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The Paschal and Eucharistic Mystery is nothing but the transposition into time and space of the eternal intimacy and self-giving of the three Persons of the Trinity, its realization in and through human heart, history, and flesh. As the Father eternally pours himself out in an abundance of overflowing tenderness and love into the Son and the Spirit, and receives and shelters them always in his bosom, and as the Son is eternally begotten of the love of the Father and reciprocates with the total gift of himself back to the Father, and as the Spirit is the mutual breath or kiss of love eternally shared by the Father and the Son—so this is the Mystery present and at work at the heart of the mysteries of our salvation. The revelation and opening up of this Mystery is the deepest meaning of the Incarnation, Eucharist, and Paschal Mystery of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ. Here what is hidden from eternity in God is made visible to us in the flesh of the incarnate Son, upon whom the Spirit dwells and whom he breathes forth upon us, in the countenance of the Son which to see is to see the face of the Father.
The eternal outpouring of the Father’s begetting is made visible to us in the conception of the Son in time in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Son’s reception and reciprocal gift, indeed his own outpouring of love to us in the name of the Father and as revelation of the Father, is realized in his gift of the Eucharist and in his laying down of his life on the Cross, in which he also opens up space for all of us to dwell, in the recesses of his own Heart, drawn thus into the very intimacy of the Trinity through participation in the mystery of his Resurrection and Glorification, which become our own. And we can share in this mystery, we can experience its saving beauty and ravishing glory as we ourselves consent to live the same dynamic of love, this circulation of receptivity and reciprocal gift that the Son eternally lives before his Father, and which he lives also at every moment of his earthly life as a man among us; we share in this mystery as child and spouse, filled as was the Virgin Mary with the presence of the Spirit and drawn into a filial union with the heavenly Father, into a spousal union with the Bridegroom Christ, and into a participation in the overflowing fruitfulness of divine love that harnesses our whole being and makes of it a sacred eucharist, a holy passover—a paschal mystery—that allows the eternal life of the Trinity to be realized in us, and through us in the world, and to carry us and the entire cosmos back into the innermost life of God, where all shall be consummated in the fullness of participation in the eternal intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who shall be All in all in us, and us in him. In the light of the previous fragments, we can see that the life and vocation of each one of us can be understood as living a Eucharistic and Paschal existence, sharing in the play, prayer, and passion of the incarnate Son for the praise of God’s glory and for the salvation of all. It is sharing in the eternal dispositions and experience of the only-begotten Son through the heart of conformity with him in his humanity, that by being “playmates” with him who joined himself to our life on earth we may become playmates with him at the heart of his eternal life with the Father and the Holy Spirit. “I was before him like a little child; I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited earth and delighting in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). This is the ceaseless play that is our origin and our consummation, our provenance and our destiny, our calling and our gratuitous gift of grace. This is the play in which both prayer and passion find their place, in which all activity and all repose, all suffering and all joy, all responsiveness and all receptivity, all gift and all outpouring, blossom freely and are always held in the security and serenity of the perfect love of the Father of all, from whom nothing can separate us, and who in his infinite wisdom and goodness weaves all into a tapestry of beauty and of joy, in this life and unto the consummation of the new creation.
There is another phrase in the Nicene Creed that is especially significant in our current context. It is actually quite amazing that in a profession of faith that is totally centered in the Trinity, focused wholly on affirming belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and their saving activity, there are two human beings, two historical figures, whose are included as well. This is because they are, as it were, necessary to the full profession of this activity, safeguards of its historicity: the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate. These references not only situate the Incarnation and the saving Passion of God in the real history of our world, in the real cosmic space of materiality, but also speak something profound of the true bodiliness of our Lord Jesus Christ. Mary is the perennial witness to the awesome truth that the Son of God truly became flesh, became a Son of an earthly mother, and lived among us not as a mere appearance or a ghost, but as a living human in all the parts of man, in flesh and blood. And Pontius Pilate is a witness to the true suffering and death of the Son of God, to his entrance into the darkness of all that is ours, which marks this world as a result of sin and the rupture it has wrought. For we truly profess that he “suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven.” Inseparable from the Incarnation, the Paschal Mystery lies at the heart of our faith.
