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This context also helps us understand appropriately the more narrow conception of “asceticism,” which we usually equate with external practices of self-discipline or self-denial. This use of the term is too narrow, as these practices are only a part, and a secondary part, of the actual “ascetic life,” of the gradual pursuit of salvation, which is our lifetime journey of appropriating the grace of Redemption offered to us in Christ and allowing it to make us whole and holy, and thus capable of sharing in the everlasting life of God.
We should not therefore interpret traditional spiritual practices in a materialistic, overly horizontal way, nor in narrow, constricting way—either “psychologically” or “ascetically.” For example, we should not interpret fasting merely as a technique for gaining self-discipline (rather than as a form of evangelical poverty and bodily prayer), or as a way of regulating brain chemistry or equalizing our “gut,” or any other things. No, fasting is first of all a spiritual, theological reality, an expression of conversion and surrender to God inseparable from prayer and almsgiving (just as they are inseparable from it), which not only has an effect on the person fasting, but also has an effect in the world, through the mysterious interconnectedness in which we all live. It is not a matter of accumulating “spiritual riches” before God, or even for that matter of training ourselves, but of learning to live within and from our innate poverty and need before God and before others. All ascetic practice, as indeed all of life, should make us more poor, not less, more dependent, not less, my attuned to our brokenness and limitations, so that we can inhabit our weakness, certain that God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9), and that grace precisely in weakness is glorified. Jesus spoke of the “space” that this inhabiting of poverty opens up in ourselves and in the world whenever his disciples came to him and complained that they could not cast out a certain demon. He said to them simply, “This kind comes out only through prayer and fasting” (Mt 17:21). This is not a matter of “earning” God’s intervention through offering up sacrifices (how much we need to get beyond this idea!), not even only about the reality of spiritual warfare—as true and important as this is—but above all about letting space be made for God to make himself present and to expand his presence. In and beyond the normal affairs of life, for example psychological and human balance and the faithful fulfillment of our duties, therefore also exists a spiritual struggle, the mysterious drama of prayer and intercession, of compassion and identification, of fasting and sacrifice. As Saint Seraphim of Sarov said: “However [important] prayer, fasting, vigil and all the other Christian practices may be, they do not constitute the aim of our Christian life. Although it is true that they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end, the true aim of our Christian life consists of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.”i Everything finds its meaning only in this and for the sake of this: that we may become a space, in poverty and receptivity, in which the Spirit of God can dwell, and spread out to others. By the mystery of prayer, joined as it is to fasting and almsgiving, we not only enter into deeper cooperation with the profound, hidden activity of grace in our own hearts and lives, but can also reach out to others and join them, and be of service to them, where words and actions can no longer reach. As a community of believers we can benefit from a deeper rediscovery of the invisible, spiritual fruitfulness of love and prayer, of poverty and need, of inhabiting our places of fragility not only for our own healing but for the healing of the world. And grace does not operate apart from nature, but rather instills itself into the very heart of nature and gradually heals, renews, and transforms it from within. The invisible, hidden work of prayer, of grace operative within a trusting heart, is not only analogous to the visible actions we take in this world, but in fact more profound far-reaching than any merely external action, even while being the true wellspring and support of such external actions. Does not the Church truly understand this and promote it so beautifully, for example in her insistence that her true heart is contemplative in nature, that is it the gratuitous communion with God from which all the blood of grace flows and to which it returns? ************* i. Quoted from: https://anothercity.org/saint-seraphim-of-sarov-on-the-acquisition-of-the-holy-spirit-a-conversation-with-motovilov/ Penance and asceticism are not fundamentally a collection of exterior acts, but a reality of metanoia, of continual conversion of heart to God each day and in all circumstances, a ready responsiveness to respond to the call of the One who says, “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away,” that he may transform us in his love and unite us to himself in the glorious mystery of his own life, welcoming us into the heart of the shared love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in which is abundance of life and overflowing freedom. Indeed, unless there is a special call, it is unhelpful for a person to engage in extraordinary practices of penance, for the path of the Spirit is rather that of littleness, humility, and simplicity, that our humanity may resonate under his touch in freedom and unselfconsciousness. After all, God looks not at the external difficulty or supposed greatness of an action or a life, but at the love within it; and indeed all that he desires is the reintegration and restoration of our humanity, that we may find health and wholeness once again, yielded up to his love and thus healed in both nature and grace, divinized by his love and made happy in the way that he intended for us in the beginning.
