Podcasts for Young Philosophers and IB Theory of Knowledge Students

Deacon Douglas McManaman

As a result of my encounter with the Salesians of Don Bosco very early on in my teaching career, I have been deeply inspired by the life and visions of St. John Bosco. However, I was never able to warm up to the image of Our Lady Help of Christians (Don Bosco’s Madonna), a heavy set woman wearing a gold jewelled crown and holding a royal scepter in her right hand, while cradling in her left arm a rather plump baby Jesus, who wears a similar gold, jewelled crown atop his rather large head. This image struck me as a cultural projection. In fact, it is typical of us to create our images of Jesus and Mary “in our own image”, as it were. Every Advent a local parish treats us to a very large display of international nativity scenes, which illustrate well the tendency to create the Holy Family in our own cultural image. The international nativity scenes are somewhat more exhilarating for me, because it is rather obvious in this context that no single culture is the paradigm instance of the nativity, and so it tends to inspire a more global theological perspective. 

That is why I believe it is important to take our own Western images of the Blessed Mother with a grain of salt; for they embody a perception that likely has more to say about us than it does about the historical Mary of Nazareth. Mary was an Israelite, a first century Palestinian Jew. Her skin would have been brown, and her character should be gleaned more from the data of Scripture than from projections rooted in a patriarchal Western European society, which for the most part lends the impression that Mary was a quiet, submissive, passive, and dependent woman, disposed to be subject exclusively to male guidance. If Mary was the pre-eminent Israelite woman, she would have had integrated within her all the characteristics of the great women of the Old Testament, such as the wisdom, courage, and leadership qualities of Deborah, the humility, work ethic, and initiative of Ruth, and the shrewdness and sacrificial spirit of Esther and Judith. 

In fact, there is much that we can infer from a consideration of the first chapter of Luke’s gospel. For example, at the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel says to her: 

“Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be ….” 

Mary was troubled at what was said because she did not see herself as highly favored by God. And if she is the exemplar of perfect humility, it is only because she did not consciously regard herself as better than anyone.

“During those days Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, …”

Notice that she was not accompanied by Joseph or any other man, and so this would have been a particularly dangerous journey. Jesus sent the disciples out two by two for the sake of their own safety, but Mary set out in haste, motivated by the condition of her cousin, Elizabeth, with the intention of caring for her until the birth of John. And so, she is a woman of great courage and initiative who acted independently. 

In her Magnificat, she says: 

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness….”

Once again, Mary sees herself as lowly (tapeinos). She is not exalted in her own eyes, that is, she does not see herself as special. 

“The Mighty One has done great things for me, …”

She sees that it is God who has done great things for her, not the other way around, and there is no hint in these verses that she merited divine favor. She simply acknowledges the utter gratuity of divine grace or favor.   

“His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him….”

She knows this because He had mercy on her, and she knows from within her own fear of God.  

“He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty….”

She rejoices in justice and the divine mercy that serves justice, and this is true only because she had a longing for that justice. In other words, injustice moved her to anger and sadness, albeit a patient anger and sadness. The degree of that sadness can be inferred from the degree of her exuberance. And so she was not one to stand by meek, mild, and unmoved by human oppression; rather, she was someone who observed and was willing to name the arrogance of the ruling class. She is attuned to the suffering, to victims of injustice, the hungry, which causes her to be incensed at the arrogance of the oppressive rich. She is one who delights in the victory of the lowly. In short, this is a woman who burns with a desire for justice.  

“He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

She loves Israel as did the great Jewish women of the Old Testament; she has a definite sense that she belongs to a larger nation but is just one among many, 

“Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home…”

Again, she returns home on her own, without any mention of accompaniment, but only after staying for three months, doing ordinary tasks ordered to the support of her cousin. Menial and ordinary household tasks are not below her, and she stays for the last third of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, when she is needed the most. 

Another important point is that Mary tends to be amazed at what is said to her. We see this at the Presentation. She is amazed at the words of Simeon and Anna the Prophetess. In other words, she is one who can be impressed with others and can learn from them, that is, she allows herself to be enlarged by others. She has no pretensions nor airs of superiority. And she ponders. She thinks about what is happening around her. She does not have an immediate and comprehensive grasp of things, and so she patiently ponders on what things could possibly mean. And she spent three days looking for Jesus when they discovered he didn’t return home with them after a day’s journey. So she understands the pain of loss, the pain of intense anxiety.  

