Summa on beauty

In the last several posts, we've done some heavy philosophical lifting to get at a better understanding of beauty. In case I lost you in those abstractions, here is a brief summary of those posts:

1. Beauty is objective. Some beings are more beautiful than others, although every being has some share in beauty, insofar as all beings possess esse, a participation in God's being. Those beings who more fully participate in the being of God, show forth more of they mystery of being, and therefore are more beautiful, from an ontological perspective. A tree and a human can both be beautiful, but the spiritual capabilities of man make him more beautiful (a tree cannot think, will, or commune with God, but a man can do all these and more).
2. Beauty is the self-revelatory property of being. Here is a quick take on the relationship between the transcendental properties of being: A thing is good insofar as it is desirable; what is desirable is also intelligible, insofar as it must be known before it can be desired (True); only that which is visible to the intellect, presenting itself, can be known by the intellect (Beautiful); what can present itself as "this thing" rather than "that thing" must be unified (One). In this schema, beauty is the bridge by which we come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of being itself.
3. Beauty is characterized by a lumen-species structure. There is an appearance (species) of a mystery that breaks forth from what appears (lumen). So a beautiful being simultaneously reveals and hides the mystery it re-presents. Think of Christ's humanity revealing the invisible divinity. 
4. Beauty is closely related to the dynamics of love. Insofar as there is a double movement that results in union between the lover and beloved, so too in our experience of the beautiful, there is a double movement from the beheld and the beholder that unites the two. 

Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.
Stained glass is another good example of how beauty both reveals 
and hides a mystery. It symbolically shows forth some of the mystery of the 
New Heavens and New Earth. It presents us with a radiant darkness!

In our next post, we will apply some of these findings to Mother Teresa's charism. 

The structure of beauty

Below is a short excerpt from an essay I wrote on the subjective evidence of faith, as it is presented in the first volume of Balthasar's 15-volume Triptych. I think that Balthasar's understanding of form gives us some insight into the structure of beauty and the way in which it functions as the transcendental property of being that reveals and shows forth being. Beauty is the visibility of being. From these reflections we can move into understanding how beauty and the sacred combine to form a compelling argument for the validity of the Catholic faith, as lived by Mother Teresa. In the essay, I take the finale to Mozart's Jupiter Symphony as an example of beauty's visibility:

Here is the relevant excerpt: 

What does Balthasar mean when he talks about form? For starters, it is an aesthetic category. Form has two elements: “Both natural and artistic form has an exterior which appears and an interior depth, both of which, however, are not separable in the form itself.” (147). In keeping with the medieval aesthetic tradition that finds its root in Plato, Balthasar calls the exterior aspect the species (that which is seen) and he calls the interior aspect the lumen. The lumen is the radiance, splendor, or glory (divine lumen) breaking out of the species.

Two important aesthetic consequences result from the species-lumen structure. First, as we noted before, “The content (Gehalt) does not lie behind the form (Gestalt), but within it” (147). So if we are to perceive the content we can only perceive it in and through the form. Second, the appearance of the form does not merely point to an “invisible, unfathomable mystery,” but is also the mystery itself (146). It both is and is not what it signifies. This is the dialectic of disclosure and un-disclosure that we alluded to earlier in our comments on Christ’s hypostatic union. In sum, the form is both the “real presence of the depths” and a “real pointing beyond itself to these depths” (116).

An example of the double movement of disclosure and non-disclosure.
We cannot look directly at the sun, but can come to know its radiance through
its appearance in the form of the clouds. The clouds both reveal the sun (we could
not directly look at it otherwise) and conceals it (the illuminated cloud is not the sun).

Take an example—Mozart’s finale to the Jupiter symphony (No. 41), a work that Balthasar finds irresistibly beautiful (cf. Love Alone is Beautiful, 53). I hope we can begin with the shared assumption that the symphony qualifies as beautiful. But what is the source of that beauty? Why is it beautiful? The beauty of the finale of Mozart’s symphony reveals itself in the sounding notes, especially in the way the coda simultaneously weaves together the five independent themes of the symphony, an unprecedented feat of integral complexity in the history of music. We can identify these themes in technical language and observe the subtlety of Mozart’s attention to details. In a certain sense the beauty is the arrangement and order of the sounding notes (what else is there?).

So the sound is the species. Yet we are certain that the beauty is not merely this collection of sounding notes. The notes also point to some irreducible mystery beyond the notes, which the sound reveals—allowing the mystery to break out in a radiant splendor from the notes—even as it hides the mystery (we sense that the mystery, whatever it is, is not subject to time, for instance, but the finale expresses it in time and so hides its non-temporality). What is the mystery, though? Is the symphony “about” something?

Some will say it expresses Mozart’s will to defy gloriously the buffets fate has dealt him: the recent death of his daughter, the loss of his audience’s interest, his brokenness and debt, the outbreak of war. But this is not the mystery, even if it is the context of the mystery that reveals itself. It cannot be reduced to an utterance. Still, we feel that the mystery is beautiful in that it shows something about reality. And the way it shows that je ne sais quoi is truth-full. The symphony corresponds to something in reality: the dynamism, balance, order, and resolution of the symphony mirrors something of cosmic proportion that is beyond rational explication. It defies formulation. Mozart’s re-presentation of the mystery somehow points to and touches the self-showing beauty of being, that point at which all the questions of man find resolution. There is a gratuitousness of the finale’s beauty that carries within itself its own credibility. The necessity of the symphony—the feeling that no note could be added or taken away from it, unless by Mozart himself—demands our surrender, yet we cannot say why. We will return to these reflections later.

Hubble image of stellar dust. NASA.

