god

Is Everyone in Heaven a Taoist?

Deacon Douglas McManaman

A short video clip of Father Dan Reehil was shared with me on Facebook recently. In this short segment he said that a woman in his last parish asked him about her mother who had died, but was a Baptist, not a Catholic–she was inquiring about her mother’s soul. Father Reehil said although she did her best in life, raised her kids well, ultimately we really don’t know where she is, she might be in purgatory, which is why we pray for the deceased. But then he said to her: “Well you know, everybody who is in heaven is Catholic”. The woman became angry at this and said: “Well, my mother was not Catholic”. He replied to her: “Well she is now if she’s there. It’s not a question of that section is for the baptists and that section is for the Lutherans, and the Calvinists are at the back, and the Catholics get the front row seats. No. When you go to heaven, you embrace everything that’s true. And the fullness of it is in this Church that Jesus founded”. 

Half truths are dangerous, and I believe this might be an instance of a half truth. I can’t help but feel terribly disappointed at having to witness what appears to be an “ecumenically challenged” priest continue to perpetuate a sectarian “us and them” cast of mind, despite his failed attempt to transcend religious tribalism (by insisting there are no denominational sections in heaven). There is one point he made, however, that is indisputable, and that is when we get to heaven, we embrace everything that is true. It would have been nice had he ended there. For if it is the case that in heaven we embrace everything that is true, that would suggest that in heaven everyone is also a Taoist, and everyone a Sikh; everyone is a Hindu, and everyone a Jew, Muslim and Catholic, and above all, everyone is a Zen Master. We could also say that everyone is Lutheran, for we will embrace everything that Luther got right. But we would also embrace everything that Roman Catholicism got right. If one insists that Roman Catholicism got everything right and has no need of further development, then I think it is safe to say that one has not studied enough Church history.

Nevertheless, Father Reehil proceeds to assert that the fullness of “it” (truth) is in this Church that Jesus founded, pointing to his own. The difficulty is knowing precisely what that means. For some people it means that “whatever you have—all you who are outside the Roman Catholic Church—, we have too, but you on the outside don’t have what we have”. The idea is that “when you get to heaven, you will keep what you have that is true and good, which we already have, but you will get what you did not have before, and so you will realize that we were right all along”, or words to that effect. To be fair, it is not clear whether Father Reehil would take that step, but too many Catholics do. 

Instead of this line of thought, I would like to submit the following: those who are not Christian, but who are in heaven, indeed embraced or possessed Christ in the first place–or better yet, were and are possessed by Christ–, for Christ is the Logos, the eternal Word uttered by the First Person of the Trinity, and divine grace is the indwelling of the Trinity, and there is no entering into the kingdom of God except through grace. Hence, they died in a state of grace. And to possess Christ (or be held by him), even without one’s explicit awareness, is to possess the fullness of truth, because Christ is that fullness (Jn 14, 6), and one need not be explicitly a Christian to love and seek the truth. But to seek him is to have been found by him who is always searching for us–which is the reason anyone seeks him in the first place. In the 2nd century, St. Justin Martyr wrote: 

Christ is the Logos [Divine Word] of whom the whole race of men partake. Those who lived according to Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.

Also writing in the 2nd century was St. Irenaeus who wrote: 

There is one and the same God the Father and His Logos, always assisting the human race, with varied arrangements, to be sure, and doing many things, and saving from the beginning those who are saved, for they are those who love and, according to their generation (genean) follow His Logos. 

One problem with the tribal “we’re right, the rest of you are wrong” model is that if I (the Catholic) were to possess all the knowledge that you possess, but more, then dialogue is unnecessary. All that is needed is a lecture from me, so that you can learn from me–but I could learn nothing theologically significant from you, for dialogue presupposes that there are two of us who are in need of rising to a higher space in which we both are enlarged and enhanced. Hence, dialogue can be nothing more than a sham. 

But ecumenical dialogue is not a sham. We learn from everyone, and we believe that the Church, which is much larger than the Roman tradition and embraces the Eastern traditions and includes the entire fellowship of believers (i.e., non-Catholics), is Christ’s Mystical Body. This means that the Church is intimately joined to Christ. But it is Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2, 3), not me, a Catholic. Every member of the pilgrim Church is “on the way”, growing and learning, yet at every moment each one of us is limited by time and geography. It is also the case that at every moment Christ, the fullness of truth, gives himself to the Church, in his Eucharistic self-offering, and so there is a sense in which I possess that fullness, since Christ has given himself to me. At the same time, however, I am unable to appropriate all that Christ is, in all his fullness, by virtue of my own limitations—I get so many things wrong throughout my life. And this is the case with every member of Christ’s Mystical Body. 