“When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety….”

It is not Joseph, the man, who speaks; rather, she takes the initiative and asks: “Why have you done this to us?” And yet, she puts Joseph first: “Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety”. She is not calm and collected with some ethereal trust in God; rather, she panics. Three days of anxiety at the possible loss of a child is terrible suffering, and this suffering enables her to sympathize with parents who have lost their own child. But she also very subtly calls out her son, challenging him, a twelve year old boy so focused on what interests him that he fails to consider his parents. She corrects this typical adolescent absent mindedness: “Why have you done this to us?”, and not: “It is we who are at fault….”. No, it was you, Jesus. You did this to us.  

After that, Jesus is obedient to them. Mary still did not completely understand all this, but kept all of it in her heart, to ponder, so as to eventually discover the meaning of it all. Thus, she is patient, and she clearly understands that understanding is going to take time and thought.  

 

Deacon Douglas McManaman
Published at Lifeissues.net (Japan)

A stumbling block for many traditional Catholics, when discussing LGBTQ+ issues, homosexuality, and related questions, is that they immediately think “sex” and seem unable to think outside that framework. I mentioned this to a former student of mine who is openly gay, and immediately—and with considerable vexation—she replied, “That’s so male!” I believe she is entirely correct on this point. This is, indeed, a tendency that is often associated with men, and, of course, those who have traditionally written the encyclicals and other Church documents on these matters are by and large male. She, by contrast, understands that homosexuality and the issues surrounding it are primarily about “relationship” rather than sex, at least for the most part.

Another problem with Catholic discourse on homosexuality is the language of “disorder”. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read:

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. (2358, CCC)

I have to agree with all those who strongly suggest that the language of disorder should become a thing of the past; for most people, upon hearing the word “disorder”, think “psychology” (i.e., Borderline Personality Disorder; Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, etc.), and not “morality”, in which the word “disorder” has a very different and less offensive meaning (i.e., I have a disordered appetite for sweets). I am of the view that Carl Jung was on to something important when he wrote:

In view of the recognized frequency of this phenomenon [homosexuality] its interpretation as a pathological perversion is very dubious. The psychological findings show that it is rather a matter of incomplete detachment from the hermaphroditic archetype, coupled with a distinct resistance to identify with the role of a one-sided sexual being. Such a disposition should not be adjudged negative in all circumstances, in so far as it preserves the archetype of the Original Man, which a one-sided sexual being has, up to a point, lost.[1]

This is not an easy thought to unpack, for there is a world of depth psychology behind it, but what is at least clear is that Jung does not treat homosexuality as a mental illness or pathology. The relationship between this insight and same sex sexual acts is, at least from a Catholic perspective, a bit more difficult to work out, but I believe we need to begin by carefully listening to and incorporating what Jungian psychology has to say about this.

Furthermore, there is a significant difference between the repressed homosexual and the non-repressed homosexual. Over the years in my role as an educator and as a deacon, both among teaching colleagues and fellow clergy, I have met a number of repressed homosexuals, and such repression has spawned a degree of misogyny, a resentment of strong and independent women and a corresponding preference for the submissive and sycophantic kind, an inordinate need to control and micromanage, narcissistic characteristics, resentment and vindictiveness. The non-repressed homosexual, on the contrary, is fully conscious of his or her homosexuality, is open about it, has accepted and embraced it (which does not necessarily imply a sexually active lifestyle), and is not ashamed of it. By virtue of that whole hearted embrace, such persons tend not to exhibit the aforementioned undesirable characteristics (i.e., misogyny, the disordered need to control, narcissism, resentment, etc.).

Now, if homosexuality is not a disease, then shouldn’t homosexual actions be morally non-problematic? This is a very difficult question to answer convincingly. The best I can do, outside of a very dry and abstract natural law treatment of this question, is to present a case for chastity from a theological point of view, which means I will leave many people unconvinced. Nonetheless, allow me to begin with the fact that man was created to be a “priest of creation”, called to raise up and spiritualize the matter of the universe. Our purpose in this life is to “Christify” matter, and such a task is a struggle on many levels.

