Purity of Heart

The Law of Moses was very important for the people of Israel. They were proud of the legal system they had developed in their desire to be God’s people. “What great nation is there that has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?”, Moses asks the Israelites in the first reading that we heard from the book of Deuteronomy.

Through the Law, they were expected to lead lives that were different, if not better than their pagan neighbors. There was a great emphasis on the observance of the Law as a sign of commitment and obedience to the Lord. But, by the time of Jesus, the Law had become so hopelessly complicated in its applications that only experts could interpret it in the many practical problems which would arise in daily life. The law was no longer a guide to help people love and serve God, but an end in itself. It was all about external behavior.

As Jesus relates in today’s Gospel, many of the laws were of human invention. They had little to do with loving God, but rather of conforming to social demands. If they were faithful to the external observance of the Law, they were “good Jews.” Even in our own day, you hear things like: “Joe’s a good Catholic, he never misses Sunday Mass.” We have no idea of what he thinks or believes, or how he relates to people outside of Mass. We judge by the external, but in most cases, we really don’t know what’s going on inside Joe.

The problem presented in the Gospel today is a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. And it isn’t the first. They ask Jesus why his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. Washing your hands is a sensible precaution, especially today. There were many prescriptions in Jewish law that were primarily hygienic in origin. As we know, eating with dirty hands could be a source of disease and sickness. By attaching a religious sanction to the behavior observation was more likely.

Jesus is not criticizing these precautions. What he is criticizing is the unequal importance given to these things to the neglect of what is more important, the love of God and love of neighbor. In strong words to the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is useless, the doctrines they teach are mere human regulations. They put human traditions before the commandments of God”.

Enslavement to culture and tradition is a major cause of conflict in our world today, between communities, and even in families. Fundamentalism is on the rise in many countries and religions, even our own. It is a terrible source of hatred and violence in many countries and the negation of true religion, whatever your beliefs. It is a scourge. This lack of tolerance is shameful especially when many countries are experiencing a greater ethnic, cultural, and religious mix of people, due to an increase in immigration.

Where does real uncleanness come from? It does not come from food or drink. A person does not become unclean by eating pork or by coming into contact with blood, as the Jewish law stated. You may remember the scene in the Acts of the Apostles when Peter, in a trance, sees what seems to be a large sheet being lowered from heaven which contained unclean animals, according to the Jewish law. The voice from heaven says to him, “Do not call something unclean, if God has called it clean” 

Uncleanness comes from “evil intentions” that arise in the depths of the heart. Jesus then recites that devasting list of evil intentions: lust, theft, murder, adultery, greed, maliciousness, deceit, jealousy, slander, arrogance. All these are in direct conflict with Christian life, which is a loving relationship with God and one another.

In contrast to what the Pharisees and Scribes were saying to Jesus, we heard in the letter of James, “Pure religion in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it and keeping oneself unspoiled by the world”. In other words, religion has little to do with the rigid observance of laws but keeping ourselves free from corrupting influences and being sensitive to the needs of the weak and most vulnerable persons among us. “As often as you did it to the least of my brethren you did it to me.”

There are some people who are attracted to a religion of strict laws and regulations. It makes them feel secure. It sets boundaries and keeps everything correct and precise, there are no gray areas. Everything is either black or white, there is only right or wrong. There are no exceptions for a fundamentalist.

Many of us grew up in an era when preoccupation with sin was the norm. Is this a sin, we would ask? Is it a mortal sin or a venial sin? How many times did I do it? The concern here is not fear of sin but fear of punishment and keeping myself from feelings of guilt.

It is possible to keep all the laws and rules perfectly, as Pharisees of all ages do, and still not be a “good” person. The law-keeper is primarily concerned with himself, not God. Getting all A’s is more important than loving God and showing charity to others.

I’m not advocating the abolishment of all laws. No human organization, government, or religion can function without rules and regulations. Without them, there would be chaos. However, laws are meant to help groups to work together, to ensure justice, equity, safety, and peace. They are a means, not an end.

