Being Alone

If one sets aside time for a business engagement, a trip to the hairdressers, a social engagement, or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it, like a secret vice.

ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH Gift From the Sea 

Unsatisfying Prayer

The fact that our prayer is unsatisfactory or unsatisfying is no reason to discontinue the practice. But perseverance in what seems to be a fruitless exercise demands a good measure of patience and a strong faith in the power of even the most seemingly hopeless prayer. Here we may be encouraged by words put into the mouth of Christ by Julian of Norwich:

Pray with your whole being even though you think that it has no savor for you. For such prayer is very profitable even though you feel nothing. Pray with your whole being, though you feel nothing, though you see nothing, even though it seems impossible to you. It is in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in feebleness that your prayer is most pleasing to me, even though you think that it has little savor for you.

Anything that we can do—no matter how small—to give more scope to prayer in our lives is worthwhile and, supposing we persevere in it, will certainly yield dividends in due season.

MICHAEL CASEY, OCSO Coenobium: Reflections On Monastic Community

God’s Presence in Suffering

God is present even and especially in suffering, in failure, even in death. The clever and the robust experience weakness and vulnerability eventually when scientific and rational measures are no match in the struggle with the suffering of the body, the mind, and the spirit. It is often in experiences of powerlessness or raw suffering that we are able to lean into the God who is to be found there in the deepest movement of contemplation at the edge of mystical union.

MICHAEL DOWNEY The Vocation of the Lay Theologian as Baptismal Witness, Workshop Session 2.1, 6/23/15

The Root of Despair

According to [Thomas Aquinas] the root of despair is to be found in what has been termed acidie: for want of a better word, we usually translate this as sloth or inertia, by which very much more, and something deeper, is meant than mere idleness, than lacking the inclination to be active. According to Thomas this metaphysical inertia is identical with the “sorrow of the world,” the “worldly grief” of which Paul says that it produces death (2 Corinthians 7:10).

JOSEPH RATZINGER To Look on Christ

The Contemplative

O my brother, the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons.

THOMAS MERTON, OCSO A Letter on the Contemplative Life 

Cistercian Perspectives on Being Human

The Cistercian Fathers provide a stupendous response to modern problems precisely at the level of anthropology. They all possess a coherent, shared understanding of human nature to which they continuously make reference. They consider man as the masterpiece of God's love, created for love through an overflowing of the love that is intrinsic to Trinitarian life, the very essence of Godhead. Man is the masterpiece of creation, destined to participate in the infinite fullness of divine life by following a path of freedom. This path constitutes a process of transformation that is sustained by man's conscience as well as by his deepest desire. His nature is sealed by a loving positivity, a seal impressed by the creative act of God. Nothing can cancel it out, not even the inconceivable negativity of rebellion and human sin. It is this origin in love that bestows sense on human existence. It clothes man in beauty and indelible dignity.

CRISTIANA PICCARDO Living Wisdom: The Mission and Transmission of Monasticism

Knowledge of God

When God the Almighty was making mankind through His own Word, He perceived that they, owing to the limitation of their nature, could not of themselves have any knowledge of their Artificer, the Incorporeal and Uncreated. He took pity on them, therefore, and did not leave them destitute of the knowledge of Himself, lest their very existence should prove purposeless. For of what use is existence to the creature if it cannot know its Maker? How could men be reasonable beings if they had no knowledge of the Word and Reason of the Father, through Whom they had received their being? They would be no better than the beasts, had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of Godlikeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life.

SAINT ATHANASIUS On the Incarnation 

Glory in Mercy

Ordinary language fails us when we come to speak of the life and happiness of the divine Trinity, who share everything without dividing it. Each of the three is God, yet there is but one God. Their loving union is so intimate that they have but one nature, one existence, one life; everything except what pertains to their distinct personalities is common to each. In short, the life of God is an ecstatic union of knowledge and love—complete and infinite happiness. God has no need of anything more; His joy and happiness are such that nothing could increase them. Yet, in His infinite goodness, He decided to share them with somebody else. And so, out of the nothingness that was not God, He created us. It is true, that God could not without contradiction act for a motive less than Himself; being infinite Truth, He cannot deny His own supremacy. But, in planning all creation for His own glory, He decided to glorify Himself by making His creatures happy. And when His creatures revolted against His plan, He went further in beneficence and arranged to find His glory in His mercy. And that is a fundamental principle that must never be forgotten: God made the world for His own glory; but He glorifies Himself in this life by His mercy.

