Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
Here is a meditation I wrote in 2006 on my own sense of call to be a “theologian.” It was a meditation on the above quote from Thomas Merton, as I thought to myself: how can I serve this Christ as his theologian?
Pulled from ranks of fallen flesh raised to starve for the bread of wisdom strewn ’round sanctuary courts ‘mid the ruins of Zion’s Temple mount. Filled with hunger, a parched and desperate pine for living waters: Stand aright! before the present Awe in fascinations of Wonder near Gardens guarded by the vigilant Seraph, sword ablaze. Drawn to seek the Face shining bloodied grace in my shattered mind; hurling a fiery Dart, deep into the fractured chalice of my heart. Commanding me “hear” in silent watch, — bear the myrrh of reverence near an empty Tomb, whilst bathed in unseen rays of dawn bleeding from immortal Light unto death’s solemn vanquish. I am to shoulder a weight of Glory enshrined in Creedal mysteries of enfolded Lights in local vestige a common mind of human strivings as Gospels are sketched lightly in our sands. I, donning servant’s wear, splintered commanded: fear not to bear this toil! relentless raids on unspeakable beauty caked in homely poverty. I am to be devout toward (broken) Titans of Faith reverent toward their crimson fields where faith, hope, love take deep root there I seek minds of sage and saint sinners all, drowned in Wine and Oil. I, called to wait upon a gush of grace ever to be in Vigil, swelling with thanks branded by marks of a slain Master gaping, failing holes in hands and feet and side.
Jesus doesn’t give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself. Jesus doesn’t explain why there is suffering, illness, and death in the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn’t allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life. — N.T. Wright
[this was a meditation on Genesis 22 I posted in 2023 as I was facing some very difficult challenges]
+ + +
Deus providebit “God will provide.”
I think often about this lovely motto of Notre Dame Seminary, which is taken from Genesis 22:8.
I once thought of this phrase as so reassuring and pacific. Like a Catholic “don’t worry be happy.” Until one day I realized these words were spoken by Abraham on his way to Mount Moriah to carry out the divine command to slaughter his beloved son, Isaac, and offer him as a holocaust.
Genesis gives relief to the felt anguish this command inflicts on Abraham:
God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love —Isaac— and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
God demands an act of trust and obedience so radical, exacts a requirement so total, it’s difficult to comprehend. And it is from this unconditional consent and surrender of Abraham of all he could claim as his own that all of the future promised blessings of the covenant will flow.
As Abraham and Isaac travel toward the mountain, Isaac is clearly unaware of his impending fate, noting to his dad that they don’t have an animal for the sacrifice. When he asks his father where the animal is, Abraham responds: “God will provide [Deus providebit] the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”
There are so many layers of deep meaning in this story, including their prefigurement of Christ. But what I have often wondered most about is what was Abraham thinking when he made this promise to his son? Was he hoping against hope that this mysterious God who called him had a rescue plan? Kierkegaard shed light on Abraham’s focus on God as the primary Actor in the story:
He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Abraham loved God, trusted God, and so his words to Isaac bear that out: “God will provide.”
Jesus’ words to the puzzled Pharisees in John 8:56 offer a new perspective on Abraham’s intuition:
Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.
Abraham’s faith was in the future rescue of Isaac. His hope, Jesus intimates, was an act of faith in him, the God whose name IS rescue, “God-saves,” Yeshua.
In the Garden of Olives, Jesus echoed Abraham’s hope in his Father, the One called the “Terror of Isaac” in Genesis 31:42. At the threshold of his own wood-bearing climb up the slopes of Mount Golgotha, Jesus prayed:
Abba, Father! All things are possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.
“God will provide.”
Jesus, in Gethsemane, became God’s provision for our rescue, the Passover Lamb of God — in the way his Father willed.
Christ is the absolute embodiment of the whole of divine Providence. That insight changed my life. …so trust in Providence must include the embrace of Christ’s Passover, foreshadowed in Abraham’s readiness to surrender all back to God — giving Isaac back to God.
