Book Review: The Catholic Worker Movement – Intellectual and Spiritual Origins by Mark and Louise Zwick

(My husband showed me this book in a half-price bookstore a couple of years ago and after reading it my life has never been the same. This book introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement, which I barely knew beforehand. It now stands as the first of many books I have read about the movement and the cause for many long conversations between my husband and I about how we understand and try to live out our faith. Since reading the book, we have had the pleasure to meet the authors, Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Houston Catholic Worker [Casa Juan Diego] and who day after day, without a break, perform the corporal works of mercy that Day and Maurin emphasized so much.)

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin Misunderstood

Known by many only as a secular activist or as a Communist by her strongest opponents, Dorothy Day was far from being either one. In fact, during their lifetime, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, fiercely opposed Communism, because its ideologies hurt the dignity of the human person and did not uphold the inalienable rights of all human beings that they strongly fought for. They did not like to be called conservatives or liberals, as they believed that the values that they stood up for were simply Catholic, and therefore, true. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, were and are still considered as radicals, which they did not mind, because to them Radicalism “meant getting down to the roots.”

Many know about her abortion or her participation in radical secular movements, but only few know about her devotion to the saints, daily Mass, and the Divine Office. Dorothy explains how she explained to communists her conversion to Catholicism:

“I had a conversation with John Spivak, the Communist writer, a few years ago and he said to me, ‘How can you believe? How can you believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Virgin birth, in the Ressurection?’ I could only say that I believe in the Roman Catholic Church and all She teaches.I have accepted her authority with my whole heart.”

Christ and Inter-Religious Dialogue

This speech was given to the Aresty Research Symposium in Rutgers, Spring 2008.

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, one of the main problems was evangelization. How were Christians supposed to propose what they call the “gospel,” the “good news” to all people as Jesus commanded them to (Matt. 28: 19-20)? Most of Jesus’ disciples were practicing Jews, that is, they had the same presuppositions and worldview that Jesus had. Yet, they were called to proclaim the good news not simply to the Jews but to the Gentiles, those who had different worldviews than they. We see examples of this when they had to debate whether Gentiles had to be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law in order to be part of the Church, the people of God (Acts 15; Romans 2-6). The early Church decided not to impose some aspects of Judaism to the Gentiles and yet proclaimed the necessity of Jesus Christ as the only savior. Today, the Catholic Church faces the same problem as the early Church. With so many cultures and religions today, she faces the difficult task of presenting the gospel in a non-imposing way while at the same time proposing an essential element in human life: relationship with Christ. Can the Catholic Church propose the necessity of Jesus Christ while at the same time be tolerant of other religions?

Christ as the Fulfillment of Human Life

            The then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in his homily to the College of Cardinals in the Mass for the election of a new pope, said that we are “moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal [in] one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” The Catholic Church, however, proposes that she can know for certain that in Jesus of Nazareth, there is “the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God.”[1] She cannot accept a religious relativism which teaches that each religion in their own independent way is a path to God, and that the revelation of God given by Christ is incomplete and that other religions are complementary to his revelation.[2] Accepting such an idea would be destroying her understanding of who Jesus is. According to the Church, Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate Word of God (Jn. 1:14) in whom the fullness of Yahweh dwells (Col. 1:19; Rom 9:4-5). He is the definitive and final revelation of God simply because he is God; there is nothing more to add because God himself has shown himself in person. In Christ we find God’s triune tenderness to humanity and all of creation, which is fully expressed in his dying and rising from the dead.[3] As Karl Rahner said,

By the resurrection, then, Jesus is vindicated as the absolute saviour. We can also say more cautiously at first: as the final ‘prophet… We must bear in mind here that his word as God’s final word can be understood to be definitive not because God now ceases to arbitrarily to say anything further, although he could have said more, and not because he ‘concludes’ revelation, although he could have continued it had he just wanted to. It is the final word of God that is present in Jesus because there is nothing to say beyond it, because God has really and in a strict sense offered himself in Jesus…Jesus, then, is the historical presence of this final and unsurpassable word of God’s self-disclosure: this is his claim and he is vindicated in this claim by the resurrection. He is of eternal validity and he is experienced in this eternal validity. In this sense in any case is the ‘absolute saviour.[4]

            It is important to note that because Jesus Christ is God himself, although he is the final revelation of God, he is inexhaustible. Precisely because he is inexhaustible, whatever we think of him falls short of who he is. His “I” is ever greater than any human speech or understanding: “no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them [God and creature]”. Our understanding of Christ in Scripture and Tradition, then, develops as time continues. Although it is a Catholic doctrine that objective revelation ceased after the death of the apostles, there is a sense in which revelation is open. Joseph Ratzinger’s study in The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure[5] wanted to free us from the conception of revelation as an abstract concept. He argued that St. Bonaventure’s notion of revelatio is the unveiling of the hidden. Concretely, it can be referred to unveiling of the future, the mystical meaning and understanding of Scripture, and “the divine reality which takes place in the mystical ascent”.[6] There can be no revelation unless there is an unveiling, which presupposes a person with a veil, a person who has the capacity to learn something new.[7] Ratzinger also emphasized that revelation was never equated with Scripture but rather the understanding of Scripture and this understanding increases as time goes on. To put it in another way, there can be such a thing as “new revelation” insofar as our understanding of Christ increases.[8] According to Ratzinger, we can summarize St. Bonaventure’s understanding on the relationship between Scripture and history this way,

a) Scripture has grown in an historical way. Only he who knows its history knows its meaning. History is a structural element of Scripture’s intelligible form…b) Scripture, however, is not simply a product of a past history, but is simultaneously a statement about and a prediction of the future. Since the Scriptures were written, part of this future has already become past, while part of it still remains future. This means that the total meaning of Scripture is not yet clear. Rather, the final “revelation,” i.e. the time of a full understanding of revelation, is yet to come.[9]

The Church’s understanding of Christ through the Scriptures, then, is not simply understanding the historical Jesus, that is, what he had done in the first century Palestine, but experiencing Christ ever anew in the present moment. It requires that the Spirit takes the word and incarnates it to the flesh of the believer. The Spirit does this throughout history and it is in this way that the life of Christ is not limited to a particular time, but universalized. The work of the Spirit is to universalize the saving act of Jesus Christ.[10] The work of the Spirit is not to be understood as some kind of magical trick of God, but rather, it is verified in the witness of the believers. The Spirit works through and in people and only when the totality of the person is taken into account can the word of God be understood. To put it in another way, God works through human realities and does not take away anything that is good in him; “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” When the Spirit moves a person to turn to Christ, a veil is removed and he is moved from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:16-18). In this way the person becomes a letter of Christ, not made from ink but the Spirit in his heart (2 Cor. 3:1-3).

            The experience of the person, the receiver of revelation, then, is fundamental in understanding Jesus Christ. Christ cannot be known apart from the one who receives him. The experience of Christ is so fundamental that the Church is obliged not to forget it. She must keep remembering her life with Christ. Commitment to the experiences of Christ is what we can call Tradition. Tradition, like revelation, is not a set of propositions or doctrines. It cannot be limited to a particular time. It is remembering the life of Christ. By “remembering” we do not simply mean a recollection of the past but reliving the life of Christ. It is the Christian immersing himself to the reality of what he has received. And because every encounter with Christ is a “new revelation” the Church does not remain close to the future but rather takes up her experiences and understanding that will lead her to examine and judge the future in a Christ-like manner. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Her tradition is not so much a link with the past as a marathon relay race in which one runner hands on the torch to the next…the Church is prevented from ever resting on any past achievement; she is continually being spurred on to make a better response.”[11]

            Another factor to be kept in mind about experiencing Christ is that the receiver of revelation has his own environment and context he is living in. The Spirit does not work in a void or a tabula rasa but rather works through the human person as he is. A person, then, who is trained in Aristotelian philosophy will not have to abandon the truths that he has learned in that discipline. Rather, Tradition purifies his understanding within that context, saving whatever is good in that philosophy and turning away from what leads to error. This is why throughout Christian history, we find that non-Christian cultures had made a big impact on Christianity, up to the point of impacting the way Christian theology is presented. One cannot doubt, for example, that Hellenistic culture was not absent in the development of Christian thought. The fact that the concept of transubstantiation has become a Catholic dogma manifests the Greek influence in Christianity.

            By understanding the concept of revelation in Catholic theology, it seems that we can say that there is a type of religious pluralism that can be accepted. As the Second Vatican Council taught,

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.[12]

The Church can accept that there are rays of truth in other religions because they all partake in the Logos in some way, that is, they are made in the image of God. In fact, St. Justin Martyr even went further to note that Christ is the “Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”[13] Such a daring statement leads us to conclude that there are those outside the visible structure of the Church who hold certain truths that we can learn from and that she cannot abolish. God could have worked through the religious traditions of those outside the Church so that when they encounter the Gospel, they understand Christ in their own way. As Hans Urs von Balthasar noted, “[T]he range of Jesus’ eschatological work is such that he can operate directly outside the Church; he may give grace to individual persons, and perhaps to groups, enabling them to act according to his mind; the Church must allow for this possibility…it can happen that, bringing her light into some new area, she finds his light shining there already.”[14] Christ cannot be reduced to a particular experience such as encountering him within the Hellenistic culture. Nor can the Church Hellenize or Latinize those countries that have different worldviews. Catholic theology seems to have a hopeful future in that although her understanding of Christ increased throughout the centuries, especially in synthesizing Hellenistic philosophy and Patrology, the inexhaustible Christ can be understood apart from a Hellenistic worldview. The Catholic Church does not stress on uniformity, but rather unity in diversity. This is the mentality of the Church ever since her beginnings. In the first century, there were many Christians who were still practicing the Torah and there were those who did not because they were former Gentiles. Even today there are many examples of diversity such as the different theologies of Thomism and Molinism, and different Rites of the Mass. There may one day be a different kind of Catholic theology that had its origin in Buddhist thinking or Hindu thinking.

            Allowing non-Christian religious traditions play an important role does not take away the Church’s mission to spread the Gospel. Every human person has a desire to know the reason to be alive, to be free from his errors and degrading slavery of becoming a caricature of himself. The good news of Christianity is precisely that it proposes that the answer to the longings of the human heart is Jesus Christ. To encounter the fact of Jesus Christ is to encounter an exceptional reality, a presence that corresponds to the deepest needs of the human heart.[15] His death and resurrection is the visible sign of the triune tenderness of God. Although the Church must not Latinize, we must say that she must Christianize. This is not imposition, but proposing to every human person that the Church had experienced a joy in encountering this man from Nazareth. There is a joy in Christ that cannot be found elsewhere, a joy that is essential in every human person (Jn. 16:22). This commitment to her experiences, that is, Tradition, can purify the religious beliefs in non-Christian religions. It does not destroy other religious traditions but rather uplifts and perfects it. Just as an Aristotelian does not have to cease to be an Aristotelian to be a Christian so too a Buddhist does not necessarily have to give up his Buddhist traditions in order to be a Christian. Christian truth is not uniform but symphonic. What is essential is the Person of Jesus Christ encountered in the Church because Christ alone “fully reveals man to himself.”[16] The essence of Christianity is the Incarnate Word of the Father who infuses into the human person a love that lasts forever, a love that produces a joy that cannot be destroyed.

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[1] Dominus Iesus, 6.

[2] Ibid. cf. K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, (Seabury Press, 1978), pg. 344: “If religion were basically nothing but what each individual perceives as the representation and interpretation of his own feeling about existence and his own interpretation of existence, then this religion would lack its essential ground and an essential characteristic.”

[3] Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9: “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ.”

[4] Foundations, pgs. 279-280; emphasis author.

[5] Franciscan Herald Press, 1971

[6] pgs. 58-59

[7] cf. Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) pg. 260: “The two classical terms for the moment at Sinai are mattan torah and kabbalat torah, ‘the giving of the Torah’ and ‘the acceptance of the Torah.’ It was both an event in the life of God and an event in the life of man.”  

[8] Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 2, (Ignatius Press, 1990), pg. 104: “Christ himself is so much the Incarnate Deed and Word of God that it would be quite inappropriate for him to write anything. When, nonetheless, his history comes to be written down, the writing of it shows, not (as in the Old Testament) progress in revelation itself, but progress in understanding and reflection upon it.”

[9] Pgs. 83-84.

[10] “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ” (Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9)

[11] pg. 75

[12] Nostra Aetate, no. 2

[13] First Apology, ch. 46

[14] Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 3, (Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 282.

[15] Cf. Luigi Giussani, Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pgs. 25-41.

[16] Gaudium et Spes no. 22

Worship is Freedom

The setting is first century second Temple Judaism. It is hard to fully describe the worldview of second Temple Judaism because it was pluralistic. We know that there were many eschatological movements and it is safe to say that “eschatology” in that time meant a restoration of Israel and the cosmos under the one God. For example, the Qumran community believed that they were the true Israel which God would vindicate. In the end, there will be a battle between good and evil, those who walk the ways of righteousness and those who walk in the ways of Belial, the ways of darkness, and God will destroy darkness, “destroy it forever” (1QS ch.4). Those who followed evil were not simply the Romans, but the Jews associated with the Temple. The Temple, they believed, was plagued by Hellenistic influences which they saw as evil. This anti-Hellenistic mentality is also seen in the Book of Jubilees (which is also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls) where even the angels in heaven have the Torah, that which distinguishes Israel from others. The earth reflects heaven and since the angels in heaven worship and follow the Torah, so too the people on earth must do the same (15:28-30). Doing the works of the law is what distinguishes the Jew from the Gentile, those who have false gods. For example, after retelling the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, it says, “[I]t is prescribed on the heavenly tablets as touching all those who know the judgment of the law, that they should cover their shame, and should not uncover themselves as the Gentiles uncover themselves” (3:31-32). Following the Torah is what made Jews righteous in the sight of God and others unrighteous in His sight. They believed that those who follow the Torah properly will be vindicated by God. N.T. Wright in summarizing second temple Judaism says, “Many if not most second-Temple Jews, then, hoped for the new exodus, seen as the final return from exile. The story would reach its climax; the great battle would be fought; Israel would truly ‘return’ to her land, saved and free; YHWH would return to Zion” (Jesus and the Victory of God, Fortress Press 1996, pg. 203). Wright is probably right that many believed that they were in exile. What kind of exile they were in is tougher to pin-point. Some may argue that they believed they were still under the Assyrian exile (B. Pitre). Whatever exile they thought they were in, the fact is that they were unable to do something appropriate. It was a lack of freedom to adhere and act the way they were supposed to. Freedom, then, was never thought of as doing as one pleases, but doing what one ought to do. The Qumran community thought that they were not free because the Jews in the Temple have corrupted and violated the Torah.

Of course we cannot limit first century Judaism to these texts alone. Nonetheless, these two tell us an important point which, I believe, has been neglected in some studies, which is, eschatological hope is hope for proper worship. This is implicit in every eschatological movement. Jews wanted to be free from Roman oppression because they believed that the Romans were idolaters. The Qumran community separated themselves from the Temple because they believed that the priests and other Jews there have fallen away from the covenant of God and have followed the ways of darkness, not that of God; their worship is meaningless. Jews then wanted Yahweh to liberate them from oppressors, oppressors who worship other gods. This too is reflected in the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. We read that the woman said, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem” (Jn. 4:20). Here we see a struggle between people on proper worship. One says that proper worship is done on the mountain Gerizim and the other says that it is done in Jerusalem. And Christ answers, “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him” (Jn. 4:23).