The Classical notion of Vollendung (“the form which contains the depths”) and the Romantic notion of Unendlichkeit (“the form that transcends itself by pointing beyond to the depths”) together “constitute the fundamental configuration of being” (116). Being becomes a portal to the theological. If we properly behold the form of a thing, we behold both its appearance and its radiance, “as the splendor, as the glory of Being” (116). These depths transport us to the last horizon of being, the point at which all reality becomes intelligible. We also note that in our experience of being, the vertical and horizontal are equally necessary: we “plunge (vertically) into the naked depths” through an encounter with the “horizontal (form)” (117). In other words, in our experience of beauty, we gain access to absolute being through a particular existent. The parallel between the horizontal-vertical unity of the beautiful and the hypostatic union of the God-man is, I hope, apparent.

We must also note that eros is always involved in perception of form. “Already in the realm of nature, eros is the chosen place of beauty:” whatever we love appears as, “radiant with glory,” and whatever is glorious in itself, “does not penetrate into the onlooker except through the specificity of an eros” (Love Alone is Beautiful, 54). There is a meeting between the perception of the subject and the radiance of the object. A double extasis occurs, in which the beholder is drawn out of himself and into the object perceived, into the depths of the mystery. The object, for its part, radiates a splendor that draws the subject towards it. These two movements are the subjective and objective aspects of perception.

A truly beautiful work of art, in its radiant glory, never ceases to fascinate the viewer, drawing him into the depths of the present mystery. The viewer becomes unaware of time, unaware of himself, and joins himself to the mystery. The experience of falling in love captures the movement well. The lover, in his love for the beloved, forgets himself and is transported into the eyes of the beloved that shine in splendor.

Beauty and mimesis

In my last post, I gave a thumbnail sketch that focused on the objective basis of beauty. I ended my post with the conclusion that beauty, as the epiphany of form (Plato), is the self-showing property of being (Balthasar). It is being as it relates to the apprehension (we could say this idea comes from Aquinas, but to be clear, it's still a disputed question whether or not beauty is a transcendental for Thomas--for those interested here is an audio presentation on the issue from St. Thomas Aquinas College).

The point of all this, remember, is to better appreciate the role that beauty plays in the charism of Mother Teresa. A fuller understanding of beauty, I am convinced, can help us more fully  and explicitly grasp what was implicitly intuited by Mother Teresa: that to live beautifully, far from being a sentimental cliche, is in fact the deepest vocation of humanity.

In this post, I want to raise the question of what it means to say that beauty is the revelatory character of being qua being. Now when it comes to representational artwork, we could call this the mimetic character of art, it is rather easy to see how beauty is the epiphany of form, even when form becomes more stylized (in the modern period) or symbolic (in the medieval period). Below, a few examples of representation art in different media:

Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters. Oil on canvas. 1845.

Raphael, School of Athens. Fresco. 1511.

Stigmatization of St. Francis. Stained glass. Barfusserkirche. 1235-1245.

Personification of Ktisis (Foundation). Byzantine mosaic. 500-550.

We could say the same about representational sculpture and even music (insofar as some pieces are representative of emotions, for example). But what do we make of art that is non-representational? Think about a painting by Pollock or one of Mozart's symphonies or abstract expressionist sculpture. these seem to be good test cases for trying to understand what we say when we say that beauty is the epiphany of form, the revelation of being. In the next post, I'll give some of my observations.

Beauty, being, and the transcendentals

[This post is a little heavier than usual. A summary of the argument and more interesting implications can be found at the end of the post!]

Most people today understand beauty to be a subjective appraisal of an object. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so goes the saying. This idiom is often resorted to when people disagree about whether or not something is beautiful. Imagine you and I are at an art gallery. You find a particular work beautiful, but I don't. We talk for a bit, and end up agreeing to disagree. And no hard feelings, we tell each other, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You're not wrong and I'm not wrong. We just have a different opinion. Beauty, this perspective proposes, is a matter of taste. Or is it? We're asking this question: Is there any on which can we judge something as more beautiful than another thing?

Before we answer that question, let's remember why we're asking it. What's at stake in the question? Why should we care if beauty has an objective basis or whether it's just a matter of taste? it gets back to the teachings of Mother Teresa that we're trying to understand. "Make every action something beautiful for God," she instructs us. Well, if beauty is simply a matter of taste, than what makes an action beautiful or not beautiful is just a matter of taste, a matter of opinion. And once we accept that premise, we very quickly fall into moral relativism (the refutation of which would require another post, at least).

Not so uncommon a view today.

But back to the question: is beauty merely a matter of opinion? I think that the reduction of beauty to subjective judgment without an objective basis degrades beauty to the level of all other things that are a matter of taste. You might like vanilla ice cream and I might like chocolate ice cream, but we can disagree--it's a matter of taste. Vanilla is not objectively better than chocolate. We just have different preferences. Is the same true of art? Is a pop song by Ke$ha really just as beautiful as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (hint: the answer is no)? And if Beethoven's symphony is more beautiful, what is the objective basis for making such a determination?

Before we can answer that question, we need a small crash course in Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics in order to familiarize ourselves with two concepts: being and the transcendentals. I'll be drawing mostly from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. We proceed to our first question:

What is being? Ens est id cuius actus est esse [see this wonderful compilation of scholastic axioms]. Being is that whose act is to be. We could say that anything that is has being. But we should note that being is different than existence. Existence is dichotomous. A tree exists and a man exist. But a man exists in a different way than a tree. His act of being is different than the tree's. In scholastic terminology, we say that the particular mode of being of the man--i.e., the form of the man--is different than the form of the tree. A man exists as a creature that thinks, wills, feels, etc. A tree does none of these things, but it does grow and reproduce.

