10 December, Advent Light X: Look up in hope

From Bishop Erik Varden’s ‘Coram Fratribus’ website. He is addressing an audience of monks in a French abbey, looking at Luke 21:5-19, when the disciples are admiring the temple but Jesus tells them it will all be destroyed. They should rather look to heavenly, eternal realities, manifest in our world of time. The full text is here.

If we lose the habit of considering what is temporal in the light of what is eternal, we shall seek the purpose of our life in view of an horizon that grows ever narrower, full of menacing shadows. We shall be at the mercy of false prophets who manipulate these shadows as puppets to inspire fear and to keep us submitted to the power of their rhetoric. We see this tendency at work often enough in our anxious Europe today. The Christian’s remedy is to raise his eyes serenely in search of a vaster comprehension, animated by hope, remembering that creation doesn’t exist for its own sake, that it indicates a purpose that transcends it.

If we accomplish our earthly pilgrimage in this way, our life will not be any less sweet or precious. On the contrary. Hope will bestow on constrained existence an opening towards eternity. By following this hope, we shall give to others, too, the courage to hope.

The quality which the Gospel proposes to learn to live in this way is perseverance: perseverance in directing our thoughts and acts according to the mind of God; perseverance in listening and patience (the two presuppose one another); perseverance in friendship with Jesus, by which grace will also instil our others friendships, which otherwise might tend towards superficiality, informed by self-love and self-interest.

By building our lives thus on what is true and real, we shall not need to fear the day of the Lord, burning like a furnace. Let fire consume the chaff and withered branches! For the Children of the Kingdom, who live according to the logic of their baptism, the day of the Lord will bring healing in its wings. Let us, then, give ourselves faithfully to our daily tasks, as St Paul would have it, for the good of others and for our delight, but without forgetting that our today points towards God’s tomorrow. Our present condition, even in its moments of ecstasy, is but a noviciate preparing us for a life of eternal abundance. Amen.

In my family there were times when there was a lack of temporal abundance. I have memories of a Christmas when my mother made a Christmas tree of green woollen yarn, stretched over drawing pins on her bedroom wall. From each branch she had hung a sweet, one for each of us for a few days. It was frugal but sweet and precious.

Let us prepare Christmas ‘for the good of others and for our delight.’

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20 October: Realities that are Unseen, IV.

Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).

As I ponder this wonderful line from the Letter to the Hebrews and dwell with it, I begin to relearn what faith is about, what the word means.  I think back to the time in my life when faith came alive for me.  It happened over a period of some months when I was a very young adult.  There were stages to this, and the first was that it gradually came home to me that I didn’t know whether I believed in God or not – indeed, I wasn’t even sure what it meant to say that I was a Christian.  I saw that although I was attending church on Sundays I did so only because as an infant I had been carried to church, and ever since then I had not been given a choice in the matter.  But I could see clearly by that time that this was not good enough.  ‘Either figure out what this church business is all about,’ I said to myself, ‘or give it up.  But don’t go on like this, going to church as if you were a believer when you are actually clueless.’   So I decided to give my religion one last chance.  (Actually, I had never even given it a first chance, but in my habitual arrogance I was not really thinking clearly).  Thus the second stage in my relationship to faith began: I undertook to study the tenets of Catholic belief and to find out what it really meant to be a Christian.  

I can see now that this undertaking was itself prompted by God because otherwise it wouldn’t even have occurred to me: there was little true religious belief present in my heart.  Indeed, my ‘faith’ at that time, was faith in the mores and (false) promises of fulfilment offered by our secular culture.  My faith was also faith in myself, rather than in God.  But there was at least a pinch of true faith mixed in with the false; I did, after all, give some sort of homage to the idea that ‘this church business’ might have something worthwhile to offer and I would do well to have a look and see if I could find it.  But, at bottom, I must confess, I thought that my study would end with me dusting off my hands and becoming a completely secular non-believer, pursuing, as did so many of my peers, the allurements of pleasure and materialism which popular culture’s media-driven propaganda constantly advertised.  

But the Lord had something else in mind, clearly, and he who takes the initiative in love, also responds to our smallest overture (and my overture was extremely small) with an overwhelming display of love.   As my study of Christianity continued, some of my smug self-reliance began to give way.  I began to face how deeply needy I was on the spiritual level, and how much I needed God.  And this, in turn, led me into to a deep interior relationship with the Lord.  A whole world was opening up.  I found that ‘the existence of realities that are unseen’ were beginning – most wonderfully – to be proved to me.  The God, whom I barely knew, treated me like the prodigal daughter and ran to meet me with lavish experiences of joy.  At length, not only did I begin to practice my faith with conviction, I also developed an intense desire to give myself to the Lord fully.  And that was the genesis of my vocation to be Benedictine nun.  Decades have passed since I professed vows as a nun, and it is even more obvious to me today than on my profession day that the unseen realities are the most real realities that exist.  

My lectio questions were quickly turning into reasons for joy by now.  These reflections reaffirmed that faith – this love-relationship with the unseen God – does indeed guarantee the deepest blessings.  Faith is not merely a default setting for the times when the great mysteries of religion loom large.  Faith is an all-the-time setting.  Faith has positive content: it is the up-and-running relationship between God the Father and me – God, who is wholly mysterious in essence, but who is infinitely and infallibly real, infinitely and infallibly “there,” holding out the blessings that we hope for.   