“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.” This is nothing new. The history of Yahweh and man can be summarized as man struggling to give proper love and worship to his God. We can understand the myth of Eden as God proposing man His love and man failing to respond properly. Such is a tragedy beyond all tragedy: love rejected. It is, in the truest sense of the word, ugly because man outside of love becomes a caricature of himself. In order for man to love God properly, he must denounce other idols, denounce those which seem to fulfill his desires but in reality cannot (the tree of knowledge). St. Maximus the Confessor said, “For he [Adam] had to make a free decision whether ‘to cling to the Lord and become one spirit with him’ or ‘to cling to a harlot and to become one body with her’ (1 Cor. 6:16f.)—the latter of which, in his blindness, he chose” (Centuries of Knowledge I, 13, quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Ignatius Press 2003, pg. 182). This is something which should disgust all of us, that the all-loving God would be rejected by man for his own pleasure. Such a rejection can only be repaired by forgiveness. God need not have to forgive man. He has absolute infinite freedom. There is nothing that He owes to man. Man has value only insofar as his source of value sustains it. Yet, God does act. St. Athanasius said,

So then, men having thus become brutalized, and demoniacal deceit thus clouding every place, and hiding the knowledge of the true God, what was God to do? To keep still silence at so great a thing, and suffer men to be led astray by demons and not to know God? And what was the use of man having been originally made in God’s image? For it had been better for him to have been made simply like a brute animal, than, once made rational, for him to live the life of the brutes. Or where was any necessity at all for his receiving the idea of God to begin with? For if he be not fit to receive it even now, it were better it had not been given him at first. Or what profit to God Who has made them, or what glory to Him could it be, if men, made by Him, do not worship Him, but think that others are their makers? For God thus proves to have made these for others instead of for Himself. (On the Incarnation of the Word ch. 13)

God would not allow men to keep up with their idolatry, to fail to worship Him properly. We can see that there is a correspondence in salvation and proper worship. God saves us so that we can adore Him. “Let my son [Israel] go, that he may serve me” (Ex. 4:23). We see this clearly in the instruction of the Passover, “Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, that place of slavery. It was with a strong hand that the LORD brought you away…For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and the seventh day shall also be a festival to the LORD. Only unleavened bread may be eaten during the seven days; no leaven and nothing leavened may be found in all your territory. On this day you shall explain to your son, ‘This is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt’” (Ex. 13:3,6-8). This notion of remembering is important for salvation history. Forgetfulness of God’s redemptive love led Israel to become impatient and to sin. Even after being saved from the slavery of the Egyptians, they would rather be in slavery than to give the love and worship God demands of them (Ex. 14:11, Num. 14:2-3). Mindful of their forgetfulness, the Shema is commanded to be “drilled” to their children: “Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest. Bind them at your wrist as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates” (Deut. 6:7-9). Of course we know that Israel would not be faithful to their part of the covenant. She would fall into idolatry, chasing after other gods, which is the same as adultery. It is the same sin Adam committed in Eden. And God would punish Israel as He punished Adam: “I will punish her for the days of the Baals, for whom she burnt incense While she decked herself out with her rings and her jewels, and, in going after her lovers, forgot me, says the LORD” (Hos. 2:15). Punishment, however, is not annihilation. It is a means to turn back to God:

“Therefore, I will hedge in her way with thorns and erect a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. If she runs after her lovers, she shall not overtake them; if she looks for them she shall not find them. Then she shall say, ‘I will go back to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now.’ So I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. From there I will give her the vineyards she had, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt. On that day, says the LORD, She shall call me ‘My husband,’ and never again ‘My baal.’ Then will I remove from her mouth the names of the Baals, so that they shall no longer be invoked. I will make a covenant for them on that day, with the beasts of the field, With the birds of the air, and with the things that crawl on the ground. Bow and sword and war I will destroy from the land, and I will let them take their rest in security. I will espouse you to me forever: I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy; I will espouse you in fidelity, and you shall know [in the biblical sense!] the LORD…I will sow him for myself in the land, and I will have pity on Lo-ruhama. I will say to Lo-ammi, ‘You are my people,’ and he shall say, ‘My God!’” (Hos. 2:8-22,25).

That divine justice is divine mercy is also seen in this passage, “When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me, Sacrificing to the Baals and burning incense to idols… How could I give you up, O Ephraim, or deliver you up, O Israel? How could I treat you as Admah, or make you like Zeboiim? My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you” (Hos. 11:1-2,8-9). Here we can get a glimpse of why God has been patient (longsuffering) with man. Although Israel has kept moving farther from Him, God is a father who saw Israel as His son. He remembered when Israel “was a child,” like a mother who never ceases to see her son, no matter how old he is, as her baby, and this overwhelms His heart and was moved with pity. Although man is wicked, He never stops waiting for His prodigal son to come home simply because he is His son, and for Him to stop waiting is contrary to His nature as a father.

Within this historical and theological background, we can get a glimpse of the Paschal Mystery. God, seeing that His people are in exile, is in harlotry, will save her so that she can become His bride. Man, ever since the fall, has fallen into the dominion of Satan, that is, idolatry. Satan’s main purpose is to drive God’s people away from Him, away from His love, away from submitting to His will. As foreseen by the Hosean passage above, God will not allow the harlot to remain a harlot, but God will make her to be what she was in the beginning, before the fall, pure and spotless. To do this He Himself will assume a human nature, orienting man to what is above. Man, ever since the beginning, has a natural desire for God but is oriented towards evil. This orientation comes from wanting to be like God without God, choosing the tree of knowledge rather than the tree of life. To St. Maximus the Confessor, the “tree of knowledge” refers to our senses which have “the criteria for telling bodily pleasure from pain; more precisely, they are the power of ensouled and sensitive bodies that gives them the ability to be attracted by pleasurable things and to avoid painful things” (Quaestiones ad Thalassium 43, Balthasar 183). The fall of man was seen as a disorder, a misuse of the powers of man. In explaining the Confessor’s theology of the fall, of man’s misuse of his powers, Balthasar said, “This comes to giving an intellectual nature sensible, temporal, transitory food to nourish its being and, so, to poison it at its root, to hand it over to death. For the opposite of what Adam hoped for was bound to happen: instead of the intellect assimilating the world of sense to itself, which could only have happened to God’s order and plan, the sensible realm took over the intellect” (pg. 184). Balthasar quotes St. Maximus,”The first man turned this capacity—I mean the mind’s natural longing for God—toward sensible things as soon as he was created, and so, from his first conscious moment on, an unnatural pleasure drew him toward sensible things, through the medium of his sense faculties” (Quaestiones ad Thalassium 61, pg. 188). Exile really started in Eden when man understood freedom as absolute autonomy from God.

Although man is oriented towards death, to sin, he still longs to be with God. It is this capacity that makes him different from other animals. Each animal has certain needs, but no animal has a need like that of man. Man has more needs than animals, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. This need can be summarized as the need to love since all the faculties of man, the whole man, is required for self-giving. Love includes not just an act of the will and the intellect, but man’s affectivity. It is in this way that we can say that man longs to know God, that is, in the biblical sense of the word. Love is an integration of these faculties to its own ends so that it can attain the End of man. The sensitive powers must be submitted to the intellect which in turn must itself be submitted to the Logos.

It would take the Logos Himself to submit the whole world to Himself. St. Athanasius beautifully said:For men’s mind having finally fallen to things of sense, the Word disguised Himself by appearing in a body, that He might, as Man, transfer men to Himself, and centre their senses on Himself, and, men seeing Him thenceforth as Man, persuade them by the works He did that He is not Man only, but also God, and the Word and Wisdom of the true God. (On the Incarnation of the Word ch. 16)

St. Thomas Aquinas said, “For the first man sinned by seeking knowledge, as is plain from the words of the serpent, promising to man the knowledge of good and evil. Hence it was fitting that by the Word of true knowledge man might be led back to God, having wandered from God through an inordinate thirst for knowledge” (ST III q. 3 a. 8). Christ, then, was sent to the world so that He can know the Father. In knowing God, man can, in the Holy Spirit, know the Father. Again, it is important that the type of knowledge we are speaking of is biblical knowledge, that is, marital intimacy. As St. Athanasius said, “…the Word was made flesh in order to offer up this body for all, and that we partaking of His Spirit, might be deified, a gift which we could not otherwise have gained than by His clothing Himself in our created body, for hence we derive our name of ‘men of God’ and ‘men in Christ’ (De Decretis 14). Deification is what man longs for and we can say that it was also the longing of the Jews in Christ’s time. They had long for the Presence of God, the presence which tells them that God has not abandoned them but has kept His promise of not letting Israel stay in harlotry.

Within the context above, we can understand the author of the Hebrews better,

“For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering. He who consecrates and those who are being consecrated all have one origin. Therefore, he is not ashamed to call them ‘brothers,’ saying: ‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers, in the midst of the assembly I will praise you’; and again: ‘I will put my trust in him’; and again: ‘Behold, I and the children God has given me.’ Now since the children share in blood and flesh, he likewise shared in them, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life… therefore, he had to become like his brothers in every way, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest before God to expiate the sins of the people” (Heb. 2:10-15,17).

We are not trying to get away from the Anselmian theory of atonement, but simply trying to put it in a different picture, that is, the obedience of Christ undoing the idolatry man and responding with espousal love to God. Christ represents Israel, and by his blood, has delivered Israel from sinful and adulterous oppression. His blood will wash her robe and make it white (Rev. 7:14) so that He and the Father can dwell in her (Jn. 14:23). God is not pleased with man in exile and harlotry. He is not pleased with men in disunity. Here we understand God’s punishment coinciding with man’s autonomy. Christ came in to this world to appease God’s anger, God’s unpleasant disposition towards man in disunity.

We can see this clearly when we take into recognition what baptism is. St. Paul tells us that we who are baptized are baptized into the death of Christ (Rom 6:3). In the early church, those who were preparing for baptism were advised to turn away from the harlotry and evil of sin and turn towards God. It is Christ’s passion applied in the world, the exodus from sin to the presence of God. This has been pointed out by Jean Danielou in his marvelous book The Bible and the Liturgy (University of Notre Dame Press 1956). He quotes St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “If your wedding day were approaching, would you not leave everything else and devote yourself entire to preparing for the feast? You are about to consecrate your soul to her heavenly Bridegroom. Should you not leave these material things in order to gain the spiritual?” (pg.23). We have already talked about the material and spiritual, the intellectual and sensitive distinctions. Here we note that baptism is a consecration of one’s soul to Christ. And Christ does the baptizing, the consecrating (Heb. 2:11). Consecrating to Christ requires renouncing, as Christ did and Adam did not, Satan and evil. Danielou quotes Cyril again, “You first entered into the vestibule of the baptistery, and, while you stood and faced West, you were told to stretch out your hand. Then you renounced Satan as if he were present, saying, ‘I renounce you, Satan, and all your pomp and all your worship’” (Mystagogic Catecheses XXXIII, pg. 26). Facing East, then, is turning away from Satan and looking to God and back to the Paradise, the place we have fallen away from. It is a turning back to our origin by looking forward to eternity. St. Maximus says, “In looking for his end, man meets his origin, which essentially stands at the same point as his end…For we should not seek our origin, as I have said, as something that lies behind us; rather we should seek out ways toward the goal that lies before us. It is through his end that man comes to know his lost origin, once he has realized that he must not look for his origin to find his end” (Quaestiones ad Thalassium 59, Balthasar pgs. 187-188. Compare this with the doctrine of epektasis of Gregory of Nyssa). We also see these words from St. Cyril of Jerusalem to the catechumens, “Already the perfume of blessedness is wafted to you, O catechumens. Already you gather spiritual flowers to weave heavenly crowns. Already the sweet perfume of the Holy Spirit is poured out. You are in the vestibule of the royal dwelling. May you be led into it by the king. From henceforth, indeed, the flowers have appeared to the trees. Now the fruit must ripen.” (Procatechesis XXXIII, Danielou pg. 193). Cyril, like many Fathers, have applied the Canticle of Canticles to Christian initiation. Danielou says, “From the fact that the Canticle is the prophecy of the eschatological marriage of the Messias and the New Israel, we are right in seeing it realized in the Christian sacraments, in which the perpetual marriage of Christ and the Church is carried out” (pg. 205).

We read from the early hymn of the Church that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God” (Phil. 2:6). This refers to the Incarnation, that God sent His Son to the world to free man. God became man, that is, the Son “left the Father” so that He can cling to His wife: “That is why a man leaves his father…and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body. The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:24,25). Like St. John Chrysostom, to say that the “Son left the Father,” does not mean that the Son lost His divinity. Rather, it refers to the Incarnation (Homily 20 on Ephesians). The kenosis of God must be seen in light of the Genesis passage of man leaving his parents in order that he can cling to a wife. But this wife of his, man, is a harlot. Because man had sinned against God, sin has become a property of man. Every man is enslaved to it. The Son, Jesus Christ, did not come to this world with a Cross. Man had given it to him. By assuming a human nature, Christ, in some mysterious way, took sin. “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Sin became a “property” of Jesus Christ, who did not commit any sin or was stained with original sin. He possessed the sin of the whole world. In a sense, as Hans Urs von Balthsar put it, the cross is the incarnation of sin. Christ carried His cross, sin incarnated, the cross man gave to Him, all the way to Calvary so that He can restore mankind. He ate with sinners, touch sinners, and will save only sinners. On the Cross, we can see what troubled men, especially philosophers and theologians in the past. On the Cross, we see the coexistence of good and evil. Sin and evil, as Dietrich von Hildebrand pointed out, is not simply a privation of goodness or a turning away from God, but wages war on God. Only within this context can we really understand Christ’s cry to the Father, “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk. 22:42). He wanted to remove His “cup,” that is, becoming sin because by becoming sin, he is “waging war” against His Father (on Gethsemane as a trial of hope, cf. Fr. Antonio Lopez’s “On Restlessness”). We can see this notion of “waging war” clearly in the image of the crucifixion. Here on the Cross, God was rejected, spat upon, beaten, humiliated, and put to death. There is no greater image of what sin is. It is man’s response to God ever since the beginning. Yet, we do not see God’s wrath. The Father’s silence is revelation that He has taken away His wrath, but rather opens his arms to the prodigal son. Christ asks the Father to forgive the sins of world: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:24). With this cry, we can be sure that the God’s words are true, “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger” (Hos. 2). In a sense, we see that the overwhelmed heart of God is “struggling,” that is, in the Crucified heart of Christ, we see a battle between good and evil. Satan is laughing (”If you are King of the Jews, save yourself”) while Christ is crying: “Have pity on me, LORD, for I am weak; heal me, LORD, for my bones are trembling” (Ps. 6:3). Christ’s cry overcomes the laughter of those who look down upon the lowly: “The LORD has heard my weeping. The LORD has heard my prayer; the LORD takes up my plea” (Ps. 6:9-10). On the Cross, Christ draws all men to himself (Jn. 12:32) and because the Father sees His Son’s obedience, He did not “give vent” to His “blazing anger.”

“Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk. 22:42) says Christ. Here, he unties the knot of disobedience. Christ’s sensitivity leads him to say “remove this cup from me,” but his obedience leads him to say “thine, be done.” In submitting his human will to the divine will, he has healed the disordered love of man that existed ever since his fall. In so doing, man can know love God properly. On the Cross, proper worship has been accomplished where both of Christ’s intellectual and sensitive powers are oriented towards God. Christ embraced death so that man can embrace God. The pierced heart of Christ is the circumcised heart God demanded, that heart which has no barrier (foreskin), a heart that is totally open. It is the heart that is free of idolatry and sin. It is a heart that cannot be destroyed, for, on the third day, he rose again. Here the whole history of human race has been embraced. In the Risen Christ, we can see the face of God, the face which knows no impatience, the glorious face which is forgiving. Only when we encounter this forgiving love can we be able to worship God properly. True adoration of God requires that man is able to love again. It is this forgiveness which makes him love again. In the Risen Christ, we get to see what true adoration is: union with God. Adoratio (to kiss, to embrace) is a gift from God which in our part must make our own. The Risen Christ has embraced us and we must unveil ourselves so that we can consume his flesh. The promise of God from Hosea is realized, “I will say to Lo-ammi, ‘You are my people,’ and he shall say, ‘My God!’”Christ has impregnated in our souls a love, the Holy Spirit, which orients us towards our Father above: “Abba! Father!” To see the Risen face of Christ is to see his love, that is, to remember what he has done. Only when we join ourselves to Him, proclaim his death and joyfully sing to his glory can we truly know Him.

Musings on Tragedy

To Louis Feliciano

All tragedies leave us in awe. No other being in the world except man is affected by such events, whether they are natural disasters or moral evils. Tragedy reminds us our place in this world, that death is not something we can control. It reminds us of our own solitude in front of such situations.

What affects us most about tragedies is that there is a silence, and maybe even an absence, that makes us tremble, a fear-provoking silence that gives us a sense of powerlessness to give answers to ourselves and to each other. It is a silence which makes us realize that we are in the midst of absolute mystery. It is a silence which provokes an unquiet longing in our hearts to beg for someone to speak, to beg for a voice, for an answer.

In the midst of tragedies, this longing cannot be neglected. It moves us not to run away from questions but to struggle to find answers, to find love even in a situation that is, in the truest sense of the word, ugly. It is a longing to find even the smallest drop of beauty, a beauty that might echo a voice we desire to hear. This longing to find love, to listen to an echo, is what makes tragedy a drama. Tragedy does not make us incapable of finding love. And that is why it is not hopeless. Hopelessness comes about only when love can no longer penetrate into our hearts.

Tragedy becomes a drama when we struggle to find beauty in its midst. But this longing to find beauty is in itself insufficient. Beauty is not what we ultimately long for. We may be passionate and enthusiastic about the beautiful, but we cannot love it. Beauty is not something we can give ourselves to. It is itself a sign that points to an unspeakable face that moves us to be enthralled. In the end of it all, it is not beauty that we desire. What we desire, what makes our hearts unquiet, what we find in ourselves when we look deeply into our tender affectivity, is a Father. It is His embrace that we seek. It is His Voice that we long to hear. It is the experience of His absence which makes us fear and tremble.

What we long for is not something abstract but a Person. This is clearly seen when we gaze at the Crucified One. Christ cried out for his Father, asking Him why He has abandoned him. The Father was silent. There again we find silence. It is exactly the loud cry of the Word which moves us closer to our Father. Christ found himself in the bosom of his Abba, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In his loud voice, the Father is revealed. In the Crucified One, we see a naked man giving himself to his Father and to the world and hear what is in his heart. He revealed himself by speaking (truth), unveiling his body (beauty), and donating himself (love). In revealing himself, we find his “You.” His “You” is who we strive to meet. Our hearts are drawn to the Crucified One because it is in him where we find ourselves not in solitude, but in solidarity with our own hearts, a solidarity which accepts and embraces who we are, that is, having a yearning in our hearts to look for a face in a time of solitude. It is not wrong to have this yearning nor was this an accident. No one, not even those with so-called scientific explanations, can ever take this longing away from us. Even when we are beaten, exhausted, depressed, or lonely, this longing in our hearts cannot be taken away. No one can ever tell us what to feel or what are hearts are drawn to. It is a God given gift to have this restlessness. To take our tender affectivity seriously, to see what it corresponds to, is human. There is nothing more human than looking for that face that tells us the reasons for our being, for our longings. It is His Face we seek. It is in gazing at Him that we find our origin, our place, our meaning, and our infinity. In gazing at Him, we are able to endure and accept His Father’s sharp glance. It is at this point that the drama of human life becomes a romance.

On Mortification and the Church

Being a gift to Christ means to give him what we value most: life. What destroys life, what makes it ugly, is sin. It is ugly because it destroys a friendship, it destroys the relationship with the people you love. Friends give you the certainty that you are loved and you cannot help but love them back. To love them back properly, you must love and know yourself so that you can properly give them what they deserve: your heart. Sin, first of all, destroys the ability to love and know yourself properly. And since you cannot love your friend unless you first love yourself (“love one another as you love yourself”), then you cannot love your friend the way he ought to.

 

Sin also breaks the source which binds you together. When a person is in sin (mortal sin), he reduces his relationship with his friend to mere gestures and to their own intentions. We all know how reducing friendship to mere joyful gatherings and laughter will soon break down. If the basis of friendship is simply that you enjoy being with the other, then you will soon find out how easy this friendship will end. There will be a day when someone will be in a bad mood and things will be said that is not meant to be said. Next thing you know, you have not been in contact for a couple of years. There must be a reason, a reason that lasts, that keeps you coming back to the other. The basis of friendship cannot be yours or the other’s intentions. You know how fragile both of you are. What is important is to understand that the other is not your friend because you somehow chose him or her. You have a relationship with your friend because Someone gave him or her to you. Your friend reminds you of your Destiny, keeps the thought of Christ in your heart, and moves with you towards Him. What sustains your friendship is Christ. Break this relationship with Christ and your friendship will not last. This is why sin is ugly. It ruins the relationship you have with your friends, that is, the Church. This is why you cannot receive the Eucharist unless you are in good standing with Christ. You cannot receive the Eucharist because you have broken the bond between you and your friends.

 

Although sin makes you turn away from your friends, you realize that one fault of yours does not make the Church fail to exist. A person can steal from someone and yet, he can still give his friend a phone call. His friend still exists. This is a concrete sign that sin does not change the way God looks at you. The fact that you can still make that phone call reveals to you that no matter how bad you have become, it is nothing compared to the mercy of Christ. In fact, friends are those that look at you with love no matter what you do. They remind you that the very fact that you exist, you are loved. Sin destroys friendship, but it does not annihilate you. It cannot annihilate you because God’s love has the final word on you.

 

To summarize, sin breaks your friendship with Christ, which is friendship with the Church. This is why confession to a priest is necessary. Christ cannot exist without the Church. The Logos, the Eternal Son, can exist without the Church, but by the very fact that He was made flesh reveals to us that we must bow down to His humility, must accept His humanity. To reject Christ, the Incarnate Word, is to reject the Church. But rejecting the Church does not destroy her. It may destroy your relationship with her, but the Church is broader, much bigger, than your own intentions and your own love. The Church is loved by Christ, the love that make things endure, the love that shatters your own weaknesses.

 

The Church, your friends, give you the certainty about your Destiny; the Church gives you faith. However, the effect of sin destroys this ability to love yourself, that is, to love your Destiny. In other words, it makes you harder to love your friends, to love the Church. It makes you harder to be a gift to Christ. This is where mortification comes in. The first thing to understand about mortification is that it has to do with friendship. Friends solicit you to move closer to Christ, to live the path Christ has given you. They do not coerce you because you have free-will, but they do move you closer to him. They remind you and affect you in such a way that you will control yourself, that is, to keep your heart simple. To have a simple heart is to embrace everything, to love all of reality. This is hard to do, however. Sin reduces our love to the finite, to one aspect of reality. This is very important to keep in mind because a lot of people think that mortification is self-denial or makes Christianity very rigid. In fact, mortification is loving the path Christ has given you so that you can embrace all of reality. A man who is in love with a woman at work will not cheat on his wife. Not cheating is not some kind of self-repression, but the way he will truly love the woman at work. The way he will possess her is by staying on the path Christ gave him, which is his wife. To love his wife, to be faithful to her, is the way he can possess the woman at work. To love someone is to love his or her destiny. To have sex with the woman at work is not loving her destiny. It is not loving her true nature, her heart. It may be that the man has to “fight” this temptation, but it is not because he is denying himself. It is because he loves himself, he loves his destiny, and his destiny consists of being with his wife. So mortification is not so much of “Okay, I will choose a or b, which leads to my destiny?” It is more: how do I possess both a and b? By following the path Christ gave you. And if a is the path Christ has given you, then you will possess b as well because in a, you have Christ and he alone can make you embrace all of reality, he alone can make things last.

 

Friends help you to control yourself, that is, remind you to be oriented towards your destiny in everything that you do. They walk with you side by side facing the same direction. They make you restless. In other words, they make you beg for Christ. This is very clear when we understand that loving your friends, the people Christ gave you, is probably one of the hardest things to do. They will probably irritate you the most. But why do they irritate you? They irritate you because you want and expect more from them and they do not. This, however, if you know that Christ is the source of your friendship, will just make you tireless and restless in begging Christ to love and be loved properly. When you fight with them, you will probably feel a desire to call them in some way, to contact them so that things will get straighten out. This is the beginning of mortification. You can know that you can control yourself, that you can love your destiny more than things which are at first very attractive, when you can love your friends no matter what their weaknesses are. You want to love them because you realize the Presence in them. You recognize that there is Someone begging you to say “You!” at this very moment. Mortification is longing to be a friend.

 

The basis behind mortification, corporal mortification included, is being reminded of who we are made for, that we are a friend, a gift to Christ. This is really where the concept of “dying to one’s self” comes from. It means being a gift to Christ because you realize your worth. You are worth so much that everything Christ possesses can be yours. All of reality can be yours, including the Father. The Christian life, then, is far from being pessimistic or self-denial. Rather, it is knowledge of your infinite worth by the very fact that you are known by Christ. Hence, the Psalmist said, “I praise you, so wonderfully you made me; wonderful are your works (yes, including me)! My very self you knew” (Ps. 119:14). We know this in the concrete way through our friends, through the community. Even when we are sinners, they are still with us—this is the experience of mercy. Even when we are sinners, they are still with us. This is the experience of the Resurrection; it is the experience of new life, a life filled with companionship. We can die to ourselves, that is, offer ourselves to Christ, because we have experience His Risen Body, the Church.

 

We recognize that Christ did not fear the crucifixion because he had in mind one thing: the resurrection. In other words, friendship with the Father and the world. He realized that by staying on the path that the Father gave him, he can possess the world. He loses the world if he follows the ways of the world. But by being oriented towards the Resurrection, by desiring the beauty that is friendship (and beauty is the radiation of friendship), he allowed himself to be handed to us. It is not easy, of course. He himself cried the cries we have cried: why have you abandoned me? Yet, we hear the silence of the Father, a sign that He has taken away His wrath. There is life because he opened his arms to the world.

 

 

 

 

Recommended summer reads for Catholic women (and men too)

Here are some excellent books I have either read or am currently reading this summer and thought of recommending them to our readers:

1. Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings–Elisabeth was a lay French woman married to a staunch agnostic living in the late 19th century and first decade of the 20th century. Her husband, Félix, returned to the Catholic Church after Elisabeth’s death and became a Dominican priest years later. Elisabeth’s journal and practical resolutions stand as a great example for lay Catholic women who want to bring Christ to their homes. She was deeply affected by the social teachings of Leo XIII, which prompted her to reflect on the social issues of the time and what should be the proper Christian response to them. She was well ahead of their time with a deep understanding of the lay apostolate that would not surface officially in the Church until the Second Vatican Council. Elisabeth’s cause for canonization was opened Servant of God. The book I have linked to is from the Classics of Western Spirituality that has several of her writings, but if you want just her journal, you can find some cheap editions here. There are also some other good writings by her that you can find in Amazon. I will be posting on her life and spirituality sometime in the next few days in case you are curious to know more about her.

2. Christ in the Home by Raoul Plus, SJ–I found this book by accident on Amazon and I have incorporated it as part of my marriage preparation. Fr. Plus talks beautifully about the engaged couple, the nuptial Mass, the newly wed couple and life after “the wedding.” He has a lot of practical advice and spiritual direction for the married couple at any stage of their marriage as to how to bring Christ into the home.

3. Women in the Gospels by Carlo Cardinal Martini–Only for less than $3.00 in Amazon: these are talks by the Cardinal given to a group of thousands of religious women from his diocese. These are reflections drawn from Gospel scenes that intend to reflect on one’s vocation based on the response by the women in the Gospels to certain situations. The reflections are very Marian in nature, which has allowed me to gain a deeper appreciation of Mary and her motherhood of the world. Strongly recommended for both men and women.

Any other recommendations?

The Mass: On Silence

To Peggy Mereles

 

On the topic of silence, the story of Christ and the woman caught in adultery can educate us (Jn. 8:2-11). The scribes and the Pharisees were trying to test Jesus and brought forth a woman who was caught in adultery. The Jewish leaders argued that the Mosaic Law teaches that they must stone this woman. It actually prescribes that both the man and the woman be persecuted, but for some reason, they only threw the woman at Christ. We also wonder how they actually found out about this adulterous act. Did they know this woman before? Were they guilty of adultery with this woman themselves? We don’t know. They threw her down near Christ and Christ was silent. He was silent because he knew what the woman did. We can only imagine with adoration and contrition the grief that took place in the heart of Christ. He bent down. The eyes of the Jewish leaders and the woman widened. Was he going to pick up the first stone? He bent down. What was he to do? The woman must have had her heart beating really fast. He began to write on the ground with his finger. The Jewish leaders began to become impatient. They kept insisting him to do something. Then, the miraculous happened. It was miraculous because at this moment, we understand not only Christ’s compassion for this woman and her humanity, but also that in his words, we understand the way God looks at us. He said, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And he then bent down and wrote on the ground. “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you,” says the Old Testament. In this story, we recognize the concreteness of these words. Continuing with the story, they all left one by one. He stood up and looked at the woman. The woman has never experienced this look before. He looked at her as if her sin did not even matter. The woman’s heart dropped. She knew what she did was wrong. She could not find the words to apologize. Yet, Christ looked at her as if saying, “So?” In her sinfulness, he looks at her with, “So what?” It is as if sin did not overcome this man, as if it is nothing compared to him, as if sin does not change the way he looks at her. He then asked her whether she was condemned. She said, in a humble and silent way, “No one, sir.” At that moment, looking at Christ, her whole destiny is revealed, her whole humanity is discovered. At that moment, that moment of Christ and her alone, she understood her place in history. He then said, “Neither do I condemn you.” If there was a person to condemn her, she knew it was this man. Yet, at that moment, that moment of silence when no one was condemning her, when no one was defining who she was, she was not condemned. She did not say, “I am sorry.” She did not even utter a word because at the moment when you are in contact with reality in all your greatness and weaknesses, you can only be silent. Silent because what can you really say or do to undo the harm you have done to yourself? Silent because what words can excuse your fragility? Silent because an experience of reality is an experience of that look that taught you to have compassion for yourself.