Unlike the Mosaic Law, the Gospel is not a code of laws, it is a way of life. It provides a vision and a guide for us as we try to love God and make our way to his kingdom. It is focused on relationships and not actions. We have all been given a conscience and free will. When we commit theft, murder, adultery, scandal, maliciousness, and deceit, I don’t think we have to ask, “Is this a sin.” Whether we are religious or not, our conscience informs us when we have committed a grave offense against God and others. Deeds speak for themselves. What lies in our hearts are the evil intentions, as Jesus tells us, that are the source of our actions.

Jesus wants us to stop being so preoccupied with the exterior part of our lives. We need interior purification first. As he said to the Pharisees in the Gospel in Matthew: “First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside may also become clean”. God looks into our hearts and he will judge us on how we have loved and the goodness of our lives, not just what we have done. No one can achieve purity of heart without the help of God. He is willing, but we have to allow him to do it. 

Photograph and homily by Father Emmanuel.

He Sees Into Our Hearts

Whenever we engage with the Word, our reading is not just reading, it is an encounter - with the Person of Jesus, Word made flesh, and Splendor of the Father. Such is the truth of our own lectio divina - as we read, we discover, more often than not, that we ourselves are being read. The life we live is not our own. We are Christ’s body, part of him, in him.

And our stories are one with his. In Christ Jesus God “has become not only one of us but even our very selves.”¹ Jesus himself is our story, our book, our destiny - now, today; Jesus is the Book - with the power to reflect and illuminate our life; the one Book that forever informs how we navigate the little strip of time we have been given, helping us clarify and grasp its most vital moments and their meaning.² The wounded and risen Jesus is the key, the template that makes sense of each of our lives. He who sees deep into our hearts – reads them like a book.

A few years ago, my favorite cousin Teddy died quite unexpectedly, and I was asked to lead the prayer at his wake. Though baptized Catholic, Teddy never went to church; his family was never very religious like mine. And even when we were kids, he always thought of church as my “thing.” Certainly, there wouldn’t be a funeral Mass. But there would be a big crowd in the funeral parlor. What would I say? Teddy was very popular, an auto mechanic who always helped anyone he could, generous to a fault. The archetypal gruff giant with a tender heart. 

Then I thought, God gets all of this much better than I do. And it struck me – maybe, just maybe Teddy was now with God, and we were all being invited to see things from his perspective. Somehow the vision of the Book of Revelation became real, and I sensed that we were being invited to see the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, as the book of life was opened; invited to see Teddy being judged according to what he had done as recorded in that book.³ And you know what, Teddy had done very well, the best he could have done with what he was given. And now he got it – church, that God stuff, was not just my thing after all. He finally understood that all the while, year upon year, as he was raising his kids, fixing cars, helping folks with their flats, planting his garden, and loving his wife…God was always, always Mercy, always looking upon him with love, tremendously kind - at least as good as he had been with his kids, not a distant judge or some disinterested holy being, but Someone within him, near him, nearer in fact than he ever realized; the One who could look into his heart and really understand him. Now Teddy finally understood it, he saw face to face. His today had happened.

Now, today. What keeps me, keeps us, from living the urgency of this now of Jesus’ presence and action in our lives? I wonder if very often I don’t hear the words he speaks to me in lectio, in prayer, treasure them for a while and then take these very real words and trivialize them, like little holy mementos, place them on a shelf and look over my shoulder at them. Do I really hear? Do I allow his words to transform me – really grab me from the inside? Or, sad to admit, is part of me still holding out for a better deal, something, someone else to fill my emptiness?

Gratefully the Lord Jesus is relentless. For the “God who spoke of old uninterruptedly converses with”⁴ us, even today, right now. Today his Word is being fulfilled in our hearing if we will allow it. Today.⁵ Now, Jesus wants to free those who are oppressed, now he wants to remove our blindness, now he comes with great good news for us, now he comes to heal us for our hearts are filled with tendencies that can lead us to sin. Now he wants to make of you and me – make of us together - his compassion and his mercy-makers. But so often I find myself, despondent, walking to a nearby village with my head down, much too slow to understand. 