Our primary “penitential” or “ascetical” journey consists therefore in docility to the Spirit who calls us, even as it embraces a healthy, balanced, and yet generous fidelity to the responsibilities and commitments of our circumstances and our way of life. And in all things, it is the ever-ready responsiveness to the unique word of grace that comes in each new moment, singular in its meaning and beauty, in which we hear anew as if for the first time, “Come to me.” We are invited, like the apostle Peter, to step out of the boat of our own securities anew and to walk on the water of faith toward Jesus who invites us, and whose very gaze of tenderness and love becomes both a bridge upholding us and a magnetism of attraction and support sustaining and protecting us. Only in the context of this relationship of love, of this inviting gaze of Jesus and our reciprocal gaze of longing and hope, does anything else find its meaning and purpose. And in this gaze of Jesus I realize both my irreplaceable beauty as a child of God and also the depths of my sinfulness, and in both awarenesses my heart is ever pierced anew by his love and set free from its fears and self-preoccupations, even to the point of tears, tears that purify and heal, making rivers flow deep within to give life and joy. And such a journey is not of benefit to myself alone, but in fact bears fruit for all, not only cleansing and transforming my own heart, making it humble, sympathetic, and compassionate, but also becoming a “bearing” of others, that what is theirs becomes my own such that I hold it before God without comparisons or internal distance, just as I simultaneously see in every person a mystery to be admired and to stir my heart to greater fidelity to God. And practically speaking, in the “nitty gritty” of daily choices and actions, the work of asceticism, interior and exterior, seeks to establish not an unbending control over the natural inclinations of the heart or even the needs of the flesh, but rather a harmony between the diverse facets of my humanity, such that—in the prudence that guides the virtues, and above all in the love that is the seal of perfection—I may taste in myself the authentic liberty of the children of God, in the spontaneous, joyous, and connatural living of the beautifully good truth. Everything is gauged by this responsiveness of love, just as from the love of God revealed in the countenance of Jesus it is born and sustained. Therefore the “training” of asceticism is aimed not only at the concupiscible appetites—those ordered toward the good, pleasurable and desirable things of this world—but also at the irascible appetites—the energetic striving for self-perfection that gives birth to rigidity and inflexibility, and the fear that seeks security through control, and in the process creates division and disharmony in the heart, refusing to integrate the whole of one’s humanity in the ascent to God and to love, and to an affirming openness to all that God has made. The best remedy here is an abiding spirit of relaxed, wonder-filled, and playful responsiveness to the sacramental gift of every moment, in its unique beauty and meaning, from the Father in Christ and the Spirit, which awakens my reciprocal gift. This is not contrary to healthy discipline of life, nor vice versa; rather, such discipline is but a school of transformation in the footsteps of Jesus, where a life of humility and simplicity, of steadfast fidelity and “always beginning anew,” is the cradle in which childhood blossoms in the likeness of Jesus’ filial intimacy with his loving Father. This is one of the central paradoxes of Christian life: that the flower of our humanity blossoms most deeply and freely not in the soil of mere earthly comfort and security, nor in false freedom according to the flesh, but in the soil of faith and surrender, under which living water flows, in perseverance in love allowing young wine, inconstant and superficial, to mature into old wine, in the mystery of the Cross which is the harbinger of Resurrection, in the lived reality of the Beatitudes, which alone make one truly blessed. But so too, all the externals of life are empty and dry, a lifeless performance, unless they are born of the spirit of childhood and sustained by the gratuity of the love that has first been received, and are thus ordained toward nothing but the fullness of reciprocal love that allows intimacy to blossom, and the fruitfulness that springs from it. If the process of conversion is ongoing, this does not thereby mean that it is dehumanizing. True Christian penitence is not a matter of stripping off the flesh in order to go to God as a pure spirit, nor does it entail suppressing the true desires and capacities placed within us by God, nor living a life of austerity or strictness for its own sake, nor any of the thousand possible aberrations. Rather, the authentic transformation at which conversion is aimed is the renewal and resurrection of our entire humanity in the Risen Christ, such that in some manner we are granted to anticipate already in this world the mystery of the new creation, in which all created things are consummated in God himself. Thus, everything in our existence, every act of conversion to God and every discipline we undertake, is ordered solely toward the sanctification of all flesh and of every moment of life, even the most mundane, worldly, or apparently secular—and this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. Everything is beautiful for God, and not only can it be sanctified, but he desires to sanctify it, making all into a sacrament radiant with his glory. Thus the conversion asked of us is not a program of ascetical achievement, but above all a matter of bringing into the light of God’s gaze every aspect of our humanity that it may be transformed in him, in the likeness of Christ. This includes our sinful tendencies and disorders, laid before him in prayer and sacramental life, but it also includes any suppressed or unintegrated desires, any capacities or longings we have not accepted as our own and made friends with, any capacities not yet fully evangelized by truth, love, and grace, and all that he himself has given in creating us in his image destined for his likeness. By this process of bringing everything to Jesus and the Father, to be bathed in the Spirit in their light of their loving, inviting, and healing gaze, little by little our humanity is permeated by the energies of grace and become thereby, not more purely spiritual or separated from the world in its positive sense, but more authentically human and more sensitive to all that God has made, in both affection and in act, and this, because it is totally God’s, joined with his own way of seeing and loving. For the life of each one of us, at the very heart of its deepest poverty, can witness to the profound truth at the center of every human existence: that in God alone can our world find its true redemption, its authentic meaning, freedom, and fulfillment. For in our own heart, our own existence, all things can be lifted up into proximity to the healing and affirming embrace of God and thus made capable of the resurrection of the body, in which all things shall be consummated in the ecstatic joy and perfect intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the end of time. Allow me to return for a moment to the beautiful call to harmonize nature and grace in our life of faith, to accept and live to the full the natural, “psychological” substratum of our longing and need for human flourishing, and the spiritual, supernatural call to divinization in Christ. In the last analysis, after all, aren’t they one, or at least two aspects of a single mystery? After all, as Saint Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.” There we have it.