 

Too often we can be distracted by the voices of people who condemn us, people who try to opine about ourselves. Too often we ourselves let others define us. We let ourselves conform to the notion of success, as if doing the right things will make God love us more. Silence educates us of our humanity and the gaze of Christ. It is not a time when we can escape the world so that we can receive peace. It is not a time when we can rest from our busy work. The story of Christ and the woman caught in adultery teaches us that silence is a way we can confront reality, a method in which Christ comes to us to look at us with that compassionate gaze. Like that woman, we are thrown into the feet of Christ. Silence is being thrown at the feet of Christ. It is not quiet time, but a confrontation with the Word. Silence is really the stillness of the heart. The stillness of the heart is being able to desire the one thing necessary: Destiny. The woman was caught in adultery. She chose something that attracted her. All temptations are attractive. Yet, at that moment when she was thrown into the feet of Christ, she realized that it was wrong not because the law said so, but because face to face with Christ, she understood that Christ corresponded to her heart. She understood that the needs of the heart is much more important than what is at first attractive. In fact, only in the face of Christ can those things which at first were attractive be brought to light. In silence, we understand that Christ being everything in our lives is a possibility.

 

Gerald Campbell asked me, “Is there any logic in hope?” He gave examples of corruption in the world, especially in the government. As I was thinking about this, I knew that I did not have to look at the world. I simply needed to look at myself. I am a world. I find myself unable to love what I want to love. I find myself insufficient in what I need to do. Yet, there was a pizza waiting for me at the table. “It’s You!” I proclaimed. I am loved. I saw Christ in a pizza.

 

But how are we educated in mercy? In the community. Mortification is not possible without the community. It is very easy to be tempted to become lazy and to simply go after what is subjectively satisfying. Friends, however, remind us to control ourselves, not in a mechanical way, but passionately loving what we are made for. They remind us to stay on the path of Christ. They are that merciful look of Christ that the woman experienced. In the community, like that woman, we experience mercy, an experience of not being condemned. It is not that we do not recognize our sins. It is that in the community, in the Church, we realize that sin is nothing compared to the great majestic mercy of Christ. In friendship, we understand our role in history. We realize that we are not defined by what we do. I would not have recognized Christ in that pizza without having first encountered Christ in the community, in my friends. Friends remind us that reality is for us, that it never betrays us. Even our sins are ways for Christ to get to us. Even in moments of sadness, trials, and sinfulness, Christ does not condemn us but “bends down” so that he can carry us. How can we not have hope when reality is for us? We understand the fragility of our hearts and then reality awakens us: there is the music of Mozart!

 

Many people think that silence is individualistic. Yet, we understand that when St. Benedict founded monasteries, it was attractive because of their experience of human presence. People saw a place of community and of order. Some people think that the monastic life is really rigid, but when one looks at the Benedictine rule, for example, one can see how many “buts” and “ifs.” One must be silent at three o’clock, but if there is a particular need, do it. Now, there were times when the monks or nuns gossiped a lot and did not follow the rules. At this moment, rules became burdensome. What silence does is lessen the weight of reality. By that I don’t mean that we ignore reality, but that silence makes us grow in certainty of Christ. It makes us grow in relationship with him and reality becomes less burdensome under this relationship. The community, after prayer and silence, then goes on in their work. Because of silence, they understand what they do. They understand that their work is a way for them to encounter Christ. They understand that silence made their company with each other worthwhile, that they remind each other of Christ. Not that they have to talk about Christ all the time, but everything they say has meaning because of Christ. Silence, then, is for the community. It is what makes us lighthearted.

 

Where can we find silence, order, and community best expressed? In the Liturgy. In the Liturgy, we find people who are just like us, people who are sinful, people who are confused. In the Liturgy, we all say the same words and yet each word is very personal because it comes from our hearts. We experience the same freedom the woman experienced. Then we sing in praise and thanksgiving. We sing because we have been awestruck by reality, because we have experienced the infinite look of Christ. Only those who have compassion for themselves can truly hit a note. And by some weird chance, if the person does not hit a note, his heart is light enough that he won’t care. He realizes that there is nothing he can do to gain God’s love for him.

 

Appendix

 

Here is one of my favorite songs. It reminds us that even vacation time is not a time when we can get away from reality.

 

The Mass: Part 2

To Peggy Mereles

 

 

“Father, they are your gift to me,” says Christ. How are we a gift to Christ? This means that we are given to Christ from the Father. But how exactly are we given? In theological terms, this is called election. It is being possessed by God. We are possessed by the Father by His sending His only Son (Jn. 3:16). The Incarnation is how we have become the Son’s, that is, that we become his gift. The fact that the Father made us Christ’s gift (“Father, they are your gift to me”) coincides with the gift of the Father’s sending His Son to the world (“For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself”). In the Incarnation, we understand what it really means that we are a gift to Christ, that we are a gift insofar as the Son is a gift to the world. We are given like the way the Son proceeds from the Father. It is in this way that we understand we are truly the image of God, that our existence as a gift reflects the Word, the Son who proceeds from the Father. This understanding comes especially with the economic plan of the Father who gives us His Son. Our election, our existence as a gift to the Son, comes from the predestination of Christ. We can only be a gift insofar as we participate in the election of Christ. This is a commonsensical view since we are a gift insofar as we are in Christ, insofar as we are possessed by Christ.

 

Christ came to this world to glorify his Father and the glorification of the Father is man fully alive. His work, which is the work of the Father, is sustaining and saving whatever is good and beautiful in our lives. Here, we understand that whatever is good and beautiful in us is truly given, that its source comes from the mission of Christ. Being a gift to Christ is the Father’s work, is in itself the mission of Christ. Mission, then, is not going out to the world to convert the world, but offering one’s existence as a gift to Christ. It is participating in the work of Christ and therefore the work of the glorification of the Father. The above statements are probably too theological but it must be internalized by us. We need to understand that our lives are a gift to Christ. Being a gift is a work, a work not by our own efforts but by participating in the Father’s gift of love to the world, who is Christ.

 

Let me now try to flesh this out in a concrete way since we seem to think of Christ in an abstract way. How do we encounter Christ? How do we know when we encounter Christ? Through exceptionality. Christ was attractive to the people of his day because he corresponded to the needs of the hearts of the people. He awakened their desires for the beautiful, good, true, justice, and love. Without Christ, their desires were cloudy, would be, in some sense, dead. Christianity, then, is an event that awakens the heart. Things attract us when they awaken our desires, when they correspond to the needs of the heart. Christ is attractive because here is a Person who knows our worth, who values us in such a way that no one else has. And how is this Person, this Presence, come to us? Through our friends, our companionship, through the Church. Whenever I think of Christ, I think of the faces of my friends who remind me of my destiny, of my heart. It is here we understand that our existence is a gift to Christ: the heart. When I recognize my heart, I see that it is given, that it cannot sustain its own life and it needs Another. What is needed, then, is to understand our hearts. The needs of the heart always correspond to Christ. This is one way we understand our lives as a gift and the gift of the Son. We understand that we are meant to be with Christ and Christ is meant to be with us. We are meant to be with each other not because we will it, but because it comes from the Father’s love.

 

To understand the heart is work. Because our freedom is imperfect, that is, we do not know what we really want or we go after things that are attractive rather than that which corresponds the heart, it takes work to understand what we really need. This work of understanding the heart, of accepting and affirming He who corresponds to it, is in itself the work of Christ. Only Christ can awaken the heart. Only he is credible, only he can possess us in such a way that is liberating.

 

In what way does this work of knowing our hearts, and therefore Christ, come about? It comes about through the path Christ gives us. Take, for example, a person who, after work, goes to Eucharistic adoration. He then comes home to his family and sees that they have been waiting at the dinner table for an hour. Why is this person wrong for going to Eucharistic adoration? Because he has met Christ in his wife, that his wife attracted him in such a way that he understood his life better. When you encounter this love, when you meet someone who gives you a better understanding of your destiny, you stay with that person. You must be faithful to that person. This is what I mean by the path Christ gives to each of us. Christ comes to us in a unique way. Following and staying on that path is the way we give ourselves to Him. That path is Christ’s begging to be with us even though it seems dull or boring. A person, then, who works every day in an office, is the way in which he becomes a gift to Christ. It is the way Christ begs to be with him, the way Christ is a gift to him. Staying in that office is the way he will understand his heart, his destiny. He will understand that no one else has experienced that awful day besides him. In this way, he will understand that he is preferred, that he is chosen. Even at that awful moment at work, he understands that this is precisely the moment Christ is begging him to come to him. He will sigh many times but not sighing because he hates the job, but he sighs because he wants more, he wants Christ to be everything in his life including his job.

 

The Christian life is participating in the work of Christ, the work of understanding our hearts and destiny. How do we understand our hearts? Christ gives us reminders, gives us exceptional events so that we can be reminded of the reason why we work, why we live. These exceptional events are promises that our hearts do correspond to the Infinite, that that Infinite exists. They remind us to stay on the path we are in. That is why that little event in Washington D.C. was such a great gift to me. It reminded me that I am loved. Once we are reminded that we are loved, our lives simply change. We go to work differently precisely because we have experienced a love so great that we are dominated this Person who loves us this way. Our lives become a search, a longing, to look for that Person who loves us. Our jobs, then, become a way we sigh, we long to be with Him, to be a gift to Him.

 

Another way we understand our hearts is our companionship. Friends are those who remind us why we do the things we do. When I was in school, I would say the Angelus and eat lunch with my friends every day I could. This is not because I simply enjoy their presence, but because they remind me that I am never alone. Friends, therefore, are sacramental. We must become sacramental or else we become a caricature of ourselves. It is not that we try to be sacramental or talk about Jesus all the time. In fact, my friends and I argue about things all the time. But by staying together, I have understood the carnality of the Logos. To touch Christ in the flesh—this is the relationship we have with Christ. Being a gift to Christ and Christ being a gift to us, then, is this concrete, so concrete that we can touch each other.

 

What is the Mass and why should we go? Because this is the source and summit of our life, the way that our work is clearly revealed as being the work of Christ. The Mass is the ultimate sighing of the heart of the Father to us and our sigh to Him. This sigh is Christ who breathes on us the love (Spirit) that gives us knowledge of our hearts and keeps us alive. The Liturgy is known as the work of the people. In what way? The same way that the person in his office is a work, that is, a work to understand his humanity and to be dominated by a Presence who knows no end.The Liturgy educates us in the fact that in every element of reality, there is a Presence who awaits our embrace. This is why I have not seen the need to speak of the Mass itself much on the last couple of posts. Speaking about a couple of my experiences such as the Bible study and the event of Washington D.C. is relevant because the Liturgy is not separated from that reality. The Liturgy is that gracious event of exchanging of gifts (”wondrous exchange”), of meeting Christ, touching him, and allowing him to come to our hearts–such as my friendship, that event in Washington D.C.,etc. Reality is liturgical.

 

 

 

The Mass

To Peggy Mereles

One of the main problems with Catholics today is not that they do not understand the Mass, but that they seem to limit their spiritual life in it. How do we extend our experiences of the Mass to our workplace, our homes, and our schools? We hear over and over again in homilies that the end of the Mass commands us to “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.” We are reminded by Hans Urs von Balthasar that “God only shows himself to someone, only enraptures him, in order to commission him.” Yet, it seems that we simply cannot get over our dualistic mentality that Christ is in one place and not in the other. We forget what just happened on Sunday morning. This is unacceptable but God is generous enough to give us the time we need so that we can see that Christ is everything in our lives. Time is grace and the more time we have, the more we have the opportunity to grow in our certainty of our destiny, of Christ. What is important is to understand what really happens in Mass and to understand the reason why we go in the first place. This way, when we have certainty on why we go to Mass, we will understand that Christ really is everything. If we limit Christ to the Mass, if Christ does not affect our lives completely, then we might as well sleep in on Sunday morning.

 

I was at a Bible study and I gave the story of an old priest, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, who was so old and so sick at his age that he could not go to the bathroom alone. He needed help in order to go to the bathroom. At this point, he understood that everything really is given, that everything is a gift. Everyone, as I assumed, laughed at that story. I did too. How the heck did this old priest make Christianity out of a bathroom? Then, when we were continuing with the study, a friend of mine went to the bathroom. He came back and said, “Thanks to you Apolonio I will never go to the bathroom the same again. It felt awkward.” Everyone laughed, including me, but at that moment, I realized how amazing Christianity really is. My friend peeing has meaning because of Christ. The meaning of urination is Christ! It sounds absurd, but if this is not true, then I cannot believe my own eyes. If this is not true, then I should not be a Christian.

 

I was in Washington D.C. one day and I had to go back to New Jersey. I went to Chinatown so I can buy a ticket for a bus to New Jersey. It was 2:30 pm. It was a long day and I was carrying a couple of bags. A couple of guys went before me to ask for a 3 pm ticket but the lady said that there is no more, that they need to buy the 4 pm one. After them was a girl who said that she missed the 2 pm bus and asked whether she can trade for a 3 pm one. The lady said she can. My turn came. I asked if there was a 3 pm one but the lady said there wasn’t. I knew she was somehow being dishonest to me, but I did not want to make a big deal out of it. I asked for a 4 pm one and she gave me one. I picked up my bags and struggled to walk outside. While I was walking on the sidewalk I heard the lady shouting. She told me to come to her and to give her my ticket. She changed the time from 4 to 3. When she left, I laughed to myself and said, “Wow, did I look that horrible? Did I look pitiful?” Then the judgment came to my head, “It’s You! It’s You! It has to be You!” Yes, I did look pitiful. My weight is His pity. Before I do anything, I am looked with His compassion. All of my hairs have been counted. I laughed and could not stop thinking how humorous and beautiful life can be. I realized that yes, everything is a gift. Everything is given. I realized Him from the pity of the lady. I looked horrible, but I am always defined by His gaze.

 

What does this have to do with the Mass? The Mass educates us to understand the world, to understand our life. The Sabbath is made for man so that he can have certainty about his place in this world. It contextualizes our place, it gives meaning to whatever we do. It teaches us that there is another world in this world. This is what a sacrament is. John Paul the Great calls a sacrament the visibility of the Invisible. That the meaning of urination is Christ is not as incomprehensible as Christ being substantially present to us in the appearance of bread and wine. That Christ is expressed through my bad hair day is not as incomprehensible as a sinner saying a couple of words to make bread in his hands to be God. But the Mass educates us in that it teaches us that every small thing, everything that seems banal, has meaning. I would not have judged that event in Washington as Christ coming to me if I did not know that Christ would come to me in a banal way, especially through the appearance of bread. The main problem we have is that we have ceased to have a permanent sense of wonder, that we take things as self-evident already. We are not being enthralled. If work, our homes, our schools, our worship, does not enthrall us, we have taken Christ for granted. We fail to realize that reality is a gift, especially the gift that you are.

 

In the Gospel of John, we read Christ praying, “Father, they are your gift to me.” We are a gift to Christ. To understand why we go to Mass, to understand why we should not sleep in on Sundays, to understand why we should live intensely for Christ at every moment, we need to understand what it means for us to be a gift. What does it mean to be a gift? Christ, elsewhere, said, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or a scorpion when he asks for an egg?” In other words, a father gives his son what the son asks for, what his son wants. Here we receive a clue to the foundation of Christian worship: we are wanted, we are desired. In other words, we are worth to someone. Worship begins with the awareness of Someone who has a sense of our worth. This is essentially the first to the third commandment. There is only One who has the true sense of our worth. This is what it means to be created, that we are worth something to Him who sustains our existence. The more we realize our worth, the more we realize that everything really is a gift. We realize that when we are on top of a mountain and can see the horizon, we realize that this horizon has been waiting for us for all these years simply so that it can be seen by us. We realize that, true to what Coldplay said, that stars really do shine for us. Everything is for us, including work. Even in our trials we understand that this is precisely the time when God is begging us to come to Him. We have worth by the very fact that we exist, by the very fact that at very moment, God begs to be with us.

