blog? I will continue to do so.).

No, politics is a much broader field than all that. It means finding the solution to the world and its problems, my life and its problems, in the external manipulation of events, people, situations to my favor. Politics is from polis – city – and politics is all about getting the city shaped up and in order according to our best ideas of it.

Politics is not evil—some things do need to be organized, and God does ask us to take care of them—but what of Dorothy Day? What of this blind instinct to pray, to bow the head, to turn to God? What of this God who stands at the door and knocks? ‘Politics’ in its various expressions is the outward visible course of the world; faith and prayer are like a subterranean spring running along beneath the surface of the world. But without that spring, the world is in a terrible state of thirst, of drought.

Without faith and prayer, our politics tend towards self-serving avarice and vainglorious pride. It is prayer that continually orients us away from self and to God and neighbor. It is prayer that turns our hearts towards the poor, towards deep concerns for justice and charity. It is prayer that humbles us, that tenderizes us, that makes us cry out to God for wisdom and mercy in the face of a world that is in deep trouble and distress.

 

It is Lent 2013, Tuesday of the first week. How’s your prayer going? How’s mine? It is this turning to God that is so utterly crucial in our world today, racked by petty politics and self-seeking, by unmanned drones and death panels and folly of all kinds. Dorothy Day prayed, and gave her life to the service of the poor. So pray… and see what God asks you to do about all of it.

Lent: A Call to Conversion

The tests which modern society subjects Christians to, in fact, are many, and affect personal and social life. It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, practice mercy in everyday life, leave space for prayer and inner silence, it is not easy to publicly oppose choices that many take for granted, such as abortion in the event of an unwanted pregnancy, euthanasia in case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos to prevent hereditary diseases. The temptation to set aside one’s faith is always present and conversion becomes a response to God which must be confirmed several times throughout one’s life.

The major conversions like that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or St. Augustine, are an example and stimulus, but also in our time when the sense of the sacred is eclipsed, God's grace is at work and works wonders in life of many people. The Lord never gets tired of knocking at the door of man in social and cultural contexts that seem engulfed by secularization, as was the case for the Russian Orthodox Pavel Florensky. After a completely agnostic education, to the point he felt an outright hostility towards religious teachings taught in school, the scientist Florensky came to exclaim: "No, you cannot live without God", and to change his life completely, so much so he became a monk.

I also think the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she found Him looking deep inside herself and wrote: "There is a well very deep inside of me. And God is in that well. Sometimes I can reach Him, more often He is covered by stone and sand: then God is buried. We must dig Him up again "(Diary, 97). In her scattered and restless life, she finds God in the middle of the great tragedy of the twentieth century, the Shoah. This young fragile and dissatisfied woman, transfigured by faith, becomes a woman full of love and inner peace, able to say: "I live in constant intimacy with God."

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – The Pope now develops the theme of conversion by turning to various examples from our own time. Florensky came to his religious faith in the context of the rising atheism and eventual persecution of Soviet Russia. Hillesum found God in the midst of the Nazi extermination of Jews. Both began as agnostics or even atheists; both came to know God in the most difficult social contexts imaginable.

And so, both of them are worth considering. For Florensky the scientist, it was dissatisfaction with a wholly positivist explanation for reality, the spurious rationalism that rejects any possibility of transcendent being and knowledge. For Hillesum, it was her own interior emptiness and need for love that led her to this mysterious God.

So many today are in this same boat – left with a certain intellectual despair where all that knowledge can offer us is greater and greater technological mastery, but with nothing to say about what it all means and is for. Others feel keenly the failure of human love to satisfy, the existential emptiness or insufficiency of created goods to fill our need.

And so many thrash around looking anywhere but God-ward in all this. Perhaps we Christians are at least partly to blame for that. We have not always shown forth the face of a loving merciful God in the world. But many are looking still, and there is a great potential for a new evangelization in our times.

The world is shaky right now. Economics, politics, personal freedoms and rights—so many things are just very uncertain and tenuous right now. There is a great chance for a new presentation of hope in God and faith in Christ as so many of the things we have placed our hope and faith in crack and crumble.

But of course, we who have faith must ourselves be converted, must be willing to make these hard choices, pay steep prices for the faith we hold. We live in a secular society that provides no encouragement at all for a lively faith life, that often opposes it in obvious and subtle ways. So Lent is a time to take hold of our lives again and examine them. Do I live as if God is the most important value, the first and deepest good, the source and goal of my life? Or am I living somewhere else, doing something else, choosing something else? This is our Lenten question, and the call to repentance and conversion at the heart of this season.

Have You Read the Manual?

Overcoming the temptation to place God in submission to oneself and one’s own interests or to put Him in a corner and converting oneself to the proper order of priorities, giving God the first place, is a journey that every Christian must undergo. "Conversion", an invitation that we will hear many times in Lent, means following Jesus so that his Gospel is a real life guide, it means allowing God to transform us, no longer thinking that we are the only protagonists of our existence, recognizing that we are creatures who depend on God, His love, and that only by “losing" our life in Him can we truly have it.

This means making our choices in the light of the Word of God. Today we can no longer be Christians as a simple consequence of the fact that we live in a society that has Christian roots: even those born to a Christian family and formed in the faith must, each and every day, renew the choice to be a Christian, to give God first place, before the temptations continuously suggested by a secularized culture, before the criticism of many of our contemporaries.

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – Well, when Pope Benedict is in top form (which he is remarkably often), I don’t think there is anyone writing today who is as succinct, elegant, and penetrating in their analysis of the Christian call in the modern world. The above paragraph is as neat and concise a description of what conversion means and the fundamental path of Christian life in the world as any I have ever read.