So, has Christ not given all of himself to the Baptist, the Lutheran, the Episcopalian, and Presbyterian, etc., as well, all of whom have entered into the tomb of Christ and risen with him, through their baptism? Of course he has, for every time I pick up something written by George MacDonald, for example, I am made so much better. And the same is the case when I get to learn from Robert Farrar Capon, G. Studdert Kennedy, Jurgen Moltmann, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Ann Belford Ulanov, Christoph F. Blumhardt, Thomas Allin, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, James Cone, Gerhard O. Forde, Samuel Terrien, Phyllis Trible, and so many more who are not Roman Catholic. We’d all be so much less without them.

Discerning Personhood: A Reflection on the Leper Who Returns 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Only one out of the ten who were cured of leprosy returned to thank Jesus. This is not to suggest that the other nine were without any gratitude–it is hard to imagine that anyone who knew the isolation and poverty of a life with leprosy in the first century could be lacking in gratitude for getting his life back. Who knows what their response was later on in their lives? But the one who did return to offer thanks clearly saw the Person behind his restoration, a Person to be thanked, namely the Person of Jesus, and that awareness was the root of his return. 

The very word ‘religion’ (Latin: re-ligare) implies a return and reunion, but such a return will only happen with those who are able to discern the Person behind the good things that happen to us every day. I’m reminded of a Hasidic tale in which a group of Jewish scholars were very upset that the renowned Jewish philosopher Maimonides would dare suggest that Aristotle knew more about the spheres in the heavens than Ezekiel. The rabbi of Rizhyn said to them: 

“It is just as our master Maimonides says. Two people entered the palace of a king. One took a long time over each room, examined the gorgeous stuffs and treasures with the eyes of an expert and could not see enough. The other walked through the halls and knew nothing but this: ‘This is the king’s house, this is the king’s robe. A few steps more and I shall behold my Lord, the King.” (From Tales of the Hasidim, by Martin Buber, Book II, p. 58.)

Ezekiel saw the cosmos as a person’s house (the king), that is, the Lord God himself, which moved him to search further in order to find him. The Indigenous too have thoroughly “personalized” the natural word; trees, the sun, the moon, the eagle, a mountain, etc., are all regarded as kin; we are all part of a larger interconnected family, and so all things in the universe are at some level our relatives. This “personalized” way of looking at the world tends to foster a greater reverence for creation, as opposed to the depersonalized mode of thinking characteristic of the Western world, which of course has led to a number of manmade environmental disasters over the years. 

Now one may dismiss this way of looking at the world as “pagan” until one realizes that St. Francis of Assisi saw things in much the same way. In The Canticle of the Sun, he refers to “Brother Sun, Brother Wind and Air, Brother Fire” and “Sister Moon and Stars” and “Sister Earth our Mother”, etc. This is not a matter of projecting human qualities onto non-living things, but is rooted in the ability to discern a Person, the divine Person, behind the goodness and beauty of the cosmos, which continually announces that goodness and sings God’s praises (See Dan 3, 24-90). This was the predominant intuition of the Samaritan leper whom Jesus healed, and it is this “sense of the divine” that is at the root of all genuine religion. 

But this sense of the divine Person is also the source of our ability to see the personhood of every human being, whether that person is developmentally disabled, or is almost completely incapacitated by Alzheimer’s, battling the infirmities of old age or suffering from a debilitating and terminal illness. We begin to realize that what is before our eyes is not simply a hunk of matter, a mere individual, but a human person, and this person was willed into existence by God for his/her own sake, not for my sake or even for the sake of society at large. When we discern the divine Person behind the cosmos and behind the life that is ours, then we are moved to love him as well as the human persons that he brought into existence for their sake, regardless of their condition, because we see them, as we see ourselves, as persons of intrinsic value and inviolable dignity, images of the divine Person. It is very possible to look at a human being and not see that ‘personhood’; at that point, we become capable of tremendous indifference, even violence. But when we become explicitly aware of that ‘personhood’ in others, we can begin to love them with the heart of God, and as St. Augustine says in his Confessions, God loves each one of us as if there is only one of us to love. 

If we don’t see the divine Person behind all that is, we may end up interpreting human existence much like some atheistic existentialists do, who see human existence as absurd, as an arena of perpetual conflict and struggle for survival, who think that love is reducible to the will to power, that the only kind of love we are capable of is the love of another primarily for the sake of what that person can do for me. As that attitude proliferates, life becomes increasingly empty and lonely, which spawns a variety of destructive behaviors, such as substance abuse, mass shootings, suicide and the request to be euthanized, etc.