Let. go. Only then can you receive what God wishes to give you, in the way he wishes to give it.
When we pray, work for deliverance, we must labor with all our might to do what seems right, but surrender all final outcomes to God alone.
In the Resurrection of Christ, we see there is no final deliverance from evil within the immanent frames of history. Instead, Christ has shattered those narrow frames to open them out into infinite horizons of hope for us. “All things work together for good for those who love God, and are called according to his purpose.”
Here is the deepest meaning of the Crucifixion as the supreme interpretive space to pronounce the words “God will provide.” With Jesus crucified we pray of our future, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
In hope we are saved. Even now we “taste and see” certain triumph in the Resurrection through hope, which becomes a wellspring of joy. Christ is risen, and we can see in the Eucharistic bread and wine, already now, signs of the transformation of the world into the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1).
And we who feed on this new Substance are to become its most evident living sign in the world. We are to be a People of joy and hope, of love, mercy, justice and peace, even (and especially) when all seems lost. This is the whole meaning of the Beatitudes.
Like the words of Abraham to his beloved son, “God will provide,” such hope in Christ is no superficial optimism, no wishful power of positive thinking. Rather, as David Bentley Hart said it so powerfully,
Christ has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes— and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom Lead thou me on The night is dark, and I am far from home Lead thou me on Keep thou my feet, I do not ask to see The distant scene, one step enough for me
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou Shouldst lead me on I loved to choose, and see my path but now Lead thou me on I loved the garish day, and spite of fears Pride ruled my will, remember not past years
So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on Over moor and fen, over crag and torrent Till the night is gone And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost a while
Meantime, along the narrow rugged path Thyself hast trod Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith Home to my God To rest forever after earthly strife In the calm light of everlasting life In the calm light of Your everlasting life
I have a podcast called Sharing the Faith as part of my work in the diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, and I will be sharing an episode here now and again. I am no pro-podcaster, like my friend Dr. Mario Sacasa in his Always Hope, but…my guests ROCK.
This one on the Twelve Steps was particularly profound for me and I was so honored Scott Berry was willing to share his wisdom and life. I met him in our Lay Formation Institute and wanted to share the gift I have been blessed by.
Ascending to the Father, Jesus became the fulfillment and model of our supreme calling: to return to God all the gifts entrusted to our stewardship on this earthly pilgrimage.
All things come from God and all things must return to God. This is an iron law.
You are made in the divine image, making you the hinge on which the entire created order pivots back to God.
Really sit with that for a moment now. The immensity of your call. Ask God to reveal it to you, if you would, as it’s just beyond your imagination’s reach.
Hear the late Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin meditating on this priestly dignity that is ours as he makes an offering to God in the absence of proper materials for the celebration of Holy Mass:
Since once again, Lord — though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia — I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols up to the pure majesty of the Real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world. Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit.
St. Paul also grasped this same sense of our dignity in the vast cosmos:
For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the cosmos or life or death or the present or the future— all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s — 1 Cor. 3:22-23
In every small choice, all of creation and of creation’s history are entrusted to into your hands. The choice? Either to lift upward to God by living in love or to desecrate on the ground by living in sin. This expansive vision of the whole is something William Blake expressed:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour
The introduction to the Last Supper in John 13:3-5 is absolutely stunning in this regard. The immense is contained in the (seemingly) insignificant. It begins by setting a metaphysical context of vast dimensions and then leads us, as if by some inexorable logic, to Israel’s God behaving as a slave as he washes filthy feet. In this, the text captures the whole pattern Christ laid out to be our Way of living at every moment:
Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him
Here it is: how do you return creation to God, with the eternal Son of God? In every moment, wash soiled feet everywhere you find yourself and do it with all that you have and all you are.
In John’s Gospel, the Eucharist is celebrated with the foot washing as its sacred Preface. Here we see God’s invitation to us to join Christ through his Spirit in binding our gifts of love to his, that we might become an eternal Offering to the Father.
What a plan God has conceived for lifting earth to heaven! So tender, so self-abasing, so inconceivable.
