Mercy, divine and human

St. Caesarius of Arles has some thoughts on mercy in today’s readings:

There is earthly and heavenly mercy: that is, human and divine. What is human mercy? Exactly this: to have care for the sufferings of the poor. What is divine mercy? Without doubt, to grant forgiveness of sins.

Whatever human mercy gives away on the journey, divine mercy pays back when we arrive at last in our native land. For it is God who feels cold and hunger, in the person of the poor. As he himself has said: As much as you have done for the least of these, you have done it for me.

What God deigns to give on heaven, he yearns to receive on earth.

The Martyrs of Daimiel

Civil wars seem to bring on great human cruelty and violence.  The Spanish Civil War in the 20^th century is an example. Great numbers of innocent people, for no reason, were put to death.

Today we remember the Martyrs of Daimiel.

Between July 22nd and October 24th, 1936, twenty-six religious from the Passionist house of studies, Christ of the Light, outside the city of Daimiel, about eighty miles south of Madrid, died at the hands of anti-religious militiamen at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

They were: Niceforo Diez Tejerina, 43, provincial superior, who previously served as a missionary in Mexico and Cuba after being ordained in Chicago, Illinois.; Ildefonso García Nozal, 38; Pedro Largo Redondo, 29; Justiniano Cuestra Redondo, 26; Eufrasio de Celis Santos, 21; Maurilio Macho Rodríguez, 21; Jose EstalayoGarcia, 21; Julio Mediavilla Concejero, 21; Fulgencio Calv Sánchez, 19; Honorino Carraced Ramos, 19; Laurino Proáno Cuestra, 20; Epifanio Sierra Conde, 20; Abilio Ramos Ramos, 19; Anacario Benito Nozal, 30; Felipe Ruiz Fraile, 21; Jose Osés Sainz, 21; Felix Ugalde Irurzun, 21; Jose Maria Ruiz Martinez, 20; Zacarias Fernández Crespo, 19; Pablo Maria Lopez Portillo, 54; Benito Solano Ruiz, 38; Tomas Cuartero Gascón, 21; Jose Maria Cuartero Gascón, 18; German Perez Jiménez, 38; Juan Pedro Bengoa Aranguren, 46; Felipe Valcobado Granado, 62.

Most of those killed were young religious studying for ordination and destined for missionary work in Mexico and Cuba. Others were priests who taught them and brothers who served in the community. Father Niceforo, the provincial, was visiting the community at the time.

Militiamen entered the Passionist house on the night of July 21st and ordered the thirty-one religious to leave in one hour. Father Niceforo gathered them in the chapel, gave them absolution, opened the tabernacle and said:

“We face our Gethsemane. . . all of us are weak and frightened, , ,but Jesus is with us; he is the strength of the weak. In Gethsemane an angel comforted Jesus; now he himself comforts and strengthens us. . .Very soon we will be with him. . .To die for him is really to live. . . Have courage and help me by your example.”

He then distributed the sacramental hosts to them.

The militiamen ordered the group to the cemetery and told them to flee. At the same time, they alerted companions in the surrounding areas to shoot the religious on sight.

The Passionists split into five groups. The first group of nine was captured and shot outside the train station of Carabanchel in Madrid on July 22, 1936 at 11pm.

The second group of twelve, Father Niceforo among them, was taken at the station at Manzanares and shot by a firing squad. Father Niceforo and four others died immediately. Seven were taken to a hospital where one later died. Six of them recovered, only to be shot to death later on October 23, 1936.

Three other religious, traveling together, were executed at the train station of Urda (Toledo) on July 25th. Two gave their lives at Carrion de Calatrave on September 25th. Only five of the thirty-one religious were spared.

Numerous eye-witnesses testified afterwards to the brave faith and courage shown by the Daimiel Community in their final moments, especially the signs of forgiveness they gave their executioners.

They were beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 1989, who said of them: “None of the religious of the community of Daimiel was involved in political matters. Nonetheless, within the climate of the historical period in which they lived, they were arrested because of the tempest of religious persecution, generously shedding their blood, faithful to their religious way of life, and emulating, in the twentieth century, the heroism of the Church’s first martyrs.” (Homily: October 1, 1989)

Today their bodies are interred in the Passionist house at Daimiel.