Through this lectio journey, I rediscovered that faith is also the word we use to talk about our relationship with God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who really was seen in his lifetime and now, through the Gospel, shows me the way to the Father and challenges me to see him, that I may see the Father; faith is the word used to talk about the mission of the Church as the mediator of Christ to me in her teaching authority, in the sacraments, and in the union of believers when they gather in his name and among whom Jesus promises to be – and is – present.  Finally, faith is something for which I thank God because the word means that God has me and I have him in a relationship of love.  Faith, inseparable from love, does guarantee all blessings; it is about the unseen realities, it reveals the existence of them, and has proved to me that they are real.  

Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).

18 October: Realities that are Unseen, II.

A gate from former military land into Canterbury’s Poets’ Estate.

Sister Johanna’s second post in this series.

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Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).

If you weren’t here for yesterday’s post I hope you will scroll back to it to catch up with us.   We’re looking at the relationship between the notion of religious faith and the notion of “proving” unseen realities – it all seemed problematic for me when I first read the verse from Hebrews given above.  “We’re not meant to prove anything; we’re meant to consent to mystery,” I ranted.  

Then, I remembered that frequently when I am doing my lectio, a problem surfaces within the text that seems unsolvable at first.  But after I spend time with the scripture passage, reading and praying, the problem resolves by means of a sort of journey I take into the text, led by the Holy Spirit.  In this case, I now found that the journey involved pondering the words at the end of the quotation given here: ‘realities that are unseen.’  I didn’t know why at that point, but those words seemed important and I kept repeating them slowly in my thoughts.  There is, I find, a balm in this – almost as though my mind craves the nourishment that the words give even before it is able to penetrate to their deeper meaning. 

‘Realities that are unseen.’ As I repeated these words, I began to reflect that unseen realities are not easy to live with, especially for us in our day.  We’re so scientifically minded.  For us, the word ‘reality’ applies mainly to what can be seen or touched or heard; we talk about ‘evidence-based medicine,’ for example–we need evidence that we can actually observe in order to decide on the right medicine.  So, the senses determine what we consider to be reality most of the time.  What is unseen can make us uncomfortable.  We often decide therefore that unseen things don’t exist.

Then it occurred to me that we do live with some unseen realities–constantly and fairly comfortably.  They don’t always discommode us.  Take love, for instance.  Love itself is unseen but we know with every fibre of our being that it is real.  While we know that love is forever seeking to give evidence of its existence through words and actions that are self-giving, even self-sacrificial, we also know that underneath these see-able expressions of love, on a level that is unseen, love exists as a reality.

Faith, I reflected, is like that.  In fact, it is extremely like love, I realised, and is inseparable from love.  Indeed, it is informed by love.  My problem with the scriptural text from Hebrews began to ease as I reflected that although faith is certainly about consenting to the truth of theological propositions that are too mysterious to grasp fully, faith is primarily a loving relationship with the unseen God.  I mentally rewrote the passage from Hebrews: “Only a loving relationship with the unseen God can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen.”  I felt that I was moving closer to an understanding of this text.

Let’s stay with these ideas for the day and find out what they evokes in us.  I hope you will come back tomorrow for the continuation of our reflection.

21 May: The risk of Gentleness

From the Church of Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam

It’s Mary’s month, I know, and we could have said more about her, so now here is a good, challenging read about motherhood – parenthood, even, but mostly motherhood – and the risks of welcoming a new person into one’s body, home, family. A risk that Mary accepted. This article from The Plough Quarterly, The Risk of Gentleness by Gracy Olmstead, is subtitled: Welcoming the baby I did not want.

But Ms Olmstead found room for her son, and is still adapting and changing to make him welcome.

 It is a shock to see the midwife or doctor hold up a freshly birthed baby, red and crying and real. For all our intimate knowing of each other, this is our first encounter as separate individuals. For the newborn, the reality of our separation is sensed through vulnerability, cold, and brightness – unpleasant sensations to be hushed and soothed by a mother’s arms and breasts. For the mother, however, this meeting is the moment in which we say “hello” to the unique human we’ve, by some miracle, sustained inside of us, yet now fully see and know as other …

Like Mary, we must make space: to accept our feebleness and embrace the mystery, knowing that God is good even – and especially – in our weakness and our poverty. Do read the article! Will.

June 5: The Virtue of Justice I:Prudence Revisited.

Over to Sister Johanna for her reflections on the second Cardinal Virtue: Justice.

The cardinal virtues come in a famous pack of four: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. We looked at prudence in some of our previous posts. I thought it time now to move to the moral virtue that is next in line: justice.

If you weren’t here for the posts on prudence, then it might help briefly to revisit them: they began on 24^th April, and can be found at this link.

Prudence has a lot to do with seeing reality as it is, not as we would like it to be. It is also to do with being able to plot out a course of action which takes that reality into account. A prudent person is a great one to have as a confidant, it seems to me. He or she will ask you a lot of questions and help you to arrive peacefully at a decision – which, in the end, will still be your decision, because the questions and answers that prudence considers do not force you into anything. Rather, they reveal a path by clearing away the weeds, and so enable you freely to walk down that path, and own the decision. The words of great twentieth century Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper,* can be enlightening. He says:

Prudence has a double aspect. One side is concerned with gathering knowledge, with establishing a yardstick, and is directed toward reality; the other side is concerned with decision and command, with evaluation, and is directed toward action.

I love the idea that prudence is about gathering the knowledge that enables us to understand reality. Behind this is the humble acknowledgement that as fallen creatures, our view of things is apt to be distorted. Prudence is about opening our eyes to the truth of things and situations, so that our subsequent decisions and actions will be directed toward that same truth and goodness. ‘Prudence translates the truth of real things into the goodness of human activity…. Thus prudence does not simply rank first in the scale of cardinal virtues, it actually is the “mother of virtues.” And “gives birth” to the others’ (Pieper).

SJC