The Samaritan leper turns around and goes in search of Jesus to thank him for giving him his life back. And that’s what conversion is, a 180 degree turn, and it begins with a recognition that we are known and loved by a Person much larger than ourselves and much larger than the world, and it is the awareness that we are loved which changes us and allows us to love in return, especially those who depend upon us because they simply cannot take care of themselves. And we begin to see that Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) is never an option. The only option is to love and care for the infirm to the very end, so that their death becomes a final prayer, a final offering to God in thanksgiving for all that He has given. 

The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that to destroy one soul is to destroy an entire world. It also teaches the converse, that anyone who sustains one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. It is quite something to behold a hospital parking lot and to consider the hundreds of vehicles parked there every day, belonging to the nurses, doctors, surgeons, support staff, etc., all working towards a single end, which is the care of the sick and suffering. It is holy work, and it has a value in the eyes of God that is beyond the grasp of a single person, because to sustain one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. There is a kingdom that works against this in very subtle ways, a kingdom that Christ came to defeat. We choose which kingdom we wish to belong to: the one in which human life is disposable, or the one in which individual human life is regarded as sacred and of immeasurable value. 

Our Priestly, Prophetic, and Royal Identity

Reflection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_432feastholycrosshomily.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

After 400 years of slavery, the Hebrew people were finally delivered, and what a miraculous delivery it was, which Jews to this day remember at Passover. And yet, many of them became impatient on their way to the land of Canaan. They “spoke against God and against Moses”, and they detested the miserable food they were given to eat (Num 21, 4-9). 

Now I’ve never spent any time in the desert, and I have never felt hunger pangs or desert induced thirst, so I’m not going to pronounce judgment on these people, but it is rather clear that they have lost a sense of the importance of their own history, for they began to long for a return to life under Egyptian slavery, because they had better food: melons and other fruits, fish and meat, and as much bread as they could eat. It was this that they valued more than their very own identity as the covenant people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were willing to surrender that identity and remain in slavery, if it meant better quality food.

The God of the Old Testament took the initiative and revealed himself to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Count the stars; that’s how numerous your descendents will be (Gn 15, 5). And this did not happen on account of anything Abraham did. It was an act of pure generosity. Furthermore, this gift was not merely for Abraham and his descendants, but was ordered to the whole of humanity: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; …All the families of the earth will find blessing in you” (Gn 12, 3). And God revealed to Abraham in a dream that his descendents will be slaves in a foreign land: “Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth” (Gn 15, 13).

These people under Moses are the very fulfillment of that promise; for they were on their way to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, and it is from this land that blessing will go forth to all of humanity, ultimately through Jesus, whose covenant will extend to the whole of humanity. The dignity of that Jewish identity has immeasurable value, but many of them, in the circumstances of the desert, forgot about it or became indifferent to it when they began to compare the quality of food they enjoyed in Egypt with the food they have now. 

We too have an identity, and it is linked to the identity of the Hebrew people who have been set free. We are the people who share in the blessing that was promised to Abraham, that all nations will be blessed through him. The saviour of humanity was born of a Jewish woman, and Christ came into this world in view of Good Friday, in order to enter into our death so as to destroy it, to inject it with his divine life so that death would no longer have the final word over your life and my life. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb delivered the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, so too the blood of the lamb of God delivers us from the slavery of sin and death. We are sons and daughters of Abraham in the Person of Christ, and when we were baptized, we were anointed with sacred chrism and given a share in the three-fold identity of Christ, namely that of “priest, prophet, and king”; for Christ is the eschatological priest who offered himself on the altar of the cross for the deliverance of humanity; he is the prophet that Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy, 18: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kindred, and will put my words into the mouth of the prophet and he shall tell them all that I command” (v. 18); and of course, Christ is the king of kings, a king who does not compel, but who defeats the one enemy that man could not defeat, namely death, by allowing himself to be swallowed up by death. 

So although you are not clergy, you are indeed priests. You exercise a genuine priesthood as a result of that baptismal anointing. Everything you do in life, such as ordinary parenting, or driving a truck, teaching children, nursing the sick, mopping floors, prosecuting the guilty or defending your clients, medical research, etc., is now made holy, for our life and labor is an offering lived out in the Person of Christ, for the bringing forth of God’s kingdom and the christification of the cosmos. The ministerial priesthood is ordered to serve this larger royal priesthood of the faithful, to help the faithful to become aware of that priestly identity, to maintain it, and not obscure it, as was done in the past. 