You know, for a man who says he is old, sick, and tired, he is sure doing OK on some fronts at least. Meanwhile here we are with this luminous path and challenge laid before us. This whole business of making the Gospel not just words on a piece of paper or something we hear in church every Sunday, but an actual life guide. So we hear today that ‘you shall not put the Lord your God to the test,’ for example. Well, are we going to test God this week? Decide how much we trust God based on how He is performing in our lives? How much He’s giving us of what we want and like, and turning away from Him as soon as our prayer life is a bit dry or the road is a bit rocky? Because, you know, that’s not living the Gospel, and that’s therefore an area we need conversion.

Or ‘love your enemies’. Or, ‘give to those who cannot repay you.’ Or ‘forgive seventy times seven.’ Or… well, you can read, right? Read the Gospels, and put them into practice. This is the instruction manual of our faith. This is what it means to live a Christian life.

Now of course we have to know the Gospels if we are to do this. When we’re in the thick of life and its challenges we usually don’t have time to go run get our bibles and start flicking through them for the relevant passage. The words and precepts of Christ should be so familiar to us that they are second nature.

Someone is rude and horrible to you, and you should automatically, as a Christian, think ‘turn the other cheek!’ There is someone in some small or great need presented to you, and as a Christian you should think ‘foot-washing time! The Son of Man came to serve!’ That kind of thing. But that kind of thing simply will not happen if you don’t know the Gospels backwards and forwards, will it? If you are reading this (all you wonderful anonymous readers of this blog who never leave comments but keep coming back here every day!) and it hits home for you, perhaps a Lenten priority would be to simply read the Gospels, study them, work them into your mind and heart like yeast into dough. Get those words down, memorized if possible, but deeply familiar.

Meanwhile our lovely secular world is drilling in its message, its ‘Gospel’ into our heads night and day, day and night. The Gospel of consumption, of pleasure, of power, of cleverness, of so many things that have very little to do with Christ and Christianity. And we have to watch out for that, too. I am a Catholic priest and have lived in an intensely Catholic community for over 20 years, and I have to watch out for that. So all you out there in the deeply secular wilderness have a real struggle on your hands, and it’s no joke.

But at the same time, it’s a matter of daily choices, daily taking a stand with Christ and for Christ in your little world, your corner of creation. It’s all very big and can seem overwhelming, but it is a matter of here and now and what we are doing next in life—the Gospel, or something else? And all the little and big conversions and repentances that come on the heels of those choices each day. And God in the midst of it all, not remote up in heaven somewhere, but by our side, in our hearts, gracing us with his presence and help. And that’s the whole story of our life, so beautifully expressed by our wonderful Holy Father.

The Hard Business of Life

In reflecting on the temptations Jesus is subjected to in the desert we are invited, each one of us, to respond to one fundamental question: what is truly important in our lives? In the first temptation the devil offers to change a stone into bread to sate Jesus’ hunger. Jesus replies that the man also lives by bread but not by bread alone: ​​without a response to the hunger for truth, hunger for God, man can not be saved (cf. vv. 3-4).

In the second, the devil offers Jesus the path of power: he leads him up on high and gives him dominion over the world, but this is not the path of God: Jesus clearly understands that it is not earthly power that saves the world, but the power of the Cross, humility, love (cf. vv. 5-8).

In the third, the devil suggests Jesus throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem and be saved by God through his angels, that is, to do something sensational to test God, but the answer is that God is not an object on which to impose our conditions: He is the Lord of all (cf. vv. 9-12).

What is the core of the three temptations that Jesus is subjected to? It is the proposal to exploit God, to use Him for his own interests, for his own glory and success. So, in essence, to put himself in the place of God, removing Him from his own existence and making him seem superfluous. Everyone should then ask: what is the role God in my life? Is He the Lord or am I?

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – I will never forget one of the signal graces of my life. Like most of the really big graces I have received it was utterly undramatic, so this won’t make all that great a story (Dear God: why can you never give me a big grace some time when I’m dangling from a precipice or fighting off a grizzly bear, just so I have at least one a good story to tell? Thanks, Fr. Denis).

Anyhow. Some years ago, we were praying the rosary in the MH dining room after supper as is our custom, and very simply, at one Hail Mary or another the word ‘Lord’ leapt out at me. So here was this word we Catholics use from practically when we learn to speak, in a prayer as familiar to us as our own names… and suddenly God brought it from my head and my lips to my heart.

God is the Lord. God is THE LORD. In other words, God has a right, an absolute claim, to my obedience, my loyalty, to my all in all. This was a true moment of conversion for me, a true waking up to the basic terms of life. I ain’t doing God no favors when I turn to him to seek and do His will—this is my absolute duty in justice towards Him, because He is LORD.

So the Holy Father’s words here resonate deeply with me. God is not an object for my use. God does not exist to get me what I want, to make the universe and my life just the way I think they should be. He is not a magician performing tricks to delight and amuse me. He is not my servant, really, although in His divine love and awesome tenderness He bends down to wash my feet and minister to my needs.

But ultimately what I most need is to be brought into the depths of the truth of His mighty lordship and my call to total abandonment and trust. And I do believe that this accounts for at least some part of the hard business of life: the fact that the universe does not curl itself around me like a snuggly blanket, that I just do not get my way in many things, and that this can at times be not just annoying but extraordinarily painful.

We must come to this reality of God’s lordship and our creaturely call to loving obedience. It may come in some form of hunger, either voluntary fasting or genuine deprivation of food or some other genuine good. It may come in the form of powerlessness, of abandoning ourselves to the condition of helplessness in the face of the world and its overpowering forces. It may come in the form of a deep call to trust God in the face of genuine difficulties and distress, to not try to force God to do our will or to force the world into our shape.

