Decisive choices

Pope Francis        ✔ @Pontifex

Dear young people, do not be afraid of making decisive choices in life. Have faith; the Lord will not abandon you!

Pope Francis on prayer

From the close of the interview: 

“I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o’clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray mentally even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.

You cannot bring home the frontier

The Pope on frontiers, also from the interview. This is a good gloss on what I've tried to get at earlier in the Pope's thought as it relates to the periphery (which in his earlier thought he seems to refer to as the frontier). [See the tag periphery below for earlier posts on the topic.]

"When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

And he links the frontier/periphery, again, with the poor: 

“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.

Pope Francis's favorite artists

Also from the big interview (see last post for link). This list I found quite impressive.

“I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.

“I have read The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of The Betrothed: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains....’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.

“Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his ‘White Crucifixion.’ Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the ‘Parsifal’ by Knappertsbusch in 1962.

“We should also talk about the cinema. ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is ‘Rome, Open City.’ I owe my film culture especially to my parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.

“Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.”

God is a surprise

From the recent big interview with the Pope: 

"God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential."

Your life story

Here are two excerpts from Pope Francis's recent homilies at Casa Santa Marta.

Jonah. John August Swanson.

1. On Jonah and the good Samaritan: "I ask myself and I ask you : Do you let God write your life story or do you want to write it yourselves? And this tells us about docility: are we obedient to the Word of God? 'Yes, I want to be docile!' But you, do you have ability to listen, to hear it? Do you have the ability to find the Word of God in your every day life, or are your ideas what keep you going? Or do you allow yourself to be surprised by what the Lord has to say to you?"
2. On Martha and Mary: "And we ourselves, when we don't pray, what we're doing is closing the door to the Lord. And not praying is this: closing the door to the Lord, so that He can do nothing. On the other hand, prayer, in the face of a problem, a difficult situation, a calamity, is opening the door to the Lord so that He will come. So that He builds things, He knows to arrange things, to reorganize things. This is what praying is: opening the door to the Lord, so that he can do something. But if we close the door, God can do nothing!"

Who is writing our life story? Who is building our life? Am I, or is God?

At the feet of Jesus

The Gospel for today is about Martha and Mary. We are all quite familiar with the story. Martha is serving and preparing for Jesus. She must be quite busy. Mary is at the feet of Jesus, listening to his word. Martha becomes a little irritated, understandably, and asks Jesus that Mary help her. And Jesus replies that only one thing is necessary. Mary has the better part--it will not be taken from her.

The story is often interpreted as the elevation of the contemplative life over the active life. Martha is busy trying to prepare the house for Jesus, perhaps a little too busy. She represents the active life. Mary is sitting with Jesus, simply being with him. She represents the contemplative life. Insofar as the contemplative life is objectively superior to the active life--since the contemplative life more closely approximates our life in heaven--this is a legitimate interpretation of the text.

But even as this interpretation answers one question--namely, the relative ranking of the active and the contemplative life--it raises another: how are we to spend our time between the two lives? After all, no one on earth can live a purely contemplative life (even hermits need to eat and sweep out their huts) nor can anyone live a purely active life, try as we will (since nothing can take from man his desire for the happiness that this world can give; he is always restless for more, a sign of his interiority).

So we come to what I think is the deeper point of the Martha and Mary story: the need for discernment. Again, we are faced with a critical question: how do we decide to spend our time? When do we pray and when do we act? It is a question of immense importance, and confusion on the answer can have real consequences. Let's take the parable that immediately precedes the story about Martha and Mary. It is about the Good Samaritan. Here there is a confusion about how we are to spend our time. A priest walks by a wounded man on the way to the Temple, while a Samaritan stops to help. Perhaps the priest thinks to himself, "I'm off to Temple, and I can pray for that poor wounded man on the way. I've chosen the better part--no time to stop." That would be hypocrisy indeed! In this case, even though the contemplative life is superior to the active life, prayer without action would be a great evil. Pray for the wounded man on the road--good, yes!--but also act: attend to him, bandage his wounds, take him to an inn and provide for him.