A priest is one who offers sacrifice. At the Mass, the ministerial priest raises up matter, namely the bread and wine that were offered by the congregation, in order that they may be transformed by Christ into his sacrificed body and blood, under the appearance of bread and wine, in order to be given back to the congregation as food and drink. Nutrition in general is a raising up of matter followed by a transformation into living tissue. Man takes the matter of this universe and forms it into complex systems that serve a common end, namely the common good of the civil community. But his ultimate purpose is to offer up his life, his own matter, to become Christ (God became man so that man might become god). Human life is a priesthood, and in baptism, this priesthood is elevated to participate in Christ’s priesthood, for in baptism a person is anointed priest, prophet, and king. Individuation, in a Jungian perspective, is the integration of the conscious and unconscious mind to become a complete and unified self, and this is an essential part of this human achievement, for one must offer the whole of oneself and the best of oneself.

The sexual drive is fundamentally a drive toward unity and integration, and the sexual act itself is in many ways ordered to help in the integration of the anima in the man and the animus in the woman.[2] He gives himself to her sexually, but in doing so receives her; she in turn receives him and in doing so gives herself to him. Not only is the result a reproductive completeness, but the beginnings of a psychological integration. If the two have become a one flesh union and this act expresses that one flesh union, then he has become more completely himself insofar as he has become integrated with or joined to this woman, and vice versa.

The sexual act is indeed an act of marriage, an expression of conjugal love. If God calls a person to be married, he calls that person to participate in the Paschal Mystery in a particular way, to leave behind a world closed in on itself, a world in which a person caters to his/her own individual needs and wants, and henceforth turns to another. One sees the other romantically in the true sense of “romantic”, that is, with the divine vision (Dante), but at the same time with the real vision of the other’s imperfections, and the two help one another towards achieving that eschatological perfection. He gives himself to her completely, totally, for her sake, for the sake of that perfection that he beholds, and she as well.

Moreover, the sexual act within marriage is a priestly act, a genuine exercise of that baptismal priesthood, in that the act of sexual union between husband and wife is an offering. Priesthood is about offering to God matter–in some cases a sacrificial victim, in other cases the first fruits of the harvest. The married couple offer themselves to one another. This offering, however, is at the same time an offering to God, because this is how God has called the two to love Him, that is, by loving one another. And so, just as the ministerial priest offers to God bread and wine that he may change those substances into the substance of Christ, to return them to us as the Bread of Life, in the act of sexual union husband and wife offer their matter to God, so to speak (sperm and egg), and God receives what is offered and changes it, infuses into it a human soul, so that it becomes a person. What God does with that offering at that moment is out of the couple’s control; they can only hope that this offering will be completed in the conception of a child; they exercise no dominion over it. That, of course, does not mean that the couple must intend to conceive a child every time they engage in the sexual act. There is a two-fold aspect to the sexual act that corresponds to the two-fold nature of marriage: it is a community of love and life.

But every married couple gets to the point where they must move beyond the physical sex act (for example, the libido naturally wanes, or one of them becomes incapacitated in some way, i.e., develops Alzheimer’s, or just becomes too old), but unless their relationship has been fundamentally self-centered throughout, life’s struggles and an unrebellious relationship to those struggles have prepared and disposed them to love one another for their own sake, not for the sake of what they do for one another sexually. And this is what makes human life meaningful. Lasting joy in this life–which is not the same as pleasure–stems from a kind of seeking whose direction is away from the self towards the other’s good. This seeking involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. This is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world (ecstatic). It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over. There’s a sense in which this joy is larger than we are, for it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it.

This is one way to interpret the principle that “anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16, 25). If our life is motivated primarily by the kind of desire in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest” (Mt 11, 28). That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery, the Incarnation of Goodness Itself.

A married couple who are well past the physical/sexual are so much one body that love of self means love of the other. The rising above the physically sexual act is an essential part of this final spiritualization of matter, that is, the raising up of one’s matter (body) to become Christ most fully. To pursue the sexual act outside of this context of conjugal union will leave a person spiritually incomplete and unfulfilled.