And you are prophets, for your new life is a genuine sharing in Christ’s prophetic office. That is precisely why Pope Francis taught that the Church is fundamentally Synodal, that is, a listening Church; for the Church is fundamentally a communio fidelium (a communion of the faithful), and the faithful have a genuine sensus fidelium (a sense of the faith) that arises from this communion, and according to Francis, the communio hierarchica (the hierarchical communion) must carefully listen to the unique and intuitive insights of the faithful, because as sharers in Christ’s prophetic office, the Lord speaks to the Church today through them. Francis writes: “Let us trust in our People, in their memory and in their ‘sense of smell,’ let us trust that the Holy Spirit acts in and with our People and that this Spirit is not merely the ‘property’ of the ecclesial hierarchy.”[1] Two years earlier he wrote: “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the “fragrance” of the men of this age, so as to be permeated with their joys and hopes, with their griefs and anxieties. At that moment we will know how to propose the good news on the family with credibility.”[2]

And your new life is a share in Christ’s kingship. Whatever authority you have been given in this life, that is, in the family, or at school, at work, in government, etc., it is not to be exercised with a sense of self-importance, as a “lording over” others. All authority must become a genuine service and thus involve a kenotic lowering of self (Mt 20, 25-26; Phil 2, 1-8); for only in this way will the exercise of authority not spawn resistance and rebellion.

Priest, prophet, and king is our identity, and it is easy to forget that identity by becoming so caught up in the pleasures of this world that we begin to believe that this life is fundamentally about enjoyment and the pleasures of the present moment. The kingdom of God, says St. Paul, is not a matter of eating and drinking; rather, it is a matter of justice, harmony within humanity, and the joy of the Holy Spirit (Romans 14, 17), and our new life in Christ is to be directed to that universal brotherhood, which can only be established through the relentless pursuit of justice. 

The bronze serpent in the desert is a foreshadowing of Christ, the crucified and risen one. It is when we look upon him, our priest, prophet, and king that our lives are made whole. Of course, to “look upon” does not mean “a glance”. Rather, it means that this cross is the focal point of our existence, for the cross alone brings healing and power to our lives. And this is the paradox of Good Friday: our king is so powerful that he defeats his enemy by allowing himself to be defeated, and our source of strength and healing is precisely the weakness of God and the death of God. 

Notes

1. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to cardinal Marc Ouellet President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America”, 19 March 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html. See also Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies. 2017, Vol. 78(2) 299­ –325. 

2. Pope Francis, “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis during the Meeting on the Family” (Vatican City, October 4, 2014), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_incontro-per-la-famiglia.html. The call to listen has been very difficult for a good number of clerics who were raised within a certain theological paradigm in which clergy see themselves as an elite class with “all the answers”, while the laity are little more than passive receptacles of clerical wisdom from on high. In 1906, Pope Pius X wrote: “The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” Pope Pius X, Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), 8, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_11021906_vehementer-nos.html.

Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength. 

One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day. 

I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me. 

Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes: 

All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.1

On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames. 

There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.2 What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

The Vocation of Mental Illness

On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes: 

Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.3

In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”. No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.4 Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

            “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

            “Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

            Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

            I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

            It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.5

A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”6 Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”7

If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.8  

Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.9 We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes: 

This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption. 

This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.10

Some Final Thoughts

Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness11—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us. 

To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.12

Notes

1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff. 

3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

6. Ibid., p. 178.

7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89. 

8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

9. “Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well.” Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959. 

12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96. 

The Nobility of Matter

Homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
https://wherepeteris.com/the-nobility-of-matter/ (@Where Peter Is)

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Recently I drove up to the cemetery to say a rosary and visit my mother’s grave site, as well as a number of other parishioners who are buried there. I thought I had the whole cemetery to myself until I saw an old man in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette, sitting next to a grave. I assumed it was his wife’s grave. Whoever he was visiting, again probably his deceased wife, he loved her and wanted to be near her, so he sat next to her grave and had a smoke. For me, it was a very touching scene.

And that’s love. We are drawn to those we love, we wish to be in close proximity to them, and when they are deceased, the next best thing, I suppose, is their grave site. I don’t mean to suggest that they are there, six feet under, but we are flesh and blood creatures, and matter gives rise to place, and we need to be in the same place as the one we love. We are not angels, or pure spirits; rather, we are composites of spirit and matter, and matter situates us in place, and if we love someone, we need to situate them in place and occupy a place next to their place. That’s why cemeteries are so important. My mother used to say she just wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered to the wind, but one day she expressed her desire to be buried in the nearby cemetery. My sister eventually told me why she changed her mind; apparently, I told her one day that it would be nice if she were buried somewhere so I could visit regularly. I didn’t think my saying that would make a difference to her, but it did.