 

Goethe, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, has a passage where a young man realized or thought that a lady he was in love with loves him as well. He exclaimed, “She loves me!—And I have grown stature in my eyes,–I can tell you this, you who understands such things—I worship myself, ever since she loves me!” He understood his worth, even to the point of making an exaggeration that he would worship himself, ever since he found out that she loves him. The Christian understands that He who loves him is not Someone he is not interested in. The Christian, when he experiences an encounter with Christ, understands that this is the One he has been looking for all of his life. He realizes that his desires are not an illusion, that he is not just randomly made, but is worth something to Someone whom he himself yearns to be with.

 

What happens when we realize our worth, when we realize that we are a gift to Him? One response may be, “Are you serious? Huh?” In other words, wonder. Wonder comes from the fact that who we are and what we are is worth more than anything we can imagine, that we are loved beyond our conceptualizations. One way we can understand this very fact is death. Death in the Old Testament is a bad thing. It revealed temporality. In Christ, however, it reminded us of our worth. Death reveals to us not simply temporality in this world, but that we are irreducible, that we are greater than what we can have and our conceptualizations of who we are falls short of who we really are. In Christ, we understand that death is the revelation that we are more.

 

Another way to respond is the way we respond when we receive a gift. We give the childlike response of “Thank you.” Gratitude is the only proper response to reality. I remember going to a Protestant worship service and it was simply a Bible study. I said to myself, “This is not enough.” It was not enough because there needed to be an objective fact, an objective event, that gives gratitude to Christ properly. Knowing our limitations and incapability, Christ gave us a way to worship him, “Do this in memory of me.” He Himself is the main actor in the Liturgy, the One who presides so that we can give the proper gratitude to our Father. An analogy to this is the sacrament of confession. We ourselves know that we have committed sins when we do not even feel sorry for them. This teaches us that when we say, “I’m sorry,” it is only because Christ has moved us to be sorrowful. Divine mercy is not so much that we apologize and he forgives us, but that we cannot even say “I am sorry” without His mercy. Divine mercy is the realization that You have changed me this way, that I come to you in my weaknesses precisely because You alone could have led me here. The Mass, then, is the proclamation that no one can make us feel grateful except for Him.

 

To be continued…

 

 

 

A Talk on Marriage Part 2

Here is the second part.

What makes you certain that the other person loves you? What makes you certain that there is no one like your beloved? Certainly something attracted you to her, maybe her looks and her personality. Love comes about from beauty. The more you spent your time with her the more you started to really like her. You started to, well, kinda adore her. This is actually the seed of veneration of the saints, being attracted to beauty. And sainthood is the beautiful life. If you kept on wanting to know the other person, you will find out the source of her beauty. That, again, is the start of veneration of the saints. It is not that you worship a human being, but you realize that Christ coincides with this person, that the Incarnation is true. So you started adoring her. But just like venerating the saints, to put the source of beauty, the source of greatness, in her, in a human being, is to make an idol. You have reduced your desires because you think your heart can rest on the finite, thinking that the other person has the answer to your heart. That is, however, the last thing you should do. You should never reduce the desires of your heart. Being with the person you love should always, always, always, make you want more, make your heart restless. That’s really the reason why there are many cases of pre-marital sex these days. They want more from the person, more from life. Yet, there is something wrong with this. The restlessness of the heart comes about from a judgment about reality, not imposing your own will or utopia to the world. It comes from understanding the depth of the other, loving her destiny. I was once asked by a girl what she should do when her boyfriend wants to have sex and tells her that if she does not do so, it is because she does not love him back. That’s a bit weird if you ask me, but I do have sympathy since the boyfriend does want to be loved. It’s just that he has a wrong conception of love. I answered her this way. Look, it is good that he wants to possess you. However, possessing you means affirming the truth of your person, your destiny. The fact is, you are not his. There is only one way that he can possess you, that you can be his. It is by loving your Destiny, destiny with a capital D. It is by loving you in Christ. That’s the only way that you can be his. The fact that he wants to possess you without Christ should make you vomit. You cannot be loved apart from Christ because anything that lacks Christ will pass away. What you need is a love that lasts forever. So you should say “no” because the only way you can love him is to love him in Christ, in loving his destiny.

 

Again, back to the question. How are you certain that what you have with your wife is forever? When you were told, when you found out, that she likes you back, you became yourself, you became excited, you became free. It made you feel a little uncomfortable because it kinda meant you had to be committed to her sooner or later. But there was something in her that just made you commit, made you want her more. Now, maybe there were times when she was kinda moving too fast. You want to do other things. I think there is a great mystery here. Girls usually want to give themselves to someone. Guys, however, find that there are other things that are also valuable and they want to pursue those things. This is just another example of why the heart is drawn by the Infinite. Look, guys are right that happiness cannot be found by the girl alone. Girls are right that happiness can be experienced by being together. In other words, there is a great experience of happiness by being together and yet, the other person is not really the source of that happiness. You need to be able to judge your feelings. Why are you happy? Why are you sad? You are sad because you wanted something and you could not get it. You are happy because someone loves you and you ought to be loved. Again, you need to ask these questions and you cannot stop at one answer. You need to get deeper. When time moved on, for some reason, you just somehow managed to commit yourself to this girl forever. What made you do that? Your will power? No. You yourself know your limitations. In fact, you yourself know the other person’s limitations. So how can you or the girl commit yourself to each other for eternity? Is this possible? How do you really know that the girl will love you forever? How do you know what you have is true, good, and beautiful? Here is one way but it should be a starting point. When you were looking at your beloved’s eyes at your wedding, you need to look back and discover that at this moment in time, you were chosen. You were chosen by God who never abandons you. You were chosen to be with this person. You can know that God chose you by the way he or she was looking back at you. This is why you should be certain that what you have is forever: the Church was your witness. This is what the great sacrament does. It gives you certainty that love lasts forever and your wedding is a promise of this truth.

 

I said before that the other person has limitations and you should never rest your heart in that person. It is making an idol out of her. Rather, you must always be restless. Marriage is not a utopia but a reality, a reality in which God has chosen your individuality to be with Him. The way you can know that you have a unique relationship with Him is the fact that you are in a relationship with this person. No one else can have this relationship with this person besides you. It is undeserving and yet, for some reason, this person managed to commit herself to you. Now, although you should not rest your heart on her, your beloved is your salvation. Being with her is the path God gave you to be with Him. There will be times of difficulties and many hardships. Maybe it’s financial problems. Maybe it’s a difficulty of having children. Maybe it’s your children being the way you did not expect. Maybe, God forbid, some kind of infidelity. But look. Christ is sometimes annoying to us. That’s the way we know that we are not loving some kind of abstract person, but someone who is concrete, someone with a face. By staying on the path God has chosen for us, we discover the carnality of the Logos. Yes, the other person will be difficult at many times. Maybe she does not show her affection for you the way she used to. But you must love her. Your salvation lies in her. You must be wounded by beauty. You must endure the carnality of the Logos, endure the sharp glance of God. You experience Christ in the flesh, in your wife and children. There should be some tension in a family because it is this way that we experience the Incarnation, the Paschal Mystery. You should never be comfortable in your family but always becoming more restless. Be restless with each other. Difficulties do not become obstacles to you. Let me quote a passage from Dante. One of the lines from this passage was quoted by Giussani. I was reading an article in Traces edited by Giorgio Paolucci and this was quoted. I would recommend you guys read that. When I read the line, it made me want to read Dante’s The New Life. Here is the passage:

 

So gentle and so pure appears

my lady when she greets others,

that every tongue trembles and is mute,

and their eyes do not dare gaze at her.

She goes by, aware of their praise,

benignly dressed in humility:

and seems as if she were a thing come

from Heaven to Earth to show a miracle.

She shows herself so pleasing to those who gaze,

through the eyes she sends a sweetness to the heart,

that no one can understand who does not know it:

and from her lips there comes

a sweet spirit full of love,

that goes saying to the soul: ‘Sigh.’

 

The article I read concluded,

 

“In love, you experience something greater, a mystery which transcends the two of you and which is expressed with a sigh, certainly not a sigh of resignation, but a sigh that expresses a longing. If there is no sigh, there is inevitable decline into pretension as regards the other, and into rage at your own and the other’s inadequacy. Two people who live the experience of true love “sigh,” because they look toward the infinite through each other. Holding hands, they walk together towards the fulfillment of them both. They experience that love for the other coincides with love for the other’s destiny. They have a common destiny and they are fruit of a love that preceded them.”

 

Be restless. Never take your beloved for granted. Always wonder, always be restless. Most of all, beg, sigh, pray. Be dominated by Christ who loves you. Passion for the glory of Christ consists in wanting to be fully alive. And you become fully alive by staying with the path Christ gave you, by being faithful to your beloved. Your salvation lies in each other. I’m out of time and there are so many things I still want to say. I tried not to talk about the usual things people talk about when it comes to marriage. You know, sacrifice, chastity, sex, and so on. In fact, I didn’t even get into my other theses. I only had time for one thesis for this talk and that is that marriage is a mystery, a sacrament. Well, I think that’s enough. It’s a great gift from God. Follow each other because that is how you will follow Christ. Following your beloved is what true affection is. There lies your salvation, there lies your freedom. In following each other, you become a sign to the Infinite, you become more of yourselves. The less you are a symbol to God, the more you become a caricature of yourself. You don’t want that. The world does not need that. The world needs a Savior. The world needs love. Your fiat, which is following each other, being faithful to each other, will build the Church and therefore give hope to the world. Thank you.

 

A Talk on Marriage Part 1

I gave a talk on marriage without anything written. To my surprise, someone wrote down what I said. Here is part 1 of the text. I did not touch anything and you will probably find many grammatical mistakes, but this is how the talk came about.

 

It is a great temptation to think that we can know what marriage is from books, even if they are from great men like John Paul the Great. A person can quote the Catechism on marriage and still falls short of a true understanding of it. The reason why marriages are not doing so well these days is that people simply do not know what marriage is. They look at marriage from an abstract point of view. Because people do not know what it is from a concrete point of view, they have problems. Those who are faithful to each other, however, know that they will always have problems but they will never become obstacles to each other. This is because marriage is never complete here on earth. Christ did say that there will be no husbands and wives in heaven. By that he meant that there is no human love in heaven, only divine love, perfected human love. But why is it that problems do not become obstacles? It is at this point that I want to stress out my first thesis on marriage: it is a mystery.

 

A man and a woman fall in love and they find themselves spending a lot of time together. They choose to marry. What keeps them together? In some way, it is not their fidelity. They will break their fidelity to each other many times. Something else makes their fidelity complete and true. Marriage, then, is an education of our limitations and our desires. It is an education of our dependence. Couples should always reflect on why they are together. The first thing the Incarnate God asked his apostles was, “What are you looking for?” This cannot be taken for granted. I know people who were in relationships and they simply did not understand why they were with the person in the first place. Of course it is good to look at concrete experiences: he is kind to me, he is romantic, he respects my freedom, he is very good looking, and so on. Great. We must start there. But relationships should never be at the surface level. A person should always ask himself why the other person is exceptional. In some way, the answer is always, “I cannot meet anyone else like him.” When you can say this with certainty, then you have discovered whom God has created you for. This in itself is a big step. Two people can love each other for eight years and yet one person is afraid to commit himself for her. He will have a skeptical attitude of, “It’s true that she has shown me love for all this years, but how will I know it will be like this tomorrow?” You know, kinda like Hume’s argument against induction. But this is irrational because the person is acting like the Israelites after God had redeemed them from slavery. You know the story. God saved them from Egypt and what did the Israelites do? They became skeptical! They said, “Bring us back to Egypt!” They forgot what God had done for them. If you want to know what it might have been like for God, read John 6. After Christ gave them food to eat and told them that he will save them, they left. They forgot what Christ did two minutes ago. They left because it was incomprehensible. Getting to the step of “There is no one else like him” is a great risk. It must be a mutual affection, a mutual “There is no one else…” It is very risky to enter into the unknown, into the incomprehensible. An experience of love always puts you into the unknown, into the incomprehensible, a joyful mystery. What is necessary is couples remembering and reliving the experiences they had with each other. This does not mean it is a personal effort. It requires begging because when you are in the unknown, when you are in a position where you cannot control things, you need to beg, you need to pray. The great risk of getting into the unknown, of asking the person to be your husband or wife comes about through prayer, comes about not from your own effort, but He who gives you to him or her.

 

This, however, is in some way at the surface level. Why is it that you cannot meet anyone else like him? This is the question you must always answer. When this question fades away, when your answer becomes worse, it is then that you have taken for granted the gift God has placed in your presence. The great thing about marriage is that when you are answering this question, it is always concrete. It means you must always give examples of your experiences. You cannot simply say, “I am with this person because God wills it.” It makes no sense. Rather, the question is, “Why is this person exceptional?” Something is exceptional if it corresponds to the deepest desires of your heart. When it comes to marriage, someone is exceptional in that he or she corresponds to your individuality. Vocation is God’s affection for your individuality, an affection you can see with a face. Unless you see the other person as God’s affection for you, then you will take the other person for granted. When you see that he or she is God’s affection for you, you understand that Someone gave him or her to you. That is, you cannot love him or her without loving Him, “Him” with a capital H. But I’m going too far already. Get back to exceptionality. When someone is exceptional, he or she corresponds to your desires. This means that the other person is an education of your heart, your desires. You need to be able to understand your heart. Silence does that. Silence is a time when you can beg the Lord to become everything in your life, when you can judge things correctly. Silence is a time to recognize your desires and therefore what they correspond to. There is an intrinsic relationship between relationships and silence. In silence, you understand the person’s destiny. Because of silence, you can talk heart to heart with the other.

 

I apologize for getting off track. I do that a lot. But get back to exceptionality. Why is the other exceptional? You need to understand your heart. And this is the biggest problem we have: we do not know our hearts. This is why marriage is a mystery. It is an education of our hearts. Marriage is this reality that is of the other world, a new world where you understand your hearts better. Marriage is a mystery because it is about the heart. Precisely because it is a mystery, our response must be awe and wonder. Every couple should have a permanent sense of wonder. Wonder comes about when you understand reality, when you understand reality as a gift. The Psalmist wondered, “What is man that you are mindful of him? That you care for him?” To wake up in the morning with your beloved should always give you this wonder. Who am I to deserve this person? There is wonder because we experience our worth, an awakening of our freedom. When a couple’s worth is taken for granted, that’s when things become dry. Look, this is not just some kind of psychological trick so that you can appreciate marriage. This is what the sacrament really is. Marriage teaches us that reality is more beautiful than we see it. This is truly what the sacrament means. Yes, it means when you can get graces from God. But that sounds a bit abstract. What does the sacrament of marriage mean? It means that you, the married couple, are necessary for us to understand God’s tenderness to the world. Without you we would not have a glimpse of God’s triune affection for the world. What I am saying right now is a bit abstract too, but once you understand that the person corresponds to you, you will try to understand why the person corresponds to you in the first place. You will find your desires being fulfilled, being satisfied, and that is a reason to believe that you are loved. We need to be certain, need to be told, that we are loved every day. How do you know that you are loved by God? By the very fact that your husband or wife wakes up with you in bed. True, he or she may not tell this to you explicitly or things may even get bad or dry, but the fact that there is a presence there with you should tell you that you are loved, that you are worth something, worth more than a sparrow. It is in this way that marriage educates us.