Jesus shows us the way in these temptations and his response, and shows us that this way is the way to life in the heart of God and eternal joy and bliss. And that is the whole purpose of Lent, and of our Christian way of life, to make Jesus’ way of life our way of life, and so enter into the fullness of life and joy He has made us for.

Don't Wanna Go There

Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin the liturgical time of Lent, forty days that prepare us for the celebration of Holy Easter, it is a time of particular commitment in our spiritual journey. The number forty occurs several times in the Bible. In particular, it recalls the forty years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness: a long period of formation to become the people of God, but also a long period in which the temptation to be unfaithful to the covenant with the Lord was always present.

Forty were also the days of the Prophet Elijah’s journey to reach the Mount of God, Horeb; as well as the time that Jesus spent in the desert before beginning his public life and where he was tempted by the devil. In this Catechesis I would like to dwell on this moment of earthly life of the Son of God, which we will read of in the Gospel this Sunday.

First of all, the desert where Jesus withdrew to is the place of silence, of poverty, where man is deprived of material support and is placed in front of the fundamental questions of life, where he is pushed to towards the essentials in life and for this very reason it becomes easier for him to find God. But the desert is also a place of death, because where there is no water there is no life, and it is a place of solitude where man feels temptation more intensely. Jesus goes into the desert, and there is tempted to leave the path indicated by God the Father to follow other easier and worldly paths (cf. Lk 4:1-13). So he takes on our temptations and carries our misery, to conquer evil and open up the path to God, the path of conversion.

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection - Well, let us leave aside the more personal reflections I’ve been doing on the blog since Monday, and return to what Pope Benedict himself clearly would like to be the focus of our attention now and always: not on him, but on the Lord Jesus.

We are on the great forty day hike through Lent and, depending on how seriously you take the austerities and call to fast in it, you may already be feeling the pinch a wee bit. You should, you know. While individual circumstances vary, and people’s health and energy needs dictate different levels of practice, we all should strive to be just a bit uncomfortable during Lent, just a bit hungry, or weak, or genuinely challenged on some front or other. The Church wisely leaves this to the individual conscience these days, but that means it’s up to us to make Lent a real journey into the desert.

Why go there, anyhow? Didn’t Jesus do all that for us? Why should we be hungry, why confront this place of death and solitude and temptation and poverty? It’s hard! It’s morbid! I get grumpy when I fast, or tired! I don’t want to!

Well, yes. That is indeed the case, at least for many people. I’m not actually using the metaphorical ‘I’ here, by the way. Who wants to fast? But it is precisely for that reason that we go into the desert.

We need to find out what we’re made of. We need to find out that, by the simple expedient of eliminating, say, eating between meals, or sweets, or caffeine, or taking second helpings, or all of the above, or… by a simple reduction of intake of food, we are all grumpy and weak and struggling. In other words, we experience our weakness, the depth of our needy condition, how insufficient we are in ourselves to practice virtue, to be kind and patient, how limited our own resources truly are.

By this most simple expedient of real fasting, of real discomfort of body and mind, we are thrown into the desert of the world where we cannot live. And in that, challenged to throw ourselves on the mercy of God more deeply. And in that throwing, to experience the mercy of God more fully. And in that experience, to enter the joy of Easter, of new life in Christ, more intensely.

 

There’s quite a bit more to be said about all these matters—I am just scratching the surface here. But the Holy Father himself is going to go on to say quite a bit more himself, so let’s take up the matter again tomorrow, God willing! Have a good Lenten Friday, and hey—don’t eat too much, eh?

We're All Only Human

Dear brothers and sisters, as you know I decided to resign from the ministry that the Lord had entrusted me on April 19, 2005. I did this in full freedom, for the good of the Church after having prayed at length and examined my conscience before God, well aware of the gravity of this act.

I was also well aware that I was no longer able to fulfill the Petrine Ministry with that strength that it demands. What sustains and illuminates me is the certainty that the Church belongs to Christ whose care and guidance will never be lacking. I thank you all for the love and prayer with which you have accompanied me.

I have felt, almost physically, your prayers in these days which are not easy for me, the strength which the love of the Church and your prayers brings to me. Continue to pray for me and for the future Pope, the Lord will guide us!

General Audience, February 13, 2013

Reflection – I am going to blog the whole of Pope Benedict’s general audience yesterday, which is quite an extraordinary reflection on Lent and conversion. But, of course, he began his audience with the above personal remarks, which were interrupted several times by prolonged applause from the crowd and great emotion.

I also watched a small clip of his final public Mass, also yesterday, at which Cardinal Bartone publicly thanked him, again with considerable emotion. “You have brought man to God, and God to man,” he said. There was, again, prolonged applause, and it was so very touching to see the various cardinals and bishops removing their miters in a gesture of respect, more than a few of them wiping tears from their eyes, and the Pope himself, looking very drawn and tired, but visibly moved by the outpouring of love and genuine affection.

You know, I keep trying to take my own personal reflections on this whole matter to the next level of depth, to get to the big picture, to the large-scale ramifications of this event for the Church, to the deeper theological and spiritual meanings of it for world and ecclesial history.

Can’t do it. Not yet. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. What really strikes me here, and maybe this is of great spiritual significance after all, is the enormous personal love and affection being poured out for this man, Joseph Ratzinger, our German Shepherd. His own personal love for the Church, for us, which has kept him at this difficult task these past years, and is now motivating him to do this hard controversial thing of resigning, and the love being expressed for him in so many quarters.

Yes, there are politics and wrangling and the usual negative comments from the usual suspects... but who cares about that? What I’m seeing is a whole lotta love for this quiet little man who has really tried to love and serve us with his great intellect and gift for words.