So the question is this: how do I discern God's will for me, at this moment? How do I balance the obligations between prayer and action, knowing that prayer is the most necessary thing, but that this world also requires and yearns for our works of love? Here is where we get to the heart of today's Gospel. Action and prayer can both be at the service of God. But when we make an idol of our projects, when we cease acting for God and begin to act for ourselves, then we lose sight of the great treasure of our lives. When we begin to act for ourselves rather than God, we become irritable when things do not go our way, when they do not turn out well. We lose our peace. It is then that we have to return to the Master and prayer, reorienting ourselves to him and his designs--the better part.

What is the better part? It is placing ourselves at the feet of Jesus. This is the critical point: we must always place ourselves at the feet of Jesus, listening to his Word. We can place ourselves at his feet when we act, by humbling ourselves and serving others. Christ is in our family members, friends, and colleagues. We can place ourselves at his feet by serving them. We also serve and glorify God by taking time to literally place ourselves at his feet in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

The contemplative life is superior to the active life. But human life, no matter one's state, is always a mixture of both contemplation and action. It is our task to discern what God's will is for us at any one moment. We can begin by asking our Lord: "How can I place myself at your feet? Let me hear your word, as Mary does, and respond with action, as Martha does. Give me the heart of these saints." 

Where there is darkness...

We recently celebrated the feast of St. Francis. Below is a prayer attributed to him. The Missionaries of Charity pray it every day after Communion, so it played an important role in Mother Teresa's spirituality. I think that the references to light, peace, love, and joy had a special resonance for Mother Teresa. Jesus told Mother in a locution, "Come, be my light," which is also the title of a book that recounts Mother's dark night of the soul in her own words. In many ways this was her mission, to be Christ's light to the world. The references to peace and love are remembered in Mother's "business card." Of course, these are cursory thoughts; a fuller exposition of the prayer and its role in Mother's spirituality would be a major project in itself! 

Here is a version from the National Shrine of St. Francis in San Francisco: 

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen. 

Processes, spaces, peripheries, horizons

Another fascinating and overlooked quote from the pope's interview: 

"We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting."

This is a rather cryptic comment. I am intrigued how Pope Francis's rejection of occupying space links up rather well with his concept of peripheries. A periphery is a boundary--it is a line, a limit, a demarcation. A periphery is not a space. It is a vector, a velocity and direction--in other words, a process. A periphery is the edge of space. Occupation of space, control of power, appears to win out in the present moment, but over time, historical processes displace spaces. So God acts in history as a vector, rather than occupying a space.

I think to understand this comment more fully, we need to turn to a comment the pope made earlier in the interview when referring to St. Ignatius:

"I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”)....it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God."

St. Ignatius

Of course, without saying it, Pope Francis is referring to the logic of the Incarnation here. God is not limited by the greatest things (God is greater than the universe) and yet he is contained in the tiniest (God emptied himself to become a baby in a manger). But it is also the logic of God's essence. It is the interplay of God's transcendence (He is infinitely above and other than all things) and his immanence (He is more intimate to all things than they are to themselves). As Augustine has it: God is more intimate to me than my innermost self and higher than my uppermost self--interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (Confessions, 3.6.11). God is not limited by the greatest spaces, and yet he is in a sense contained in the tiniest. How is this the case? Oddly enough, Thomas Aquinas seems to suggest that God is immanent because he is transcendent. God's transcendence or infinity (his being-esse, his comprehension all perfections) is the ground of all created being that participates in God's esse (i.e., His act of being). And so God is in all because he is above all.

If that confuses you, it should. Check out the Summa (I, 7-8).

In the Incarnation, God reveals in concrete terms what he already shows forth in his essence--that the God who is above all is also in all and present to all. In the Incarnation, this truth takes on a vivid reality. The God who is not subject to time assumes a human nature in time. And he does so in a way that spurns occupation of space, that is, possession of power. God knows that possession of space is static while processes are dynamic. In his utter poverty, Jesus initiates a historical process that changes the world. He changes the vector of history.