Now God became matter, joined matter to himself, and began to occupy place. In doing so, God elevated flesh; he elevated matter and material existence. When God became flesh, he gave matter a new dignity. Life in the body is now holy. Early Gnosticism could not understand this; for the Gnostics, matter is evil, the body is evil, which is why they denied the Incarnation of the Son of God. In their minds, it is unthinkable that God would join matter to himself. But everything God created is good, but in joining himself to matter, God actually made matter holy, that is, extraordinarily good. The flesh is holy. Your body is holy. He joined himself to the matter of humanity because he loves each one of us, and love seeks to unite with the beloved, and if the beloved is in the flesh, love seeks to unite with the beloved in the flesh. In joining a human nature to himself, God the Son joined himself to every man and woman, as it were. 

But God did more than that. In his flesh, Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father. That expression “right hand” is not to be taken literally, as if God the Father has a literal right hand. It is a symbolic expression that we still use today when we refer to someone as my right hand, like my right-hand man: my closest most intimate friend. God the Son sits at the right hand of the Father, because he is the Son, and the Father loves the Son as His eternal divine Son. But the flesh to which God the Son joined himself was not some temporary covering or shell that is disposed of after death. Rather, the flesh he assumed was forever. In his ascension, matter has been glorified, deified, for all eternity. Humanity has been lifted up to the right hand of the Father, and we are part of humanity. And every level of the hierarchy of being exists in us, that is, the mineral level, the vegetative level, the animal level, all within each human being, and so in being raised in the flesh to the right hand of the Father, all of material creation has been raised to the right hand of the Father in the Person of Christ. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, wrote:

The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God…The final purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward, with us and through us, towards a common point of arrival, which is God (83).

So, we have begun to sit at the right hand of the Father, in Christ who has ascended. All of humanity and all creation has begun to sit at the right hand of the Father. When the Father looks upon his Son, he sees humanity, each one of us, and when he looks upon humanity, he sees his Son, and he loves humanity with the same love by which he loves the Son, and he sees and loves all creation in loving humanity: As Christ said: “not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge” (Mt 10, 29).

My daughter is a high extrovert, while my wife and I are high introverts–she was in many ways God’s practical joke on us. My wife and I would be content staying at home all the time, but since as far back as we can remember, my daughter has always been one who wanted to get out and party and see people and travel, especially where her favorite celebrities live and eat at restaurants where these celebrities eat, and so we had to go to Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London, and Rome and Capris, etc. We were forced out of our shell; if it wasn’t for her, we never would have visited these places. But what I discovered is that when I see these places that I’ve visited with her on television or in movies, like the Observatory in Hollywood, or a street in Santa Monica or New York or London, or if I am actually in one of these places without her, I actually love these places and want to visit the same places we visited when I was there with her. I thought to myself: What do I love about the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood, or Central Park in New York, or the fashion district in Rome of all places? It’s that she loves them, and she was there and I was with her, and I realized that it is her that I love in these places. She loved them, so I found that I began to love them as well. In the same way, the Son loved humanity and the matter of this creation to the point of joining to himself a human nature, becoming a part of humanity, raising up human flesh in the process. And so, the Father loves us because the Son loves us; the Father loves us because his Son was here and is still united to the flesh of humanity. 

That’s why you and I will be raised up on the last day, because we are in him, and when God looks upon us, he sees his Son in our flesh, and He cannot turn his back on his Son, so he does not turn his back on us.

Womanhood and Priesthood

Deacon Douglas McManaman

At a recent bible study, I was asked how it is that Adam prefigures Christ. I don’t believe there is a simple and single answer to this question, but diving into it opens up an interesting horizon in light of which we may be able to shed light on other important questions having to do with the role of women and perhaps the ordination of women.

Those who posed the question were puzzled that Adam could prefigure Christ; for Adam is fallen, but Christ is perfect; Adam was disobedient, while Christ was obedient; Adam was married but Christ was not, and Adam was created while Christ is the eternal Person of the Son made flesh, etc.  

Jesus is the second Adam, or last Adam (Rom 5, 12-21; 1 Cor 15: 22, 44-49; Eph 1:10). All things were created “through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). The first Adam is indeed a figure of Christ. We say this because God created Adam (humanity) in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. What this means is that there are two ways to be “Adam”, a male way and a female way. It is not Adam the male who was created in the image and likeness of God while the female was in some ways secondary. Rather, Adam is both zakar (male) and neqebah (female). These two Hebrew words imply relation to one another. Hence, the human person is fundamentally relational; in other words, the one cannot be understood without the other. Zakar and neqebah imply an “existing towards one another”, for zakar (male) means “the one who has a tip” and neqebah (female) means “the one who is punctured”. The relationship of the sexes is clearly implied; for each one individually is reproductively incomplete, but together, in the act of sexual union, they become reproductively one organism.