Here's my point: whereas existence is dichotomous (things either exist or they don't), being is intensive (things can exist in many different ways, on account of their different forms). To put it another way, being admits of degrees. We could say it's multichotomous, rather than dichotomous. A man has more being than a tree, because it can think and will and feel and move, whereas a tree can only grow and reproduce. Man more fully expresses the possibilities of being.

Hierarchy of Being.
From Rhetorica Christiana, 1579. 

Why should we care about the difference between being and existence, whether one is dichotomous and the other is intensive, etc? Keep reading. We need one more concept to get there, the transcendentals. What are the transcendentals? Transcendentale est universalis modu entis inquantum entis. A transcendental is a universal mode of being insofar as it is being. To put it another way: a transcendental is a property of being that pertains to all being qua being. All things that are possess these properties. 

In Scholastic philosophy, they are four: all being is one, true, good, and beautiful. Since all being as being has these properties, the transcendentals are convertible. So whatever is one is also true, good, and beautiful; whatever is beautiful is also one, true, and good; etc. Under this schema, what is beauty? Ens relate ad apprehensum. Being in relation to the apprehension. It is the revelatory character of being, the aspect of being that is self-showing, that gives itself to the intellect to be understood (as truth) and acted upon by the will (as good). As Balthasar would have it: "The basic phenomenon in all three of them [the true, good, and beautiful] was their epiphanic character, which permeates everything that exists: self-showing (beauty), self-giving (goodness), self-saying (truth), were all seen to be various aspects of this appearing. This appearing is a king of shining-out that recalls the illuminating action of light" (Chapter 5, section c in the Epilogue to his Triptych).

Of course, none of these are my ideas, nor are they new ideas. I'm relying here first of all on Plato's notion of beauty from Symposium: beauty is the epiphany of form that functions as a bridge to the divine (cf. 210 [acc. to Stephanus pagination]). I am also appropriating Heidegger's notion of aletheia (unconcealedness or disclosure), which he identifies as truth in The Origin of the Work of Art but later admits, correctly I think, that "to raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth" (On Time and Being, p. 70). I think what Heidegger was getting at with the notion of aletheia as the opening and disclosure of a world is what Plato understood as the epiphany of form and what the Scholastics would understand as beauty. So the notion of beauty as the self-showing aspect of being has a long and rather distinguished philosophical genealogy.

Plato's Academy. Mosaic from a villa in Pompeii.

At this point, perhaps you're thinking that not all things are beautiful and true and good. There seems to be much in the world that is not beautiful and good. Things like genocide, starving children, civil wars, and natural disasters that we read about in the news every day. Here it is important to keep in mind the aspect under which being is beautiful, etc. All being is beautiful as being. Some beings as evil agents are perverse and ugly. But even these people who do ugly things are still beautiful insofar as they are beings. They are morally evil, yes, but ontologically good, true, and beautiful. So we need to be careful to recognize the formal aspects under which we judge something as beautiful. 

To summarize: 

1. Being is that which is. Everything that exists has being, but not all being exists in the same way. Different beings exist through different modes (called forms). Being admits of degrees in such a way that one thing (e.g., a man) can have more being than another thing (e.g., a tree). 
2. The transcendentals are properties common to all being as being. That is to say: everything that is has these qualities. They are the one, true, good, and beautiful. Beauty is being qua being as it relates to the apprehension. It is, in other words, the self-showing property of being. 

With this framework, our conclusions about beauty fall into place rather easily:

1. All things that exist are beings. Some things have more being than others (they more fully express the possible ways of being).
2. All being possess transcendental properties. The more being a thing possesses, the more one, true, good, and beautiful it is qua being. Why? If beauty is the self-showing property of being, a thing that has more being will be able to show/reveal more being than that which has less. 

To answer our original question: we can judge something as more or less beautiful on the basis that it possesses and shows forth more being than another. This is primarily a conclusion that applies to the ontological realm. It would take quite a bit more work to move from here to the ethical realm, but I would at least suggest a way forward: the human who lives a more beautiful life is the one who more fully reveals the possibilities of being and the nature of being itself.

If God is the source of all being-- ipsum esse per se subsistens, being itself subsisting through itself (again, material another post!)--then the human who is most beautiful is the one whose life more fully reveals being itself by conforming itself to that Being's mode of being. And if the essence of that supreme being--being itself--is love, then the life that is most beautiful is the life most fully lived in love. And what is it to love? To will the good of the other as other (that is, for its own good and not for your own benefit). So Christ lived the most beautiful human life because through his human nature he most fully revealed (incarnated) being itself is and showed forth the possibilities of being. He most fully showed us what love is and how to love.

I would suggest that the saints and blesseds, including Mother Teresa, did something similar: showing us new ways of living in the world in conformance with the life of freedom that is life lived in and for God. 

Living flames

"I have come to cast fire upon the earth..."

The fire of divine beauty will transform us into living flames of charity.
Scripture is the Word on Fire. Christ is the flame.
Kindle this flame within your heart and cast it upon the world. 

Beauty, evangelization, and MT

Here is another fascinating video from Father Robert Barron. In it he discusses the role of beauty in the New Evangelization. here's his thesis: "The best way to evangelize...is to move from the beautiful, then to the good, then to the true. And to get that backwards is to evangelize very ineffectively." Since our culture tends to be suspicious of truth claims ("all religions are at their core the same"), and relativistic on the question of morality ("what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me"), it is best to start with the beautiful--simply to present beauty to a person. Not to tell them that what they're doing is wrong or that they're living a life of lies. Obviously no one likes that. Simply to show them the beautiful.

It is difficult to argue with something beautiful, perhaps because beauty doesn't make an argument. It shows forth something, it gives of its essence to the beholder. Beauty seizes us and compels us to enter into the world that it has created, the world that it shows forth. The experience of beauty is also something intensely personal (although beauty itself is not subjective), and for this reason it is a good place to begin evangelizing in the modern world, which places so much emphasis on subjectivity and personal experience. It is hard to deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, or Palestrina's motets, as Father Barron notes. It is even harder to deny the beauty of a saintly life. 