Incarnation window from Chartres Cathedral.

The Pope then brings all of this high-flying theology down to earth. The spiritual takeaway from the logic of Incarnation, the dynamics of God's metaphysical relationship with creation, and the rejection of occupying space is this: we can "appreciate the small things inside large horizons". 

Again, the theme of peripheries! A horizon: the boundary between earth and heaven, the mutual limit of each domain, the space in which earth becomes heaven and heaven becomes earth (here again we find the logic of Incarnation and Sacramentality). If the horizon of our life, the eschatological orientation of being, is the Kingdom of God, then all of our actions, even the smallest, can have eternal significance. 

In fact, we could say that the more meaningless our actions seem, the greater significance they have. This is the case because small actions, actions on the periphery (as opposed to space-occupying actions) are God's privileged channels for changing the world. Indeed, precisely because an action seems so small, there are great opportunities in it for love. Why? Because love is humble; it does not seek aggrandizement. To love when no one is looking, when there is no reward on the other end, when choosing not to love would be so easy--it is then that love counts the most, because it is then that love gives freely and purely.

Let's ask St. Therese for light on this point, whose feast day we celebrated recently. Mother Teresa, who took her name from Therese, looked upon her as a guide to the spiritual life. A good summary of Mother's teaching (although I can't verify that she ever said this sentence word for word) is this maxim commonly attributed to here: We can do no great things, only small things with great love. 

The Little Flower

Making a mess

Pope Francis on religious life (from the recent big interview):

“Religious men and women are prophets,” says the pope. “They are those who have chosen a following of Jesus that imitates his life in obedience to the Father, poverty, community life and chastity. In this sense, the vows cannot end up being caricatures; otherwise, for example, community life becomes hell, and chastity becomes a way of life for unfruitful bachelors. The vow of chastity must be a vow of fruitfulness. In the church, the religious are called to be prophets in particular by demonstrating how Jesus lived on this earth, and to proclaim how the kingdom of God will be in its perfection. A religious must never give up prophecy. This does not mean opposing the hierarchical part of the church, although the prophetic function and the hierarchical structure do not coincide. I am talking about a proposal that is always positive, but it should not cause timidity. Let us think about what so many great saints, monks and religious men and women have done, from St. Anthony the Abbot onward. Being prophets may sometimes imply making waves. I do not know how to put it.... Prophecy makes noise, uproar, some say ‘a mess.’ But in reality, the charism of religious people is like yeast: prophecy announces the spirit of the Gospel.”

Word cloud of the most common words in the prophetic books.

Peripheral beauty

The Cross is the fullest revelation of God's love that man has received. So the Cross is the most beautiful creation, insofar as it most fully reveals the hidden depths of God's-being-love. And perhaps we could say that the pinnacle of this revelation was Christ's cry of thirst from the cross, his thirst for our love, to love and be loved by us. And we find this beauty, today, at this moment in history, on the periphery of existence. If we are looking to discover beauty in our life, if we want to find something more meaningful--what are we waiting for? Duc in altum. Launch into the deep! Into the depths of the love of Christ, into uncertainty, into a life lived in radical trust.

Peripheral litrugy

The periphery is the place where the poorest of the poor dwell. The periphery of history is the Cross. If we imagine time as a ray (a line extending in a certain direction), the moment of the Crucifixion is the point on the line tangent to eternity. It is the point at which we become closest to entering into the eternal, into the life of God, for God alone is without beginning or end. For this reason, our liturgies are remembrances of the Paschal mystery. It is in the liturgy that we enter into the Paschal sacrifice and touch eternity, whether we are being baptized or receiving Last Rites. The periphery is our place of departure into the deeper realities of love and sacrifice, the places where time meets eternity.

Let us make our lives peripheral liturgies, sacrifices to God.

Towards a theology of thirst

The divine thirst is the first principle and foundation of the MC charism. All else is contained within the experience of thirsting for and being thirsted for by Christ. Accordingly, any theological work must begin with this principle and keep it ever in mind. It will be the soul of any theology that seeks to explicate the MC charism.