And they both reveal also our own calling and destiny in Christ—a destiny lived not only in the spirit but in the body, a body sanctified by the Body of Jesus given to us and drawing us into unity with him. In the light cast from the mysteries of the life of Jesus, indeed in participation in the mysteries of the humanity of Jesus, our own life becomes clear and its significance revealed. For if Christ seeks to be born also in us, conceived in the womb of faith and brought forth through the birth pangs of love, that we may become a living icon of the Son alive again in heart and flesh, so too he seeks to live and perpetuate the saving mystery of his Pasch also in and through us, that we may be made capable of sharing fully in the glorious joy of his own eternal life with the Father, and that this grace may spread to all. We too are to be given with him as a “eucharist,” joined to his own total self-gift in the Eucharist, which sanctifies and offers flesh, making it again the very sacrament of perfect unity and the meeting-place of universal intimacy. We too are to experience the victory of life over death, the saving compassion that permeates all suffering and loss and proves utterly triumphant, and to taste to the full—already in this life and fully in the glorious consummation of the new creation—the plenitude of his own Risen Life, his own Ascension into the bosom of the Father. For here, in Jesus Christ, who became man and gave himself to the end for us in Eucharist, Passion, and Resurrection, in sacrament and suffering and salvation, we all find a home. In Jesus Christ the entire cosmos is welcomed into the innermost heart of the Holy Trinity, that it may partake forever in the ecstatic joy and abundant fullness of the life of love and intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After having read and recited the words of the Nicene Creed for so many years, it is understandable that they lose for us something of their initial impact, indeed of their world-turning topsy-turvydom that in fact sets the world right once again, turning what we see upside-down rightside-up once again. G.K. Chesterton spoke of the conversion experience of Francis of Assisi in this manner, saying:
This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards. It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.” It was in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.” It was by this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few people have enjoyed them; and they are in themselves the best working example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved, and more indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is significant and not when it is insignificant.i Truly, God desires us to see all the things of this world in the light of their Origin; this is why he has revealed it to us, revealed himself to us in so evident and profound a manner, even if with such incredible delicacy and humility. He wishes us to see all things as extraordinary precisely because, through faith, we can discern God himself, the uncreated life of the Trinity, within them, and can thus reach out to him, know him, and feel him in and through them. How different this is from so many of the other “mysticisms” offered by other religions and spiritualities! It is the true marriage of God and creation, in which in the revelation of God the world itself also reveals its truest and deepest meaning, even as it is carried forward, with the human heart longing for God himself, utterly ravished by his beauty, until all is fulfilled in the direct, face-to-face vision and unmediated embrace of eternal consummation. That is what we are about in this fragment. For if we could really receive the words of the Creed like children, indeed all the teachings and sacraments and the very living lifeblood of the Church, then the same experience of Saint Francis is accessible to each one of us. We can then experience both the thrill of the “strangeness” of first discovery and the warmth and security of “coming home.” Allow me to focus upon one aspect here, picking up the thread of the last few fragments. I remember being assigned a reading from Saint John Damascene in my Philosophy of God course at university in which he says that “we should not be ashamed to speak of begetting in relation to God, for he himself has wished to speak to us in this manner, and the earthly reality therefore must reveal something that exists in God himself, and correspond with it.” This is a paraphrase, since I have not been able to locate this quotation since. But the truth stands. Perhaps the words of the Bible, words elucidated and summarized in the Creed, not longer strike us in their marvelous beauty and indeed surprising enfleshedness. But let us open ourselves to be moved by them anew. For, while respecting the divine transcendence of any earthly images or concepts, we can and must affirm that the God who reveals himself to us in the Creed is not a set of ideas but three living Persons, Persons who emerge to enter into relationship with us and to grant us a knowledge of themselves that is true and certain, real and direct. The Nicene Creed states: I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. A few things stand out in our current context: Jesus is referred to as the “only begotten Son” of the Father, something straight from John’s Gospel, who is born of the Father before all ages. And then, almost immediately, we profess that “by the Holy Spirit he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” The Apostle’s Creed says simply, “he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the Virgin Mary.” There is thus a direct connection drawn between the eternal begetting of the Son in the heart of eternity, his being born of the Father before all ages, and his begetting in the womb of the Virgin Mary and his birth from her in