I think this is one reason why Mother Teresa so fascinated the world. She did make claims about truth and goodness that cut against the modern world, especially on abortion (as she so often said, "abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world"). But most people's first encounter with Mother Teresa was witnessing her work with the poor, the selfless sacrifice she made day after day for those who had nothing and no one. Who could fail to see the beauty of a life so lived? 

From the beautiful, we move to the good: when we encounter beauty we ask ourselves, how can I become like that? how can I become beautiful? And here we have the good. Once we are striving towards goodness, we are likely to ask ourselves about truth: what is the goal of my action in the world? what is the end toward which I am ordering all my activity? The beautiful opens us to the world of the good and true, in a way that seems more inviting than demanding. 

And so, when Mother Teresa gave the 1982 Harvard commencement speech, she could denounce abortion and call students who had cheated to repentance--and still receive a long standing ovation. Can you imagine any other Catholic religious figure giving a speech denouncing abortion at Harvard, that bastion of secular bastions, and receiving a long standing ovation? I think not.

Yet people listened to her, and listened intently. Why? Because she lived a beautiful life. She made great sacrifices that few others were willing to make, and so the world listened. And through that beautiful life she opened up to us more distant horizons and broader vistas, the life of beauty lived entirely from, for, and with Christ. She showed us that beauty is our portal into the divine. 

Something beautiful

Beauty was a key category for Mother Teresa. When I was at Kalighat, the home for the aged and dying in Calcutta, there was a sign that read, "Let every action be something beautiful for God." I think it was one of Mother's favorites. To those who implicitly criticized the work that she did as enabling the poor or somehow not being enough she would say: "I can do what you cannot do. You can do what I cannot do. Together we can do something beautiful for God." Many people have heard both of these quotes, but I suspect that not many people know what they mean.

Mother Teresa became a living presence of the divine beauty in the world. I think it is no small aspiration to want to become beauty. It is our vocation: to become beautiful. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is beauty itself. But we have lots of mud and grime caked on this image within us, and it takes hard work to scrape it away and let the divine light break forth.

In the next few posts, I'll be exploring beauty. I think if we can understand this concept better, we can come to a much deeper appreciation of what Mother Teresa meant in the above quotes.

What, after all, is beauty?

Who is Jesus?

Christ asks his disciples in today's Gospel: "Who do you say that I am?" (Lk 9:20). It is a question worth asking ourselves. Who is Christ to me? What is my relationship to Christ? We know the answers of others. He is a great prophet (Lk 9:19). We could translate that this way in the 21st century--he's a good and holy man, a wise teacher...but not God. Sound familiar? It is a scandal to the secularism of our culture that God assumed a human nature, that God became man (cf. Jn 1:14).

When she was in the hospital, Mother Teresa made a meditation on the parallel passage of this Gospel in Matthew (cf. Mt 16:15). I post her meditation below:

"Jesus is the leper..." Lepers in Pune, India.

Who do you say I am?

You are God. 
You are God from God. 
You are Begotten, not made. 
You are One in Substance with the Father. 
You are the Son of the Living God. 
You are the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 
You are One with the Father.
You are in the Father from the beginning: All things were made by You and the Father.
You are the Beloved Son in Whom the Father is well pleased. 
You are the Son of Mary, conceived in the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary. 
You were born in Bethlehem.
You were wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary and put in the manger full of straw. 
You were kept warm by the breath of the donkey who carried your mother with you in her womb. 
You are the Son of Joseph, the carpenter who is known by the people of Nazareth. 
You are an ordinary man without much learning as judged by the learned people of Israel. 

Who is Jesus to me? 

Jesus is the Word Made Flesh. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life. 
Jesus is the Victim offered for our sins on the Cross. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice offered at the Holy Mass for the sins of the world and mine. 
Jesus is the Word--to be spoken. 
Jesus is the Truth--to be told. 
Jesus is the Way--to be walked. 
Jesus is the Light--to be lit. 
Jesus is the Love--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Joy--to be shared. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice--to be offered. 
Jesus is the Peace--to be given. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life--to be eaten. 
Jesus is the hungry--to be fed. 
Jesus is the Thirsty--to be satiated. 
Jesus is the Naked--to be clothed. 
Jesus is the Homeless--to be taken in. 
Jesus is the sick--to be healed. 
Jesus is the Lonely--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Unwanted--to be wanted. 
Jesus is the Leper--to wash his wounds. 
Jesus is the Beggar--to give a smile. 
Jesus is the Drunkard--to listen to him. 
Jesus is the Mental--to protect him. 
Jesus is the Little One--to embrace him.
Jesus is the Blind--to lead him. 
Jesus is the Dumb--to speak for him. 
Jesus is the crippled--to walk with him. 
Jesus is the Drug Addict--to befriend him. 
Jesus is the Prostitute--to remove from danger and befriend her. 
Jesus is the Prisoner--to be visited. 
Jesus is the Old--to be served. 

To me--

Jesus is my God.
Jesus is my Spouse.
Jesus is my Life. 
Jesus is my only Love. 
Jesus is my All in All. 
Jesus is my Everything. 

Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being.
I have given him all, even my sins and He has espoused me to Himself in tenderness and love. 
Now and for life I am the Spouse of my Crucified Spouse. 

Amen. 

God bless you,
Mother Teresa, MC

Types of poverty

Here is a matrix I put together on the relationship between different types of poverty (if you're reading this on a computer, you can click the image to enlarge it):

A note on terms. I'm presenting wealth and poverty under two aspects, the objective and the subjective. We could say that one's objective poverty/wealth is measured by the size of one's bank account. It refers to a measurable object outside of the subject (viz., material goods). Subjective poverty/wealth is measured by one's relationship with others and with God, who is the ultimate source of our happiness and meaning. It refers to a relationship intrinsic to the subject.