DOM EUGENE BOYLAN This Tremendous Lover 

Homily: 23-B Sunday in Ordinary Time

INVADED BY THE LOGOS

23-B Sunday in OT

(Is 35:4-7a; Jas 2:1-5; Mk 7:31-37)

Witnessing Jesus’ magnificent healing activity in the regions of Tyre, Sidon, the Sea of Galilee and the territory of the Decapolis, the crowd in today’s gospel praises Jesus the Healer with this beautiful acclamation: He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak! The exultant acclamation echoes God’s own feeling of great satisfaction when, on the evening of the sixth day of the creation, the Lord contemplates all the works of his hands as a totality: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Gen 1:31). Thus, in a certain way, the Gospel text equates the transformative, life-giving presence and actions of Jesus of Nazareth with those of the Creator God of Genesis.

The particular focus of the gospel today is the healing by Jesus of a speech-and-hearing impaired person. (Please forgive me if at times I use the simpler expression “deaf-mute man”. To be precise, the Greek says that he stammers.) The minute details of the narrative tell us that this is not just any miracle. After all, Jesus could have simply said to the man, “Your faith has healed you”, instead of producing a series of puzzling gestures, and the man’s friends had requested only that Jesus lay his hand on him. But, in fact, what we have is a detailed dramatization that seeks to unveil the archetypal encounter between needy creature and loving Creator, man clamoring for redemption and God eager to redeem. So I invite you to read the episode with me as a paradigm of our life of intimacy with God, which we properly call our mystical life.  

The encounter with the Savior initiates the man into to the joy of salvation through intimacy with God in Christ. And this initiation occurs in five steps, which strongly suggest the so-called mystagogical catechesis of the early Church—the process by which catechumens, first enlightened by grace, were then gradually instructed in the truths of the Christian faith and thus introduced in orderly fashion (usually during Lent) into participation in the “mysteries” (or sacraments) of Christ.

1. First Step.  Jesus took the man aside from the crowd privately: The moment of essential encounter requires separation from the world so as to induce the experience of solitude with Jesus. Friends bring the man to Jesus, but only Jesus himself can make him his familiar by revealing to him the secrets of his divine Heart. The man can discover his personal truth only in the presence of Jesus, by looking at the Lord’s face and submitting in intimacy to his creative and purifying action. All else must be set aside. All worldly bonds must be severed at the beginning of conversion so that he can be totally plunged into the healing influence of divine love.

2. Second Step.  Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears and after spitting touched his tongue: This is the most complex of the five steps. Jesus the Healer’s mysterious actions are more than oddly puzzling gestures. One commentator says, rather lamely, I think, that “these singular acts of Jesus” were probably meant “to rouse interest and aid faith in the dull soul of the sufferer”. To which I say: Is that all? Because I believe a lot is at stake here, really our whole understanding of salvation and how we view our relationship to Jesus as Savior! We can, in fact, unlock the meaning of “these singular acts” by reading them in the light of certain foundational moments and symbols elsewhere in Scripture, as any Jew of Jesus’ day would have done. 

These “mysterial” (or, if you prefer, sacramental) gestures of the Redeemer seem to evoke, first of all, the creating movements of God in Genesis: Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Gen 2:7). Penetrating the man’s ears, Jesus’ fingers re-enact here-and-now God’s act of molding and quickening a new being as conceived by the divine wisdom and will. Jesus’ sacred gestures establish remarkable physical intimacy between his own holy body, from which divine power and love emanate, and the afflicted body of the deaf-mute. 

Jesus’ action of graciously anointing the deaf-mute’s tongue with his own saliva may be seen to evoke the water that God made to flow in Eden to irrigate the garden and give all things life (cf Gen 2:10). For, is not the body of Jesus, in whom the Father is well-pleased, itself the personified Paradise of all the saints’ delight? The Letter of James today praises our Lord Jesus Christ as “the Lord of glory”, and John explicitly declares Jesus’ human body to be the definitive temple of God’s majesty (cf Jn 2:21). Consider, then, the convergence in this scene of 1. the temple of Jesus’ body, 2. the saliva flowing from his mouth, and 3. the river of life in Paradise. Together these references point to Ezekiel’s vision of the water issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east: Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live (Ez 47:1,9). 