Bethlehem. The eternal, uncreated mystery of God, the Son’s generation from the Father in the love of the Spirit, is not only reflected but revealed in in the midst of time; it is fully expressed, fully made flesh, in his begetting and birth in and from the womb of the Virgin Mary. And there is also a parallelism in the Creed that carries the union between divine and human, this marriage of heaven and earth, even further. Namely, we then profess our belief “in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son” (or through the Son), solidifying the presence of the Holy Spirit in the eternal begetting of the Son, being as it were the “womb” in whom the Son is eternally begotten or the shared love of the Father and the Son, the bond of their communion. But that is not all, for just as the Virgin Mary is the individual living locus of the Son’s incarnation, and thus of the revelation of his eternal generation from the Father in the midst of time and space, so through the Holy Spirit the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” becomes the enduring locus of his continuing incarnation, and precisely because, impregnated and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, she becomes in ecclesia what Mary is in persona, that is, the Virgin, Daughter, Bride, and Mother, the Bride of Christ who through the grace of the Holy Spirit conceives his image anew in all the children of God throughout history. And thus, too, Christ’s begetting and birth from the Father—and from the Virgin—is realized also in each one of us, who are born, “not of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God,” to truly become children of God, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and coheirs with Christ,” for he has “predestined” us “to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren” (Jn 1:13; Rom 8:17, 29). And thus even now, in the very limits of time and space, in the very living of our bodiliness, gathering up as it were the groaning of the entire cosmos in the breath of the Spirit who prays within us, “we who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23), that is, for the glorious consummation of all things that awaits us in the new creation, when the whole universe shall be renewed and fulfilled in God, who is All is all, and in whom are all things. ************* i. G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi, quoted from: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63084 “This is my Body given for you… This is my Blood poured out for you.” These words, more than any others, reveal the true meaning and significance of the body. The human body—namely the human Body of Jesus Christ entering into our own bodies in holy communion—becomes the true sacrament of our deepest and most radical encounter with God, and the means by which the Trinity comes to live within us and we in him. The Body of Christ is therefore the “medicine of immortality,” the first-fruits of our resurrection, the bread of life by which we taste heaven already, and by which our own bodies are made immortal. Jesus said as much: “Just as I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6:57). And by live he means that we participate in the substance of his own eternal life with the Father and the Holy Spirit, an eternal life in which his own bodily humanity fully shares in his glorious Resurrection and Ascension, and in which at the end of time each one of us shall participate: as he lives, we too will live (cf. Jn 14:19).
And yet the body can become a sacrament in this manner only because it is already a sacrament from the first moment of its creation. Indeed, John Paul II calls the conjugal meaning of the body by which man and woman become “one flesh” the primordial sacrament on which all other sacrament are, as it were, based. For a sacrament is precisely defined as a making visible of the invisible mystery, that it may be experienced and participated in. I participate in the life of others in and through my body, and in and through their bodies, in that our bodies become places of reciprocal hospitality, “hosts” of mutual welcoming and communication, of self-giving and the abiding communion that blossoms from it. And yet sin disrupted the harmony of this communion because it fractured the purity and totality of this self-giving, and it made the body in some manner “opaque” to the inner mystery within, even as it instilled in the mind and heart a tendency toward a gaze that is inclined toward possessiveness and pleasure-seeking, rather than the reverence and love that sees and is moved purely by the beauty of the body’s sacred mystery as sanctuary and temple of love and sacrament of communion. And yet Christ comes. He comes not to condemn the wounded heart but to rehabilitate it, to instill within it a new sight: a vision born of his own vision, a vision made possible by the prolonged experience of his own loving and cherishing gaze, which causes the scales to fall from our eyes and illumines us such that we can see in every person the mystery of someone uniquely and incomparably loved, chosen from eternity unto eternity by Love himself. And by entering into communion with the humanity of Christ, who draws us into union with the Father and the Spirit, we come to live our own humanity in its authentic depth and beauty. Our whole life little by little becomes sacramental, a participation in the unseen mystery of the Trinity and a manifestation of this mystery in the contours of human life and love. Our life becomes “Eucharistic.” We come to have a sacramental vision of the entire cosmos, filled with the glory and splendor of God and revealing his countenance, and we hear his “word” speaking uniquely in each and every thing that he has made, drawing our hearts to the One whom we love and for whom we long. We “are moved to holy joy, divine love, and tears by” things “both