Obviously there's nothing wrong, in itself, with buying purses.
But there is a type of spiritual poverty that seeks to replace God with things.

According to this chart, the poorest of the poor would be those who are spiritually and materially poor. Ranking the other types of poverty is more difficult and depends in part on your hierarchy of values. Is spiritual or material well-being more important to you?

Consider this thought experiment--to be spiritually rich and materially poor or spiritually poor and materially rich--which would you choose? The question quickly reveals our hierarchy of values. To be fair, there are an infinite number of nuances and qualifications that make answering that question difficult, if not impossible. But if we simplify the choice to this--would you rather be rich without God or poor with God?--I think we can agree that the ideal Christian would choose poverty with God over wealth without God. Thus we have Christ on the Cross.

Mother Teresa often spoke about the difference between spiritual and material poverty, and how people in both situations could be called the poorest of the poor. She also observed that spiritual poverty is much deeper and more painful than material poverty (so there's a good case to be made that the person who is spiritually rich and materially poor is better off than the person who is spiritually poor and materially rich, though this requires an eschatological perspective. "Blessed are the poor...").

In her talks, she often associated material poverty with the developing world and spiritual poverty with the developed world. It would, of course, be dangerous to reify this distinction. Mother Teresa knew that the materially poor also exist in the developed world, just as the spiritually poor exist in the developing world. But it is generally true that development and material contentment can threaten us with a spiritual malaise. Development is good (obviously), as is the material world (obviously), but when we inordinately desire our material good over our spiritual good, sin lurks nearby.

The authority of mystery

The Gospel for today (Thursday, Week 25 of OT) recounts the perplexity of Herod the Tetrarch (Lk 9:7-9). Presumably he has heard about the great miracles this man from Nazareth has wrought: raising the dead to life, casting out demons, quelling storms, and healing the sick and lepers. Quite naturally, Herod asks, "who is this about whom I hear such things?" The opinion polls are divided. Some think it is John the Baptist risen from the dead, others Elijah, and still others one of the great prophets.

The consequence of categorization.

What is the response of Herod and the people to Jesus Christ, to this miraculous intervention of the divine in history? First, perplexity (Lk 9:7). How are we to understand this Jesus of Nazareth? How is it that a man from such a humble background could work such great miracles? There is something mysterious about this man, something that can't be explained. He does not fit our expectations. There is some power working in and through him whose source remains hidden. 

What is the response to the perplexity that this great mystery inspires in us? It is to categorize: to demystify the mystery, to desacralize the sacred, to make the mystery fit into human containers and expectations. The people place Jesus in their own categories--perhaps this is a great prophet, they say. Herod probably sees him as a miracle-worker with unusual teachings (cf. Lk 28:8). Of course, neither Herod nor the people are right in their assessment of Jesus's identity, though they are not entirely wrong, either.

Do we fit this pattern of behavior? Are we perplexed by the intervention of the divine in history, choosing to categorize the divine according to our expectations, in such a way that we are not entirely wrong, but still far from being right? Note that the people do see something divine in Jesus. They think he is a prophet, because he has wrought extraordinary miracles. And yet the true identity of Jesus, the God-man, still infinitely exceeds their grasp.

Are we fully alive to the working of God in our lives, or are we too busy categorizing God's actions, certain that we know how he does and does not act? In the present moment, we are usually not capable of discerning what is from God and what is not. Discernment requires times (cf. Mt 7:16). Rather than categorizing, would it not be safer to do as Mary does: pondering these things in our hearts (cf. Lk 2:19)? She, who has encountered the deepest mystery, gives it the deepest reverence. 

"Mary, treasured all of these things..."

Herod is not without redeemable qualities. In his perplexity, he "endeavored to see him," to see Christ, though almost certainly for the wrong reasons (Lk 8:9). But we would do well to follow Herod's lead, endeavoring to see Christ, although we should do so inspired by a genuine faith, a faith that seeks holiness, and not out of trivial curiosity. We can bring this faith to all our activities today: our work, recreation, and relationships, seeking to encounter Christ, remaining always open to the possibility of encountering the divine. And when we do encounter Christ, or think that we may have, we must remember to let God be God, as Mary does--to let time unfold the fruit of the mystery present at every moment of existence. Not to categorize immediately, but to respect the authority and logic of mystery, which draws us inexplicably to holiness. 

The two pillars

A charism (>Gk: charis: favor, gift, grace) is any gift of the Holy Spirit. I am using it in this context to refer to the founding grace of a religious order, from which that order draws its spiritual life. Every charism has two aspects: a spirituality and a mission.

• Spirituality is a particular way of relating to God. It is not a substitute for religion, but a particular lived experience that places a person in relation to Jesus Christ and the Trinity. The spirituality of the Jesuits, for example, has a particular focus on discernment of spirits. The spirituality of the Benedictines focuses on the liturgy, especially on relating to God through communal prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours. The spirituality of the Dominicans places emphasis on coming to a deeper knowledge of God through study and contemplation. 

• Mission is a particular apostolic work towards which a charism is oriented. It is important to note that the mission is not necessarily an active apostolate. Monks, perhaps even more than missionaries, go out in search of souls to save them, but they do so through prayer and penance. To give some examples, the particular mission of the Dominicans is preaching; the mission of the Benedictines is prayerful labor; the mission of the Jesuits is...almost anything, it seems! But historically they have been excellent educators and missionaries.   

Of course, I give these examples with the caveat that I am painting in broad strokes. The particular spirituality and mission of any order is far more nuanced than I have presented them.