Thus we can affirm that the right path forward lies neither in a rejection of the insights of natural thought and therapeutic experience, nor in a radical reinterpretation of the classic spiritual life “from the bottom up,” which would supposedly rule out or belittle the deeper, spiritual, supernatural drama of human life. For example, we cannot reduce sin to maladaptive behavior, as if it were not a free choice of the human person born of the disorder and concupiscence within us, which trace themselves back, not only to wounded human experiences (though this is true) but to the inheritance of original sin. And thus the remedies cannot be merely psychological either, merely techniques aimed at training and correcting behavior. But neither should be spiritualize everything and think that explicitly theological, ascetical disciplines can solve every problem or heal every wound. Sometimes what the heart needs is not fasting and prayer and vigils, but, to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas, “a glass of wine or a warm bath or a good nap.” What is needed therefore is an integration of the two dimensions: the therapeutic method and the ascetic method. Or, to express it better from the center, it is both the affirmation of what is truly human and the purification of its aberrations. As Conrad Baars explained, it is not enough just to discipline and correct our “humane” emotions, our love, desire, and joy, but it is important also to correct our “irascible” emotions, our energetic striving or fear, which, if given free reign, will crush and destroy our very ability to delight in the beauty of reality and to cherish the gratuity of life, rather arranging everything on the basis of strict control that has no space for spontaneity and freedom, for relaxation and enjoyment, for childlike forgetfulness of self. This is a great danger for all of us: that we will forget the hierarchy of values, that we will forget that our fear and energy exist only in the service of our love, desire, and joy; they are servants of what is humane in us, what seeks abundant life and happiness, communion with reality and with others, and the ecstasy of fulfillment found only in God. As the Fathers of the Church understood deeply, the struggle against sin is not just about self-mastery but about healing a deep wound (more on this later); it is not about merely correcting or disciplining ourselves—that is so petty in comparison with the real grandeur of our calling!—but about being set free for the fullness of life, about being healed and restored in the very wellsprings of our emotions and affectivity, our thinking and willing, so God may breathe freely within us and we may live the very life of God through participatory grace. This alone truly brings our nature to its fulfillment. Thus the ascetic method when understood authentically is therefore supremely therapeutic. We see this in the Desert Fathers with vivid clarity and also with a paradoxical and beautiful lightness and humor—in that these men whose lives were so apparently “inhuman,” that is, who chose such an austere mode of living, were so radiantly humane, and so ordinary! And they did so with such an acceptance of their quirkiness, their radical poverty, and their foolishness that often we cannot help but smile—for we see ourselves in them, even as in the same moment their apothegmata are truly that, a “word” to us inviting us to convert anew and to embark upon our own “ascetical” (or better, “restorative”) path to God, to yield ourselves totally to his healing mercy and transforming grace. We can learn from them not in falsely focusing on accidentals and externals, but by looking at the core humanity that we all share. We can affirm, therefore, that attaining human wholeness is not just about addressing psychological wounds or traumas or “changing our way of thinking” but about being purified of the selfishness and pride and all the other sinful tendencies that live within us. But neither is it merely about conquering sin, but also about rediscovering the beauty and the wonder that set the heart free from its pettiness and self-preoccupation, and enrich it with the fullness of life that make sin and self-medication, coping and covering-over, not only undesirable but inconceivable. In fact, if read with an adequate degree of maturity and humanity, the saints are the best and deepest psychologists—for they are the true doctors of the soul. It is important for us, in our contemporary age, to rediscover the ascetic ideal, the beauty and richness of the ascetic life. In other words, to rediscover the importance of striving for holiness, which alone is full wholeness, and to do so in response to the call of Christ who says, “Follow me.” And for this to bear authentic fruit, it must be done “humanely,” that is, not as a form of muscularity, as proving that we can conquer ourselves through discipline and practice, but rather as a humble cooperation with prevenient grace. By this grace the Spirit of Christ convicts us of “sin, righteousness, and judgment” (Jn 16:8), and marks out the path to the healing of our disordered tendencies and the gradual re-unification of the energies of our heart, mind, and body that have been dispersed both by fear and by desire gone astray. And here both approaches should meet, the psychological and the ascetical: in the process of coming to see. In coming to see the truth I am set free, or rather my eyes are opened to the path to authentic freedom and, little by little, by God’s grace (manifest in a thousand ways every day) and my own cooperation, I gradually become a person who can live the truth in love. That is freedom. And that is sanctity. And that is also psychological wholeness, not in the individualistic manner that we tend to think about it in our world today, but in its deepest theological sense: the salvation of the soul (and the body) by the restoration of ruptured communion with God and with the cosmos itself. In fact, the ancient usage of the term salvation indicates precisely this unity. Salvation for the ancient believers was not, and in fact for the authentic living tradition of the Church is not, a matter merely of “making it to heaven,” or even merely of being forgiven sin. It means rather both deliverance-from and participating-in, and it means both the removal of debt and the healing of wounds. Salvation is a global phenomenon that includes liberation from the estrangement of sin and its effects, the purification and healing of the heart, the setting right in us of what has been wounded and distorted, and the rehabilitation of the integral image of God that we were created to be. And finally it is our participation, as image of God, in his full likeness—that is, our living experience, in love and truth, of the very innermost life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which through grace has become our own, and yet which we were also created to experience from the very beginning. The psychologization of our faith: I mentioned this near the end of the previous reflection. It is an unfortunate trend in certain spheres of the world today that we too little recognize the spiritual, invisible foundations of reality, and allow ourselves to be confined to what can be seen, to what is visible on the level of natural events, circumstances, and causes. In the worst cases, this is manifest in the tendency to “explain away” the serious nature of sin as hardly more than a psychologically maladaptive behavior rooted in childhood trauma or mistaken beliefs. Nonetheless, our human well-being, even on a natural level, is important, indeed essential, and grace always builds on nature and indeed carries nature to its own full blossoming. God cares for each one of us uniquely and tenderly, and is interested in every part of us. Nature to him is bathed in grace; it is grace. And it can be so for each one of us as well.