 

Musings on Eternal Love

Last week I went to the nursing home for the last time. I have been volunteering there for three years and I have always found myself experiencing a silent joy that no one can take away from me. I have always thought of volunteering there as bringing Christ to them. But most of the time, I found myself finding Christ there; they brought Christ to me. Or rather, Christ brought them to me. Christ for me is a concrete presence because once the word “Christ” comes in my head, I can remember the faces of the people He gave me in that nursing home. On my last day, I remember seeing one of the women there crying as she told me she was going to miss me. Why would Christ allow me to leave them? Why would Christ allow me to fall in love with him for three years in that place and then simply call me out of that place? This is one of the most dreadful experiences we have: that we lose the people we love, that love does not last. We find ourselves in skepticism, in fear, and in sadness because it seems that love does not last forever. And yet, if I judged my experience correctly, then the fact that I experienced that incredible joy in serving the elderly for three years should be a promise that there is more to come. I can leave them because I can see that love is not reduced to being physically with them. Love is He who put those people in my life. What really happened in those three years? Who gave them to me? These are the questions that must be asked and answered or else reality becomes superficial and we only see the surface of love. To fall in love with Christ is not infatuation. It is a desire to be with Him, to stay with Him, to gaze and embrace Him, forever. Love has the intent of duration. It means to intend to live in whatever situation I am put in and not simply passively receive it, but to embrace and acknowledge His Presence no matter how terrible it may be. Here we begin to see what love entails: loving His absolute freedom. To embrace His freedom is to embrace the possibilities of living. Our capacities, our love, what we can become, are based on His freedom. And because His freedom is infinite, we can become infinite. It is in loving His freedom, a freedom that you can trust, that we begin to love.

My experience with the nursing home reminds me of a story we hear in the Gospel, the story about Jesus and the widow in Nain. Jesus and his followers were walking towards a city called Nain. There was a large crowd walking with him because they did not want to leave him. They found this man to be exceptional, someone who corresponded to their hearts. They stayed with him and wanted to see and listen to him more and more. While they were walking, Jesus saw a silent crowd. It was a crowd carrying a coffin. There was silence in the crowd because silent awe was the only proper response to a tragedy. This was not the first time Jesus saw a coffin nor was it the first time he saw a crowd mourning for a dead man. Yet, there was something that struck him. He saw a woman weeping. She was a widow and the mother of the dead man. We can only imagine in adoration and reverence what Christ must have experienced in his heart. His stomach must have dropped and he probably got a lump in his throat just by looking at this poor woman. Crying for her son was probably not the first time she cried those tears since she lost her husband early on. In the heart of that mother, she was probably crying, “When does this end? Have I not suffered enough in my life?” Here was her dead son, the son that she loved with an impossible love, and she found herself alone. There was a crowd with her but she still found herself helpless and powerless. Jesus went up to this woman and looked intently in those motherly eyes and said, “Do not weep.” He told the dead man to rise and gave him directly to his mother. The crowd was in awe after this event, after this encounter. They said, “God has visited his people.” Christ brought God, a love that lasts forever. Even the motherly love of that widow could not bring her son back to life. Human love is insufficient. She needed Christ because only in Christ can she experience motherhood in a new and surprising way. Only in Christ can she become a mother forever. In this miracle, the widow can now believe that love does not end, that there is not one day that God does not care about her. That is the certainty of faith: that the Incarnation, the gravity of love, shatters whatever is sinful and evil in creation, and makes what is true, good, and beautiful last.

Trinity Sunday: Understanding the Triune God

It is that time of the year again: Trinity Sunday. As my seminary professor admits, it is a day that many young priests simply do not look forward to, because they have to give a homily about “three in one and one in three”! How can one condense a mystery of our faith in a 12-minute homily? Our modern way of thinking prevents us from being comfortable with merely accepting something as a fact without any evidence. We live in a scientific world where all claims made have to be accompanied by empirical or rational demonstrations that meticulously prove their existence. It is important for us to understand that the Trinity has been and will remain a mystery of faith and that it is our outlook on the Trinity that can aid us in making this mystery relevant in our everyday lives.

 

Charity and the Trinity – Families as “little trinities”   

  

Let us approach the subject of the Trinity by talking about love, or more appropriately, agape or charity: Christian love. When we start talking about the Trinity, we are really delving into the mystery of who God is. Perhaps we can start with Sacred Scriptures, since the first letter of Saint John tells us that God Himself is love (4:8). Let us follow the epistle with what the medieval theologian Richard of St. Victor had to say about love:  

“No one is properly said to have charity on the basis of his own private love of himself. And so it is necessary for love to be directed toward another for it to be charity.” [1] 

 

Let us look at the love existing between married couples as an example. It cannot be said that love exists in a marriage if one of the spouses only loves himself or herself. Rather, we come to the conclusion that true love exists in a marriage when the love is mutual or reciprocal—in other words, when both spouses constantly give of themselves to the other for the sake of their love for one another. Although the spouses share commonly in the marital love, they still retain their individual identities and their roles also remain distinct from one another: the husband remains a male in nature and the protector of the household while the wife remains a female and the caregiver. On the other hand, we also know that one of the primary functions, so to speak, of marriage is to bring new life to the world. Hence, marital love cannot exist if it is self-contained—the love between husband and wife becomes richer when it is poured out in their children. This is what we mean when we say that children are the fruit of the love of their parents. When children are born, they enter into the mutual love of their parents and participate in it yet they remain distinct individuals with their different personalities and tastes. In this manner, there is one love that unites the parents and their children yet there are three distinct persons (mother, father and children) that participate in that common bond. 

   

With this example, we can start to see how we can use the concept of love that exists in the family to understand the dogma of the Trinity. Augustine said that “If you see charity, you see the Trinity.” [2] Augustine also believed that the Trinity was indeed a mystery and that we were not going to fully understand it in this life; however, he still thought that we could find analogies for the Trinity in our lives by finding traces or vestiges of it in creation, because man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:27). Hence, we can use the family as an analogy for the Trinity, but at the same time we have to be careful. Because it is an analogy it has its own limitations in providing us with a true understanding of the Trinity, and that the reality of God will still remain a mystery of our faith.  

  

If we take the words of Augustine as our starting point, then we should be able to “see” the Trinity in the love that exists within a family. As mentioned above, all three persons in a family—mother, father and child—share in one love and yet the three persons remain distinct from one another with different roles and personalities. We can also carefully apply this understanding to the Trinity. In the Trinity, there is one God and three different persons with different roles. It is the infinitely reciprocal love that exists within the Trinity that keeps the three divine persons together. At the same time, each person of the Trinity has a distinct role or mission. The Father sent the Son to reveal Himself to the world (Jn 20:21) and the Son left us the Advocate or the Holy Spirit (Jn 14:16) before He returned to the Father.  

  

It is important to remember the Trinity in terms of relationship. Just as the words “mother”, “father” or “child” in themselves imply relationships (a mother or father cannot be understood without a child and viceversa) the three divine persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—cannot be grasped when taken out of context of their relationships to one another. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves His Father and the Holy Spirit is the love—the common bond—that unites the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is the fruit of the reciprocal and infinite love that the Father and the Son share in common.  

 

 

True Images: Our Participation in the Trinity 

  

What about the times when we cannot see love in a family? Can we always see the Trinity in family love? Perhaps not. This is why it is of utter importance to restore the true meaning of marital love and family relationships in a world where, for the most part, motherhood and fatherhood has been reduced to a mere biological accident. We also have to restore friendships and human relationships in general and ensure they remain true, sincere and just instead of being false and filled with greed and hidden interests. As the then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger said in one of his essays, “If God does not reflect Himself in his image, then He cannot be thought of.” [3] We have to conduct ourselves in a way that others can think of God when they meet us. Our relationships with others have to serve as windows for others to see and come to know God through them. If we truly live as we were meant to live by our Creator, as made in his image, then we will reflect Him everywhere we go, and we will show to the world that God is alive and present everywhere. In this way, we will be the true images of a God Who is far from being abstract or isolated, and we will reflect instead a God who is familiar and is relational and even calls us “friends” (Jn 15:15). When our relationships are governed by charity, we will also make known a God who is Himself love (1 Jn 4:8) and Who is, accordingly, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is through love—charitable reason rather than scientific reason— that Christians can make the triune God known to the world.  

_____________________________________________________

[1] Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate in Richard of St. Victor: The Book of the Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, and Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), III.2.

[2] Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII.5.12.

[3] Joseph Ratzinger, El Dios de los Cristianos: Meditaciones, (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 2005), 30 (translation mine).

Reflections on Jesus’ Prayer

“Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.”

 

“Eternal life”—what do these words mean? It is the life that we want. All of us had some experiences of fulfillment, events that made us happy and free, experiences that gave us recognition of our absolute worth. They were experiences that told us that life makes sense. It could be throwing a touchdown pass, spending time with your friends on the beach, being in the arms of a loved one. In all of those experiences, we understood that life really is good and we did not want that experience to end. That is eternal life—that the happy moments of our lives never end. This is the life that we are created for and is the only reason for living, for our studies, for doing the works we do. The Christian message is that life is beautiful and happy. How often do we see our faith simply as a bunch of rules and sacrifices? Many Christians, with great intent, often speak of a Christian life as one of sacrifice. It is true that Christians sacrifice many things but the saints never saw it as giving up anything essential.

I remember a man thinking about priesthood. This man was a flirt. He could not resist flirting with any girl who was at least half-decently looking. A young girl once said, “You cannot be a priest. You love girls too much!” It was true that the man loved girls a lot. But does this mean that he should not be a priest? It is interesting that the young girl’s remark resembles the narrow conception of love the modern world has. The young man should have answered, “It is precisely because I love these women that I would be a priest. To love them means to love them as I love myself. And I love myself to the extent that I love my destiny, my vocation. To love them means to affirm who they are, who gave them to me, possess them in such a way that nobody can. I will possess them because I love them in Christ. I will choose priesthood precisely because I love women.” What the young girl lacked was a conception of love that knows no limits. Her narrow definition of love makes an idol out of God because it is a reduction of reality, of one’s heart and its desires.

Human love was created precisely for divine love, an eros that is fully self-giving. Jesus was right in that there are no husbands and wives in heaven. This is not because the husbands would not love their wives in heaven. It just means that the human love that we experience here on earth will be perfected in heaven. Husbands will love their wives in a greater way, that is, through and in divine love. Celibacy is more than human love; it is ascending to divine love. It is heaven on earth. To put it in another way, celibacy is God telling the person, “I cannot wait for heaven to love you this way.”

I tell this story of the young man who loved girls because it is often the case that we have reduced our desires to something finite, to what which is not lasting. It is true that when a football player throws a touchdown, he has the experience of feeling like he is exactly where he should be. But to think he should define his life by his success as a football player would be making a mockery of himself. His experience as a football player is a sign, a promise, that there is more to come. Football should be a part of his life but not the defining factor. What defines him is God who became man so that he may have life and live it abundantly.

We often find ourselves having a hard time with sacrifices because we have already limited our desires, our wants, to something that cannot last. Christianity, however, tells us to fix our gaze on what is lasting, to look to the eternal because anything less is unsatisfying.

 

“…that they should know you, the only true God.”

 

A happy life, eternal life, is knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is a familiarity. It is not an intellectual abstraction but an intimacy with the Other who loves us infinitely. But how often are we stuck in our skepticisms toward God? Many times we find the Christian life to be burdensome. We often try to live a virtuous life and yet we somehow fail to see our place in this world, our worth, and we even fall into sin. We find ourselves in a sadness that can turn into despair. Despair—this comes from skepticism. There are many events in our lives that did not go the way we expected that made us lose certainty of our place in this world. This is eternal life—that we become certain of everything; “that they should know you, the only true God.” Faith is not a leap but God’s gift of certainty to us.

Skepticism is the opposite of faith, of knowledge. It is essentially denying or doubting that God, who is our Destiny dwelling in the present moment, can become everything in our lives. What is a sign of skepticism? Dualism. That is, when we live a life that is schizophrenic, a life where God is there in one moment and gone the next. In other words, dualism is a partly opened heart. How much space do we have for God in our hearts? Do we go to our work half-heartedly? Do we doubt our talents and desires? Do we have a hard time with patience? Skepticism is failing to affirm who God is. Like Adam, it makes us run to the bushes, close our hearts, because we do not want God to enter. It is what leads to idolatry, for to close a part of one’s heart means you will worship something else rather than “the only true God.” All of us can remember in our lives when we closed our hearts to God and how we became enslaved to our own ideals, becoming a caricature of ourselves. In the end, it just made us unhappy. Skepticism, dualism, idolatry—the anti-trinitarian life makes us a Gollum; it makes us ugly and unhappy. No wonder, then, that Christ said that eternal life is precisely the opposite of skepticism, dualism, and idolatry; it is knowledge of the one true God.

 

“Now this is eternal life…that they should know…the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.”

 

Prayer is recognizing that we cannot do anything by ourselves and recognition of God’s absolute power. The word “power” seems so cliché and non-Christian that we sometimes do not want to use it. But it is precisely understanding what the power of God is that will destroy the misconceptions the world has about the word. Power is liberation from slavery, from the caricatures we have made for ourselves. It is moving us to become more of ourselves, of becoming more human. It is here that we understand that the power of God is understanding the Fatherhood of God.

God is a Father to us in that He wants us to be free, to adhere to what is true, especially about ourselves. How do we know that God is a Father? From the One who was sent. The world was skeptical. It found itself wandering around, lost in the cosmos. And then there was an Intruder who came to give us certainty about our place in this world, to give us a certainty about our own hearts which asks for the infinite. The Intruder tells us to follow him and tells us that our place in this world is in the arms of his Father. The Son is the Intruder, the One who has died and risen from the dead. The crucified-risen One manifests to us that God can become everything in our lives. We look at the hands and feet of the Risen One and see that God never abandons him who gives his whole spirit to Him even though he is at the point of death. The Risen One was dominated by his Father and his love was better than life; life without love is hell. Christ descended into hell so that we can never despair, we can never suffer alone.

How can we know Christ? How can we know he who our God sent so that we are never alone, that we can be certain of our destiny? Through and in the Church, which is guided by the Spirit. In the Church, that is, in our friendship, we begin to desire Christ more intensely, more fervently. We concretely understand that the Spirit will never coerce us but awakens our freedom. Life in the Spirit of the Father and of Christ is life in the Church, which is a communion between God and man (1 Jn. 1:1-4). We begin to see the face of Christ in each other.

A lot of Christians think that life is individualistic. Rather, the Christian life is having lunch with a friend who moves you to think about and understand your life with Christ. It is hiking a mountain together so that beauty is co-experienced. It is having affection for those who are in need. In doing these things, we begin to see that we could not have done this by ourselves because we have our own skepticisms and frailties. Nor can we say that we are friends because we have the same mission in life. If we experience happiness with each other, it is because of grace, of the generosity of the Father who gave us His Son so that we will have His Spirit dwelling in us. We can find a place in this world because who we are made for has made Himself known to us. He has graced us with His presence so that we can feel at home in this world, although our home is in His infinite embrace; the Incarnation is the hospitality of God. We will experience His joy to the extent that we are naked before Him, naked before His Church. In service of the Church, we will find ourselves renewing the face of the earth, the earth that groans toward a new creation. We will find ourselves in gratitude, in eucharistia. Only in the body of Christ, in the Church, can we really find a home, a fully open heart, a life that makes sense.