According to the Genesis text, it is not the male (zakar) by himself who is the image (zelem/eikon) of God, nor is it the female (neqebah) by herself who is the image of God; both of them together constitute the divine icon that is Adam. And so God in His active generosity, in His effusive act of communicating the goodness of existence to creatures, is represented in the icon of male and female, joined in the one flesh union of marriage. It is important not to overstate the passive element belonging to the female in the act of sexual union. Her ovum actively “goes out” to meet the male seed, and so her role is not entirely passive. The first parents (Adam) are one body, one flesh, who prefigure Christ, who is one body with his Church.

In the second creation story, the man is put into a deep sleep and from his side, the woman is formed. This allegorical imagery foreshadows the cross on which Christ enters the sleep of death, and from his side the Church, his bride, is born–blood and water proceed from his side, symbolizing the Eucharist and baptism; for it is through baptism that one becomes joined to Christ’s Mystical Body, and of course the Eucharist is Christ’s flesh and blood. As De Lubac famously said: “The Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church.”

Christ’s existence is a relational existence. He is the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, which is a subsistent relation. And since in the flesh, he is one Person, Christ continues to exist “in relation to…” He came to redeem his bride, the Church, the New Israel. The existence of the first Adam, as we said above, is relational, for Adam includes zakar and neqebah who exist in relation to one another (who face one another). Their relationship is nuptial, and of course the relationship between God and Israel is nuptial, and the relationship between Christ and the Church is nuptial, and heaven will be an eternal wedding banquet (Mt 22, 1-14). 

“Adam’s” existence is ordered to Christ, who is the fulfillment of humanity (Adam). We read in section 22 of Gaudium et Spes that “…only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light”. And so “Adam” indeed prefigures Christ, who in turn is the perfection of Adam (humanity). But “Adam” is not a man in the sense of an individual ‘male’, but ‘them’, male and female in relation to one another. The two in relation are the ‘icon’ or image of God. This is a relationship that gets disrupted or distorted as a result of the fall: “You shall have desire for your husband, but he will dominate you” (or rule over you) (Gn 3, 16). In other words, the domination and subordination of women is not part of God’s plan for creation, but is the result of sin. Male and female were created equal, “of the same stuff” (from his side). In fact, the image of woman coming from the side of the man suggests that her role is to reach down and call forth the man to what is higher, for he came from the mud of the earth, the soil, while she came from a higher place. But the history of humanity is a history of oppression, including the oppression of women. 

Now, the entire Church is woman, the New Israel, the Bride of Christ, and she has been given authority, but the exercise of this authority is to be entirely unlike that of the gentiles: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20, 25-28).

Furthermore, the entire Church is “priest”. In the evening prayer for Thursday within the octave of Easter, the Church prays: “Almighty God, ever-living mystery of unity and Trinity, you gave life to the new Israel by birth from water and the Spirit, and made it a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a people set apart as your eternal possession. May all those you have called to walk in the splendor of the new light render you fitting service and adoration.” Each of the baptized is anointed priest, prophet, and king, and so with regard to the royal priesthood of the faithful, gender is irrelevant–certainly not an impediment. The entire Church is a “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pt 2, 9). And so the Church as a whole is a priestly people and at the same time bride and mother (female); for it is the entire congregation that offers gifts to be consecrated. The congregation are not simply passive observers, but active agents, priests offering their gifts, their labors, their sufferings and toil, their bread and wine, placed at the foot of the altar; the ministerial priest offers it on behalf of the entire congregation, of which he too is a part. Christ receives those gifts and changes them into himself, and returns them to us as our food. In consuming the Bread of Life, we become Christ, that is, all our matter becomes Christ–the cosmos becomes Christ in us. 

So it seems there is no incongruity between priesthood and womanhood, for the entire Church is both woman and priest. Indeed, the priest is the icon of Christ, but Adam prefigures Christ, and Adam (zakar and neqebah) exists as the image or eikon of God who became flesh in Christ, “…a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 7, 17). The original icon that Adam is includes both male and female. The Church cannot be understood except in relation to Christ, for she is his body, and thus woman cannot be understood except in relation to Christ. The woman that is the Church is the sacrament of Christ, and she participates in his priesthood.

One year during a Confirmation class in which we were talking about the sacraments, one clever young lady put up her hand and asked: “Why is it that men are able to receive all seven sacraments, but women have access to only six?” That was a brilliant way of formulating the question. I did not have time to go into a detailed explanation of the reason the Roman Church does not ordain women, for it would not do justice to the precise formulation of her question anyway. Moreover, it is increasingly difficult for me to see any genuinely compelling reason for the exclusion of women from the sacrament of Holy Orders. Perhaps the theology of sexual complementarity, focused exclusively on the sexual act itself according to the strict categories of activity and passivity, a model currently employed to maintain an all male priesthood, is really a theologically sophisticated rationalization of an outdated sexist divide. 