So too, many of the insights of psychology as a science—that is, as a careful observation of the workings of the human mind and emotions and their interrelationship with the will and with the events and experiences of life—can be utilized for good, and can harmonize with the truths of our faith. Also, certain practices, techniques, or forms of advice and accompaniment not only can be utilized in service of Christ’s truth and compassion, even as many of these are in respects (though by no means all) a “reinventing of the wheel” of the profound insights of the Fathers and saints of the Church from the beginning. What we need, rather, is a truly holisitic understanding of the Christian life, which takes seriously both nature and grace, both the visible and invisible, and allows these to grow together into fullness: that man, who is the image of God, but who is fractured and wounded by the inheritance of sin, may be restored little by little to God’s likeness by the work of divinizing grace. This is not in any way a matter of not being concerned with human wholeness, even on a natural level, nor with what we tend to call “psychology.” It is rather but rather a matter of our conception of what constitutes this wholeness, and our understanding of the interrelationship between nature and grace, between spirit and body. This is really what is at stake, and at times our approach to mental wholeness is reliant not on an adequately Christian vision of humanity, but rather on materialism of positivism, being excessively naturalistic, and seeing our experiences as hardly more than a jumble of brain processes and chemical balances or imbalances. Legalism and spiritualism are not the answers to this, nor a pharisaic or overly rigid clinging to certain practices or expressions of Christian life (past or present), but rather a true re-centering in the mystery of theosis, of our divinizing transformation in God that begins in baptism and reaches consummation in the resurrection of the body at the end of time, and which every moment of life deepens and facilitates. All of the sacraments, disciplines, prayers, and ascetical practices, all the expressions of human and Christian life find their place therein, in humanity’s appropriation of the redeeming and divinizing work of God in Christ through the heart of his Spirit-imbued Church. Let us therefore neither over-spiritualize the work of grace (as if nature did not matter, and demand a gentle cooperation), nor think that we will find outside of Christ something that Christ fails to offer, just as we have seen in the last century with the rise of New Age, Asiatic forms of meditation even in Christian contexts. The Church on her journey through history continually encounters new peoples and cultures, new forms of thought, practice, and expression, and she most definitely is both challenged by this newness to deepen and expand her proclamation of the Gospel, and also blessed by the “development of doctrine” within her. This does not consist in the addition to her of things that come merely from the outside, like the sewing on of a new limb, a third arm or a new ear, for example, but rather through the ever-deeper maturation from within of the seed of grace and truth that she received from Christ in her begetting and birth from his opened side on the Cross. This is a great paradox: that the Church engages in encounter and dialogue with the world, not as already having all the answers, but as truly listening to the voices and hearts of all peoples and of every individual, not only so that she can find an avenue to give them what is hers, but also so that she may be enriched by what is theirs. For the more that the Church listens to the authentic voice of humankind wherever it is, crying out for God, grappling with the questions and experiences of life, the more too does she come to understand the inestimable truth and beauty of what has been revealed to her and entrusted to her by the Trinity, in order to make his life and love present in the world until the end of time. All of this is tremendously beautiful, and yet another indication that what is truly Catholic, truly proper to the Catholica, cannot be limited either to liberal progress nor to traditionalist conservation, cannot be constrained to resisting the development of doctrine in protecting the Church’s heritage nor to a blindly open aggiornamento to the modern world. Rather, the Church lives at the heart of the paradox, at the coincidence of opposites, where they are drawn together into a deeper and higher unity. The Church lives in the rich and beautiful tension between aggiornamento and ressourcement, between opening to the unexpected work of God in the present while remaining profoundly rooted in the past, in the sources of grace in the living tradition and life of the Church, and indeed discovering and embracing them anew every day, so that they are truly experienced not merely as “past,” but as fully and truly present, according to the words of Saint Augustine: “ever ancient, ever new.” And something that one will notice when one reflects upon the paradoxical mystery of Catholicism deeply enough (as for example did G.K. Chesterton, as he recounted in his book Orthodoxy) is that those who persist in one or other extreme, one or other pole of the opposite, simply cannot see the unity, harmony, and beauty of the center. They rather see it as melding into the very other extreme that they oppose: thus for the “trads” the contemporary Church has been overcome by the heresies of liberalism and modernism, and for the “libs” the Church is out-of-date and persisting in her stubborn and archaic teachings. The truth, of course, is that the Church stands still while the world, on both extremes, is spinning vertiginously in confusion and resistance, in anger and revolt, in delusions of freedom and in agonies of despair. As the motto of the Carthusian Order expresses so well: Stat Crux Dum Volvitur Orbit. “The Cross stands still while the world turns.” And the Church, despite all the scandal and confusion and sin of her members which rises up and threatens to hide her beauty and the beauty of Christ from the world—the Church remains always at this still-point of the Cross, at the place of convergence where all extremes are united in the reconciling heart of Jesus Christ, who gathers us together in the Father. And if we want to be of service to the God who has so loved us, saved us, and called us to himself—if we want to be of service to the Church in whom he lives—then let us not presume to do so outside of or against the Church, but only ever in her very heart and body, with all of its messiness. For here Christ comes to us without ceasing, and here we can truly be united in faith with the leaven of Christ that forever lives in his Body and enlivens all those who persist in her. Here too, for all our littleness, our lives can be a leaven to help heal and counteract the sins and disorders that harm and hurt the Bride of Christ so much. Let us be the saints that the Church needs: saints who are radically and totally obedient to the Magisterium entrusted with the authority of Jesus, to the full symphony of truth that has been entrusted to the Church and is ever protected and elucidated by her throughout history, to the full array of practices and means of grace and sacramental, communal, evangelical life through which her heart—and the heartbeat of the entire Trinity—throbs within us for the glory of God and the salvation of all. To conclude these little fragments on missionary evangelism based on the experience of Father Christopher, allow me to turn to the theme of the radicalism and totality of the love to which we are invited, a love that, as Scripture makes so clear, leads us to the giving of our lives in the likeness of Jesus Christ. We are meant to be totally harnessed by love, harnessed in the joy of loving such that we may become a living sacrifice both to God and to our fellow man, Indeed, we are to more than give ourselves; we are to be given in the poverty and vulnerability of the Crucified, in order to draw near to the other (both God and man) and to be of service to them.