A non-repressed and openly gay man or woman who renounces genital sexual acts is in some ways ahead of the game and has the unique vocation to witness to the archetype of the Original Man, so to speak. This does not mean that his or her life will not be a struggle–human life is essentially a struggle to overcome various obstacles. However, homosexual persons are not the only ones called to sexual renunciation–virtually everyone is at one point or another. Rising above the physically sexual to a love that is ecstatic and selfless is the end to be achieved in this life, for this life is about learning to love and be loved, which is a struggle on many levels.

It is very difficult to convince others that the call to sexual renunciation is actually a positive, a gift in fact. In many cases, only life experience will bring a person to that realization. But who is the Original Man but Christ himself? [3] G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

…if He was the warrior and the women blent into the unity of a new creation in whom there was neither male nor female because He had worked out within Himself that higher human harmony of both in which their age-long creative discord is destined finally to be resolved, that harmony was no easy miracle. In this, as always, He learned obedience by things that He suffered, and worked out His harmony as we must, after His example, work out ours, using the sex relationship and the poignancy of its appeal as one of our chiefest means of grace. It is in this perfect unity in Him of the Warrior and the Woman that I find the keystone to the quality of His life. He was the man woman, the mother father, the creative warrior complete.[4]

This is why I believe that those Cardinals such as Pietro Parolin and Blase Cupich are right to call for a new paradigm with respect to certain moral questions. As in sense perception, there are certain angles that simply do not permit one to ask the questions that lead to new data that make possible certain insights that are otherwise missed. I believe most people today readily see that homosexuality is not a pathology, but if we as a Church continue to operate within a pathological model, I think we can reasonably expect faithful Catholics who are gay to repress it, which inevitably leads to a host of negative projections, such as those listed above. A natural law paradigm is fine as far as abstract moral problem solving goes, but a deeper and more psychological paradigm is necessary if we are going to begin to understand homosexuality more accurately and hope to stop driving away gay Catholics who choose to return to mass until they are finally shamed from the pulpit by “pastorally challenged” clergy, never to return. A non-repressed and openly gay Catholic is one who can live that faith without looking at women as inferiors, but as equals, who is free from the need to create and control an environment that fuels an unhealthy narcissism that exploits others, and who lives in hope and with a healthy self-esteem, and yes, a certain degree of pride.

Notes

1. Carl G. Jung. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9/1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 71.
2. “Jung believed that within every person there are elements of the opposite sex. This contrasexual core, which Jung calls the anima in the male personality and the animus in the female, performs the specific psychic function of connecting the conscious male or female ego-identity with the deeper regions of the unconscious which Jung calls the objective psyche. Jung calls this deep unconscious layer of the psyche objective because our subjective ego-consciousness gradually emerges out of its prior existence and continues to experience that existence as other than itself, alien to its own subjective ego-territory. In contrast to what Jung calls the personal layer of the unconscious, whose contents consist of repressed memories and traits which can be recalled to consciousness and experienced as belonging to the ego, the contents of the objective psyche, the archetypes, are more impersonal and collective in nature and hence harder to integrate into conscious adaptation…. Thus, to the conscious ego the anima or animus seems to be an impersonal “other” that confronts the ego from outside itself. Somehow the ego must learn to bring this force into connection with its own personal identity. Jung coined the word “anima” and “animus” as a result of observing in countless patients split-off sides of the psyche recurrently appearing in personified forms as male or female figures. One common example was the overly rational male who consistently dreamed of being confronted by an emotional and sexy female who tempted him into “irrational” behavior. On awakening, the dreamer still felt possessed by the mood of this dream anima-figure, invaded by a bittersweet mixture of excitement and longing. This anima-lure is typical of the way the unconscious tries to acquaint the one-sided ego with affects and impulses it has excluded from its conscious functioning. This is what Jung means when he says that the function of the contrasexual factor is to lead us to the deeper realms of the objective psyche. The anima-figure points the way, in this example, to the split-off nonrational side of life.” Ann Belford Ulanov. “C. G. Jung on Male and Female” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality, edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban. T. Holmes, III. New York: Seabury Press, 1976, pp. 197-199.
3. “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible. All were created through him; all were created for him. He is before all else that is. In him everything continues in being. It is he who is head of the body, the church! He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, so that primacy may be his in everything. It pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him and, by means of him, to reconcile everything in his person, both on earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1, 15-20).
4. G. Studdert Kennedy. The Warrior, the Woman and the Christ: A Study of the Leadership of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929, pp. 159-161. 