And remember the Samaritan woman, to whom Jesus likewise speaks of salvation and union with God in terms of water richly given from his own person: Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:14). Finally, at the cross, Jesus would drench the earth with water from his pierced Heart, mingled with his blood (Jn 19:34). From the Body of the enfleshed Word, then, there come not only words of teaching and symbolic gestures but also water, saliva, and blood, sacred liquids that are bearers of his divine DNA, intended to communicate divine life to humankind. 

All these biblical instances converge on the present scene and transform it into a powerful Eucharistic event. The man’s ingestion of Jesus’ saliva puts an end to all the metaphors, promises and symbols of the Old Testament, prophecies to be fulfilled in a distant future. Jesus’ multi-tiered action of lavishing intimate care on this man enacts, existentially and historically, the full reality of God’s gift of himself to us, in a concrete time and place. The actual, earth-shaking miracle that occurs in this episode is not, in fact, so much the physical healing as the opening of a gateway to intimate participation by man in God’s very life, to which the physical healing points.

Let us now look more briefly at the remaining three steps:

1. Third Step. And looking up to heaven, Jesus sighed: This intense sigh, which comes from the very depths of Jesus’ soul, is at the same time an exorcism of the evil that afflicts man, an invocation of the heavenly Father, and, above all, the insufflation or “in-breathing” by Jesus of the Holy Spirit who inhabits him into the sick man, that he may have fullness of life. This sighing re-enacts, in a mournful key, the second action by God at the creation: The Lord God … breathed into [Adam’s] nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. After touching the man with his hands and communicating to him a restorative elixir from his own body, Jesus now emits this sigh, which expresses his ardent desire to share with the deaf-mute the vibrant inner life which is his as Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Jesus gives the man both water and breath from his mouth, that he may taste the delights of eternity, and he caresses him into audition with his fingers, one in each ear.
2. Fourth Step. And Jesus said to the man, “Éphphatha”, that is, “Be you opened!”: After all these non-verbal gestures and actions, Jesus of Nazareth speaks as Christ, the eternal Logos, and he speaks an imperious, creating word of power that bestows the faculties essential for faith (hearing) and praise (speech), as if he said: ‘Let there be hearing! Let there be speech!’ And Christ conveys this command not just to the man’s ears and tongue but to his whole human person and his total human nature as such: Be opened! This command of Jesus as eternal Lord of the universe was considered by the early Church so sacred and precious an utterance that it has been preserved down the centuries in the Gospel and in the Baptismal Liturgy in its original Aramaic form, Éphphatha! These are the very consonants and vowels the historical Jesus would have uttered, and the uttering of this holy word by the priest makes Jesus sacramentally present here-and-now. What is at stake is not just the opening of bodily ears to the hearing of earthly sounds, but rather the grafting onto human nature of the capacity to hear and fully understand every word that comes from the mouth of God. This highly blessed man has been literally invaded by Christ the divine Logos on all sides! Incredibly, by his close association with Jesus, this anonymous person has heard the Holy One of God say to him, in the intimacy of his heart, what the bridegroom says to the bride in the Song of Songs: Open to me, … my beloved  (5:2, NJB). To the all-knowing, all-loving Logos, no man is anonymous: in every human being God sees a beloved of his heart; and Jesus is healer only because he is, above all, Lover. He does not heal in order to showcase his power but to bestow life.
3. Fifth Step. And immediately his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was untied, and he spoke plainly: Here is the expected result of the process of initiation into the Mystery of Christ: The man bears witness to the new life he has been given by “speaking correctly,” that is, by communicating to the world his participation in the truths of the Logos who has just re-created him in his divine image. Because the incarnate Logos himself has touched him, conferred his substance upon him, and spoken to him, and because he has obediently opened himself up to the divine voice, this man can henceforth himself speak logically, which in this context means like the Logos, fully in harmony with the Wisdom, Will and Love of the triune God.