Unfortunately, in the affluent West we live in a culture that fosters a kind of spiritual myopia, an excessive preoccupation with our own well-being and a “psychologization” of the Gospel which sometimes diminishes it to the pursuit of my own wholeness, not to mentio comforts and pleasures and so much else, fostering a disposition of pettiness and self-pity that constrain our hearts from taking flight into the freedom of the love for which we were created, and which our brothers and sisters so desperately need. Indeed, all of our riches and comforts make it so very difficult for us to hear and to be moved by the Word of God, to be gripped by the ravishing beauty of the God who reveals himself to us in Christ—in his Son given, poured out, in the Eucharist, Passion, and Resurrection—and alive in the faces and the lives of the poor and the suffering. For the mystery of the Gospel is a mystery of poverty, and the mystery of poverty is the reality of love—a love that shares in the destitution of Jesus on the Cross, who has given everything “to the end” (Jn 13:2), and thus reflects, in his own torn body, his own pierced flesh, his own anguished heart, the very mystery of the Trinity’s innermost life, which is pure love and gift, and the unbreakable communion that this makes possible. To illustrate this, and to look with reverence and wonder at Father Christopher’s own experience of this, let us look at a couple of words of his own prayer. They are a cry of his own frail and faltering heart, which loves the Lord yet loves him so weakly, and which wants to serve his poor and yet struggles to cast off the burden of selfishness and sluggishness. And for us, too? And are we not invited anew every day, in the peace born of his mercy and the trust born of his love, to embrace again the call to love as if for the first time, and to set out anew on the exodus of love that leads from our narrowness into the broad expanses of self-giving, into communion and service before God and our brothers and sisters? Father Christopher, reflecting on his own tendency to self-pity and complaint, to gauging his own successes and to accepting the praise of others, to viewing his ministry as wealth rather than as poverty—which was illumined for him by his encounter with a woman who had nothing, who was covered in sores, and who saw straight through his hypocrisy—prayed in the presence of the Eucharistic Jesus, in the presence of Jesus upon the Cross: Jesus of my life, I have known your love and goodness for so many years now, and yet I still go on with complaints and meanness. Good Shepherd, so wounded with sin and love, how can I complain when you have always been so good to me? I feel tonight an immense shame when I see the courage of a sick, disabled mother, and I, who “have never wanted for anything,” can think only of complaining, as though you had to thank me for my poor favors. Look at your priest, Christ of Calvary, of so many calvaries where you die forgotten. Look upon your poor priest, your blundering apprentice missionary, who, when he was young, made so many promises of faithful love and friendship to you. Look with mercy upon my sick flesh, my sick heart. A priest of so many dreams and ambitions, who after years, after presuming to ply infinite oceans for love of you, is still thrashing about and pushing along in his meanness, trying to wade across the little puddles of the mission. I’m ashamed, because seeing you, my eyes come and go from your body pierced with love on the wood of a cross, to mine, so soft and comfortable, given a thousand beautiful things. Lord Jesus, my good friend and companion, in whom I have suffered and delighted so much, grant me that I may never complain again. … So many times I have thrown myself down on the ground before Jesus, with nothing to offer you, nothing more than my empty hands. So many times in this chapel, which has on so many nights heard my most intimate confidences, I have felt myself to be the poorest of the poor for having believed, in my conceit, the praise in which the world was so undeservedly dressing me. Prostrate before you, my crucified God, I humbly recognized that I’ve spent so many nights toiling away with my nets in the water and returning to the shore without having caught a single fish. Now, here, in the stillness of this night, I see your hands, so lac-rated, so full of wounds, nailed to the blessed wood of the cross. I thought you always demanded from your poor missionary a granary that would be more and more full of the harvest, and now I know my empty hands are enough for you. It’s enough for you that my that hands should slowly assume the form of yours, so that the nails should hurt mine more and yours less. I know now that it isn’t applause and worldly success that forges the missionary, but that instead his worth is measured by the wounds of nails that the world cannot see, but that leave the missionary on a cross, a little more nailed with And I still complain tonight about having empty hands? Empty, yes, to extend them like a beggar to you, Jesus of all the calvaries, and so that I never again complain that the yield of the fishing or the harvest is small. It is enough for me tonight that these hands of mine should hurt a little bit more and be emptier and emptier, to bless, to caress, to heal, to love, to serve. Empty, yes, of myself, but full of your goodness and compassion.i *********** i. Ibid., 204-208. To follow up on the words of the previous fragment, allow me to share a final quote concerning the parish of Father Christopher in the Dominican Republic. I will not give any further comment, but rather leave it in silence as an example and a witness of what a living and vibrant transformation of life and culture by the Gospel looks like, and what is most certainly possible also in our own lives and communities. It is written:
With the support of an enormous number of collaborators, catechists, and backers, the Liturgy of the Hours is prayed, mornings and evenings, in many little campos and bateyes in the parish. Every Sunday, after celebrating Mass, a team of properly trained extraordinary eucharistic ministers line up to bring Holy Communion to the sick and the handicapped in their communities. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is held every Friday, and the catechists for baptism, first Communion, confirmation, and marriage roam the nearly six hundred square miles of the parish of San José de los Llanos, proclaiming the gospel to the poor, the workers, the mothers, the married or separated couples, the orphans, the starving, the naked, the addicted... Every hamlet and batey knows, weeks in advance, where Father Christopher will celebrate Mass every evening. When he arrives at the place whose turn it is, they have everything ready: the altar, the altar cloth, the corporals, the missal. The congregation gathers in the chapel, if there is one, and if not, in the shade of a coconut or mango tree. Rain or shine, not a day goes by on which he does not celebrate Mass in those campos and bateyes in the parish, in many of which Mass had never been celebrated before. Baptisms are performed at an impressive rate. The father’s helpers maintain the register to perfection. The preparatory formation is a kind of juggling act of catechization, because coordinating the meetings among parents, godparents, and godchildren is no exercise for the faint of heart. The volunteers in the parish are ordinary people, laypeople with families and