An illumination from what appears to be Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is the source of all charisms.

But back to the point: The MC charism has two scriptural foundations for these two pillars of its charism. They are the source of inspiration for the life and prayer of the MC. We could say that they are the two engines that drive the MC's body and soul.

1. Jesus' cry of anguish from the Cross--"I thirst!" (Jn 19:28)--is the basis of the spirituality. Mother Teresa, in a famous letter she wrote to her Congregation from Varanassi, tells us that the thirst of Jesus is something more than love, something deeper than love. This is, of course, difficult to understand outside of a lived experience of Christ's thirst, as Mother had on the train to Darjeeling, when she received her call within a call to found the MCs. The MC takes his identity entirely from his understanding of Jesus's thirst for him. He comes to recognize himself and his vocation only in the light of this thirst. And from this experience of being loved, he desires to go out to the world to satiate Jesus's thirst--to share Christ's love by loving others.



The spirituality: "I thirst".

2. How does one satiate the thirst of Christ? Mother understood that Christ was especially present in the poorest of the poor. She took her inspiration from the 25th chapter of Matthew, when christ gives us his criteria for judgment, when he is separating the sheep from the goats: "whatever you did to the least of these my brethren--you did it to me" (Mt 25:31-46). When we give water to the thirsty, we are giving water to Christ. In the poorest of the poor, Christ thirsts to be given water, but he thirsts even more to be loved.

The mission: "you did it to me".

To summarize: the MC understands the meaning of his existence as this--to quench the thirst of Christ on the cross, by quenching his thirst for water and for love in the poorest of the poor. And I cannot emphasize enough that the poorest of the poor, those who dwell at the peripheries of existence, exist in the wealthy countries of the world perhaps even more than in the poorer countries. There is a great poverty of loneliness in the developed world, a thirst for love and a thirst for God. 

Radical poverty

The Gospel for today, from Luke (9:1-6), contains a fascinating passage in which Jesus instructs his apostles, whom he is sending on mission, to take with them no staff, no money, no wallet, no bread--and no second tunic! I think that would make washing clothes rather tricky.

Why the instruction to radical poverty? It seems exaggerated and unnecessary, perhaps even dangerous by modern standards (and I'm sure it seemed like all of those things to the apostles). So what was the point? I think it has to do with the power that Christ gives them, "over all the devils, and to cure diseases" (Lk 8:1). I think it also has to do with the nature of their mission: "to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick" (Lk 8:2). In order to receive the power of Christ, "who though he was by nature God...emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave" (Phil 2:6-7). To enter into the power of Christ is to become weak, as St. Paul knew: "for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:10). Just as Christ's strength depends on his being entirely from the Father, we gain our strength from being entirely from Christ--living entirely in Christ and according to the form of Christ's life.

Christ asks that the apostles empty themselves of their attachments, to adopt a radical poverty, for the same purpose that he came into the world: to love man--"to love one another: that as I have loved you, you also love one another" (Jn 13:34). Radical poverty is for the sake of radical charity, as witnessed to by the purpose of the apostles' mission: to liberate man from material (disease) and spiritual evil (demons). In the MC charism, poverty [perfect emptiness] exists for the sake of our fourth vow, charity [wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor]. We empt ourselves of ourselves to fill ourselves with God's love. In emptying ourselves, we become weak in the eyes of the world, but such emptying gives us a great spiritual strength.

What are we attached to? Just as Jesus asked the apostles to leave behind even their staffs, so, too, he asks us to leave behind our staffs--those things that we lean upon for comfort and security to which we are inordinately attached. Perhaps it is my ego, my sensuality, my love of small comforts. Let's ask our lord for the grace to give these up, for the sake of living a more radical charity. 

Exile and return

Blessed be God who lives for ever! This is the response to the Canticle today (Tb 13). Blessed be God who lives forever! It is a response to Christ's miraculous work of bringing Israel out of exile in Babylon back to the promised land. And what an unexpected turn of events! A new king, Cyrus, makes a sudden proclamation that the Jews can return home to build their temple, and even provides funds to do so (cf. Ezr 9:5-9). It would seem nothing less than a miracle to the faithful remnant in Babylon.

A model of the Herodian Temple.

Do we need a miracle in our lives? Are we in a spiritual exile, distant from God and yearning for communion? We can renew our trust in the living God, the God who lives forever, by going to him in the Blessed Sacrament. Here is the greatest miracle Jesus wrought--God's eternal presence among us.

The Heavenly Jerusalem, with the Lamb of God at the center:
here is Christ, who gives himself to us in the Eucharist

Here  God has the power to deliver us from our exile and return us to the promised land to build another temple, the eschatological temple of which the Jerusalem temple was a mere shadow. To be with Christ is already a foretaste of heaven; it is already to be in the eternal promised land, to be in the Heavenly Jerusalem (cf. Hebr 11:10). And in his presence of Christ in the Eucharist we enter into the Christic temple, the temple of his body. Let us become living stones (1 Pet 2:5) of that spiritual temple of which Christ is the cornerstone (Eph 2:20). Let us live in that spiritual house as priests of the New Covenant, offering continual sacrifice. Smiling at that person who bothers you. Writing a note to someone who needs encouraging. Offering our work to God. In all these ways we build up the spiritual temple that is the Mystical Body of Christ.

Born into meaning

We are born into the loving plan of God, who thirsts to give us life: 

 For you formed my inward parts;  
    you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them.  

Psalm 139:13-16

What are you doing here?

There is a well-known passage in the First Book of Kings that recounts one of Elijah's encounters with the Lord. Elijah has just called down fire on Mount Carmel and executed the prophets of Baal. He is on the run from King Ahab and his idolatrous wife Jezebel, who are seeking to kill him. Elijah despairs of his life and asks that the Lord end his misery and kill him. He then falls asleep under a broom tree, but is awoken by an angel who provides him two meals of bread and water. Elijah then begins a forty day fast, and sets out on a journey to Mount Horeb (Sinai).