Their feastday is July  24^th.

Loaves and Fish

The miracle of the loaves and the fish is one of the most important miracles in the New Testament. All four gospels recall it; Mark mentions it twice. The miracle, which  foreshadows the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, is about important aspects of the gospel message.

The miracle takes place as a crowd of people follow Jesus into a desert place and he blesses them with  nourishing bread and a meal of fish. According to the gospels, they’ve come from their homes, from different towns–some a distance away; they’ve made an effort to see him. Now they’re  tired and hungry.

Some may have come just from curiosity or because others brought them along, but Jesus doesn’t  multiply the bread and the fish to satisfy curiosity. People were hungry and needed food.

John says people came “because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick.” So, probably some of them were sick or brought their sick with them.

Mark’s gospel says the miracle happened because, on seeing the crowd, Jesus’ heart went out to them. “He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and so be began teaching them many things.” (Mark 6,34)

“Sheep without a shepherd.” They’re looking for direction, for meaning in their lives, for a sense of who they are and what they’re about. And Jesus offers them a shepherd’s care and a teacher’s wisdom.

But they’re hungry. We shouldn’t  forget the first reason Jesus gives the crowd bread and the fish. His gospel is practical; feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, care for those in need. And what he did, he tells those who follow him to do:  “What do you have, go and see?”

Let’s not forget the practical demands of this story. At the same time, we know that the hunger Jesus addresses is more than physical hunger. All of us are looking for  more than physical food; our hunger is also for the “true bread from heaven that gives life to the world.”

Unlike other miracles Jesus worked, the miracle in the desert benefits, not just one person, it benefits all.

And so, when we come to the Eucharist, we come together to a place where “the hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.” (Psalm 145) We come to Jesus whose heart goes out to us.  Once again, he  takes bread and gives thanks. “This is my body,” he says. “Take and eat.”  This is the cup of my Blood,” he says. “Take and drink.”

And we are satisfied; we receive our Daily Bread. And from what we have, we give to others.

Mary Magdalene

St. Gregory the Great may have got it wrong when he identified Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman mentioned in the gospel stories and Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, but his description of her spirituality is right on.

I wrote about Mary elsewhere in Bread on the Waters; here’s an excerpt from Gregory’s beautiful sermon in today’s Liturgy of the Hours:

“We should reflect on Mary’s attitude and the great love she felt for Christ; for though the disciples had left the tomb, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found, and while she sought she wept; burning with the fire of love, she longed for him who she thought had been taken away. And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tells us: Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.

At first she sought but did not find, but when she persevered it happened that she found what she was looking for. When our desires are not satisfied, they grow stronger, and becoming stronger they take hold of their object. Holy desires likewise grow with anticipation, and if they do not grow they are not really desires. Anyone who succeeds in attaining the truth has burned with such a great love. As David says: My soul has thirsted for the living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God? And so also in the Song of Songs the Church says: I was wounded by love; and again: My soul is melted with love.

Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek? She is asked why she is sorrowing so that her desire might be strengthened; for when she mentions whom she is seeking, her love is kindled all the more ardently.

Jesus says to her: Mary. Jesus is not recognised when he calls her “woman”; so he calls her by name, as though he were saying: Recognise me as I recognise you; for I do not know you as I know others; I know you as yourself. And so Mary, once addressed by name, recognises who is speaking. She immediately calls him rabboni, that is to say, teacher, because the one whom she sought outwardly was the one who inwardly taught her to keep on searching.”

On to Something

Why should someone in his late 70’s be thinking about the future of the church and his own community? Leave it to younger people; they’re going to live then, not you.

I’ve been reading the 1977 novel “Lancelot” by Walker Percy, who writes incisively about modern American life and I think he’s “on to something.”

It’s a story of a man confined to a mental hospital after setting fire to his beautiful ancestral home in Louisiana and murdering his wife and her lover. Fed up with the evils of his time, he thinks they have to end, even if it takes blazing fire to do it. He’s turned against the modern world and is looking for what’s next; he’s “on to something.”

The book is his conversations with a visitor, an old friend , a priest. The priest’s role interests me. He visits the hospital regularly and listens, hardly saying a word. That’s because Lancelot, the main character in the novel, no longer believes in the faith the priest represents.