worldly and spiritual.” Wounded by the ravishing beauty of Christ and falling head-over-heels in love with him, we “keep before our mind’s eye the face of the beloved and embrace it there tenderly.” Yes, all things become sacred to us because the face of the Beloved is in everything, and everything is in the Beloved, held and cherished by him in its singular beauty and meaning in his providential plan. “That is how it is for the body. And that is how it is for the spirit.” Only such a transfigured vision can heal the wounds that have afflicted and still afflict our world, and all the trauma and scars of the scandal of abuse and disorder. And only this can prevent such terrible things from happening again. It is the Eucharist, therefore, that shall be our truest medicine and the remedy for all ills, though its work is so subtle and so gentle as to go unnoticed. But the Eucharist can only be seen with eyes of faith and prayer, eyes of humility that walk the journey to interior integration (castus) through longing for intimacy with the Beloved, that we may know his presence always, even in the night of faith, and proclaim with Saint Patrick: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.” Then I shall spontaneously treat every person whom I encounter as Christ himself, as he himself said: “You did it to me” (Mt 25:40). And in the same moment the unique and irreplaceable beauty of every person shall be unveiled before me, not apart from Christ but in Christ, and I shall marvel at their glory, in awe and wonder that the mystery of eternity is capable already of shining through the contours of human flesh, stirring my heart with the longing for the consummation that awaits in eternity, where God shall be All in all and all shall be in God. One who upon beholding the beauty of the body is moved spontaneously to the love of God has “risen to immortality before the general resurrection.” So we read in the previous fragment. This is the fulfillment of the mystery of chastity, which is able to see already in mortal flesh the mystery of immortality, and to discern in the lines of this world the radiance of the virginal consummation that awaits us at the end of time. This helps us to truly understand the significance of the saying of Christ that those in heaven, and in the new age, shall “neither marry nor be given in marriage, but rather be like the angels of God” (Mt 22:30). Our being made “like the angels” does not imply a leaving behind of our bodily nature, which has been directed willed by God and by him assumed and redeemed. Rather, it means that “what is mortal shall be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:4), and that the body shall be harmonized with the spirit and by the spirit permeated, restored as a true temple sanctuary once again as it was meant to be at the beginning: a sanctuary for the person who is the image of God and a sanctuary for God himself.
And a purified and transfigured gaze of love can see this mystery, and be moved by it, already in this life. Just as the eyes of faith see in a bit of bread or wine the mystery of the Son of God incarnate, and in him the full mystery of God, so in the material beauty of the human body—even a body broken and suffering—they can see the glory of the risen body unveiled. They see in the seed that is sown in weakness already the beauty of what shall be when it rises imperishable, for they behold in it the mystery that it has been from the beginning and shall always be, a mystery that even sin was not able to efface, and which the redemptive gift of Christ’s own Body restored and fulfilled. Thus the gaze of a purified heart, a heart transformed in the fire of God’s own loving gaze upon his children, becomes a “Eucharistic gaze,” one that sees not only in the consecrated Gifts the mystery of the Body of Christ, but also in every single person, male and female, the living presence of Christ and of his Bride, the Church. And then everything becomes beautiful, every single body of every single person, and every single part, for all of it speaks of love, of love and communion, of communion and belonging, of belonging and the joy of heaven, of the joy of heaven and the consummation of the new creation wherein all bodies shall rise again restored and made glorious, permeated wholly by God’s own life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The body bears its capacity for divinization not only in the sense that someday it shall be made glorious, someday its earthiness shall be made spiritual, but even more appropriately in that it is already a bearer of divine glory and that its very nature manifests God, reveals God, being formed and fashioned by him. In other words, the body is iconic. It is a making-visible of something that is invisible, or rather of two things: the spiritual nature of the person and the self-giving of God. The body speaks of a person’s mystery, being truly the living “sacrament” of his or her presence in the world. And what are sacraments ordered toward? Toward gift, toward love, toward communion. Does not the human body, after all, exist in a ceaseless process of receiving and giving, of taking in and of surrendering, whether that be the inhalation and exhalation of air, the mystery of sight with the eyes, or the conjugal union of man and woman? The whole body speaks of love, manifesting first that this person is a gift, this body is a gift given by God to the individual who lives it; and as a gift the body is also a vocation: this body is also meant to become a gift back to its Creator and also to other persons. And precisely as gift and vocation the body is iconic of God himself. For what is mutual self-giving and the communion that such giving effects but the manner of living and loving proper to the Trinity? Thus the body, in being the revelation of the person, is the revelation of the very mystery of God.