And this is rather important, actually. So often we can lose the humanity of the Church behind the trappings of office or the tug-of-war of controversy or the struggle with obedience and authority. So often people can become symbols: Ratzinger of the ‘conservative’ wing; Martini (say) of the ‘liberal’. But people are not symbols, not primarily. They are human beings, with all the human fraility and foibles, but also with human beauty and grace.

The Church is divine… but it certainly is always human, too. And this humanity is not, as we so often mean when we speak of it, simply the Church’s failures and the sins (horrific at times) of its members and leaders. It’s also a little old man in the Vatican who is sick and tired and is telling us he cannot do it any more. It’s his colleagues and co-workers in the Vatican wiping tears from their eyes as they thank him for trying so hard for so long. It’s all of us with our hearts in our throats and perhaps tears in our eyes as we take in these events and turn to each other for support, perhaps in some confusion, perhaps anxiety, perhaps hurt or even anger.

It’s all of this—all of us gathered together around this little old man—our father in Christ who is also our brother in Christ and who needs our prayers, and all of us gathered together around the college of cardinals who most definitely need our prayers, because they are only human too, and subject to the same frailties and limitations as we all are.

 

All of us human, all of us needing kindness and compassion, all of us together in this divine project called the Church, this divine mystery that comes to us in our deep humanity to draw this humanity into divinity, and the name and the path of this drawing is one thing and one thing only: it is love, which is made possible by grace, which is given to us by Jesus Christ. Amen.

A Catholic Moment

It is interesting to observe how in the New Testament the word “saints” designates Christians as a whole, and certainly not all would have qualified to be declared saints by the Church. What is meant, then, by this term? The fact that whoever had and lived the faith in Christ Risen were call to become a point of reference for all others, setting them in this way in contact with the Person and the Message of Jesus, who reveals the face of the Living God. And this holds true also for us: a Christian who lets himself be guided and gradually shaped by the faith of the Church, in spite of his weaknesses, his limitations and his difficulties, becomes like a window open to the light of the living God, receiving this light and transmitting it to the world...

Today’s widespread tendency to relegate faith to the private sphere thus, contradicts its very nature. We need the Church in order to confirm our faith and in order to experience the gifts of God: his Word, the Sacraments, the support of grace and the witness of love. Like this, our “I” can be perceived in the “we” of the Church and, at the same time, be the recipient and the protagonist of an overwhelming event: experiencing communion with God, that is the foundation of communion among men. In a world in which individualism seems to rule personal relationships, making them ever more fragile, the faith calls us to be the People of God, to be Church, bearers of the love and communion of God for all mankind (cf. Pastoral Constitution Guadium et Spes, n. 1).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – As I said yesterday in my initial and rather shocked reaction to the news of Pope Benedict’s resignation, I think I will continue blogging as normal. The German Shepherd has shepherded us long before he came pope, and his words and wisdom will continue to be part of the Good Shepherd’s shepherding of us long after he has left the office.

Meanwhile… well, we’re all very conscious of our Church identity now, aren’t we? Nothing like a conclave to make everyone very mindful of being Catholic and this strange call to communion that comes to us accompanied by puffs of white smoke and rooms of elderly men wearing red hats.

It’s a ‘we’ time that hopefully overrides or at least gives a stiff competition to the ‘I’ focus of our normal lives. Meanwhile, the eyes of the world are, for at least a couple news cycles, very much on the Catholic Church. There is a great opportunity here, but also a great challenge.

Our non-Catholic friends and relatives may ask questions of us on Facebook. Can you answer them? Fevered media speculation and verbiage fills the airwaves and bandwidth of the chattering classes. Can you sort out what has validity from what is ill-informed nonsense? (Hint: the ratio is about 10%-90% on that score).

It is this whole business the Pope speaks of here, of a Christian being a point of reference for others directing them towards Christ, and to do that, allowing ourselves to be formed by the faith of the Church and not the passing values of the world. It is a very Catholic moment right now—lots of attention and ‘buzz’ around all of this, at least until the next squirrel distracts our ADHD media. Are we going to move through it in a Catholic way, though? That is, with a depth of faith and prayer, a knowledge of how serious all this is, but at the same time a deeper knowledge that it’s not too serious, that God is in His Church to watch over it and guide it in all events.

If I may give you all a bit of practical advice, it would be this. Ignore the mass media. They don’t know what they’re talking about, frankly, and don’t seem terribly interested in getting the story right. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBC—all the alphabet soup of talking heads are simply not reliable sources for information, and bring an exclusively political perspective to the whole matter (it’s all they know about, the poor dears), along with their own peculiarly obsessed tunnel vision re social issues (‘maybe the NEXT Pope will approve abortion and gay marriage!’ Uh, no – that’s not going to happen.).

Ignore them all – they are untrustworthy. Rocco Palma is a knowledgeable journalist, as is John Allen (Yes, I know the link is NCR - he's still one of the best). EWTN does a reliable professional job covering this stuff, as does Salt and Light TV in Canada. Go to the people who know what they’re talking about and ignore the rest.

 

Above all, though, pray, pray, pray. This is a clarion call from God to the Church to pray for our leaders, to ask the Holy Spirit to descend on the College of Cardinals, to give peace and firmness of purpose to all the faithful, to be the saints of God our baptism and Confirmation have made us to be. Amen.

Updated to add: Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. A good day to mortify our senses and our intellects. I will not blog tomorrow. See you Thursday, God willing.

The Unbroken Chain

There is an unbroken chain in the life of the Church, in the proclamation of the Word of God, of the celebration of the Sacraments, that has come down to us and that we call Tradition. It gives us the guarantee that what we believe is the original message of Christ, preached by the Apostles. The nucleus of the primordial proclamation is the death and the Resurrection of the Lord, from which stems the entire patrimony of the faith. The Council says: “The apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by a continuous line of succession until the end of time” (Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 8).