 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Last week (21st Sunday in Ordinary Time) the gospel reading was taken from the very same chapter of the very same gospel as today’s gospel (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time), just one paragraph after last week’s gospel reading. We saw that Peter declared Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and Jesus said to him that “it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”, and then Jesus makes Peter the head of the Church: “… on this rock I build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it”. However, in the next paragraph he is calling Peter Satan and telling him that he is thinking not as God thinks but as man thinks. This is a tremendous irony. What does this mean?

What it shows is that Peter, the rock on which Christ has built his Church, the first Pope, can manage to “go off the rails”, so to speak. He can be inspired by God the Father on the one hand, but he can also find himself listening to the Evil One on the other. And what’s important to consider as well is the very subject matter. In the first instance, Jesus asks them: “Who do you say that I am?” This is a very important question, and it is crucial that the Church gets this right: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. And Jesus promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church that he established, and since Jesus called Satan the father of lies (untruth), this would seem to suggest that the Church will be protected from error in the most important matters pertaining to faith–and the identity of Jesus is certainly a matter of faith, for it has a bearing on our salvation. That’s where the charism of infallibility lies, namely on statements of faith, that is, on the deposit of faith.

In today’s gospel, the matter is not about a statement of faith; rather, it is about Peter’s understanding of that faith. It is about Peter’s attitude towards suffering, specifically his understanding of what kind of Messiah Jesus is. Jesus had to foretell his passion three times in the gospels, because the Jews were expecting an anointed king, like David, who conquered through the force of arms and who, like other kings of this world, was served hand and foot. This is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus is. Rather, Jesus was described by the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 53: “He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain, like one from whom you turn your face, spurned, and we held him in no esteem. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, …Like a lamb led to slaughter or a sheep silent before shearers he did not open his mouth. … For he was cut off from the land of the living, struck down for the sins of his people.”

The very notion of a king who would lower himself, who did not come to be served, but to serve and enter into human suffering and death, was simply unfathomable at this point in time. Jesus is indeed the Christ (Messiah), and that was revealed to Peter, but just what that means exactly is going to take time, and we see this in this gospel and in the history of the Church–the tendency to monarchy, opulence, the abuse of power, etc., is all there in our history in plain sight for all to see.

There’s a very important lesson in this. We have a tendency to idealize certain people, especially clergy: priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, etc. And Pope Francis warned against the tendency to put clergy on pedestals. Doing so is dangerous, for even the rock on which Christ built his Church can go off the rails and seriously misjudge a situation, to the point where Jesus actually calls him Satan. The problem is that when the faithful idealize clergy, they fail to recognize their own baptismal priesthood and the charisms God has given them for the building up of the body of Christ. What also tends to happen is that they eventually discover the humanness of the clergy, that they are just as flawed and sinful as anyone else, and then they are scandalized, seriously disillusioned, and the result is often that they abandon the faith and will never set foot inside a Church again. This happens all the time. Not with everyone, of course, because a good number of the faithful realize that our faith is about Christ first and foremost; it’s not about Peter, James or John, Bartholomew, Paul or Timothy. Even St. Paul reminds us of this when he says: “For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers, …that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I give thanks to God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say you were baptized in my name” (1 Co 1, 11-14).

In other words, it is all about Christ, not about us. And St. Augustine said that we pray every day “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us” because we are sinful. Every day we get it wrong, and we have to repent. Yet despite that, people still engage in hero-worship. Many of the faithful still insist on treating clergy as slightly more than human. After Pentecost, however, Peter got it; we see this when the Roman officer Cornelius fell at his feet to do him homage. Peter simply says to him: “Get up. I am only a human being.”

So although the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit and has the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals, every single member of the Church struggles every day with his or her own humanness and tendency to sin, and if you live with someone long enough, you’ll see it, even a pope. And a great deal of how we see the world and interpret the faith is shaped by that humanness, which is why we need always take our own point of view with a grain of salt.