Do we see this in the way we look upon and relate to our own bodies? Do we see this when we look upon and relate to the bodies of others? For in this consists the wholeness of chastity, its root and its crown, its foundation and its fulfillment. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). I think in this context of a beautiful text from the Ladder of Saint John Climacus, in which he says: There was a man who, having looked on a [woman’s] body of great beauty, at once gave praise to its Creator and after one look was stirred to love God and to weep copiously, so that it was marvelous how something that could have brought low one person managed to be the cause of a heavenly crown for another. And if such a man feels and behaves in similar fashion on similar occasions, then he has already risen to immortality before the general resurrection.i When we reflect on this deeply enough, therefore, we see very clearly that beauty does not just indicate the pleasingness of something to our eyes, but rather communicates to us a harmonious form. It is the “external radiance of the interior essence,” to use one definition, in which all the parts of a being approach me as a unified whole and strike me as beautiful, not because I can gain something by them, but because they are simply good in themselves, and therefore true. The body speaks of truth because it speaks of meaning. And it is beautiful because it does so. Beauty is, after all, the voice of the good truth, a vehicle by which our hearts are stirred to the pursuit of goodness that will lead us to be espoused to the truth, and in this truth to find fulfillment. Beauty, therefore, is a sacred mystery, an irradiation of God’s light in this world. Its true beholding purifies and “chastens” the heart, gathering it from fragmentation into unity. On the other hand, seeking pleasure for its own sake degrades the heart and fragments it, fracturing the unity of body and spirit. As John Climacus further says: The same guideline ought to direct us when when we sing songs and hymns, for the lovers of God are moved to holy joy, divine love, and tears by songs both worldly and spiritual, just as lovers of pleasure are moved to the opposite. … Someone truly in love keeps before his mind’s eye the face of the beloved and embraces it there tenderly. Even during sleep the longing continues unappeased, and he murmurs to his beloved. That is how it is for the body. And that is how it is for the spirit. A man wounded by love had this to say about himself—and it really amazes me—“I sleep (because nature commands this) but my heart is awake because of the abundance of my love.”ii These words are straight from the bride in the Song of Songs: “I slept, but my heart was awake” (Sg 5:2). In sum, when a heart truly longs for the uncreated beauty of God, yearning for the countenance of Christ, it is gradually enabled to see God everywhere. For it seeks constantly the radiance of his light, to taste it already in this life, to be joined together with it, and eventually in its embrace to find everlasting rest. Indeed, if we look deeply enough, we can see in the very mystery of the body an apologia for God, a proof of his existence. If Thomas Aquinas found avenues to God in the processes of reason and Anselm in the concept of the highest thinkable thought and John Henry Newman in the indelible voice of conscience, there is also, as we see in Augustine, a proof for God’s existence to be found in beauty. And the human body is the most beautiful of all forms in this world, for its form is the most sacred: the person created in the image of God and destined to his likeness. If the human body exists, then heaven must exist. Indeed, if breasts and wombs and loins exist, then there must be a Son eternally begotten from the bosom of his Father and a Spirit in whom he drinks without ceasing of the Father’s generosity. If the conjugal faculties of man and woman exist, and they are so perfectly fitted to one another in both union and procreation, then the reciprocal love of the Trinity must exist, the origin and consummation of all intimacy and all fruitfulness. ************** i. John Climacus, Κλῖμαξ {Ladder of Divine Ascent}, from Step 15 (Περὶ ἁγνείας {On Chastity}), from Greek trans. Luidhéid & Russell (1982) p. 179. ii. Ladder of Divine Ascent, from Step 30 (Περὶ ἀγάπης, ἐλπίδος καὶ πίστεως {On love, faith, and hope}), from Greek trans. Luidhéid & Russell (1982) p. 287. Cf. Matthew 26:41, Song of Songs 5:2. A few times in these fragments the theme of the body has come up, and of the interrelationship between spirit and body. I indicated that the mutual influence between body and spirit is closer and more direct than we often recognize, in that what we do or experience in the body has repercussions in the spirit and that the state and dispositions of our spirit truly resound in the body. After all, I am not merely a spirit “housed” in a body; I am an enfleshed spirit, a spiritual body. I am a bodily person. The two cannot be extracted from one another without losing the fullness of my God-designed being. All of this has profound theological and practical implications.