In this way, if Sacred Scripture contains the Word of God, the Tradition of the Church preserves it and faithfully transmits it, so that the men and women of every age might have access to its vast resources and be enriched by its treasures of grace. Thus, the Church, “in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes” (ibid.).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – Well here we have a good little catechesis on revelation, the Church, and faith. Where the Reformation tradition of Luther and Calvin upholds sola scriptura (the scriptures alone) as the place of revelation, the Catholic faith has always been that God reveals Himself in His word and in the living unbroken Tradition of the Church, that which has been passed down to us from generation to generation.

If I can briefly dip into the field of apologetics, the fatal weakness of the Protestant position is that it is itself unscriptural. By its own argument—that the scriptures alone are the source of revealed truth—it is self-refuting. There is not a single Bible verse from Genesis to Revelation that states the principle of sola scriptura. It is, itself, an expression of Protestant Tradition, and extra-biblical. There is also, nowhere in the Bible, a list of the canonical books of the Bible (and no, the table of contents at the front doesn’t count). The very composition of the Bible, then, is an extra-biblical contribution of Sacred Tradition.

None of that is a problem for Catholics. It has always been our understanding that God comes to us in His word, in Tradition, and that all this is mediated by the living authority of His Church and its episcopal leadership. The Bible is a precious and unique place of God’s revelation, where the very words of Truth and salvation are recorded in an fixed, unchanging expression, but it sits in honour within a living communion of faith and love—the life of the Church.

Anyhow, enough apologetics. It is amazing, though, how many Catholics need to be reminded of our faith in this matter. For many Catholics, it is a serious business if a Protestant says to them, ‘Well, your beliefs about Mary (or Confession… or the papacy…) are not in the Bible!’ Really, this shouldn’t faze us. We could easily respond, with charity of course, ‘Well, your beliefs about the Bible are not in the Bible!’ and that would be the end of the matter.

Meanwhile, it is so very beautiful that God arranged things this way. It is, again, this whole business I have blogged about already this week—he really means it that we are to be a family, a body, a communion of love. He really wants us, and in fact is quite set on it, that the life of the Church will be a true life, and so He communicates the fullness of his Truth to us only in the life of the body.

Any fool can walk into a book store, buy a Bible, sit down and read it, and think they now possess the fullness of God’s truth. And, as we see so clearly, that approach to understanding God’s revelation results in—how many is it now?—thousands of little Protestant churches, each quite sure that their doctrines are 100% scriptural. A privatized, deeply individualistic, and ultimately relativistic view of faith is the inevitable result of sola scriptura theology.

 

Meanwhile, to receive Scripture and Tradition together as the fullness of truth means being part of the living communion of the Church. It means, yes, being submissive to the authority of the Church, but even the bishops and even the Pope must themselves be submissive to the 2000 years of unbroken transmission of faith in the life of the Church. It is the utter opposite of an individual, private, relativized faith—it is an entry, if we choose to take it as such, into the depths of communion with God and from that, with one another. And that is what God has revealed to us as His great desire for the human race.

The King's Silly Servants

At the start of the Christian adventure, when the Holy Spirit descends with power upon the disciples, on the day of Pentecost — as we read in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. 2:1-13) — the early Church receives the power to begin the mission entrusted to her by the Risen Lord: to spread the Gospel to every corner of the earth, the Good News of the Kingdom of God, and thus to lead every human person to the encounter with Him, to the faith that saves.

 

The Apostles overcame every fear in proclaiming what they had heard, seen, personally experienced with Jesus. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they start to speak in tongues, openly announcing the mystery of which they were witnesses… And so began the journey of the Church, the community that bears this proclamation through time and space, the community that is the People of God founded on the New Covenant thanks to the Blood of Christ. Her members do not belong to a particular social or ethnic group, but are men and women of every nation and culture. It is a “catholic” people, a people who speaks in tongues, universally open to welcoming all, beyond all boundaries, breaking down every barrier. St Paul says: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all” (Col 3:11).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – The Pope is very much focussing in on the Church as the vessel of faith in this General Audience. From the very beginning until today, the task of inspiring divine faith in man has been given to the Church in its proclamation of the Gospel.

That can seem a bit overwhelming, perhaps, especially as we come to think of the Church not so much as those guys up at the front wearing the funny robes, but as… well, as you. And me (I’m one of those guys at the front, of course). It is our proclamation of the Gospel that will continue this mission of the Church and the raising up of men and women of faith in the next generation.

Overwhelming, yes, and if we thought it was some kind of task we had to perform by our own wonderfulness and strength, we would be fairly hopeless. But, you know, I think back to my own childhood and adolescence here. How did I receive the faith, personally?

My parents (both deceased now) were very ordinary people, and didn’t do such a great job passing on the faith in the home, to be honest. The priests in my parish growing up were not exactly dynamic preachers or men of great personal charisma. Small town Ontario is a pretty sleepy place for the most part. The Catholic schools I went to were in the immediate post-Vatican II meltdown, and consequently taught us nothing.

So how on earth did I receive the faith from the Church, when its local representatives didn’t seem to have much personal genius or ability to teach it? Well, I did have the words of the Gospel proclaimed to me, Sunday after Sunday, and the rest of God’s word. I did have crucifixes and rosaries and pictures and statues of saints all about me. I did have the Eucharist, and regular Confession, and Jesus just kind of around… even if the explanations of just who He was and what He was doing were a bit deficient. And somehow, in all that, faith came to me.