Once Elijah arrives, the Lord instructs him to stand on the mountain, the same mountain on which the Lord descended, accompanied by earthquakes, fire, smoke, and trumpet blasts, to give the law to Moses. But now God acts differently: "A great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a low whisper."

The literal Hebrew here is "thin silence."

At this point, Elijah wraps his face in his cloak and stands at the entrance of the cave in which he has been living. God asks, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Elijah complains of his plight, and God responds by providing a sort of rescue plan for Israel. He instructs Elijah to anoint a new king and a new successor to his own prophetic ministry. This will be the prophet Elisha.

And so begins a new chapter in the history of the Kingdom, that will lead to many more prophets, who will guide Israel through its exile and return, preparing it ultimately for the Messiah, and the fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham that all nations be blessed through his offspring. It is one small but indispensable episode in the history of salvation.

***

One could easily write a book on the exegesis and interpretation of this story. I want to make one point, about the necessity of silence. Elijah has apparently suffered a major defeat. He is on the run from a bloodthirsty king and queen. In his own eyes he has failed his mission. He has not brought Israel back to covenant faithfulness with God. He has won the battle with the prophets of Baal, but he has lost the war with King Ahab. In the wilderness, Elijah is perfectly alone. He is in the depths of despair. He asks that God end his life. He is disoriented and lost, to say the least.

And what does he do? He travels to the holy mountain, the fount of inspiration, the place where Israel became a nation by receiving the laws from the hand of God. It is the spiritual birthplace of the people of God, the first stop they make after leaving Egypt, the place of death. What does Elijah expect to find there? We are not told. Perhaps Elijah himself does not know. But he makes the arduous journey, more than 250 miles on foot over treacherous terrain as a fugitive, seeking an answer.

He arrives at Sinai and he experiences a magnificent show of power in the wind, earthquake, and fire, all of which hearken back to the first Sinai theophany to Moses. But God is not in them. God reveals himself in the "thin silence." And from this silence he speaks to Elijah: What are you doing here? Presumably God has not instructed Elijah to come to Sinai. He comes of his own accord.

Perhaps we, too, are looking for great prodigies of God's presence, when he wants instead to reveal himself in silence. Perhaps we, too, are lost and yearning for something, searching for purpose and meaning, but we don't know where to look. Perhaps we don't even know what we are looking for. And as with Elijah, perhaps God will answer our questions with a question. "What are you doing here?"

What am I doing here in this job, this career? What am I doing here in these relationships? What am I doing here on this earth? What is the meaning of this seemingly routine and banal life I live? What is the meaning of the sufferings and difficulties I have encountered, for which I am not responsible?

We seek after the Why. Why am I here? And why am I going where I am going?


These are peripheral questions in more than one way. They are peripheral to the world, insofar as the world does not care to ask or answer these questions. The world does not ask Why, it asks How. How can I gain more wealth? How can I obtain power, pleasure, honor, fame? But these questions are peripheral in a positive sense as well. They are questions that go to the edge of existence, to the limits and bounds of knowledge, to the limits of being and into being itself who is God. To ask these questions and to live the answers is to live a peripheral existence, or what I called in an earlier post an asymptotic existence. It is to live the fullness of the Gospel. And it is joyful.

If we have not asked these questions, we won't have answers to them. And if we don't have answers, there's a good chance that we're wasting the precious little time we have to live. Of course, there are answers to these questions. Answers that give meaning and direction to our lives. God has a plan for us, just as he did for Elijah. And just as his plan for Elijah contributed to a larger plan for Israel, which itself existed for the salvation of the world--so, too, does God have a plan for us, which contributes to the completion of his cosmic design. And without our cooperation, he cannot accomplish that plan of divine beauty. But the first step in all this is to hear the question in the silence. To hear God questioning us.

Elijah does not give an answer to the question God asks. His answer amounts to a complaint that he is alone and has failed, when neither is truly the case. We all face this temptation--not to answer the meaning of our existence, but to complain instead about the discomforts we face. But we must keep returning to these ultimate questions, as Elijah did, and live the answers, as Elijah did.

Above all, we must keep returning to the silence in which these questions surface. Is there silence within us? Can we hear God asking those questions? It is only in the silence that we recognize the shape of our lives and its direction.

Let us ask for the grace of a silent heart. Lord, give me ears to hear!

A map of life: hearing and doing

The Gospel for today (Lk 8:19-21) tells of an encounter between Jesus's mother and brethren who come to see him. They try to get closer to Jesus but cannot get in because of the crowds surrounding the Master. Jesus asks a question, "Who are my mother and my brethren?" And he gives what should appear to us as a surprising answer: "They who hear the word of God and act upon it."

The brothers of Christ--or to change the relational term: the sons of the Father--are those who hear God's word and act upon it. And so we have here a map to our ultimate destination in life, a path to divine sonship. First we must hear. Where do we hear God? In prayer. "In the silence of the heart, God speaks," as Mother Teresa so often repeated. And to hear, we must be silent.

So we are reminded of Mother Teresa's spiritual axiom: souls of great prayer are souls of great silence. The first step to becoming sons in the Son, children of the Father, is to learn silence. There is a silence of the body, a silence of the mind, a silence of the heart.

But as St. James exhorts us, "be doers of the Word and not hearers only" (Jas 1:22). To hear the word of God and not to act upon it--this is a great tragedy, because it is a refusal to accept the great dreams, gifts, and plans that God has made for us. It is to reject our own ultimate happiness, because our ultimate beatitude is in God. "I have come that they may have life!" It is life with the Father.