Cosmic Restoration

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Peter, do you love me? Then feed my lambs.

Today it is very common to confuse love with sentimentality. Genuine love involves willing the good of another, and that willing may be accompanied by positive sentiments or it may not be. Good feelings towards another are really not part of the essence of genuine love. A true sign of love is the willingness to sacrifice for the other. A genuine love of Christ reaches out to others; it does not stay inside, but seeks out the lost, the wounded, the poor and the oppressed, which is precisely what we see in the life of Christ. 

Another popular tendency is to confuse holiness with sanctimony. I’ve noticed that I hesitate to use the word “holiness” when teaching, because the word conjures up images of sanctimonious individuals with folded hands and a serious demeanour, but who are indifferent to social outreach. 

Holiness is love, it is charity, and love seeks the lowest place, it descends to whatever level is required in order to reach the person to be loved. A priest friend asked me recently: Where can God be found? He pointed out that if we read the New Testament carefully, we see that God is found in the sewers; always in the lowest places. God the Son descended and dwelt among us, and on Holy Saturday he descended further to the utmost regions of hell’s darkness. That is what holiness is like; that is what the divine love is like. Sanctimony, however, is something different. It does not seek the lowest place, but the highest place. And piety as well is not quite the same as holiness. A person may be devotional, reciting prayers, chaplets, novenas, observing religious laws, in love with religious things, churches, basilicas, etc., but if this is genuine piety, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, then it will bear fruit in genuine social outreach. If it is false, it will remain closed in on itself.  

Genuine holiness is inclined to descend to the lowest places, to those places where most people are not willing to go; for if we love God, we love all who belong to God, and everything that God has created belongs to God. If we love God and not merely things associated with God, our fundamental desire that drives every one of our choices will be the desire to see God loved, adored, and glorified. That is what justice is according to the New Testament. Justice (justification) is the restoration of all things to their proper order, which is joyful and grateful subjection to God. The love of justice is the desire to see all things restored in Christ, who in turn has no other food than the praise, love, adoration, and glorification of God the Father. 

Christ loved those who were murdering him. His passion and death were the consummation of the world’s injustice. But the most perfect rectification of that injustice is to see all of Christ’s enemies turn towards him and love him in gratitude, to finally recognize him and to praise, adore, and glorify him forever. Without that, there is no justice, but perpetual injustice and disorder; with that, however, there is the perfection of justice, the perfect victory over sin, very much like the story of St. Maria Goretti. Her murderer spent 27 years in prison, asked for forgiveness and afterward became a Capuchin brother. That’s a small scale example of Christ’s victory over evil. 

And that is the universal and cosmic justice mentioned in the second reading: 

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might forever and ever! (Rev 5, 11ff). 

What is interesting about this verse is that it says every creature, every created thing (pan ktisma), in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and in the sea, which includes not only every man and angel, but every sea creature, fish, dolphin and shark, etc., every plant, every tree, every created thing will in the end bless, honour, and glorify God forever and ever. And so the love of God includes a love and reverence for the earth and an awareness of the way each creature manifests and praises God (Dan 3, 56-82).

A genuine love of God is accompanied by the awareness that all things came to be through the Word (Logos), and so all things carry within themselves some reflection of the Word, just as every work of art has a trace of the artist in it–all creatures are inexhaustible words of the Word, and as St Paul says, every creature longs to share in the freedom of the children of God (Rom 8, 21). The entire cosmos longs for justice (redemption), which means it longs for Christ. And Christ’s resurrection is that victory over death, the perfect victory over injustice, and that victory is a process, a movement, that has begun and will in the end be achieved (Mt 13, 31-32). 

Creative and Destructive Conflict

Deacon Douglas McManaman
Also published at https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_422creativedestructiveconflict.html

The kiln tests the potter’s vessels; so the test of the just person is in tribulation.

A kiln is a furnace that dries out the potter’s clay and actually transforms it into a beautiful ceramic piece. We can’t use a clay bowl or cup that has not been in the kiln; it would fall apart, for it would be too soft. And of course, we are the clay, as we read in Isaiah, “Yet, Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand” (Is 64, 8). And so it follows that trials, sufferings, difficulties, are part and parcel of the spiritual life.