One of these is that to “care for” my body, to be a true custodian of the bodiliness that God has entrusted to me—which we are so preoccupied with doing in our world today—does not mean merely to take care to safeguard my physical health and well-being. My physical well-being is a good, certainly, and one for which a due attention is appropriate, but equally one for which an excessive attention is inappropriate. For being a true custodian of my bodiliness does not mean trying to remain healthy and free of pain, but recognizing and living my body’s capacity for divinization. For I am marked by mortality, by the inheritance of sin and death, both in my spirit and in my body. And the only way to confront and to overcome this inheritance, to taste the life for which I long, is not by earthly means but by divine grace. It is by cooperating with the redeeming love of God that in Christ has confronted and conquered death and has opened the path to everlasting life, to the new creation, to the resurrection of the body. Thus only sanctity, only being transfigured in the image of Christ through the gradual purification, healing, and transformation of my being—bodily and spiritual—do I begin to taste the authentic wholeness for which I was made. Every other aim ultimately gives way to dissolution and loss, to fragmentation and destruction. Only the medicine of immortality, the bread of angels, only the living Body of Christ to which I am joined, and which becomes the very substance of my own being and life, grants me the capacity to “be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48), in other words, to be made “whole and entire, spirit, soul, and body, irreproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes 5:23), that I may know in him the fullness of life, in the completeness and integrity of my being made a partaker of the divine nature and a participant in the everlasting life of the Trinity. What is so important for the authentic renewal and radical evangelical fruitfulness of the Church today, even above and beyond practical action, is the mystery of atoning love, the love that, joined to the love of Christ, allows grace to weave together what has been torn asunder, to heal the wounds and disorders of sin, and to gather all together in the unity of God’s life once again. This is what true atonement means, and this too the mystery of reparation. We must therefore—each and every one of us in our own way—be willing to become the suffering heart and body of the Church, of Jesus Christ. We must be willing to let the words of Saint Paul be realized also in us: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” Only thus will the Church and the world find healing from the countless wounds that sin has inflicted.
Let us reflect a bit on this mystery of reparation. If reparation does not consist in trying to establish a kind of “juridical” righteousness before God, in the interpretation which this was given by the Jansenists, what does it mean? If it does not mean a certain “amount” of suffering or punishment needs to be born to expiate sin, as if it were some material quantity that needs to be burned off, what does it authentically mean? I have already indicated it a number of time throughout these reflections: it is a matter of healing, a matter of restorative justice. God’s justice is never vindictive, never imposing punishment or suffering as if to “get equal” with one who has offended him. Rather, God’s justice seeks only to restore what has been harmed, to reestablish the divine image within us that sin has shattered, and to reconcile all things, all relationships, which in the beginning were intended to manifest in the depth of their love and communion the very love and intimacy of the Trinity itself. Thus reparation, reconciliation, and atonement are all one reality, or aspects of one reality: to repair, to reunite, and to make-one. It is to put a halt to the deleterious effects of sin, and to bring restoration to wholeness and right relationship, true communion, in our relation to God, in ourselves, and in our relation to one another and to the cosmos itself. And only mercy can restore such justice. Mere punishment cannot do it; mere corrective measures cannot do it. And what is mercy? It is the love that becomes compassion in order to restore in the sinner, in those wounded by sin, the wholeness that they have forfeit. And compassion means suffering-with. Reflecting upon his experience reading the Sauvé Report on clerical sexual abuse in France, Erik Varden writes some words worthy of reflection: Of course we have work to do! I am convinced it is crucial to read this crisis in a theological perspective, and to formulate a theological response. On a practical level, much has already been done, thank God. It is painful but good to map the extent of abuse. Care for victims is essential. Perpetrators of abuse must answer for their deeds. Juridical and canonical reforms to ensure the efficacy of due process are good. It is good to have clear safeguarding procedures. It is good that we have found words to express a corruption that for too long spread silently. Still, if we are to deal with this crisis as believers, more is called for. For we do not face only a legacy of crime. We face a legacy of sin. Sin, we know, can be forgiven. The Church has always taught, in consonance with Scripture, that God is swift to pardon. Each day the Eucharist is offered ‘for the forgiveness of sin’. The fact that a sin has been pardoned does not, though, remove the hurt caused by sin, whether to the sinner or to those affected by the consequence of sin. There may still be a need for reparation and cleansing, whether in this life or in the next. Theology speaks austerely of the ‘temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven’. Personally, I find it helpful to think in terms of the ‘wages of sin’. We know what they stand for, from