Still, the priest listens; Lancelot occasionally seeking acknowledgement that he understands. The priest has been affected by the modern world too. “When our eyes met, there was a sense of our having gone through a great deal together, wasn’t there?” Yet the priest has something his friend wants to regain, but it wont take place in a day.

‘When I saw you yesterday, it was like seeing myself. I had the sense of being overtaken by something, by the past, by myself.”

“Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to,” Lancelot remarks. Only as the book ends does he say to the priest: “Very well, I’ve finished. Is there anything you wish to tell me?”

As we foresee an increasingly secularized society what shall we do? Withdraw to a few secure places of faith and speak only to a diminished number of believers? Or engage the Lancelots of this world who are “on to something” yet have trouble accepting the gospel and the church and all they entail?

“Go out to the whole world and preach the good news…”Is silence a way of evangelizing the world as well as words?

I visited some sisters recently living simply in a big city neighborhood where not many go to church. Their neighbors love them; they’re not preachy people, but I tell them they’re the pastors of the place.  Too bad, instead of investigating nuns, Rome doesn’t praise religious women like them who engage so many who don’t darken a church door.

My own community is engaged now in planning its future. Instead of being absorbed in its institutions, I wish it would think more about the world of Lancelot.

The Journey of the Mind

You would expect a theologian like St. Bonaventure to tell you to hit the books if you would want to go to God. After all, his treatise we read today on his feast is called “The Journey of the Mind to God.”

Instead he directs us to Christ and the Cross as our way to God.

” If you ask how such things can occur, seek the answer in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; seek the bridegroom not the teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervour and glowing love.”

Is This All There Is?

In his sermons on the sacraments, which we’re reading in the Office of Readings today, St. Ambrose shows a keen appreciation of the power and weakness of signs. They signify so much, but we find them hard to accept. “Is this it?” he hears his catechumens say as they approach the waters of baptism.

Ambrose calls on stories of the Old Testament: the Israelites saved as they flee from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea, the cloud that guides them on their way–foreshadowing the Holy Spirit, the wood that makes the bitter waters of Marah sweet–the mystery of the Cross.

“You must not trust, then, wholly to your bodily eyes. What is not seen is in reality seen more clearly; for what we see with our eyes is temporal whereas what is eternal (and invisible to the eye) is discerned by the mind and spirit.” (On the mysteries)

Remember Namaan’s doubt as the Assyrian general stood before the healing waters of the Jordan, Ambrose reminds his hearers. There’s more here than you see or think.

Still, aren’t we like those whom the saint addressed? Maybe more so, for we  likely look for proof from what our eyes see, schooled as we are in the ways of science and fact. We live in a world that tells us what we see is all there is.

Faith is a search for what we don’t see.

One Thing Leads To Another

I read Ross Douthout’s  op-ed column this morning in the New York Times about the Pope’s new encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

He welcomes the way the encyclical joins many areas of social life. “It links the dignity of labor to the sanctity of marriage. It praises the redistribution of wealth while emphasizing the importance of decentralized governance. It connects the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos.”

It contains a “left-right fusionism with little traction in American politics.”

The article caused a lot of comments in the online edition of The Times, many of them critical of the Church as an outmoded, discredited institution that should keep its mouth shut about what to do today. A song we’ve heard before.

“These questions, and many others like them, are the kind that a healthy political system would allow voters and politicians to explore.” Douthout says,

“But for now, at least, you’re more likely to find them being raised in Benedict XVI’s Vatican than in Barack Obama’s Washington.”

Douthout’s mother is Patricia Snow, who wrote a piece about  Anne Rice in a February’s First Things. It seems to me that Anne Rice and artists like her may be “on to something,” to use a phrase from Walker Percy.  She uses imagination, guided by the best of biblical scholarship to portray in a series of novels the life of Jesus Christ, from birth to death.

Meditating on the life of Christ has always been a way of prayer for Christians, but I’m afraid it’s less practiced today. One of the reasons may be that we’ve become intimidated by biblical scholarship and all the “findings” of archeologists and historians we see periodically on The History Channel and National Geographic.  We distrust our own imagination.