I’m not trying to suggest that the (truly) woefully inadequate religious formation I received was really OK—I do wish everyone involved had done a better job of it. After all, most of my generation walked away from the Church and from the Catholic faith with seemingly little regrets and fuss. That would not have happened quite so much if we had been taught better.

But I guess what I am saying is that the treasure of the faith—the Gospel, the sacraments, the whole of our Catholic rich spiritual heritage—all of this is ours to give, and the power and beauty of it is not dependent entirely on our brilliant presentation of it. We are silly semi-competent servants of the King, and our primary job in life is to usher people into the presence of the King Himself—He can take it from there.

 

That’s what my own religious formators with all their defects and confusions did for me, and once I was in the presence of Jesus… well, that’s another story for another day. Faith came in, and thirty years later here I am, tripping over my own feet and being just as deficient and silly as anyone as I try not to bumble and fumble too much in the one task I have been given, of bringing people to the King.

It's Almost Like He Means It

On Sunday, in the Holy Mass, reciting the “Creed”, we speak in the first person, but we confess as one the one faith of the Church. That “I believe” said individually joins a vast chorus across time and space, in which each person contributes, so to speak, to the harmonious polyphony in faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums this up in a clear way: thus, “believing” is an act of the Church. The Church's faith precedes, engenders, supports and nourishes our faith. The Church is the Mother of all believers. “‘No one can have God as his Father, who does not have the Church as his Mother’ (St Cyprian)” (n. 181). Therefore, the faith is born in the Church, leads to her and lives in her. This is important to remember.

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – I have mentioned before on this blog my encounter with a young theology student who told me she wasn’t interested in studying ecclesiology because ‘she wasn’t married to the Church.’ My reaction to her was, alas, gaping horrified silence (I was a second year seminarian then, and not quite as quick on the draw), although afterwards in a fit of l’esprit d’escalier (that’s French for thinking of something clever to say five minutes after the conversation ends), I said to the empty air, ‘Well, that’s too bad, since Jesus is.”

But of course it’s not for us to be married to the Church, precisely. The Church is, as the Pope says, and as we have always said, our Mother. There is this body, this group of believers spread across time and space, this countless throng of mostly ordinary men and women, a few of them saints, but most of them struggling sinners like you and I… and the faith we profess comes to us through them. It also comes to us as a direct action of God our Father, but in the womb, if you will, of the Church our Mother.

This is so crucial. For so many people today, ‘The  Church’ has a bad name. Even many Catholics find it a fairly anguished term, like that young woman who distanced herself from it. Either the horrible sexual scandals that have beset us all have become the primary association with ‘Church’, or failures (real or perceived) of ecclesiastical leadership to teach the faith and promote justice and charity, or teachings that simply seem wrong to some, or the appalling unkindnesses and inhospitality and harshness that can occur at the Church on the most local and immediate levels.

So many people leave the Church simply because ‘Fr. X. was mean to my mother.’ It’s easy to dismiss this (‘oh, for crying out loud – there’s more to the Church then Fr. X. at St. Blatherings Parish!’). But for many people, there really isn’t, and harsh or rude treatment really does that kind of major damage.

So it is important—beyond important, it is crucial—for those of us who can expand our vision of the Church to do so. To see this motherly reality, this profound dynamic where God the Father begets us as his sons and daughters in the womb of our Mother the Church. Because it didn’t have to be this way, you know. God could have just done it on a person-by-person basis without reference to a Church, you know. He chose, in his sovereign will, to have all these graces of divine life, sonship, deep communion with the Trinity all come to us through and in the life of the Church.

You know, it’s almost as if He’s really serious about this ‘love one another’ business. It’s almost as if it is really matters to Him that we fashion a human family, a real community of persons among ourselves. It’s almost as if He really means it that it is not good for man to be alone, and He really does intend us to be with each other, not just in superficial commercial or social interactions, but in depth and in love.

 

And all this happens in all our brokenness—sex scandals and lousy leadership, mean pastors and cold parishioners, teachings we don’t understand or agree with and people we would rather not say hello to, let alone embrace as brothers and sisters. All of this is ‘the Church’, along with all the beauty and goodness that we can see if our eyes are not too jaundiced or blinded by our judgments. Our Mother—a bit shabby in her dress at times, a bit odd in her behaviour at other times, but nonetheless, where faith is born in us, and where the faith has been borne from generation to generation for 2000 years now.

The Whole of Our Faith

Today I would like to take another step in our reflection, starting once more with a few questions: Does faith have a solely personal, individual nature? Does it concern only myself? Do I live my faith alone? Of course, the act of faith is an eminently personal act; it happens in the deepest part of us and signals a change in direction through personal conversion. It is my life that changes, that is given a new direction.

In the Rite of Baptism, at the moment of the promises, the celebrant asks for a profession of the Catholic faith and formulates three questions: Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his only Son? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? In ancient times these questions were addressed to the person who was to receive Baptism before being immersed three times in water. And today, too, the answer is one and the same: “I do”.

But this faith of mine is not the result of my own solitary reflection, it is not the product of my thought, it is the fruit of a relationship, a dialogue, in which there is a listener, a receiver and a respondent; it is communication with Jesus that draws me out of the “I” enclosed in myself to open me to the love of God, the Father. It is like a rebirth in which I am united not only to Jesus, but also to all those who have walked and are walking on the same path; and this new birth, that begins with Baptism, continues for the rest of my life.

I cannot build my personal faith in a private dialogue with Jesus, because faith is given to me by God through a community of believers that is the Church and projects me into the multitude of believers, into a kind of communion that is not only sociological but rooted in the eternal love of God who is in himself the communion of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it is Trinitarian Love. Our faith is truly personal, only if it is also communal: it can be my faith only if it dwells in and moves with the “we” of the Church, only if it is our faith, the common faith of the one Church.