jobs, who decide to help the father in his pastoral tasks. i As Father Christopher himself writes: During the Ash Wednesday Mass, as Jesus did in sending his first disciples out to evangelize, we undertook a great mission for the whole town of Los Llanos. The parish council designated the evangelization of the town as a priority objective for this liturgical season and solicited volunteers for it in the Sunday Masses leading up to it. Sixty volunteers, young people and adults, stepped forward. There was a coordinating team that took charge of dividing the town into neighborhoods and streets. Every pair of volunteers was assigned a sector and, when the Eucharist was over, they were sent out two by two. The goal is to turn Lent into a large mission. They’ll spend the first two weeks visiting every house in town with a syllabus of evangelization, a little catechesis with every family, making a note of the sacraments that each member needs, and an invitation to become part of a community. The third week will coincide with a novena to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of our parish, in which we have a different priest for every night with a set theme. The new communities will thus be established. We’ve already established five communities in the town. People from the same neighborhood meet every Thursday night with their own leader, and a series of parallel conversations are carried on in all of them. We pray that five more of the more marginalized neighborhoods will emerge as a result of the mission. The mission will end with an act of penitence on the Friday before Palm Sunday, for which we are counting on priests in the surrounding area to help us hear confessions, as we expect there will be a great who will benefit from that sacrament. I ask you to commend this mission in your prayers and sacrifices. ii ************* iIbid., 125. iiIbid., 129-130. After reading and writing about the evangelical mission of Father Christopher above—and other similar things, in particular the vibrant life of his parish—I have asked myself why parochial life often looks so different in the first-world West than it does in poor countries around the world, in which the Gospel is being proclaimed and received, often for the first time, amid great poverty and need. Of course, the immediate answer is obvious: the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel, as was prophesied of Jesus in the book of Isaiah: “The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (Is 61:1; Lk 4:18). It is the poor who know their need for God, who, experiencing the fragility of earthly existence and the absolute inadequacy of all worldly things to fulfill the restless longing of the heart, see in the proclamation of Christ the true answer to all their desires. They have experienced in their very flesh the disposition without which hearing and receiving the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ is impossible: I need you and I want you!
But there is another element that also comes to mind, related to the first. In addition to poverty, there is also interconnectedness, an openness, a “wovenness” of life and relationships that endures among the poor that in the affluent West has been largely replaced by individualism, hedonism, and an all-too-narrow understanding of the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” How often, for example, do we not even know the names of our immediate neighbors? How often is our life filled to the brim with our own private affairs with little or no regard for seeking the well-being of those around us? How often can an unknown face appear in one of our parishes and depart without a single person making a point of speaking with them, making them feel welcomed, and inviting them to return, to find in the community of faith a true home and family? But this is not only a “horizontal” problem, in other words, one that is a symptom of a breakdown of the depth and openness of human relationships and a sense of our mutual belonging (though this is certainly the case), but also a breakdown in the vibrancy and joy, the enthusiasm and fervor, of our life of prayer, worship, and devotion to God. Here, too, has not faith been “privatized” into something that happens in the secrecy of my heart, and that should not be spoken of before others and shared with them, and which should not be “too present” in my so-called public life, that is, in my choices in the daily affairs of work, relationships, politics, and commerce? But if faith does not utterly pervade these things, it is profoundly lacking; it is even, as Saint James said, a dead faith (Js 2:14-26). Even the life of many of our parishes often leaves something to be desired, sometimes being hardly more than an empty building throughout the week except for Sunday Mass, daily Masses attended by a chosen few devout persons, and perhaps a group or two of catechesis or education. All of these things are good, of course, but there could also be so much more. I suspect that the attractiveness of the so-called “Benedict option” communities, and even parts of the temptation to radical traditionalism or, alternatively, jaded liberalism, come from a discontent, a deep and unspoken awareness of what is lacking in our Christian life in the affluent West. And this is neither the responsibility solely of the Church, who has ceaselessly offered us the light of truth and the fire of love, nor of our priests (the scandals of the past notwithstanding), but also of the ordinary man and woman in the pew. Many long for a more vibrant and intentional Catholic community, for a greater sharing of life and relationship, for a more immersive and constant devotion to prayer and worship, not only as individuals but as a community, and—if we look deeply enough—for a renewed enthusiasm and boldness in evangelization and witness. But do we embrace and live these desires in a vulnerable and real enough way that change may happen, and may spread? And this is not a matter of size or of money, but of listening to the Spirit and of the radical readiness of all the members of the Body of Christ, from the pastor to the most humble of the faithful, to welcome the newness that only he can bring. We may think that our culture is too “old” now to recover, too lost to return home, too secular to rediscover its Christian roots (indeed even more deeply than at its founding), but God can make all things new, not through programs and resolutions, but through the radical conversion and transformation of hearts, and their willingness to put out into the deep to live a wholehearted Christian life. Let us contemplate some further words of Father Christopher recounting the “climax” of these days of dedicated mission to these bateyes which had never received the Gospel. He expresses in a splendid way the high point of the act of implanting the Cross of the Redeemer in these new lands, and in the soil of these hearts that had never received him: the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. The simplicity, directness, and enthusiasm of his words—born of the childlike joy of these people—cuts through so much of our “old” and “tired” theologizing, our rigid preoccupation with secondary and peripheral things, so that we can return to the heart without which nothing has meaning: the celebration of God’s joy opened up to us, his love that cherishes each one of us and draws us together, and the happiness of a life entirely consumed with sharing this joy with all people.