The Ascension then opens out into Pentecost, unleashing the Last Supper into the whole cosmos, giving each of us a full share in the slave-work of the Fire-breathing Christ, who makes all things new.
Pope Benedict unfolds this vision with a singular boldness of language:
God invites us to join with him, to leave behind the ocean of evil, of hatred, violence and selfishness, and to make ourselves known, to enter into the river of his love.
This is precisely the content of the first part of the Eucharistic prayer that follows: “Let Your Church offer herself to you as a living and holy sacrifice.” This request, addressed to God, is made also to ourselves. It is a reference to two passages from the Letter to the Romans. We ourselves, with our whole being, must be adoration and sacrifice, and by transforming our world, give it back to God.
The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy.
This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host. And let us pray the Lord to help us become priests in this sense, to aid in the transformation of the world, in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves.
That our lives may speak of God, that our lives may be a true liturgy, an announcement of God, a door through which the distant God may become the present God, and a true giving of ourselves to God.
By Jyoti Sahi (Indian, 1944–), Pentecost, 1983. globalworship.tumblr.com
This poem-prayer came to me the 8th day of the Pentecost Novena in 2019, only three months before my mother’s death.
Come!
My being is longing carved out by desire O King of all ages O Tongues of Fire come down to knit wedding life to Life interweaving All in all ending present strife O Christ-bearing Dove Light unseen, unsetting fall upon parched flesh calm the frightened, fretting turning deserts into gardens death into eternal glory see sin teeming with grace retelling our ancient story as mercy now runs fast hastening creation’s mend touch now our mortal wounds us as wounded healers, send!
Come, Creator Spirit, harmony of humanity, renew the face of the earth. Come, Gift of gifts, harmony of the Church, make us one in you. Come, Spirit of forgiveness and harmony of the heart, transform us as only You can, through the intercession of Mary – Pope Francis
[re-post from 2023]
The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is less than two weeks away. I can already smell the Holy Fire above, nearing, the sweet aroma of Christ falling from the Father.
The Novena begins this Thursday. Our global epiclesis will commence, begging the Ascending Christ to breathe downward, with his Father, outpouring Spirit to brood once again over the waters of chaos — awakening a novus Ordo, a new Order.
This awesome Feast is the seal of Easter season, completing the total revelation of the great secret hidden in God — what St. Elizabeth of the Trinity affectionately called O mes Trois! “O my Three!” Israel’s One God is Triune.
At the Annunciation, the Word was clothed in flesh. At Pentecost, the Spirit was clothed in Fire. Both divine Persons were sent by the Father to draw us back to the Father, from whom they both eternally proceed. As St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote in 108 A.D.:
There is Living Water in me, which speaks and says inside me, “Come to the Father.”
Here we have been admitted into what the Armenian liturgy’s opening words call khorhoort khoreen “deep mystery.”
The Son came down from heaven to wed our human nature to the divine nature, to confront death and to reconcile us to the Father. The Holy Spirit, overshadowing Mary, celebrated this divine-human wedding, joining in an eternal covenant bond the Son of God to our humanity in the womb of Mary. On the day of Pentecost, a second Annunciation, the Spirit overshadowed the disciples to extend that wedding invitation to each human person who, through faith, becomes one-flesh with Christ’s glorified humanity in the womb of Mother Church. This is Holy Baptism.
The Spirit’s mission in the world is absolutely singular: to complete the mission of Jesus Christ in the world, unleashing all of his Passover riches by flooding the world with the Blood and Water gushing from Christ’s open side.
Pentecost is catholic, a universal event, an invitation for all of humanity to receive this limitless Gift of God’s only begotten Son and become living members of his Body —
Until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to Man-made-perfect, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. — Eph. 4:13
As we become members of Christ by the working of the Holy Spirit, we enter into the “marvelous exchange”: God becoming man so that man might become God. Which in turn leads us to this “marvelous” thought: since God has chosen to give us a sharing in his divinity by becoming human (divinization through hominization), it is true that, in the words of Pope Francis, “holiness does not make you less human, but more human.” Pope Benedict echoes this same thought:
If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.