Father Eugene Fulton from Larchmont, New York, years ago told me the story of two brothers from the UK who went into the seminary together and were later ordained together on the same day. After many years, however, the one brother became so disillusioned with the Church that he left the priesthood. He lost his faith entirely. The other brother stayed the course. The brother who left the priesthood and lost his faith was, years later, dying of cancer. When he was lying in a coma, the other brother was sitting by his bedside praying the rosary for him. At one point, the dying brother opened his eyes, sat up in bed, looked over at this brother praying and said: “It’s all about Christ. Go and tell the whole world”. He then laid back down and breathed his last. 

 

Douglas P. McManaman

Originally published by Lifeissues.net, May 2, 2017

What always strikes me about the story of the road to Emmaus is that the disciples failed to recognize Jesus; while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. What was it that prevented them from recognizing him? I think the answer lies at the end of the reading. What was it that opened their eyes to recognizing him? The answer is the “breaking of the bread”; the Eucharist, which is the fundamental and central prayer of the Church; it is Christ in the act of sacrificing himself for us, and it is the act of receiving Christ in this sacrificial act. It is an act of communion, an entering into union with him. It is not in debating that we find him, it is in prayer that we begin to recognize him where we didn’t recognize him before.

This reminds me of a great story of a Trappist monk, Dom Christian de Chergé, whose cause for beatification has begun. He was the prior of the Monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. Those monks had a great relationship with the Muslim villagers. The monks served them, and the villagers would invite them to their celebrations (i.e., birthdays, weddings, etc.), which the Monks gladly attended. Eventually, however, the monks were kidnapped and murdered by Muslim radicals hostile to the French.

But before that time, before he was a priest, when studying for the priesthood, he was a young staff officer of the French army. He was assigned to a certain district in Algeria and it was at that time when he met Mohammed, whose duty it was to protect the harvest, the roads, and public utilities. They developed a very good relationship, but what really cemented their friendship was their common love of God. What Christian found surprising is that, with Mohammed, he could talk unselfconsciously about God, unlike in France, where talking about God made people uncomfortable. And Mohammad would challenge Christian: “You Christians don’t know how to pray. We never see French soldiers praying. You say you believe in God. How can you not pray if you believe in God?” That was a question that Dom Christian says he had difficulty answering.

One day they (Mohammed and Christian) were making their rounds through the villages unarmed when suddenly they found themselves face to face with Muslim rebels, guns pointed at Christian’s chest. Mohammad stepped in front of the guns and said: “This soldier is a godly man and a friend of Muslims”. The rebels withdrew without harming Christian, but the next day they found Mohammad with his throat slit, lying by a well near his home where he lived with his wife and ten children.

This event had a profound influence on Dom Christian. He said it was the act that sealed his decision to become a monk in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria. He reflects: “Mohammed had given his life like Christ. He had imitated Christ. This act is celebrated in every Eucharist where Christians memorialize the gift that Christ made of his life and where each person is invited to enter into this gift to the praise of the Father.” For Christian, every Eucharist signified the gift of Mohammed’s life; in other words, in the Eucharistic gift of Mohammed, he recognized the gift of Christ himself.

And of course, there is no doubt about it, in loving Christian and giving his life for him, Mohammed loved Christ. Both of them were on the road to Emmaus; both of them did not realize at first that the person right beside him was Christ. Christian discovered it in Mohammed’s sacrifice, and of course he believes that Mohammed discovered, in paradise, that his love for his friend Christian was all along a love of Christ.

Pascal once said that the “heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. In other words, love takes us into regions where the intellect, on its own, has no access, but once within those regions, the intellect begins to see what it otherwise would have missed. That’s why we truly come to know God through prayer. Study is important, but through study we come to know about God, in prayer we come to know God. Discussion and debate are one thing, and they have their place, but they don’t take us into the heart of God. Only the heart can reach the heart of God, and it is in the heart of God that we discover who our neighbor is. In other words, only in the heart of God do we discover that our neighbor is Christ. That’s a perception that the intellect on its own is not capable of. And that is the problem with all fundamentalism, whether we are talking about Catholic fundamentalism, Evangelical fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu or Jewish fundamentalism, or the political fundamentalism of the Left and Right. Fundamentalists believe that what they see with their heads only is complete and exhaustive – they have no sense of the limitations of their own way of seeing reality. They fail to realize that reality is much larger and far more complex than what is given through their own limited understanding. And so they take it upon themselves to be God’s spokesperson; history is filled with prophets of God who represent Him with great confidence and assurance – and of course they usually end up doing more harm than good.