I have found over the years that the vast majority of people mistakenly believe that religious life, life in the Church, life in Christ, the devout life, is supposed to be a life of peace and tranquility, like the quiet of a cemetery, where everything works out smoothly and without a glitch. And so when things go awry, we tend to see this as an anomaly, that something is wrong, that if we are right with God, life should proceed without a struggle. But this is a serious misconception. Life is essentially conflict, because it is movement, and all motion is at some level a struggle. Anyone who has studied evolutionary biology knows this. There is no such thing as life without conflict and struggle.

There are, however, two kinds of conflict: destructive conflict and creative conflict. Sports (play) is essentially conflict and struggle, but it is an enjoyable one because it is essentially creative. Art is a matter of creative conflict, a battle between the sculptor and the resistance of the marble that he is about to carve into a beautiful figure. A life without creative conflict becomes intolerably dull and meaningless. In fact, heaven will be an eternity of creative conflict. Hadewijch of Antwerp writes:

God will grace you to love God with that limitless Love God loves himself with, the Love through which God satisfies himself eternally and forever. With this Love, the heavenly spirits strive to satisfy God: this is their task that can never be accomplished and the lack of this fruition is their supreme fruition” (Love is Everything: A Year with Hadewijch of Antwerp, trans. Andrew Harvey, May 1st). 

“Peace” and “rest” are not opposites of conflict, that is, heaven is not a life without obstacles and things to achieve. 

It is destructive conflict that is the problem. However, God joined a human nature, he joined himself to our humanity, and in doing so he entered into the destructive conflict that human sin has brought about in the world. The victory of that destructive conflict is death, which without Christ has the final word over our lives. But Christ came to die, to enter into our death, to inject it with his divine life, to destroy the power of death, to rise from the dead. He was victorious over death, and so he overcame the struggle of human existence, the battle against destructive conflict. 

Christ transformed the destructive conflict of death and sin in all its various instances into a matter of creative conflict, a matter of play, as it were: “When he set for the sea its limit, so that the waters should not transgress his command; When he fixed the foundations of earth, then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth, having my delight with human beings” (Prov 8, 29-31). We can now share in his victory over both sin and death. He offers us his own humanity so that we might overcome our own life struggles with his strength: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Phil 4, 13). The kiln that dries out all our moisture (disordered love of self) and in time transforms us into something beautiful is the particular difficulties and struggles that we have to contend with in our lives. And some people have greater struggles than others; the heat of the kiln is much hotter in their lives, and perhaps they have been in it for much longer than the rest of us. But the result is a more beautiful product from the hand of the potter. It is not the case that God wills that certain people suffer illness or tragedy; rather, God the Son joined himself to a human nature in order to draw very close to us in our suffering and trials, to give us his divine life that we might overcome the world and its conflicts with him and through him, that we might share in the joy of his victory. The greater the struggle, the greater the victory, and the greater will be the joy in that victory.

This, I believe, is the key to unlocking today’s gospel: “Can a blind person guide a blind person?…Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?…first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye”. The spiritual life is a long and difficult road, a slow process of gradual enlightenment. I don’t know about you, but I do not like looking back at my life and being reminded of what I was back then, because I see my blindness. And of course, the blind cannot lead the blind. But the blind are leading the blind all the time. Even great saints had their blind spots. Study the history of the Church without triumphalist blinders: stupidity, arrogance, sin, oppression, envy, violence, lust for power, control, avarice, etc, is everywhere in our history. We have had great popes who did great things as well as some outrageous things; made great decisions as well as terrible decisions that were very destructive and whose repercussions are still with us today in many ways. It is a real mixture. But that’s life in the Church, as well as the life of the individual person in a state of grace. The spiritual life is conflict, a struggle, a struggle against our own blindness and propensity to sin and self seeking as well as the blindness of others and its repercussions. 

But before we can take it upon ourselves to correct others, we have to spend years in the kiln, in the furnace, allowing the fire of the divine love to change us so that we may remove the plank from our eye. Recently I asked my Confirmation class about the graces they are going to receive from God upon their Confirmation, specifically the grace of mission. 

“You are going to be sent on a mission; but to do what?” I asked them. 

One good candidate put up his hand and said: 

“To proclaim the gospel”. And of course, that’s a great answer. 

“But how are you going to do that?” 

“Preach”, he said. 

Well, the problem is you’ll lose friends quickly. If you want to be friendless, start preaching to them. If parents want to drive their kids from the church, start preaching. The way to proclaim the gospel is by the very life you lead. The gospel is the good news of Christ’s victory over death, his resurrection. We don’t need to use words. We just need to be a person who lives in the joy of Easter, a person who has the hope of eternal life, a person who is not overcome by life’s tragedies, because we believe that Christ has overcome the world and conquered death. Others will see that in us, by how we react to life’s difficulties and struggles, even life’s tragedies–that we have risen above them in the joy of the risen Christ.