This cluster of considerations leads me to revisit the extraordinary experience British Catholic author Caryll Houselander had one morning in the 1940’s as she was traveling in the underground train in London:
All sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too … all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.
…Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.
After a few days the “vision” faded. People looked the same again, there was no longer the same shock of insight for me each time I was face to face with another human being. Christ was hidden again; indeed, through the years to come I would have to seek for Him, and usually I would find Him in others—and still more in myself—only through a deliberate and blind act of faith.
Just sit with that in stillness for a moment, if you would. Imagine how our living each day would change were we to truly believe this vision. Especially with those we find most difficult to endure or love.
How can I conclude such lofty thoughts? I will lean on the 10th century saint of the Eastern Church, Symeon the New Theologian, whose fifteenth Hymn washes the imagination in Christ:
We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ, He enters my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in His light he awakens as the Beloved in every last part of our body.
As the Novena nears, beg the Spirit to open the eyes of your heart to see Christ in you, wedding the world to himself. Then, being yourself Christ, resolve to love the world as Christ.
“The Ancient of Days,” c. 1794, William Blake. ibiblio.org
[re-post from 2013]
To be receptive to the highest truth, and to live therein, a man must needs be without before and after, untrammeled by all his acts or by any images he ever perceived, empty and free, receiving the divine gift in the eternal Now, and bearing it back unhindered in the light of the same with praise and thanksgiving in our Lord Jesus Christ — Mesiter Eckhart, German sermon 6
My children and I often have bedtime chats about the big questions of life, which is both a delight and a challenge. It’s a delight because their fascination with the meaning of everything reawakens my fascination. And add to that the fact that they want to talk about this with their father, even as teens? Holding on to that one.
But it’s also a challenge, because their questions, which are so basic, force me to articulate truths which cannot easily be “gotten behind” because they are so fundamental. They ask me at times to demonstrate the ground on which we walk. Like the principle of non-contradiction (which means that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time), certain truths just have to be accepted as givens, forming the basis for any conversation governed by the rules of logic.
Like existence: that we exist is a given, a needed presupposition without which any rational discourse is simply impossible. If we assume we live in The Matrix, we can proceed no further.
One of the “basic” questions my son Nicholas has posed to me again and again since he was six years old is the meaning of divine eternity. How is it possible, or even conceivable, that God is without beginning, without origin? He once articulated it this way:
If God knows everything, has infinite knowledge, and if he also has no beginning — where did he get all his information from in the first place? What was there to know if there was nothing other than God? But I guess even saying ‘was’ in the past tense already misses the point of eternal, right? Okay, let’s stop. It hurts my head!
Mine too! Try that thought exercise some time, think it through.
Nick has asked this often enough to keep the puzzle in the forefront of my thinking and prayer. It’s served as a powerful stimulus for theological wonder! In fact, I often pray now over Aquinas’ descriptions of God as actus purus essendi “the pure act of to-be” and as ipsum esse subsistens “self-subsistent Being” – both of which mean that God is (to speak awkwardly) self-caused, the source and reason for his own existence.
The other day [November 2013] Nick asked a particular question I had never thought of, at least in the way he asked it:
Dad, okay, I get that God has no beginning. I get the idea. That God’s the reason for his own existence. But this is what I still don’t get: Why does God exist? I mean, what’s his reason for existing at all? And why is he love and not, like, raw power or anger or something else? And if he’s really infinitely free, did he choose to exist as a Trinity or did he have no choice?
I think I passed out.
After saying, “I think that may be the most mind-bending theological question I have ever heard,” I said to him: “We’ve just reached the boundaries of thought in theology.” I shared with him the theological strategy of apophasis, or “unsaying.” Apophatic theology affirms that everything we say about an infinite God requires, as soon as we “say” something is true about God, that we have to immediately “unsay” it. Because everything we can say is drawn from our experience of this finite world. To be apophatic is to acknowledge that God is always more unlike than like what we have said about him. We might say, “God is good, but he is good in a way that infinitely transcends our experience of goodness. There is likeness, but always greater unlikeness because he is infinite.”