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – I’m committed to a time-sensitive project tomorrow, so am posting tomorrow’s blog post this evening. You know, we see here in this beautiful general audience talk a whole Christian anthropology emerging. A whole vision of the human person that flows from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ – what I’ve been blogging about all week as I made my way through one of the central texts of that revelation, the Lord’s prayer.

It is this encounter of the individual and the other, the subject with the Subject, which occurs in harmony and a real unity with the encounter of person with community. We are individuals; I am a person, with my freedom, my intellect, my own self-determined being. This is precious, real. When this is violated, it is one form or another of abuse—physical, emotional, verbal.

But this person does exist only through the actions of others. God, but also mom and dad. God, but also the society that shaped me, the civilization that maintains much of my life in existence. The strong atomic individual living off the grid and dependent on no one for anything is a myth. Even the most un-gridded people still have some dependence, some involvement in the lives of others, some reliance on their fellow man.

And God… this is the whole anthropology of Christ. We come from Another and our lives are in and for and towards this other. And this is not some horrible turn of events, some degrading slavery, some terrible oppressive tyranny. It is love, and communion, and this is where joy and peace lie.

And it is all deeply connected with the Church and our communion with and in the Church. Love one another, for love comes from God, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in Him.

I’m out of room, since Pope Benedict’s quote is a bit longer than normal – I’m also out of time, since supper at MH is about to begin, and I must be off to it. We are made for communion—this is the whole of our faith, ultimately. Communion with God, and from and in that, with one another.

Back with more on Friday, God willing.

A Gamble For Life

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

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

General Audience, 24 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Good Seed, Good Soil

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

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

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

General Audience, 24 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

It's a Mystery to Me

I think we should meditate more often — in our daily life, marked by problems and at times by dramatic situations — on the fact that believing in a Christian manner means my trusting abandonment to the profound meaning that sustains me and the world, that meaning that we are unable to give to each other but can only receive as a gift, and that is the foundation on which we can live without fear. And we must be able to proclaim this liberating and reassuring certainty of faith with words and show it by living our life as Christians.

However, we see around us every day that many remain indifferent or refuse to accept this proclamation. At the end of Mark’s Gospel we heard harsh words from the Risen One who says: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mk 16:16), loses himself. I would like to invite you to reflect on this.

General Audience, 24 October 2012

Reflection – The Pope is going to go on here in the audience to reflect himself on this reality of proclamation and rejection of the Gospel of Christ, but since he invites us to reflect on it ourselves, I thought I would stop here and do just that.

The wide-scale rejection of Christianity in the modern world is a deep mystery to me, I must say. I have never quite understood why so many people have turned away from the Christian faith, its practice, its beliefs. I suppose my own experience of Christianity, at least ever since I came to have a true apprehension of it around age 17 or so, has been so thoroughly positive, my understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ and to really plunge into the demands and promises of the Gospel is so radiant and joyful even as it is far from easy and my fidelity to it far from perfect, that I find it difficult to connect with the popular image of the Church and Christianity that so many reject.

It seems to me that what so many people reject—harsh, censorious, hypocritical, joyless, boring, lifeless religion—is simply not the Gospel. Much of the apostasy of our day is not actually (I believe) an apostasy from the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the salvation it offers, but an apostasy from a bizarre caricature of that gospel, a parody Gospel which in fact is an anti-gospel, bad news all around for humanity.

Now I really don’t know where people get this anti-gospel from – that is the mystery to me. The parish life I grew up in was, perhaps, a little boring, the preaching not exactly stirring, the music rather tedious, and the parish life in general not exactly bursting with enthusiasm. But there was certainly no hellfire and brimstone or obsessing over sexual sin or any of the (frankly) ridiculous pictures of Catholicism the popular media like to project. Maybe some of that was true in an earlier era, but I am 46 years old, and I simply do not believe that very many people my age and younger were exposed to that kind of Catholicism.

The wide-scale rejection of faith in our day is mysterious to me. There is an entire generation now whose parents and perhaps even grand-parents were the ones who walked away from the church and from Christ, and for whom the whole thing is simply an utterly alien reality. Meanwhile this same generation are increasingly sub-literate, unlikely to have the attention span to even read (say) this short blog post. The new evangelization has deep challenges.

It seems to me that those of us who do believe and who do see the beauty and joy of Christianity need to reflect deeply on how to communicate this joy and beauty to the world. Social media, yes, but personal encounter more so. Reasoned explanations and elegant formulations, yes, but works of mercy and compassion more so.

Christianity and the Gospel are all about love—God’s passionate personal love for you and me and each human being, our entry into that mystery of love. We need to make love our focus, our priority, the main work to which we give our lives. Otherwise, people will simply never know who God is, and never know the fullness of life He is offering.

 

We have to do it. It is our job, and no one else can do it for us.

A Great Alleluia and a Greater Amen

Of course, this adherence to God is not without content; with it we are aware that God has shown himself to us in Christ, he has made us see his face and has made himself really close to each one of us. Indeed, God has revealed that his love for man, for each one of us, is boundless: on the Cross, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God made man, shows us in the clearest possible way how far this love reaches, even to the gift of himself, even to the supreme sacrifice. With the mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection, God plumbs to the depths of our humanity to bring it back to him, to uplift it to his heights. Faith is believing in this love of God that is never lacking in the face of human wickedness, in the face of evil and death, but is capable of transforming every kind of slavery, giving us the possibility of salvation. Having faith, then, is meeting this “You”, God, who supports me and grants me the promise of an indestructible love that not only aspires to eternity but gives it; it means entrusting myself to God with the attitude of a child, who knows well that all his difficulties, all his problems are understood in the “you” of his mother. And this possibility of salvation through faith is a gift that God offers all men and women.