experience; how a sin committed leaves a wound in our soul, a wound on which we need to keep pouring the balm of God’s mercy. The graver the sin, the more infectious and slow-healing the wound. To be a Catholic today is, I’d say, to live within a huge, unclean, ulcerating wound that cries out for healing. Who is claiming this wound, to hold it before God so that, eventually, health may be restored? To explain what I mean by this question, let me draw a parallel to the early nineteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution and the horrors committed in its name, Catholic France fell to its knees in a prayer of reparation. The great monument to this surging remorse is the basilica of Montmartre, dedicated to the Sacred Heart. In its dome you can read, in letters of gold, this dedication: Sacratissimo Cordi Iesu Gallia poenitens et devota et grata. ‘To the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus from France penitent, devoted, and grateful.’ The basilica was built as a penitential pledge, a space dedicated to uninterrupted prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, to call Christ’s Eucharistic grace down upon a broken nation. What the basilica represents outwardly was lived as an interior, secret reality by countless souls. We shall never understand the resurgence of religious life after the Revolution if we lose this aspect out of sight; nor shall we appreciate the fervour of nineteenth-century mysticism. St Paul’s mysterious words about ‘making up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ’ was perceived as a personal call by many. The saving sacrifice was made on Calvary once for all. It is perfect. But it is not ended. It unfolds within the Church, the Body of Christ, by way of a real presence. Pascal wrote in the Pensées: ‘Christ remains in agony until the end of time. That isn’t a time to be slumbered away.’ Many good Christians assumed their share in the task of repairing, through Christ, in him, and with him, the damage wrought by others. To us, this may seem terribly passé, even a touch embarrassing. The only echo we hear on a regular basis might occur at Benediction, if we recite the Divine Praises composed in 1797 by the Italian Jesuit Fr Luigi Felici as a way of making reparation for sacrilege. We should not, though, take this kind of piety lightly. While it did occasionally assume bizarre forms, it rested on solid foundations. Before sin is ‘taken away’, it has to be assumed and borne. That is the meaning of the Cross, which Christ calls us to share by means of a mystery embedded in the structure of the Eucharist. The victorious Lamb is inseparable from the Lamb of sacrifice, the Lamb who bears the sin of the world. ... May I share an intimate conviction? I think there is an immense work of bearing to be done in the Church today. I think this bearing, consciously and freely assumed, is a precondition for healing. It belongs above all to us who, as priests and religious, live close to the heart of the Church, which is Christ’s heart, cruelly hurt by sin. But it is not ours alone. Are we willing to take our share of it, for Christ’s love’s sake? Is our heart alert, open, vulnerable enough to hear the cry of the poor and feel the pain of it? Do we share Christ’s ‘rage and sorrow’ in the face of outrages committed against his little ones? These are urgent questions if, in the renewal we badly need, we wish to maintain the vertical axis of the Church’s life. And what is the Church without a vertical axis? A humanitarian coffee morning, no more—which is an excellent enterprise on its own terms, but hardly a phenomenon that renews and orients our lives, kindles our love, fortifies our hope, purifies our joy, and forms in us courage and peace in the face of death. Life, and death, in Christ doesn’t drop from the sky. It needs to be striven for valiantly. The Son of God became man, not to hand out sweetmeats, but to redeem the world. When we look at the world today, it is clear that this work is still sorely needed. Whether the healing potential of the salvific mystery will show itself effective in our time depends in no small part on us, whom Christ calls to live as members of his body—on how we exercise stewardship of the grace entrusted to us, to enable it to spread. The New Testament culminates in a majestic description of how, from the throne of the Lamb, rivers of the water of life flow out towards the ends of the earth. The rivers are surrounded by shoots of the tree of life whose fruit is unfailing and whose leaves are ‘for the healing of the nations’ (Ap 22:1ff). Will we let our living and our dying be a watercourse along which Christ’s healing may spread, to reach the desert, death-infected places of our world and of human hearts? The Seer of Patmos ended his book with a clear ‘Amen’. Let’s make that, likewise, our final note. i ************* i. https://coramfratribus.com/life-illumined/repairing-the-wound/ I would like to return in this fragment to something that I mentioned previously but did not explore in any great depth. In particular, how can I speak about the authentic renewal and reform of the Church, about recapturing the beauty of her radiance as the Bride of Christ that it may shine for coming generations, without also speaking of the scandal of sexual abuse and offering some words stirred by lament and compassion? Let us therefore spend a few moments opening our hearts to sorrowfully consider the grievous evil of this sin in the Church, and the response that is called for. The words of Benedict XVI, speaking in 2010, point the way for us:
We realized afresh [during this Year of Priests] how beautiful it is that human beings are fully authorized to pronounce in God’s name the word of forgiveness, and are thus able to change the world, to change life; we realized how beautiful it is that human beings may utter the words of consecration, through which the Lord draws a part of the world into himself, and so transforms it at one point in its very substance; we realized how beautiful it is to be able, with the Lord’s strength, to be close to people in their joys and sufferings, in the important moments of their lives and in their dark times; how beautiful it is to have as one’s life task not this or that, but simply human life itself—helping people to open themselves to God and to live from God. We were all the more dismayed, then, when in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime. In this context, a vision of Saint Hildegard of Bingen came to my mind, a vision which describes in a shocking way what we have lived through this past year. “In the year of our Lord’s incarnation 1170, I had been lying on my sick-bed for a long time when, fully conscious in body and in mind, I had a vision of a woman of such beauty that the human mind is unable to comprehend. She stretched in height from earth to heaven. Her face shone with exceeding brightness and her gaze was fixed on heaven. She was dressed in a dazzling robe of white silk and draped in a cloak, adorned with stones of great price. On her feet she wore shoes of onyx. But her face was stained with dust, her robe was ripped down the right side, her cloak had lost its sheen of beauty and her shoes had been blackened. And she herself, in a voice loud with sorrow, was calling to the heights of heaven, saying, ‘Hear, heaven, how my face is sullied; mourn, earth, that my robe is torn; tremble, abyss, because my shoes are blackened!’ And she continued: ‘I lay hidden in the heart of the Father until the Son of Man, who was conceived and born in virginity, poured out his blood. With that same blood as his dowry, he made me his betrothed. For my Bridegroom’s wounds remain fresh and open as long as the wounds of men’s sins continue to gape. And Christ’s wounds remain open because of the sins of priests. They tear my robe, since they are violators of the Law, the Gospel and their own priesthood; they darken my cloak by neglecting, in every way, the precepts which they are meant to uphold; my shoes too are blackened, since priests do not keep to the straight paths of justice, which are hard and rugged, or set good examples to those beneath them. Nevertheless, in some of them I find the splendour of truth.’ And I heard a voice from heaven which said: ‘This image represents the Church. For this reason, O you who see all this and who listen to the word of lament, proclaim it to the priests who are destined to offer guidance and instruction to God’s people and to whom, as to the apostles, it was said: go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation’ (Mk 16:15)” (Letter to Werner von Kirchheim and his Priestly Community: PL 197, 269ff.). In the vision of Saint Hildegard, the face of the Church is stained with dust, and this is how we have seen it. Her garment is torn—by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year. We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves. We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen. We must discover a new resoluteness in faith and in doing good. We must be capable of doing penance. We must be determined to make every possible effort in priestly formation to prevent anything of the kind from happening again. i He goes on to acknowledge and thank those who work with those who have suffered such terrible abuse, and also to speak of some of the ideological foundations that made such a profound betrayal of faith and love possible: a loss of the objective ethos of moral truth, preventing us from seeing certain actions as intrinsically evil, preventing us from seeing good and evil as objective categories of being and action, and a dimming in the minds of many of the splendor of the Church’s teaching and life. Much more could be said as well. But let us conclude this fragment by saying simply this: what grieves our hearts the most about this scandal is not only that the members of the Church sullied her credibility but above all that the sacred and beautiful image of God in those abused was so horribly ravaged and offended. In other words, this is not something to be viewed in political categories or as a matter of “saving face,” or trying to recapture our credibility, as if the Church were a mere earthly institution. The Church’s message and mission, in this respect, does not ultimately depend upon our credibility, but on the fidelity of Christ, even though we must seriously hear the call of Christ and convert to him, that his light may shine in us, and we may not be a stumbling block in the way of those whom God loves and calls to himself. If the Church is not a political institution, what is she? As we see in Saint Paul and as we saw in the vision of Hildegard of Bingen, the Church is the Bride of Christ, and she suffers alongside those who are abused, she suffers in herself—as does her Bridegroom—the sins of men. The more important dimension of our response to the horrors of this evil, therefore, is not structural reform or any external actions—as necessary and important as they are—but atonement, to bear in prayer, suffering, and penance the pain of this gaping wound in the Body of Christ and in the suffering bodies and hearts of those who have been wounded in this way. The same is true, in fact, for all the evil and sin in the Church and in the world. The most important thing is always atonement, always the act of reparation which seeks to repair what has been torn and to heal what has been wounded through a love that becomes one with the wounds of the Crucified, which heal all wounds by making them capable of bearing the glory of eternity. ***** i. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/december/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20101220_curia-auguri.html |
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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