Here’s why Jesus in John’s Gospel speaks such a strange language — he is attempting to transgress with human language the infinite divide.
God is being apophatic when he says, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex. 33:20). When we compare our categories of thought (our analogies) with the reality of who God is in himself — his face– those categories collapse. As St John of the Cross says, when the intellect enters into union with God, our language passes from prose to poetry to stammering to silence.
Jesus’ parables give lots of likenesses. God is a Father, but not in a way we have experienced fatherhood. Which is why his parables, like the prodigal son story, shatter all kinds of socio-cultural conventions, leaving his hearers thinking: “What kind of father acts like that?”
Exactly.
In fact, you might say that Jesus’ entire life, death and resurrection is the supreme discourse of God, because Jesus is God-made-man, Infinity-made-finite, Word-made-words. And the fact that we believe the crucifixion of God (!) is the most perfect and complete revelation of God makes the cross also the perfect apophatic symbol. God’s supreme moment of revealing himself is also a supreme moment of paradox; a moment of disappearing as he reveals. Theology built on the ruins of God on Golgotha worthily shocks both intellect and imagination into a sustained state of awe.
For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and madness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. — 1 Cor. 1:22-24
Aquinas says it this way: “We cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, as we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.” God is not simply one being among other beings, the peak of a hierarchy of complexity — like moving from an amoeba to a man to angel to God. Rather, there’s an infinite gap between an uncreated God and creation; between limitless and limited; between the eternal Word and temporal words.
Theology, which is our way of thinking linguistically about God with God (i.e. Jesus), always stands on the brink of collapse. This makes theology the most fascinating, exhilarating, thrilling human intellectual endeavor possible. Theology is a quest that never comes to a point of rest, but challenges the mind to incessantly stretch out toward the infinite. Made in God’s image, the human mind is capax Dei “capable of God,” which means that the mind — through faith in this life, vision in the next — will never cease to grow in its reaching out toward the infinite and ingesting it whole. Even in heaven, the sounding of divine depths will never cease.
This makes the author of the book of Revelation the most honest of theologians:
When I saw [the risen Jesus], I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” — 1:17-18
“So it’s a mystery?” my son continued. “But isn’t that just a cop out, like saying, ‘I don’t know?'” “No, not really.” I went on:
Mystery is theology’s way of recognizing its limits. Confessing that God always exceeds our capacity to know, like a waterfall. And our knowledge of God is ultimately a gift of faith. But let’s clarify what faith means.
How do you know who I am in my deepest self or what I think? You know it only if I choose to reveal it to you freely. When I offer you the gift of making my secrets known to you, I’m offering you the gift of faith. Once you accept my offer in trust and receive what I have to reveal, and then come to know me, then you have faith.
Faith is not just blind belief, it’s the manner in which we accept knowledge another person’s free self-gift, self-revelation. In offering the gift of self, someone says to me: I trust you enough to offer this. In receiving the gift, I say to them: I trust you enough to receive this as truth. Once they offer that gift, and we receive that gift, faith leads to knowledge and to intimate communion. To love.
Poor guy, he’d glazed over by now. But I continued:
Okay, so the “Why does God exist” question is the last in the series of all your whys. It seems to me you can’t go any deeper than that. Honestly, I can think of only one good reaction to your question: praise. Praise says to God, “I honor you for being God! For being Trinity! For being just and good and merciful! For existing at all!” I don’t see how we can ever answer “why God exists.” Only God, who is his own origin, can answer it.
But maybe, as I think of it, God’s answer would be: “I AM, without a why.” Like all the best things in life. If you asked me why I want to sit and talk with you late at night, I might have specific answers. But in the end, it’s because I love you, which, in the end, is without a why.
But back to praise as a fitting response. This must be the reason the word “Alleluia” is everywhere in the Bible. Hallelu-yah. It means, “Praise Yah,” and Yah is short for Yahweh, which means in Hebrew something like “the One who causes to be.” Or as the Greek translation of the Hebrew has it, “ego eimi ho on,” which translates roughly into the English, “I am the IS. The TO-BE.”