The mission reached an unambiguously clear peak moment that em- bodied and made sense of all our tasks and efforts: the celebration of Mass in these six bateyes for the very first time. It took us a month to prepare for it, explaining every day one aspect or another of the Mass. Those men and women didn’t have the slightest idea of what the Mass was, and in all the bateyes we taught the same songs and the same responses to the various parts of the ceremony. The big day arrived. One afternoon, at the end of the mission, we gathered everybody together in the biggest batey, San Felipe. We organized transportation with a tractor and a cart used to haul cane, besides making several trips in our vehicles, gathering them all under the bower. The happiness of the people from the different bateyes was indescribable, and even more so, if possible, was the joy of the young missionaries at seeing them arrive. There was an outpouring of enthusiasm. The songs followed one another to the rhythm of clapping and the guitar. Despite the deluge that was falling, and the quagmire in which we found ourselves bogged down, there was nothing that could dampen so much happiness. The Mass finally began. The first Mass. The people were amazed, they followed every step and every gesture with amazement, they sang and sang, and there was no way to stop them. When they said amen, they shouted so loudly that they seemed to pierce the clouds and reach heaven itself. Only one person had been baptized, one man, who was the only one who could receive Communion. I talked in the homily about the simplest things, the really important things. Holding high a crucifix in my hand, I explained the love of God the Father, who gave his Son to the world, and how he, the innocent, had died for our sins. I talked about the Church, about how we are called to be the Body of Christ in the world, and emphasized that there are no strangers in the Church. I talked about the Virgin Mary, about her maternal love and her constant presence at our side. The Mass ended when darkness fell, and after singing, singing, and more singing they finally got back into their wagons to go back to their different bateyes. They had all come in their Sunday best. They returned up to their ears in mud but happy, radiantly happy. They had all participated in their first Mass. And I had the odd feeling of having celebrated my own first Mass all over again! If it was the first Mass for them, it was also the first one for me.i ***** iIbid., 102-103. I would like to share in this fragment and the following some words illustrating the true beauty of evangelization, which can cast a strong light upon our own lives and the longing for God that indeed lies in the heart of every person who has not yet heard the message of Christ, or heard it in all of its clarity and brilliance, just as this longing lies also in each one of us. Let us believe that the possibility of evangelization, both near and far, in both the “first” and the “third” world, is not only possible but ready to bear abundant fruit. For what Jesus once said about the Samaritans is true in all times: “Lift up your heads and see that the fields are already ripe for the harvest” (Jn 4:35). Even if evangelization meets with different responses in different cultures and situations, and if its modes and methods prove to be different as it seeks to encounter men and women where they find themselves, and to make known to them the love and truth that save, it is always feasible, always indeed the very heart of what the Church has to offer to a world estranged from God and yet thirsting for him. Let us not be afraid of the joy of the Gospel! And let us not be afraid to share it with others!
These words come from a letter written by Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius recounting his work, and that of other missionaries who joined him, among the poor sugar cane laborers of the Dominican Republic at the very end of the twentieth century. He writes: No missionary, whether a priest or a layman, had been to these corners of the parish, according to what the local elders told us. Nobody had ever been there to evangelize, catechize, or otherwise prepare these people for a sacrament. Nobody had ever come to pronounce the word Jesus. The honor, grace, and privilege of being the first to make Christ present to these people were ours. Everybody’s enthusiasm was extraordinary. There was so much happiness, so much joy in the hearts and faces of these poor people, weathered and worn by pain, hunger, abandonment, affliction, sweat, exhaustion, sun and more sun, illnesses, oblivion… The faces of the children were so full of tenderness and innocence… Every day, when it was time for us to leave, they looked at us as though to say, “Will you be back tomorrow?” As if having such a good time couldn’t last long, as if it were all a dream that they were afraid to wake up from. The people were divided into groups of men, women, and children, which were assigned to different missionaries. The time was devoted to teaching them the sign of the cross, the simplest prayers, religious songs, games for the children, reading and writing for the adults...and anything else that was within the reach of each missionary’s imagination. Since we didn’t have anywhere to gather, we made use of the shade of a tree, an arbor, the yard next to a house. We brought our school supplies, such as chalk and a big blackboard that had been given to us and that we cut into three pieces. The thousand scenes and unforgettable moments that would certainly be etched deep in the heart of every missionary from then on are, without a doubt, the greatest recompense and treasure that the Lord could have given us. How could one forget the moment when, during a prayer of thanks- giving in one of the bateyes, a woman who had never in her life prayed out loud said: “Thank you, Jesus, because we have always lived like animals, but now we know we are children of God”? We planted a big cross in every batey, in the most visible and busiest place, to show that the victory of the crucifixion had come to this place and that these people were now bathed in the precious blood of Christ. We began the day in prayer before the cross and ended it there, approaching the cross one at a time to kiss it and to bid Jesus good-bye until the following day. I’ve been back there, and in all the bateyes they still gather every night to sing and to pray the simple prayers that they learned during the days of the mission. And I wonder: What does God feel when he hears these songs and prayers? Is he moved? Is he moved when he hears a child in filthy shorts, his face covered with mucus, or a woman worn out with suffering and troubles, or a man with calloused hands, hard as leather, singing with his eyes closed and his hands raised to heaven: “God’s love is wonderful...so great...so high...so broad”? Our God isn’t blind, nor has he a heart of stone. You friends who read this letter in other parts of the earth: How many surprises are awaiting us in heaven! How near are these poor people to God and the kingdom of heaven! i ********** iJesús García, Slaves in Paradise: A Priest Stands Up for Exploited Sugarcane Workers, trans. Richard Goodyear (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2012), 99-100. As is so often the case, the loss of God can lead precisely to the discovery of God, for it is in many times and many ways not God himself who is lost, but the countless idols and projections of the human mind and heart which we set up on an altar which is meant to be reserved for his transcendent, Triune majesty alone. And even for those many who have lost God himself in the mass confusion and doubt, or have never been allowed to know him, it is nonetheless true that the longing for God, indeed the intuition of his reality, cannot be erased from the human heart, and his very loss can be a preparation for his presence. Thus the aching abyss of loneliness and sorrow, the anguish and confusion of the people of our time shall for many prove to be a catalyst of a movement of spiritual awakening and renewal brought about by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who descends precisely into places of poverty and need, places that are empty, to anoint them with his presence.