Living in the todayness of Jesus’ compassionate presence always involves surrender and a passover with him into a place of precariousness and uncertainty where we are invited to abandon ourselves and depend on God alone, even unto death, just as he did on the cross. This happens most often when we crash headlong into our own limitations, when I, foolish camel that I am, fail to see my own giant hump, when we do not know how to go on, when finally, in desperation, exasperation, and near despair, we hand ourselves over into God’s hands so that he can act for our good. Then our today comes.⁶

 For most of us some great, earth-shattering revelation never comes. What we get instead are “daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”⁷ And this is enough, more than enough for a day, today, the now of Jesus’ inbreaking and self-revelation.

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Reflection by one of the monks.

1. Thomas Merton. 2, Katharine Smyth, All the Lives We Ever Lived, 3. Rev. 20.12, 4. Dei Verbum, 5. See Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth. What He Wanted, Who He Was, 6. Ibid., 7. Virginia Woolf.

Saint Monica

When Monica was told of Augustine’s conversion, he tells us in his Confessions that she leapt for joy, rejoiced, and praised God. This woman of faith well understood that God had given her more than she had ever dared to beg for. Augustine continues, “you changed her mourning into joy, much more plentiful than she had desired, and in a much more precious and purer way than she ever required.”

God hears our prayers; God always answers our prayers – in ways we may recognize and in ways that we may do not understand. Still, we continue to pray with confidence and quiet wonder. 

Saint Monica by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464–65.

Repaying His Favor

 

Love is the only one of the movements of the soul, of its senses and affections, in which the creature can respond to its Creator, even if not as an equal, and repay his favor in some similar way... Although the creature loves less, being a lesser being, yet if it loves with its whole heart nothing is lacking, for it has given everything.

Baptized into Christ we are one with Christ forever. He calls us to love Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, all our mind, our very being. But how can we? We can love because God gives us the love with which to love. 

Text from Sermon 83: On the Song of Songs, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Holy Communion

Which of us is worthy - of love, of real relationship; which of us is worthy of Holy Communion each morning? Only the love of the other, earthly or divine; only that gaze of love can draw me into the reality of my belovedness. Small wonder that the intuition of the Church has placed this prayer just before Communion, “O Lord, I am not worthy.” We are not worthy. But Love has made us worthy. Indeed, in his desire for me, for you, in his dying and rising for us, Jesus loved us into worthiness. He refuses to not love us. 

Still, we know the closer we get to him, the more clearly, we see who we are. Always, with the realization of God’s nearness, there is not boasting or complacency but reverence and contrition. “Who am I?” The response of a grateful, awe-filled heart is always appropriately- "I am not worthy." Noticing the blessing, the undeserved abundance, we see clearly who the recipient is. It is I, it is you, not because of what we have accomplished but because of who God is- all Love. It’s never been about worth, but always about love, and the sweet condescension of his mercy, the tenderness you never really deserve. 

Our work is to be seized by awe-filled gratitude at Christ’s deeds on our behalf over and over again, to see clearly what God is doing in my life, in our lives together. It demands our attention and openness to the epiphanies - to believe beyond all doubt that God is choosing me, choosing us, favoring us, and blessing us beyond our imagining in ways far beyond our often-narrow comprehension, ways that are his ways, not our ways of doing things.

We may sometimes want to say with Saint Peter, “Depart from me, Lord, I am sinful.” Well, the hardest part is that he won’t go away. Even with my hardheartedness and stupidity, Jesus is not going anywhere. He just continues to love and mercy us. His love is ultimately unmanageable. He is aching for us. He can’t help himself. He is longing to take us into his wounded side as refuge.

Only what is fragile and broken can be created anew; what is vulnerable is transformable; what is sinful can be mercied. But what is stiff, stubborn, and intractable is stagnant and stuck. Allowing myself to be forgiven changes everything. God doesn’t want my virtue, he wants my weakness.