General Audience, 24 October 2012

 

Reflection – Running through all the Pope’s writings and talks about the Year of Faith has been this recurring theme of the relationship between the act of faith (joyful entrustment to God) and the content of faith (the Creed, the doctrines of the Church.) I think here he draws the connections very well.

 

It is precisely the contents of our faith that give us bold confidence to entrust ourselves to this God of ours. Because God in Christ became a man, he understands our human condition. Because God in Christ died for us, we can begin to believe in the depths of his love. Because God in Christ rose from the dead, we can confidently lay our lives before Him, knowing that He will work this same gift of life and victory in us.

 

Because Christ ascended into heaven, we know that this man Jesus is present everywhere, has broken the bonds of time and space to ascend to the divine sphere. We also know that He holds out for us the promise of this same transcendent ascent. Because God in Christ sent the Holy Spirit, we know that the power of God has been given to us to follow Him and live His love in our lives.

 

All this—which is the core content of our Christian faith—directly and immediately leads to our being able to make the deep act of faith, which is to wholly entrust our lives to this God and to do whatever He tells us. To live the ethos of the Gospel, an ethos of sacrificial love and utter generosity. To stay united with the Church he established to be his sign of communion and channel of grace in the world. To constantly seek him in prayer and serve him in our neighbour.

 

All of this is really hard to do much of the time. If the contents of our faith are not really true, if Jesus is not really God, did not really die, really rise, really ascend, and really give us his Spirit, then why would we bother, or how could we even think, of doing all this hard stuff he asks us to do?

So the content of our faith directly and essentially relates to the path of faith, the life of faith.

Furthermore, the contents of our faith make the living of our faith a joyful thing, a beautiful thing.
We can just go through life gritting our teeth and white-knuckling it in terms of trying to do what is right and just. There are times when that may indeed be all we can do. But God wants it to be a little better than that for us. He does want us to have joy in the battle, to see the beauty of the Gospel and communicate it to others. And it is a firm and solid, deep and penetrating grasp and being grasped by the truths, the dogmas, the creedal statements of our Christian faith that sets us on a path of joy and beauty.

He has come. He is risen. His Spirit is moving in our hearts. The battle is won. Victory is ours. A great alleluia is rising up from earth to heaven, and a greater yet amen is resounding from heaven to earth. It is all true, and so we can know a measure of joy and peace even in the present state of struggle and travail. Amen, alleluia.

A Rough Piece of Fabric

What is life’s meaning? Is there a future for humanity, for us and for the generations to come? In which direction should we orient our free decisions for a good and successful outcome in life? What awaits us beyond the threshold of death?

From these irrepressible questions it becomes clear how the world of planning, of precise calculation and of experimentation, in a word the knowledge of science, although important for human life is not enough on its own. We do not only need bread, we need love, meaning and hope, a sound foundation, a solid terrain that helps us to live with an authentic meaning even in times of crisis, in darkness, in difficulty, and with our daily problems. Faith gives us precisely this: it is a confident entrustment to a “You”, who is God, who gives me a different certitude, but no less solid than that which comes from precise calculation or from science. Faith is not a mere intellectual assent of the human person to specific truths about God; it is an act with which I entrust myself freely to a God who is Father and who loves me; it is adherence to a “You” who gives me hope and trust.

General Audience, 24 October 2012

Reflection – Happy feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Our Advent season just keeps lurching from feast to feast, doesn’t it? Hard to have a great penitential spirit when the whole Church keeps breaking out in joyful songs of celebration and general festivity.

Oh well. I don’t know if all my readers are entirely familiar with the story of Juan Diego and the Lady with the roses on Tepeyac hill. It is a beautiful, tender story of a mother, a son, a bishop, and a rough piece of cloth which received a radiantly beautiful image of a woman clothed with the stars and standing upon the moon. The poor, coming to pour out their troubles to this mother; the mother, abiding in her beautiful church in Mexico City, receiving millions of pilgrims each year; the image, still radiantly beautiful on that rough piece of cloth that has no earthly reason to still exist, let alone bear a radiant image of the Mother of God upon its fibers.

Something about the story speaks very deeply to this faith business the Pope is reflecting on these days. We do not need only bread, we need love, hope, meaning. The poor Mexican people in the 16^th century were beleaguered, a conquered people, harried and oppressed, lost on the way.

I am sure there was hunger in Mexico—there is always hunger, everywhere. But God knew the deeper hunger in them and in us. He knew they needed a Mama; He gave them one. They needed to know God was with them; He sent them this woman who was one of them, clothed in symbolic garb of a queen, a pregnant mother, and a virgin, her skin and features matching theirs.

And they came to this woman, to this shrine, and to the little man Juan Diego who spent his life telling the story over and again, and they became Catholics by the millions. It is a story unlike any other in the 2000 years of Church history that I am aware of.

Faith—we need to encounter a person, a love, something solid we can build our life on. We all have our beleaguered times; we all get conquered by life, by sin, by our own frailty or by the travails of the world; we all go into darkness, doubt, confusion, sorrow at times.

Human certainties and scientific-technological mastery offer us very little at those times. We have to know that we are held by a deeper wisdom, a stronger love, truth that surpasses our human intellect and its limitations.

 

At Guadalupe a woman brought this truth and this love to one poor man, and a nation was converted to Christ. Let us abide in our poverty today and ongoing, so that God may find His own way of coming to us ‘over the hills’, so that faith may shine forth from our homes, churches, and the rough fabric of our own hearts, so that our nation, too, might be converted to Christ again.