Allow me to give but one example of this movement by sharing some words from Sally Read, a woman who was raised in firm atheism who later converted to Catholicism. In her written account of her conversion experience, which took place over a period of less than a year, she writes: Strangely, in the fear of falling into that void [of atheistic despair], I now see proof of God’s being. His absence was so painfully loud it seems, now, to prove his existence. I seemed almost at risk of being torn to physical pieces—so the fact that I lacked something vital seems, now, obvious and insistent. The rock, of course, is mentioned more than once in the psalms. Whenever I hear it in prayer now, I think of the rock that lay at the limits of that terrifying void and know it as the other side of God—he reaches us wherever we are, even if we are so far from knowing him that we mistake him completely. His infinity always contains our finitude. And she goes on to say later on: My father actually had a lot in common with good Catholics: he was uncompromising on truth; he had a sound conscience and was always ready to stick up for the underdog. But more than that, the good atheist’s soul, I had come to see, can almost be a tabula rasa, readied for God. It was Simone Weil who described atheism as a “purification”. My father, the most scrupulous atheist, had rejected the false trappings and evils that can exist in any religion: the superficial consolations, the conveniently personalized god, the sin. And he taught me to do the same. Neither of us were satisfied with half-truths or superstition; we had no fear of supernatural punishment. There had been a gaping space in my soul for truth. And I believe the same could be true of my father. That day I began to see the polar opposites of atheism and Catholicism as synapse-like connections in the infinite medley of our own free will. What we kick against may turn out to be what we are most attached to, where our passion lies, at the quick of our soul. And when those connections flip over into faith—even on a deathbed—they can color an entire life, as one drop of cochineal, added last, colors a tall glass of water. Truly atheism and Catholicism are not as far apart as they may appear, or rather the connections between them are more profound than we realize, when a heart of good conscience embraces one or the other; for what is implicit as a seed in one—the refusal to believe in a false god on the basis of human imagining or need or immature projection, and the willingness to face the truth of reality in all its vulnerability and rawness—can lead directly to the birth of the other: respect for the mystery of the transcendent God, who shatters all idols and demands from the heart total commitment to truth. And what is revealed in the one shines light into the darkness of the other, seasoning with beauty and truth what was so empty and anguished, so lacking—revealing that the lack finds its meaning, at the end, when it is filled with the fullness for which it always yearned. As Sally writes regarding her experience on receiving Christ in the Eucharist for the first time: In the intimacy following Communion I was aware of my story, with all of its contradictions, doubts, desires and sins, resolving in the same way a city’s random, scattered lights take on one whole form when viewed from the window of an ascending night flight. I was taken in by Christ’s gaze and felt no pressing inconsistencies or troubles. He saw the long sweep of me, with infinitely tender comprehension, from before I can remember to the rangy future of how I should and could be. The acceptance of his gaze—like that drop of cochineal—colored everything. I recalled how my screaming had stopped after my baptism as a baby; it felt as though another long cry inside me had been silenced now, too. I had arrived. Let us not therefore presume, when someone says to us, “I am an atheist,” that they have definitively rejected God and ruled him out, that they are arrogantly persisting against him, that they are our enemy or the enemy of the faith. Yes, there is certainly great evil in the world and there are many forces that oppose God. But many—very many—of the people whom we encounter today are victims of the darkness of our world, a darkness that has been with us from the days of Adam and Eve. These men and women, however wayward they may seem to us, should not be judged and lumped into a category that would dismiss them and hold them at arms’ length. Rather, each one of them, as we ourselves, is living a great story, and the final word of this story is not pronounced until the moment of death when we at last stand before God unveiled. Let us, then, listen deeply enough to each heart whom we encounter, and with enough humility, compassion, and empathy, that we may attune to the unique contours of their journey, their story, and discern—and place ourselves at the service of—God’s great intention for it to become a story of the journey from darkness into light, from estrangement into the welcoming embrace of his everlasting Love. |
Joshua ElznerI am a humble disciple of Jesus Christ who seeks to live in prayerful intimacy with the Trinity and in loving service to all through a life devoted to prayer, compassion, and creativity. On this blog I will share the little fruits of my contemplation in the hopes of being of service to you on your own journey of faith. I hope that something I have written draws your heart closer to the One who loves you! Archives
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