We must normalize fragmentation for one another - normalize the falling apart as the means to life in Christ Jesus. This is not careless, presumptive laziness, (“I’m broken, you’re broken; Christ will rescue us. No problem!”) Neither is it the blind leading the blind into a catastrophic fall. It is rather the weak leading the weak into a willing acknowledgment and celebration of the inevitability of our fragmentation and weakness as good news that will lead to our transformation in Christ. We need to be prepared for a “collision of desires”- our desperate need for forgiveness bound to collide with Jesus’ desperate desire to forgive and console us. 

Photograph of Brothers Guerric and Mikah by Brother Brian. Meditation by one of our monks.

Our Father, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Reflecting on how I might approach Bernard for today’s feast, I found myself drawn to the theme of freedom, which is certainly fundamental for Bernard; since for one thing he devoted a whole treatise to it as a young abbot in his On Grace and Free Choice. Freedom is also clearly a value very dear to our contemporaries, reaching back to the very origins of our nation’s existence. I did a little search for a contemporary attempt to define freedom and decided upon one that has long intrigued me, that ventured upon by the Supreme Court in the case Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in 1992, which is often noted as one of the few attempts on the official level to try to get at the essence of freedom. The majority opinion wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

The first thing is that liberty is expressed here in terms of a right, which in the modern sense, in a formulation I find helpful, concerns “the scope of the exercise of our power to choose, as we wish, unobstructed by the power of the will of others.” The scope here, at first sight anyway, appears incredibly broad. In fact, one of the most common critiques of the Court’s formulation is that it is superhuman. Who in human history, even the most megalomaniacal tyrants of the ancient world, would have claimed such power over the givenness of the world in which they found themselves? Yet, here, this power is bestowed on absolutely everyone as a right. Yet, upon closer examination, what, we might ask, does this power actually amount to if everyone has it? First, regarding my relationship with others: the minute I try to exercise this power I discover that I am in conflict with everyone else’s right to define their own concept of existence, and so on. You and I, all of us here, can have this absolute power to determine the meaning of existence only as long as my determination of the meaning of existence means nothing to you, and your determination of the meaning of existence means nothing to me unless we so choose. Everyone can have this power, it turns out, only if they keep it entirely to themselves, only if it remains a totally private affair, concerning themselves alone. Thus, it turns out that if everyone has this power, no one can in fact exercise it.

If I cannot determine my own meaning of existence in such a way that brings about real change in anything or anyone around me, then perhaps I can at least determine it for myself. Again, if I take this power as genuinely absolute, I soon discover that it results in a rather volatile and unstable existence since I find that I am in fact not at all bound to any of my previous determinations of the meaning of existence, not even the one I had this morning unless I freely choose at every moment to do so. Such power leaves me with no more substance than a leaf blowing in the wind, and thus cannot have any real significance even for myself and leaves me in the end without any really meaningful existence.

Since this power does not allow me in actual fact to determine the meaning of existence for others or for myself, what am I left with but a purely subjective feeling of freedom, with no foundation in the real? Such a right, then, is at bottom deceptive, an illusion. To hold it cuts oneself off from God, the world, other people, the community as a whole, and even oneself.

What has happened here is that the will as a power of self-determination and choice has been isolated from any determination outside itself, and so in this respect has become its own source and its own goal. Remaining for a moment on the philosophical level in which the court has expressed itself; in terms of the classical tradition, what is missing here is the priority of the good, which gives the self-determination and spontaneity of the will sense and meaning. In the sense associated with Plato, goodness is a self-diffusive first principle, the ultimate cause of generation; goodness, therefore, as generosity. In the sense associated with Aristotle, goodness is finality. Goodness represents the telos, the goal, toward which all things strive, it is that by which they are attracted, and in which they rest. When the will is isolated from this framework of the good, it becomes disordered, chaotic, destructive, meaningless, and unreal. Freedom has its genuine place within this twofold generosity of the good as origin and goal, the generative outpouring that gives order to all existing things.