Brothers and sisters: When left to ourselves, all of us are spiritually deaf and tongue-tied, are we not? Let us too, then, allow ourselves to be brought daily by the Church and the prayer of our friends into the healing presence of the Redeemer. In this way, we will be courageously submitting ourselves to his transformative mystical action through word and sacrament, and this will splendidly rejuvenate and strengthen us, in keeping with the perpetual youthfulness and beauty of Christ, the New Adam. 

Reading the Gospels

I must remember that I am listening to the Word, to Christ. When I think about the voice of Christ I try to recall its various manifestations in his earthly life. I hear it sometimes encouraging and cajoling, at other times challenging and demanding. And then, since my reflections and prayers must inevitably be drawn to the paschal mystery, I think of the voice from the cross where, even at a time of almost unimaginable pain, Christ is calling for forgiveness, making excuses for those who do not realize what they are doing, speaking in what Saint Aelred of Rievaulx calls ‘that wondrous voice, full of gentleness and love’.

ESTHER DE WAAL Seeking Life: The Baptismal Invitation of the Rule of St. Benedict

The Eschatological Moment

Do not look around yourself into universal history; you must look into your own personal history. Always in your present lies the meaning in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your responsible decisions. In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.

RUDOLF BULTMANN The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology

Wishing to Know the Future

To wish to see or imagine the future is to make a fiction out of hope, and this seems to me to be doing violence to hope…. Obviously, since we do not have God’s imagination, when we think of the future, we think of it in terms of the past…. When we are in a tunnel, we see nothing, but it is absurd to want the landscape when we come out to be the same as when we went in…. Let us let the Holy Spirit do its work…. It is the Spirit’s business; this is what I call poverty.

CHRISTIAN DE CHERGÉ Retreat for March 8, 1996

God’s Permissive Will

Having created the universe with all its forces, and having made man master of his decisions and destined him to the life of the family and of society, God of necessity wills the interplay of cause and effect, he wills to permit good and evil according to the normal course of events. This evil can be either physical (such as sickness, suffering, death) or moral. Moral deficiencies are to be found everywhere, in us and outside of us. Even in the bosom of the Church of Christ there has been much wrong-doing, and wrong-doing there will be till the end of time. So great is the wretchedness of men that they deface the work of God by their mistakes, their illusions, their weaknesses, and their passions. If we want to sanctify ourselves we must adapt ourselves to the order of things permitted by Providence. We must accept from the hand of God the present, and all the effort required for our daily work, our responsibilities, the defects and wrong headedness of those near to us, the annoyance and suffering of ill-health.

DOM IDESBALD RYELANDT, OSB Union With Christ

In Becoming Man, Christ Became All Men.

I believe that every man is a hidden Christian. And in two senses. Man is saved by Christ, in that only through Christ can he attain the beatific vision. And furthermore, all yearnings for the divine, whatever form they take, are and must be attributed to the Holy Spirit. That is at one level but man is also a hidden Christian because, although he is not in a situation in which he is consciously responding to Christian values—there is nevertheless something of Christ in him, as in everyone. And there are many senses, I think, in which this is true. The most obvious, the most simple, is the fact that Christ became man. The fact that he shared our human condition gives significance to every human life wherever it is, whatever it is, and whatever religious belief is held.

CARDINAL BASIL HUME, OSB The Intentional Life: The Making of a Spiritual Vocation

The Birth of a Monastic Vocation

According to the Catholic contemplative tradition, desire is only possible as the consequence of experience. We can only desire what we have already tasted in some way. And this is exactly how a monastic vocation starts. One day a child (often it begins as early as that), a teenager, or a young adult senses in the midst of ordinary activities that behind and beneath all things and all acts there is a mystery that continually upholds, enlivens, and renews all that exists. There is a fountain out of which everything arises, a fountain of life that irrigates all life. The surface of the world peels back, and the young person glimpses the center, the burning core—burning, but not destroying, like the burning bush.

This mystery, although it is indefinable, has characteristics proper to it. It is holy: in its presence, in the moment of experience, you feel compelled to make some gesture—bow down, take off your shoes, close your eyes, to sing. It is personal. You may not know its name, but you know that it has a name, and that in fact it is not something but someone. More than that: it is someone, par excellence. It is beautiful, and good, and true, and above all, it is love.

BERNARD BONOWITZ, OCSO Truly Seeking God