Praise you God for being I AM, radiant beauty, sheer love, without a why!
I’d never thought of any of that last part before our conversation that day. I will never forget it.
There’s a medieval Persian poet, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, who said, “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment. Then you will know the true God.” Praise is the mind and heart’s song of bewilderment before transcendent mystery. Praise gives us licence to recklessly adore what is both absolutely true and utterly incomprehensible.
After I made that last point, my son said: “Okay, Dad, no more. That’s too deep.”
It was after midnight. Time to sing an Alleluia. Then to bed.
The child has become the father of the man. Thank you, son, for rekindling in me wonder. As you have taught me to praise Him tonight, may I teach you to love Him more tomorrow. Amen.
Wastefulness is the original Christian attitude…The entire Passion occurs under the sign of this complete self-wasting of God’s love for the world. — Hans Urs von Balthasar
I was recently talking to some seminarians about a Catholic view of “the Gospel of Prosperity,” which — in caricature — essentially affirms that following Jesus leads to blessings of wealth, surplus, health and success.
A Catholic sound-bite reply might sound something like this:
Following Jesus means that we will be given all that is necessary to carry out our personal vocations, i.e. to become the sort of saint God made us to be. Any wealth, surplus, health or success that may come our way is an evident sign of God’s love for all those whom he has placed in our sphere of influence; whose lives we can benefit and lift up.
Following Jesus means cross-bearing, which is the supreme symbol of love in the face of hate; a life broken and given away. In the words of St. John Chrysostom’s liturgy, the sign of God’s blessing worthily received is a life lived and offered to God “on behalf of all and for all.”
We are blessed in order to be a blessing. My life is not my own. It belongs to God “and the children that God has given me” (Heb. 2:13).
St. Paul (2 Cor. 8) exalts such a divine economics:
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. You are being enriched in every way for all generosity.
Let me share a story that Fr. Tom Hopko referred to in a lecture he gave once on the Cross. It makes my point in a very startling way.
…Mother Teresa was being interviewed by a reporter who complained that she was healthy, while those she served were sick. The reporter said: “If God supposedly loves them so much, how is that fair that they are sick and you are well?” And I loved Mother Teresa’s response. She said, “If I am blessed with health, it is not for my sake, but only so I can spend my health in caring for the sick.”
The agitated reporter then went on to argue the unfairness of suffering if there is a good God. Mother attempted to respond with the Christian view of life as tragic, wrecked by sin, death, suffering. She spoke of God’s compassionate desire to share our sufferings in Jesus and heal all ills in eternity. “But,” the reporter interrupted her, “You! You yourself do not suffer. How is that fair? Why do they suffer but you do not?”
And again, I love Mother’s response. She said, “Yes, you are right. I am not worthy to suffer as they do, so near to Jesus on the cross. But I have been made worthy to be near to the suffering, and to love Jesus in them. This is my calling, this is your calling.”
Worthiness. Suffering. Love. Compassion. Health. Sickness. In Jesus, all has become gift, inscribed with a law of love. Received in order to be given away. Even from the the darkest elements of life, the worst of the worst, we can draw treasures for others. Because of the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection, our everything becomes a worthy offering. Darkness has been re-purposed by God and filled with light, with a love stronger than death, blazing from the Body of Christ.
God is love. It is love alone that grants enduring worth to all things. Love, which is to will the good of another. The only love that “wins” is in those who choose, from the dunghill, to will the good still; to love with the very love with which God loved us in Christ crucified.
But the choice to love in such a supra-human way must be preceded by the acceptance of a Supra-human love that says in the first instance: we are loved. Loved by the God of Jesus Christ, above in that painting. The God who longs to be allowed to love us. To turn a phrase from the old Baltimore Catechism:
Why did God make us? God made us so that He might know, love and serve us in this life and be happy with us forever in the next.