In the Church, skepticism fades away and a new life dominated by love is begun. We will no longer find ourselves in idolatry, but rather we become a signpost, a sacrament, to the One who knows no end. And we will never despair because we are certain of our absolute worth, that we truly have a place here in this world because we are loved. When we experience this great event of love, we will find ourselves with great joy and find ourselves singing the praises of the angels. Singing belongs only to the lover and he who loves will never die. Truly, “this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.”

 

 

 

 

Away for a while…

It’s been slow around here lately… Sadly, a lot of things have been going on that have prevented me from writing for this blog and Vox Nova. School and work have kept me busy and Michael and I are engaged to be married in September, so we will be focusing our time preparing mentally and spiritually for that day and for the many to come after the Sacrament. I may start writing again, but perhaps not until I am done with summer classes. All my best to you and thank you as always for stopping by!

In Him,
Katerina

Faithfulness to Christ

To Pilar Timpane, for her birthday

What does it mean to obey, to be faithful to Christ? Our obedience depends on our certainty of God’s faithfulness. This is what the great words “Thy will be done” really mean. They are a reminder of our original dependence and most of all, His faithfulness which is His affection, for us. How do we know that He is faithful? How do we know that He cares about us? Was Christ serious when he said, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and then lose his heart? Or what can a man give in exchange for himself?” (Matt. 16:26). Does Almighty God really value us in this way? We read in the Scriptures that Christ did not regard himself equal to God but emptied himself and became obedient to God even unto death (Phil. 2). The Incarnation, then, is the confirmation, the verification that God is truly obedient to His love for us, faithful enough to go into the depths of our hearts, of our solitude, and of our loneliness. This is the condition of our obedience: God’s obedience to Himself, His faithfulness to His love.

Everything depends on His faithfulness, in His freedom to keep looking at us with that same merciful look He gazed at Peter, the blind man, Judas, and the widow with. He revealed His absolute freedom, absolute love, when He allowed Himself to be naked, allowed Himself to be a corpse that hung on a tree. He preferred to die than live without us. And when he rose again, this confirms to us that He who loves us tells us, “You cannot die.” He who loves does not want the other to die. He who loves dies when that love is unreciprocated.

How do we experience this great event of love? We can list many examples from the Scriptures but two is enough. The first is when God saved the Israelites from slavery. Experience of God is an experience, an expansion, of our freedom. But when we keep reading this salvific event, we read that the Israelites had become impatient. They kept telling each other, “Let us go back to Egypt!” “God has left us hungry here in the desert. Let us go back to Egypt!” The problem with the Israelites is their forgetfulness. They had forgotten how miserable their lives were in Egypt. They had forgotten the mighty Pharaoh’s oppression and their terrible condition of slavery. They had forgotten their allegiance to an unarticulated man named Moses who had led them out of Egypt. They had forgotten the miracles God had done. How many more miracles did He have to do? How many more miracles does God have to do for us to believe? I am reminded of a person who was going to convert to Christianity and she asked a great philosopher, “But what if this whole thing is wrong?” Dietrich von Hildebrand answered, “But think of the miracles!” Think of the “coincidences,” the people, the experiences you had!

In contrast, think of the annunciation. A young faithful virgin was in love with a man. But God wanted something else. He sent an angel to Mary and told her that she would become the mother of God, of Christ. She allowed God’s love to penetrate her and infuse her with His Spirit. The angel left. This had many implications. It meant, first of all, that she had to explain to Joseph what happened, why she was pregnant. It also meant that she would be looked at with disgust by people. What she had was a promise from an angel that her son would be the Son of God, the Messiah. Her existence depended on that promise, under the context of her experience with God. It was with great joy that she experienced God and she never forgot this event. It was her constant remembering of this event that made her endure the questioning and hateful looks that others gave her, that made her endure Joseph’s heartbreaking face when she told him she was pregnant. And when she had to endure the great suffering of seeing her beloved son suffer on the cross, she must have remembered the time when she held him in her arms when he was born: “she kept all these things in her heart.” She must have remembered the time when she was in distress looking for her twelve year old boy and joyfully found him in the temple. Finding him in the temple was a promise that in every great distress, there will be joy; in every crucifixion, there will be a resurrection. And so, “she kept all of these things in her heart.” That is why she could endure the crucifixion. She remembered; she relived the experiences she had in the past. Unlike the Israelites, Mary kept her experiences of Christ in her heart. She did not forget but grew in her certainty of God’s tenderness to humanity. Obedience to God’s will, which is always His faithfulness to us, can only be done when we relive and remember the experiences we’ve had of Him.

Whenever you experience a great love, you never forget it. Hopefully, all of us can remember our first encounters with Christ, or that experience with Christ that allowed us to convert, change, and made us fall in love with him. We saw a glimpse of our destiny, a moment when our lives made sense. We look back; we remember. What was our judgment, the judgment we made on our experience? This is not just an intellectual exercise, but the way we understand Christ. We understand Christ when we look into our lives and see how we have changed, see how he worked through the people he put in our lives, see the trials we have endured. We do not understand Christ apart from our hearts because it is in our restless hearts that he starts his work in us. It is also the place he ends, for it is in our hearts where his Father and his Spirit will dwell forever.

When we experienced Christ at those points in our lives, what did our hearts say? Did not our hearts burn within us like the two disciples in Emmaus? Did we not experience a reason for living, an experience of exceptionality? To put it in another way, when we experienced that thrilling, quivering, and jolting love of Christ, did we not understand that this is the One whom we have been looking for all along? To experience Christ is to understand our destiny, the meaning of life; the meaning of life is love and love is Christ. For Christ to be the meaning of our life means that all that we do – whether it is school, work, parties, heartbreak, friendships – everything has a meaning, everything has a face. We can look at an awful situation and see that it is part of something greater. We can be with each other with joy and know that this event is a promise that there is more to come. The good news about Christianity is really that our life longs for more and the message is: there is more.

An experience of God’s faithfulness is not a mere sentimentality but an experience which moves the whole being of the person to be open to reality. For example, I went to a retreat once and I had a joyful moment. When everyone was leaving, I was sad because I did not want the retreat to end, an experience like Peter’s at the Transfiguration who told Jesus, “Let us stay here and build tents.” Now, there are two possibilities: either I am a sentimental person or there was an objective presence, a fact, which moved me so much that I wanted to stay with these people. If the former is true, then I cannot really know whether there is a higher power at work because I could become sentimental in any event. If the latter is true, then it means that my life changes. My life changes because I am now in search of this Presence which moved me to be joyful. I am now in a search of a Person, wanting to know who this Person is. “Who are you that moved me to so much joy?” In other words, it provokes prayer. Prayer is an expression of the heart’s desire of wanting to know who it is made for. It is begging Christ that he comes to us, to be aware of his presence in our lives. The time of prayer becomes the truest moment in our lives because it is there that we are explicitly depended on a “You,” that this relationship with this “You” is what makes us certain about our hearts, our desires, our place in this world. Nothing is worthwhile unless it is related to this “You.” Our desires have been altered, wanting to follow where this Presence takes us. We want to follow this Presence because He has put joy in our lives, a promise that there is more to come, that if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to His freedom, we will attain this infinite joy. Faithfulness to invoking God, faithfulness to prayer, allows us to say with decisiveness and freedom, “Here I am. I am Yours.” An experience of God’s faithfulness, then, increases our affection to Him, move us to become His: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

Following this Presence is not simply having a personal prayer time but requires following a concrete person or persons. It is in following concrete persons that we experience the carnality of the Logos. When I made the judgment that Christ was in that retreat because I experienced joy, the rational thing to do is to stay with those people. Of course I could not stay with all of them. Many of them lived far away. But there were a few that live close to me. The rational thing for me to do is to stay with them, to follow them. This does not mean that I must be with them all the time. This does not mean that we will never have any problems with each other – good friendship requires struggle. It means that we have been dominated by a Presence, realizing that there must be Someone who puts us together through our weaknesses and struggles and our joys. It is the Presence that these persons carry that I want. This Presence should dominate my life. The way I think, the way I talk to people, the way I wake up in the morning, changes. Even if I am not with them, they are with me because what is important is He who dominates us. This is what obedience really is. Obedience is following Christ in each other, in our friendship. It is following the Church. This is why even though we can see the corruption in the Church, we can see the sins of each other, we can still say the Church is good. We can say that we belong to the Church, we belong to each other. We belong to each other because we are not alone in our sinfulness. This is the essence of the Church: Christ sits at the table with sinners; Christ has truly become sin. We can say that the Church is good because we remember, we experience, that Someone has looked at us the same way. In our sinfulness, in our wickedness, Christ looks at us and still says, “You are good.” We can say to the Church, “You are good” because she too looks at us the same way. Faithfulness to God is always ecclesial.

Because we remember how God has been faithful to us, our freedom has been expanded. If there is ever a time when I am called to be at a place without the people I have grown to love, the people whom I have encountered Christ, I can tell Christ, “thy will be done.” I can leave the people I love because my friendship with them is no longer limited to how much time I spend time with them. I can leave them because I experienced joy with them, a promise that whenever I follow this Presence that moves us together, I will have the joy that I deeply need and desire.
Obedience to Christ, then, is not attempting to do anything in our own wishes, even if those wishes are good. I can say, “I will do charitable works, Lord. I will pray for an hour every day. I will be more faithful in my studies.” Notice how it is always “I will”, “I will”. It is focus on the “I.” Rather, there is one thing necessary: we are loved, the “You”. Obedience is not attempting to please the Lord by our own works. Obedience is not a mechanical following, but a simplicity of the heart. And the simpler the heart is, the more it gives itself away. The simplicity of the heart is giving itself to the people whom it has been affected by. To be simple means to be sensitive to Christ’s tenderness. It is allowing oneself to submit to the people he has given to us, those who are living their vocation and certain of Christ’s love for them and has their hearts geared towards His absolute freedom.

Finally, the story of Jesus, Mary, and Martha is a definitive guide for obedience (Luke 10:38-42). Martha heard that Christ was coming. Christ was a friend of hers and she knew that there was something exceptional in this man. Not only was he becoming a famous teacher, but he looked at her with an attentiveness that she had never experienced. Martha had never seen such a man before. She had never seen a man so serene, so generous, so attentive to one’s needs, so firm, and so loving. He had helped her in a way that no one had ever helped her before; she realized herself through him. So she heard that he was coming again. As a sign of gratitude and hospitality, she cleaned her house and wanted to have a presentable meal. Mary, on the other hand, was not the best helper. She was busy doing other work and she might have been lazy. She may have even ruined a certain kind of food Martha was making. We don’t know. But we know that Martha was trying to impress Christ and there is nothing wrong in trying to impress him. Then, unexpectedly, she heard that Christ was coming earlier than what was planned. This is a great and sweet blessing of God: He comes unexpectedly and sooner than we think. He comes and the meal is not even cooked and not even prepared. The house is not in the best shape. Mary, who was probably not as skilled as Martha in cooking and other things, saw Christ and entertained him. Martha got mad at Mary and told her to help her. Christ told Martha that she was too worried about too many things. “Only one thing is necessary” and Mary had chosen the best part. This is not to say that Martha was wrong. It pleased the Lord that she was doing all of those things. But Christ desired one thing: Martha herself.

At the end of it all, the Lord wants you. That is it. Obedience requires an awareness of what is essential: “You.” Obedience is saying with affection, “I am You who make me.”

“Descended into Hell” — Exploring God’s silence

This article of the Apostle’s Creed is certainly by far the most controversial for many Christians, but why? At first, it is hard to believe that the Son of God who is sinless would descend into hell, which we understand it to be a place where there is only pain and suffering.

As this can be a topic of deep theological discussions, I only attempt here to scratch the surface based on Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The “Death of God”
In reality, even though as Christians we believe in the mystery of the resurrection, we may not feel as comfortable in accepting the fact that for the resurrection to be possible, Jesus had to experience death in the same way that all men do. The mystery of our faith is based in the reality that Jesus Christ in fact died; however, this was not an ordinary death. Jesus Christ as the Redeemer, descended into hell in a special way in order to proclaim “the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there.”[1]

Sheol, Hell, and Death
Scholars claim that the word “hell” in this article of the Creed may be a false translation of the word sheol, which meant in the Old Testament a state after death characterized by nothingness. Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Introduction to Christianity, challenges this interpretation of “hell”, which only implies that Jesus died, and inquires further into the meaning of hell and death.

It is in our human nature to be afraid of loneliness. According to the Pope, if we face certain situations, such as being alone in the presence of a corpse, for instance, we will become afraid of the body even though we are aware that we will not get hurt by it. However, if someone else would be in the room with us, our fears would go away, because we would no longer be alone faced with death.

Because we enter into death by ourselves with no one accompanying us, death is also considered as utter loneliness under the Old Testament definition of sheol. This is why the Pope defines death as “absolute loneliness,” but goes further into saying that hell is “death into which love cannot longer reach.” [2]

Christ Conquers Death
Jesus also experienced this loneliness leading up to His death when He cried for the Father: “My God why have you forsaken me?”[3] Subsequently, because prior to the Incarnation, death or the state after death (sheol) was considered as complete loneliness, it is important that Christ’s death would differ from this earlier idea. He descended into hell, our final loneliness, and opened its gates to reach us with His love. When Christ died, death and hell no longer meant the same thing, because from that point on love resided in death.

“Since this love-death of our Lord, death has taken on a quite different meaning; it can become for us an expression of our purest and most living love, assuming that we take it as a conferred opportunity to give ourselves unreservedly into the hands of God” [4]

Scripture and other non Biblical References for Personal Study

Mt 27:52; Mt 12:40; Acts 2:27, 31;Rom 10:7; Eph 4:9; 1 Pet 3:19ff, 4:6
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 632-637
Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity
Johann Auer and Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Credo

[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 678.
[2] Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 227
[3] Mk 15:34
[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Credo (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2005), 54.

Reflections on John 4

To Alexi-Noelle

Christ did not come to this world with a type of spirituality but a penetrating gaze that infuses into the human heart a love that lasts forever. In the eyes of Christ, we encounter God’s human sympathy that shatters the hardness of the heart and our indifference towards our destiny. The more we look into his eyes the more we become certain of our vocation, our destiny, and who this man is, this man who looks at us in such a way that it provokes us to have compassion for our human fragility.

Two thousand years ago, in what seems to be an ordinary event, a woman’s life was changed by a conquering gaze that awakened her freedom. She was an attractive Samaritan, a woman who had many husbands. By “happy chance,” she went to Jacob’s well while a Jewish man was resting there from his tireless work of attempting to save the world. She knew he was sitting there but did not pay attention to him. She was paying attention to her own affairs, to her own problems that she created. The Nazarene, like other men, was probably attracted to this woman. He thirsted for her heart, that is, a desire to give his spirit to her. He said, “Give me a drink.” She was surprised and forgot about what she was thinking about. She had the common conception of religion we have today, a preconception that religion suffocates you with its rules and doctrines. “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” Some narrow-minded Jews refused to talk to people who did not share their views of God and the world. This woman probably encountered those kinds of people, people whose arrogance made them walk past people whose quality of life was not up to their standards (the Good Samaritan story). But this Jew was different. The way he looked at her was different and he proposed to her something that she probably suppressed in her heart, a proposal that attracted her because here was someone who took her heart seriously.