But think about it. Those stories we read in the scriptures are real, about real people, in real places. They are about a world like ours (but without computers and  internet). And they only tell us some things. Can we fill in some more? Let’s get the best scholarship and take a look. I like the advice from the medieval Meditations on the Life of Christ. “Go in there and look around, stand with the holy people there, especially Mary the Mother of Jesus, and let your imagination speak God’s wisdom to you. What’s it saying?”

Maybe Anne Rice can “revert” us to meditation.

The pope ends his encyclical with a reminder that social thinking has to be joined to prayer. Another “left-right fusionism” we shouldn’t neglect.

The Petrine Ministry

One of the best known statues of Peter the Apostle is in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The apostle, seated on a chair, has his hand raised, not just in blessing but to make a point. He’s teaching the church.

The popes continue the teaching ministry of Peter and one way they do it is through encyclicals, letters sent to bishops and people throughout the world. On June 29, 2009, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Benedict XVI issued Caritas in Veritate, an encyclical on socials issues affecting our world today.

It took me a week to read through it and I can’t say I’ve grasped it all, but I’ll be back to it.

If you read this extensive, densely packaged work, remember that the word “encyclical” is close to the word “encyclopedia.” Our world isn’t simple, it’s big and complex, and the pope–certainly helped by advisors– tries to analyze it and provide a vision for living in it.

It’s a lot to digest. The letter is a long banquet table, not a quick snack for one gulp.

But that’s the challenge I like about it. Love, the gift we have from God, calls us to look at big things and be engaged in them. We tend to consider love mostly in interpersonal dimensions, but the letter speaks of a love that reaches into the mystery of God and enrolls us in work at building our earthly city.

It’s not a letter of pat answers but of many questions which arise from the reality of the world we live in now. A love based in truth calls us to think about the world as it is and creatively work for its good.

It’s about the development of the human being, the whole human being and all human beings. As Christians we’re charged to work for this development, which has now taken on new global dimensions through the advance of technology.

Politically, it calls for international structures more responsive to the situation of a global society and technological advances. The stumbling G 8 meeting just concluded in Italy is evidence of the need. Hard to believe for some, but nation states alone are not the answer.

It urges the human family to respect the rights of the natural world, which must be part of the development of an earthly city. It warns against untrammeled technological advances that don’t take into account human rights, the rights of creation, as well as the divine law. It recognizes greed and lack of oversight behind the present world financial crisis.

The pope’s encyclical is not a view from a small cloistered world.

There’s a consciousness in the encyclical that weariness and loss of hope can stop our efforts to engage our world as it is, but love refuses to be conquered. It endures. Importantly, our efforts are not simple human efforts:

“Development needs Christians with their arms raised towards God in prayer, Christians moved by the knowledge that truth-filled love, caritas in veritate, from which authentic development proceeds, is not produced by us, but given to us. For this reason, even in the most difficult and complex times, besides recognizing what is happening, we must above all else turn to God’s love. Development requires attention to the spiritual life, a serious consideration of the experiences of trust in God, spiritual fellowship in Christ, reliance upon God’s providence and mercy, love and forgiveness, self-denial, acceptance of others, justice and peace.” (79)

Caritas in Veritate

I’m reading Pope Benedict’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” –Charity in Truth. Not easy going, because he’s trying to address something that’s not easy going–the situation of our world today.

The pope begins with love, not intimate, confined love, but love engaged with truth. A love found in Jesus, God’s gift made flesh, who engaged his world and gave his life to raise it up.

Jesus calls us to love our world and work for its development.

“Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity. Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace.

It is a force that has its origin in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth…To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity.” (1)

So love calls us to more than an intimate relationship with friends, family or small groups, the pope says; it must be part  of our personal relationship with God, and the “macro-relationships” of society, the economy and politics.

By its nature, love desires someone’s good and takes effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of individuals, “there is the good that is linked to living in society: the common good.

We must desire the good of “the earthly city,” not just through respect for rights and duties, but also by offering it gifts of “gratuitousness, mercy and communion.” We must love the world we live in.

Tight reasoning, long sentences, much content. The subject is large, like the world itself. Yet, as the pope says,  love’s “exacting” task is to take it on.