What is the task of the theologian as he studies the charism received and transmitted by Mother Teresa? I think it is to make explicit what was implicitly lived and taught by Mother. She was not a theologian, in the normal sense of the word, but I suspect that she had a deeper theological outlook on reality than almost any theologian that lived in the 20th century (and beyond), insofar as she more deeply penetrated the mysteries of reality and their ordering principle--i.e., the divine thirst.

At the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas makes an interesting distinction between two types of wisdom (I, 1, 6, ad 3). One type of wisdom judges by inclination. The virtuous man knows what is right, for example, though he may not be able to explain why. This wisdom is given as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Another type of wisdom (sacred theology) judges by knowledge. This knowledge of wisdom is acquired by study. The moral theologian knows what is right, not by inclination necessarily, but by a thorough study of the precepts of the natural and divine law, etc. Mother Teresa was wise in the first way. She judged by inclination, illuminated by the divine light. It is the task of the theologian to (1) enter into and (2) give an account of this light.

Mother Teresa came to theologically profound conclusions about the relationship between the poor and the Eucharist, the role of suffering in the Mystical Body of Christ, the meaning of human vocation, the phenomenology of love, the meaning of spiritual and material poverty, the interrelationship of beauty and sanctity, to name a few themes. She rarely gave arguments for her conclusions, having received them in the depths of prayer, but since they come from God, they are surer lights to truth than any worldly philosophy. A theology of thirst can help us to explore her conclusions and their significance, with the aim of making manifest the profound depth of the charism so as to draw others to sanctity.

Although many biographies and memoirs have been written about Mother Teresa--the most recent of which have focused on her dark night of the soul--very little work has been done on the theology underpinning the charism. The most significant step in this direction, I think, would be the book Mother Teresa's Secret Fire written by Father Joseph Langford, co-founder of the MC Fathers (read an excellent biography of Father Joseph and the inspiration for the book here). He writes in Secret Fire that Mother Teresa's vision "takes us into the depths of the Trinity in one direction, and the depths of human nature in the other" (84). I think there is no better time than now to explore this theme.

The application of beauty

What are the end of all these musings on beauty? Why spend the time trying to grasp the relationship between beauty and being, the structure of beauty, and its relationship to love? I think because more fully understanding beauty is a key to unlocking Mother Teresa's vision of the human vocation.

Mother teaches us that we must make our lives something beautiful for God. I think we now have the tools to explicitly describe what Mother Teresa implicitly grasped:

• Christ's crucifixion is the apex of created beauty, insofar as it most fully reveals the depths of divine being whose essence is love (we can understand the processions of the Trinity from Father to Son and Father and Son to the Holy Spirit as perfect gifts of self [=love]. The crucifixion is a creaturely icon of this self-gift). Our entrance into this beauty is a double ecstasis. It is a meeting of thirsts: Christ's thirst to love and our thirst to be loved. Or Christ's thirst to be loved and our thirst to love. Here is the core of the charism of the Missionaries of Charity. 
• Holiness (beauty) is the goal of human life. This could change how we understand even the smallest of our tasks. If we are able to orient all of our work towards the final goal of holiness, and if we understand holiness as beauty (the glimpse of God that breaks out of our life and into the lives of others), we can find intense meaning in even the smallest tasks.
• The Church teaches the path to beauty. To want to live a beautiful life is not some false sentimentality. The objective path to beauty (and the most beautiful life is the holy life, inasmuch as the holy life more fully reveals the being of God who is love) is taught to us by the Church, above all in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium. The Church calls us to holiness and gives us the means: Tradition and Scripture guide us, the Magisterium instructs us, the Sacraments strengthen us and prepare us to live charitably, and our prayer feeds us. Mother Teresa's holiness was a holiness lived from and for the Church. Let us make her mantra our own: I will give saints to Holy Mother Church [starting, we could add, with myself!].

I hope to return more to the theme of beauty and its relation to Mother's charism in future posts.