How do we become doers of the Word? Through charity. The fourth vow of the Missionaries of Charity is wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor. We can all live this vow, even if we do not publicly profess it. In this vow, we encounter the ideal of the Christian moral life. Faith, hope, and charity abide (1 Cor 13:13). But charity is the greatest. For to live a life of charity is to live the life of God, since God is love (1 Jn 4:8). Charity becomes the path to life.

Loneliness

Mother Teresa on loneliness: there is a hunger for love, a hunger for God!  

"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God."

Am I starving for love without even knowing it? If I am not a saint in heaven, the answer must be Yes. The holier we become, the more we realize how destitute, how hungry we are, hungry for the eternal love. 

So let me seek out the Bread of Life, the bread of love. There I can hear Christ say "I Thirst!" For you! He thirsts to give you life, to give you love! 

Sharing our poverty

Why do we hide our poverty? Our loneliness, our weakness, our sadness, our emptiness? Why do we put on a smile for the world if our heart is not truly smiling? Of course, there is a time and a place to reveal our poverty, but in my experience we too often hide it. And we have learned to hide it well.

Revealing our poverty--showing others our incompleteness--makes us vulnerable. But it also opens us to love. And it gives others a chance to love. How many people are dying to love and be loved? Whether or not we realize it, we all yearn to love deeply, to love unto the end. But we distract ourselves with our work and study and entertainment. And then, when we do realize that deep need within ourselves to love, when we realize that ultimate meaning is not found in our work, or our study, or our endless distractions, we feel desolate, because there is no one to love. Everyone else is to busy working at a million trivial things to allow themselves to receive the one thing necessary: to be loved. And each day, a little closer to death, that ultimate mark of our finitude, the ultimate reminder that love alone matters, that only love survives beyond this passing world.

What a world we live in! And yet, are we perhaps to busy to love or be loved? Do we give others a chance to love us? Perhaps we think it selfish to want to be loved. Or perhaps we are afraid to show others our brokenness, our unfulfilled desires, our yearning for belonging. But what a gift it is to show others that we are not complete! It is a gift we give them, the opportunity to love. How many people are yearning to love, but are afraid to reach out in love, because they are afraid of being rejected, ignored, or misunderstood?

And so it is a gift we give others when we show them our need to be loved. It is a gift because it opens to them a pathway which will lead them to their own happiness. This poverty of mine, this loneliness of yours...it is a gift, because when my poverty meets yours--there I can love, there I can empty myself of myself to fill myself with loving you.

Let us be more willing to show our poverty. Think to yourself, What is that poverty for me? Where is there loneliness in me...where is there a deeper desire to be loved and understood? Let us share that need with others, first of all with our Lord, our Lady, and our guardian angel. They will fill us. They will give us the necessary courage to share our poverty with others.

The gaze of love

Pope Francis visited Sardinia on Sunday and celebrated Mass at the sanctuary of Our Lady of Bonaria. The text of his homily included this beautiful reflection:

"Today I have come among you, indeed we have all come together, to meet the gaze of Mary, because there, there is something like a reflection of the gaze of the Father, which made her the Mother of God, and the look of the Son on the Cross, which made her our Mother.

The gaze of Mary, the Pope tells us, retains something of the gaze of the Father and Son. To accept the gaze of the lover--as Mary accepted the gaze of God in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is already to be changed, because it is in the gaze of the lover that the beloved recognizes her own value and dignity.

And to come to a truer recognition of our own worth is to more truthfully know ourselves. So we come to a knowledge of ourselves through the love we receive from others. That is why to fall in love, to go out of yourself by living for another, is the only path by which we finally become ourselves. This, precisely because we exist only in relation to others. I am who I am and become who I am only in relation to others--by being a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a colleague, etc. 

The ultimate love, the ultimate gaze that draws us most fully out of ourselves--and in liberating us from ourselves finally brings us to ourselves...this is the gaze of God, the love of God. It is through the gaze of God that the Church, that the soul, arrives at a recognition of her infinite value, her infinite potential...and arrives at a recognition of her vocation: to live with God. 

Pope Francis continues his reflection:  

And with that gaze Mary is looking upon us today. We need her tender look, her maternal gaze that knows us better than anyone else, her gaze full of compassion and care. Mary, today we want to say to you: Mother, look upon us! Your gaze leads us to God, your look is a good gift from the Father, who awaits us at every turn of our journey; it is a gift from Jesus Christ on the Cross, who takes upon Himself our suffering, our struggles, our sin.

How is it that Mary knows us better than anyone else? Because she knows our vocation, to live with God. And she knows the dignity and beauty of that vocation because she already beholds God as he is. 

Through Mary we can realize our vocation, by meeting the Father and the Son. And Mary is willing to give that love to us, since she knows that to be in love is to share that love with others, just as Christ's whole life was a sharing the love of the Father with the world. Amor tendit in alterum. Love tends toward another--love gives. We must strive to meet the source of all love:

And in order to meet this loving Father, today we say: Mother, look upon us! Let us all say it together: Mother, look upon us! Mother, look upon us!"

We cry out, too: Immaculate heart of Mary, pray for us! 

Broken bodies

At the Fraction, when the priest breaks the consecrated host at the Mass...do we remember the broken members of Christ's mystical body? Those suffering from famine, war, displacement? Do we think of those suffering at their spiritual Calvaries--from despair, loneliness, fear? Perhaps they are in our family, in our classroom, on our streets. Perhaps we are ourselves suffering.

Let us ask Our Lady for eyes to see--to see as she saw. To see the deep unity between the wounds of Christ and the wounds of his mystical body, the poorest of the poor. And at every Mass we will remember to ask Our Lord to guard and guide those who are broken and breaking today.