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!

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?

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.

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.

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?

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. 

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!

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! 

Mother's business card

The fruit of silence is prayer.

The fruit of prayer is faith.

The fruit of faith is love.

The fruit of love is service.

The fruit of service is peace. 

What is our business? What is our work in this world?

The answer is born from the womb of silence.

Sanctity--for you and for me

"I will, I want, with God's blessing, [to] be holy!" Here is the secret of joy. 

The text in full: My dear Lay Missionaries. Keep the joy of loving Jesus in your hearts and share this joy with all you meet. Make a strong resolution, "I will, I want with God's will [to] be holy." This will help you to satiate the thirst of Jesus for love for souls--by working at the salvation and the sanctification of the poor--especially your family. Let us pray. God bless you, Mother Teresa. 

A perfect summary of the MC charism in her own words. Notice: work for the salvation of the poor--especially your family. We need not look to the horizon to find the periphery.

A universal call

Christ thirsts on the cross (Jn 19:28). Not only for water, but for souls.

Even now, he thirsts to give us relationship, meaning, peace.

He thirsts for our sanctity. To love and be loved--this is our vocation.

Do we hear him call our name?

Will we quench his thirst?