What is interesting about this short conversation is that the woman gained certainty of who she was talking to when she gained certainty of herself. “He told me everything I have done.” What seems to be an ordinary event with a typical Jew was an encounter with a Presence that saved her from her inhumanity. The more a person is certain of her own heart, the more she becomes aware of the infinite closeness of God. This is the certainty Christ gives us. The woman lacked understanding (vs. 22) and Christ gave her the understanding that her five husbands never gave her, an understanding about her destiny, about an everlasting life that is worth living, not an immortal life without love. This type of person, a person who is aware of her needs, is the type that the Father wants (vs. 23).

“He told me everything I have done.” Christ knew what she had done and yet, he never looked at her with wrathful eyes. He recognized her longing for the everlasting, for an infinite embrace from her Father. God looks at the depth of the human person and never divorces Himself from her. This look, this gaze, provoked the Samaritan woman to be naked in front of her Creator and her neighbor: “The woman…went into the town and said to the people, ‘Come see a man who told me everything I have done.’” She was not afraid to be vulnerable anymore, even to the people she knows. What she had done was embarrassing. It made people look down upon her. And yet she knew that Someone looks at her, even with her fragility and faults, with an awareness of her absolute value. Worship begins with an awareness of an Other who has a sense of our worth. In the end of it all, only this profound look is what matters. What matters is what is behind this look. To discover this look, to discover what is behind this look, is the Christian life.

Lent is not so much of a time of discipline as much as it is being free because we recognize a look that keeps our lives worth living. How do we recognize the gaze of Christ? Yes, we recognize him first and foremost in the Eucharist for it is there that we become deaf to our rationalizations and conceptions of God, and our hearts are attuned to a “luminous darkness” that melts our souls. We recognize Christ in prayer. But where else? How else do we recognize him? It is very easy to say that we recognize Christ in the sacraments. It is difficult to recognize him elsewhere. How do we know when we encounter Christ? And where do we encounter him? Where is the evidence of this resurrected Presence that Christians talk about? In friends. Even when we are not spending time with them, we are with them. It is they who make us realize the importance of walking the straight and narrow road, that is, living a simple life with the certainty of one thing necessary: we are loved. Their joys become ours. And our communion with each other is built on truth, on a certainty that our desires are not an illusion. This is why true friendship never ends. Our good will and affection for each other are founded on a steadfast look that hell itself cannot prevail against, a love so tremendous that it brings us together to walk in the same direction. Even when there are faults committed against each other, there is a look that looks beyond it, an intense and profound sympathy for each other’s fragility. In other words, the look is not limited to what a person has done, for that is looking at a person in a fragmented way, but with affection for the other person’s life as a whole, a love for the person’s destiny. Because there is this love, the person changes and looks forward to that day when he is no longer tied to his childish ways but naked with his arms stretched in front of his God and the world (Jn. 21:18). Christ told his friend, “Feed my sheep. Tend my lambs. Feed my sheep.” In other words, love the Church even with her weaknesses. Love the people God has put in your lives.

New Contributor

Apolonio Latar who had been a previous reader of my former blog Evangelical Catholicism and a current reader and frequent commenter of this blog will be joining me in writing for this blog.  Apolonio’s thoughtful reflections and comments add an invaluable insight to the main theme I write about here: love.  Not a love of dreams, as Dostoevsky would say, but a real love that demands sacrifice and the ultimate gift of self.  This is not to say, nonetheless, that all the joy is taken out of this love.  All the contrary.  It is in addressing this point that Apolonio’s reflections become important in our ongoing discussion.  Join me in welcoming Apolonio!
Please check out Apolonio’s blog for more of his insights.

Falling in Love

(In honor of St. Valentine’s day and the season of Lent, I thought I would share a quote that my professor of Systematic theology gave us last year at the end of the semester. )

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is,

than falling in Love in a quite absolute way.

What you are in love with,

What seizes your imagination,

Will affect everything.

It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,

What you will do with your evenings,

How you will spend your weekends,

What you read, what you know,

What breaks your heart,

And what amazes you in joy and gratitude.

Fall in love, stay in love,

and it will decide everything.

Attributed to Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

Fast and Abstinence in Perspective

My friend Soutenus from Catholic Notebook has a wonderful post on where she puts fasting and abstinence in perspective. The post looks at fasting during the Lenten season keeping in mind how our brothers and sisters in Haiti, specifically, suffer from hunger.  Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I think that Soutenus has a good Lent tip that I will personally consider:

During Lent you might want to place the money save by fasting and abstinence aside for people in poverty. Go to the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation to learn about their nutrition programs.

A Case Against Mardi Gras

Having lived over eight years in South Louisiana I am somewhat familiar with the hype around Mardi Gras in Catholic and non-Catholic circles. I have never been part of any of the floats or have gone to the balls, but I have gone to the parades to catch some beads and plastic cups or Frisbees and they were “okay.” We used to go to the “family-oriented” parades, but they turned out to be everything but fit for the family. My coworkers and I limited ourselves to eating the King Cake in the office and hoping we didn’t get “Baby Jesus” so we wouldn’t have to buy the cake next time. That has been the extent of my participation in the Mardi Gras festivities.

I would say that most of my Catholic friends from Louisiana, without exception, participate actively in the Mardi Gras festivities since January 6^th (technically, Mardis Gras in French refers to Fat Tuesday only, but the term is also applied to the days and festivities that precede this day). In all honesty, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the concept of participating in excesses and indulgences before the fasting and penance that characterizes the sacred season of Lent. I don’t understand it and I don’t agree with it. I’m going to go as far to quote the words of my dear boyfriend regarding Mardi Gras: “Mardi Gras is a mockery of the Catholic faith.” I agree. It is a mockery of the Lenten season and of its purpose and sacredness.

My friends make it sound as if Mardi Gras is intrinsically Catholic and although there may be some truth to the fact that the feast is related to Catholicism by association, the festivities are everything but Christian in nature. In fact, history places the origin of carnival festivities back to pagan spring fertility rites during pre-Christian times.

Lent is supposed to be a time to grow in virtue through penance, sacrifice, and mortification. The purpose of the Lenten season is to prepare our bodies and souls to grow closer to God so we can accompany Him faithfully during his Passion, death, and then His glorious resurrection. Although Lent in itself is a time for preparation for the Triduum, preparation is also required prior to entering the Lenten season, because we need to get our minds and bodies in the mode of receiving God (just as in Advent).

So, what is the purpose of Mardi Gras? What is the goal of excessive eating, drinking, and partying right before Ash Wednesday? Is it an attempt to forget about God right before “reality” hits during Lent? How do the carnival festivities help us in growing closer to God in preparation for Lent? How does Mardi Gras aid our spiritual and physical preparation to receive God?

Growing in virtue this Lenten Season

“What are you giving up for Lent?” we are often asked during this time of year. This question usually refers to which specific food or drink we are going to stop eating or drinking during this season. Some go further and want to give up TV shows or the Internet. Although these practices of disciplining the will may sound trivial (because many people go back to their same old practices after Lent), if they are coupled with a true sense of solidarity and strong spiritual practices, they can lead us into growing in virtue during this season. It is through small acts that we can grow in humility; nevertheless, they cannot be isolated from our final goal—to reach unity with Christ.

Fasting, Abstinence, and Solidarity

Fasting is often times seen as pointless and unnecessary in an individual-centered society like the one in which we live in today. On the other hand, there is another extreme in fasting. There is a temptation to become spiritual athletes for Christ and practice intense fasting losing focus of our ultimate end: to grow closer to Christ. But it is in solidarity that our fasting can be fruitful in our spiritual life: when we realize that we are not alone, that we are united with members of the Mystical Body of Christ in the name of His love.

In other words, if you decide to stop drinking sodas or eating chocolate during this season, because they are not good for you or they make you fat, your attempts may not be all that fruitful spiritually (perhaps physically!), because they do not extend vertically or horizontally, religiously speaking. A different approach may be to actually practice fasting and abstinence as outlined by the Church and if you desire you can abstain also from certain foods of your choice, but all of this has to be done in a context of solidarity with others and in “offering it up” to Christ. Solidarity means that you recognize others’ needs and that they are always in front of you. For instance, when you fast it is a way of recognizing the hunger that many suffer around the world and the injustices that make this happen. Or when you don’t drink that soda that you usually love is a way of knowing we can leave our desires aside and understand that many people around us do not have the luxury to fulfill their desires even if they are really small and harmless as a can of soda can be.

Spiritual Practices

Lent can become almost like that time of New Year’s when we start making resolutions and we later break them after the season ends. Although it does not have to necessarily be that way. Lent can be a time for training and disciplining our will to start certain spiritual practices that if successful can extend well beyond the Lenten season and even for life. Personally, it was during one Lent two years ago when I decided to attend daily Mass and start praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I still practice both two years later, although with daily Mass schedules nowadays, it becomes difficult to attend Mass every day working a full-time job and going back to school at the same time. Nevertheless, perhaps you may want to try to go to daily Mass and visit the Blessed Sacrament or start praying the Liturgy of the Hours or read a chapter of Scripture every day or start a new devotion—or be more perseverant with the ones you already practice.

So let us go forth and make this Lenten season count. Let us allow the grace of the Lord transform us so we can cultivate solidarity in humility in our hearts as we attempt to grow closer to Christ during these 40 days and receive Him joyfully on Easter Sunday.

See:

• Creating our own desert with the Desert Fathers
• Sacrifices and Solidarity

Transforming the world by being a people “in love”

We love because he first loved us.” (1 Jn 4:16-19)

One of the things that I struggle with the most is evangelization. I have friends and family members who either do not believe in God or are baptized Catholics who have left the Church. I do not want to force my beliefs on them, but on the other hand I am by no means a pluralist who thinks that it is okay for everybody to believe in whatever it is they believe is true and leave it at that. Otherwise, I would not believe that the truth is one and that it can only be found in the God of Jesus Christ and that has been transmitted to us through His Church.

I have learned from friends who are very successful in speaking to inactive Catholics or nonbelievers that whenever we are fortunate enough to be presented with an opportunity to discuss matters of faith, first of all we must listen very carefully to the other person. We need to understand what their concerns are, which are always valid and authentic. The issues they may have with organized religion or Catholicism, for that matter, do not occur in a vacuum and may very well be justified. Unfortunately, we are not always presented with this scenario: an adequate setting or enough time to have a relaxed and truthful chat about religion or Catholicism. Most of the time we are either working, or going to school, or attending social events or going about our daily chores. So how can we evangelize during this time?

I personally believe that it all comes down to the words that have been traditionally attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” We all know that saying, but it sounds like it is easier said than done. I have long reflected about this and I have come up with an idea that is less than innovative and that may also sound like it is easier said than done! But let’s give it a try.

Love is the universal language.  Regardless of age, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, or political affiliation, human beings can all speak the language of love.  Love unites us.  Love is our common bond.  Therefore, if we want to “evangelize” we start and end with love.

When we are in love with someone, people notice it and they talk about it with us or with others. Michael and I know a Catholic couple that has been married for years. One of their children is disabled, but yet they are so filled with love and joy for their child as well as the rest of their children, friends, and coworkers. They are always smiling and making others smile as well. They are so welcoming and are always willing to help and give to the poor and needy. When we see a couple like this who share their reverence and love for the other constantly, we notice it right away and we feel like we can also share and participate in their joy—in the happiness of their union. Their union no longer is self-contained, but in fact welcomes anyone who wishes to participate in it. This is how our love for God should be: so abundant that it overflows and that allows others to share in it—a welcoming love.

When we see a compassionate person who perseveres in their ministry to the broken and the needy we are inspired by this love and wonder what keeps this person going. When we witness a son or daughter constantly caring and serving his or her elderly parents we are elevated to this higher love that moves them to give of themselves in such a way. These are people who are in love with someone and they act accordingly. They walk the talk. Same goes with our love for God. The true Christian is in love with someone—with God himself and he or she has to live out that love in order for it to be credible and for it to be a true witness.

If I constantly talk about the love I have for my boyfriend, but I am flirting with other men when he is not around or I am rude to him in front of our friends and family, will others know that I am a person in love? People will start talking and will let him know that I am perhaps not the right person for him. Same goes with friends or family members and God. If I constantly talk about how pious I am or how often I pray, but I am impatient and rude to others who I encounter every day of my life, will others know that I am in love? If I refuse to serve others and prefer to always be first, will people be inspired by my love? Am I letting my love for God shine through my actions? Can others fall in love with God through my actions?

Blessed Mother Teresa was indeed in love and she elevated our spirits to that same love that united her to Jesus Christ. In her own words, she speaks of how “demanding” that love can be just as our love for spouses, significant others, family members and friends can be:

Because I talk so much of giving with a smile, once a professor from the United States asked me: “Are you married?” And I said: “Yes, and I find it sometimes very difficult to smile at my spouse, Jesus, because He can be very demanding – sometimes.” This is really something true. And this is where love comes in – when it is demanding, and yet we can give it with joy.”

One may ask at this point, but what kind of love are we talking about here? It is definitely not romantic love that I am referring to. It is not temporal love either. It is self-emptying love. It is a radical love that seeks nothing but to serve for the glory of God. It is perseverant love. It is the kind of love that moves us out of ourselves and that bears it all for God’s sake. It is a supernatural love that acknowledges that there is life to come and that knows that this world is not an end in itself, but only a phase in our journey. It is a love that knows that we are simply nomads walking towards our final and eternal destiny to share in the joy of the Divine fellowship. It is the kind of love (caritas) that St. Paul talks about in his first letter to the Corinthians:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. (13:4-8)

Christian love is radical… as radical as God becoming man… as radical as God dwelling among us… as radical as the crucified God… as radical as God being raised from the dead. We cease to be Christians when we cease to live and love radically until the end. Radical love is credible and transforming. Living out daily our radical love for God is the greatest witness we can give of our belief in the truth.

What is the true meaning of the Trinity in our daily lives?

(Busy, busy, busy… Sorry for not updating the blog lately, but since the beginning of the year I have been working late hours and will be going on business travel the next couple of weeks. On top of that I just started another semester at school, so I have not had much of spare time.)

Regardless of how busy I may be, I still miss writing for the blog and, most importantly, reading your thoughts. I just started a Trinity and Incarnation class and we are, obviously, learning about the Trinity, but because my degree focuses on the pastoral aspects of theology, we are going to be asking ourselves throughout the semester how to talk about the Trinity to parishioners and fellow Christians in simple terms. Our belief in the Triune God is one of the pillars of our faith, but many of us do not know how to explain it or even how to make it meaningful in our own walk of faith. From personal experience, I know that every year when Trinity Sunday comes along, I expect a fruitful homily that would hopefully enlighten further my understanding of this sacred mystery. It turns out that the homilies have helped a lot. Reading books on the side by the saints and theologians has helped me tremendously. I have gotten to the point that I meditate on the Trinity daily when before I just didn’t know where to start thinking about the Trinity! Three in one, One in Three? What? Why would God make one of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith such a difficult one? Well, it doesn’t have to be.  It is a mystery after all! :)

Many valid questions and many answers too, but for now, I would like to know from you the following:

• How do you incorporate the mystery of the Holy Trinity into your daily living (if at all)? Your spirituality?
• If you have children, how do you explain it to them? Have you even tried?
• What difficulties do you experience with this dogma?
• Do you think it is not emphasized or explained enough at the pulpit?
• What do you think would happen if suddenly we stop talking in Trinitarian terms at Mass or at the parishes or at home?

I have written something on the Trinity before on this blog, where I explain how I’ve dealt with this dogma, in case you’re interested. When I think about the Trinity, I think about the relationship between the Three Persons and the infinite love that reigns among them. I stopped trying to figure out the “three in one and one in three” part, because that didn’t get me anywhere ;)