But it is only within the context of his Eucharistic sacrifice that our eyes are opened, the eyes of the heart. In other words, only through love do we come to know God who dwells within our neighbor, and if we love, we will pray, and if we pray, we enter into the humility of God. With that humility, we begin to see others as God sees them.

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

What stands out to me in this gospel is that Jesus is moved to compassion for the crowd that followed him. The Greek word used here suggests that it was a compassion felt from the very core of his intestines. You could say he was physically moved at the sight of the people looking for him.

The very word “conversion” implies a moving in a new direction, that is, away from oneself and towards the mystery of God. Everyone in this world is seeking. Everyone. But not everyone’s seeking has the same trajectory. There are two directions: the first involves a seeking to directly satisfy an emptiness within me, the self, which is the direction that is characteristic of hunger and thirst. When we hunger for food or what have you, we seek to satisfy the self; when thirsty, we seek to satisfy the self. Even the more lofty pleasures, such as the enjoyment of beautiful art, or the enjoyment of tropical weather, beautiful sights from travel to exotic places, all these things are good, they are the object of this kind of desire, and they satisfy to a certain degree. But the satisfaction just does not last. The reason it does not last is because it is a seeking to directly satisfy a kind of hunger within. The direction this desire takes is toward the self. 

But there is a seeking that has a somewhat different trajectory. It is a seeking whose direction is away from the self towards another. It involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. It is very hard to convince people that this kind of seeking alone brings enduring satisfaction, but this is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world. Ecstatic. It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without our knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over, that is, we have no dominion over it. There’s a sense in which it is larger than we are, it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it. 

This is what Christ meant when he said anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. If our life is motivated primarily by desire of the first kind, in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery. He is the Incarnation of Goodness Itself. 

Those who came looking for Jesus did not make any provisions for themselves. They forgot about themselves. They went looking for Jesus in a deserted place, because that’s where he was, grieving the death of John the Baptist. It was evening and they had nothing to eat. The disciples were ready to send them off so that they could fend for themselves. But then Jesus tells his disciples not to make them fend for themselves, but “feed them yourselves”, he says. 

The disciples are all too aware of their limits. They don’t have enough to do what Jesus asked them to do. What they have is inadequate. So what does Jesus do? He tells them: give me the little you have and I’ll do the rest, and he feeds them. He takes care of those whose hearts are set on finding him; for they moved him to compassion. Their pain was his pain.

And that’s the lesson. There are people in this world who are seeking the Lord, and the Lord calls us to feed them, not ourselves, but them. However, in our minds we can’t. We don’t have what it takes. But our purpose is to feed one another. And that’s where we find Christ, the person we are looking for; we find him in those who are seeking, those who are hungry and destitute. They are all around us. A life of service alone brings ecstasy. Nothing else. We only find life, meaning, joy, etc., in a self-forgetting exit of self, and never in a seeking to directly satisfy the emptiness of the self–we’ll be seeking forever, without rest. 

But we will feel our inadequacy and inability to really do anything for anyone, because we’ll sense our own limitations, as the disciples did when Jesus told them to feed the 5000 with nothing but 5 loaves and 2 fish. But this is where he comes in. Give it to me, he says to us. He’ll do it. Those 5 loaves and 2 fish symbolize us, our limited ability, limited resources. In a spirit of faith and trust, we just give it to him and he’ll do the rest. He’ll work through us in such a way that others will think we did so much for them, but in our minds we will have done nothing at all.

So we are all called to be miracle workers. And we will be miracle workers, but we won’t know it. That’s the beauty of it. We won’t know it. Only in the end will it be revealed to us just how much we did for others, or more accurately, how much the Lord did for the world through our limited efforts.