St. Bernard shows himself within this classical line of thought when in his treatise On Loving God, he calls God the efficient and final cause of our love (De Dil, 22). Here, though, is introduced a very big difference: the actuality and perfection that is the source and goal of all our striving is no longer just the good of the philosophers, but personal, divine love, that pours itself out on us gratuitously and calls for a response.  “Why and how should God be loved?”, Bernard asks, “God himself is the reason why he is to be loved. As for how he is to be loved, there is to be no limit to that love.” “What right has God to be loved?” The fact that “he has loved us first.” Man grows in freedom insofar as he grows in the capacity to love without limit the God who deserves to be loved for his own sake, “since he gave himself to us when we deserved it least” and “what could he have given us better than himself?” Man’s rights are situated within the divine right God thus has to be loved for his own sake. Here is where they find their scope and meaning.

Awareness of how God deserves to be loved is not just an idea, it is a mystery that can never be exhausted, and so is something we need to consciously cultivate at all times. Bernard insists we do this by being attentive to God’s many gifts: “For, who else gives food to all who eat, sight to all who see, and air to all who breathe?” Without these, we cannot live, but beyond these “chief gifts” lie man’s nobler gifts, of which Bernard names three: dignity, knowledge and virtue. Man’s dignity is precisely his free will. Knowledge is that “by which he acknowledges that this dignity [of a free will] is in him but that it is not of his own making.”  “Virtue”, the third gift, “is that by which man seeks continuously and eagerly for his Maker and when he finds him, adheres to him with all his might.”  

These gifts seem to me to make for a powerful recipe for human flourishing. A world view such as that of the courts constructed around an absolute free will promotes in my view what Bernard might call at best a “restless curiosity.”

The reason is based on our human condition. As Bernard puts it: “Every rational being naturally desires always what satisfies more its mind and will. It is never satisfied with something which lacks the qualities it thinks it should have. A man with a beautiful wife, for example, looks at a more attractive woman with a wanton eye or heart; a well-dressed man wants more costly clothes, and a man of great wealth envies anyone richer than he…Why wonder if man cannot be content with what is lower or worse, since he cannot find peace this side of what is highest and best?”

Such is the condition of our contemporaries who have been handed the “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”. They can run through an infinite number of these concepts and never find peace for their restless heart until they have settled on the highest and the best, which can only be God himself, his love, and his plan for their life.

As Bernard says, “whoever desires the greatest good can succeed in reaching it if he can first gain possession of all he desires short of that good itself.” That is, if you could actually do the impossible and possess all that you desire, you would discover their incapacity to fill your desire and so turn at last to the God of the universe. There is another way: “If they could only be content with reaching all in thought and not in deed. They could easily do so and it would not be in vain, for man’s mind is more comprehensive and subtle than his senses.”

Yet, this is not the best way. “The desire to experience all things first is like a vicious circle, it goes on forever. The just man is not like that…he prefers the royal road which turns neither to the right nor to the left.” The path of the just is the way of those who “take a salutary short-cut and avoid the dangerous, fruitless round-about way, choosing the shortened and shortening word,” That is, God’s word in Christ, “not desiring everything they see, but rather selling all they have and giving it to the poor.”

Our world today needs badly the witness of the just who prefer the royal road, the straight path of genuine freedom, who have responded to the call to walk the way of the “shortened word” in search of the God who loved them first; and who, when they have gone astray, heed the call of love to return and take up the path once again. Let us cling to this God, and never let go.

Saint Bernard by El Greco.  Father Timothy's homily for today's feast.

With Blessed Guerric

 

Blessed is he who allowed his hands and feet and side to be pierced and opened himself to me wholly that I might enter 'the place of his wonderful tent' and be protected. Indeed it is a safe dwelling place to linger in the wounds of Christ the Lord. The protection this tent affords surpasses all the glory of the world. It is a shade from the heat by day, a refuge, and a shelter from the rain so that by day the sun will not scorch you, nor the storm move you.

As we celebrate today the feast of our own Cistercian, Blessed Guerric of Igny, we wonder with him at Jesus' goodness and self-effacing love. 

Detail of a photograph by Brother Brian. Lines from The Fourth Sermon for Palm Sunday of Blessed Guerric of Igny.