If we get that first, then we are freed to know, love and serve God in this life and be happy with him forever in the next. St. Catherine catches this lovely thought:
O eternal Father! O fiery abyss of charity! O eternal beauty, O eternal wisdom, O eternal goodness, O eternal mercy! O hope and refuge of sinners! O immeasurable generosity! O eternal, infinite Good! O mad lover! And you have need of your creature? It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her, in spite of the fact that you are Life itself, and everything has life from you and nothing can have life without you. Why then are you so mad? Because you have fallen in love with what you have made!
Re-read John 13, the washing of the feet, with this in mind. Only those who truly believe into the foot washing of God can act like the God who is “in the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7). As St. John says,
In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.
The most difficult dogma to swallow in the whole Christian tradition is that we are unconditionally loved, a truth that then demands of us to learn to love without condition.
People say photographs don’t lie, mine do. – David LaChapelle
Today I thought I would share a fun thing. Well, fun for me.
As I was sorting the other day through the thousands of printed photos we continue to keep, I happened on a slew of pix from my own childhood and teen years. I found this photo of me from December of 1986, about two months before my conversion experience. Fortunately, you can’t see the mullet.
It made me reflect on what I was like back then, and then that reflection randomly triggered the memory of a song by the 1980’s Christian rock band, Petra, that I became obsessed with soon after my conversion. I have not listened to that song since then! It’s called This Means War. My Evangelical friend who had led me to Christ introduced me to Petra, and the album the song was on, when he took me to a local Christian bookstore to get me a Bible. I would listen to it frequently to pump me up in my resolve to push through the moral chaos that had erupted in my life, and it introduced me to the idea of spiritual warfare.
Enjoy…
Son of the morning, highest of all You had so much going till you took the fall Had a place in the glory but you wanted it all Impossible odds but you had the gall It seemed so unlikely that you would rebel Such a worthy opponent that you knew so well But you went down fighting when you heard the bell Took a third down from heaven when you went to hell This means war and the battle’s still raging War and though both sides are waging The Victor is sure and the victory secure But till judgment we all must endure This means war! Then came the cross you thought you had won You thought you had conquered God’s only Son So much for Jesus, you said in jest Then you got a visit from an unwelcome guest This means war and the battle’s still raging War and though both sides are waging The Victor is sure and the victory secure But till judgment we all must endure This means war! Now it’s all over down to the wire Counting the days to your own lake of fire But you’ll go down fighting for all that you’re worth To try to abolish His image on earth This means war and the battle’s still raging War and though both sides are waging The Victor is sure and the victory secure But till judgment we all must endure This means war!
The pain within is so great… Please ask Our Lady to be my Mother in this darkness. The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me. In the darkness…Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The one You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone. Before I used to get such help & consolation from spiritual direction— from the time the work has started— nothing. If I ever become a Saint — I will surely be one of “darkness.” I will continually be absent from heaven – to light the light of those in darkness on earth. – St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
These words were written by Mother Teresa, expressing the great trial she underwent for several decades after she began her work of serving the “poorest of the poor.” These trials were a dark night of faith, of feeling abandoned by God. And yet, see her life.
What I find so extraordinary and inspiring is Mother Teresa’s honesty in her personal correspondence with her spiritual directors, and that she came, over time and with much struggle, to accept these trials in surrender to Christ on the cross; and she did not live aspiring beyond this trial by looking for an easy ‘fix.’
After years of struggle trying to understand it, she eventually came to discern and embrace this darkness as the cost of her mission to live in solidarity with the destitute. Destitute who, beyond all choice, lived in that same darkness. This insight gave her great peace.
From within that emptied out space her trial carved out, Mother chose to trust and to love.
That is a difficult pill to swallow in our American culture that sees suffering and struggle as the only real problem, and one that must always be eliminated. St. Paul need not apply:
Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. — 2 Cor. 12:10
Even beyond the grave, Mother testified she was ready to continue ‘absent from heaven’ for the sake of loving those who sense themselves ‘absent from heaven,’ abandoned.
O God, take these broken wings of mine and teach me to fly with them. St. Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.
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