Darkness is Light with Love of Thee

The narrative of John’s account of the man born blind presented in the Gospel of the Fourth Sunday of Lent flows towards a dialogue between Jesus and the healed man. The importance of this dialogue consists in being a model of conversion, which entails personal encounter with Christ, confession of faith in him and comes to the climactic point of surrendering oneself in the act of worshipping him (cf. Jn 9:35-38). Worship pertains to the core of what is at issue in this incident recounted (as in others in the gospels), namely, the Pharisees severe critical rejection of Jesus for breaking the Law of the Sabbath, which forbad doing work on that day of rest in order to be dedicated to the worship God. Jesus’ act of compassionate healing, thus, showed the purpose of worship being intrinsically related to fostering human worth; it also showed up the Pharisees’ attitude of spiritual blindness in preferring a rigidly narrow interpretation regarding what they considered worship to be.

In commenting on this passage of John’s Gospel, Jean Vanier says: “The authorities are imprisoned in (confined by) an ideology – an intellectual theory cut off from reality and experience… We refuse to accept others because we are closed up in our own ideas and certitudes. Jesus came to liberate us from ideology.” (The Gospel of John, The Gospel of Relationship, p.56.)

Furthermore, this attitude of spiritual blindness indicated exactly the opposite of Jesus’ intention of expressing God’s loving goodness. It missed the point of this entirely through presuming to pre-judge his intention by failing in an all too limited human way to perceive beyond or into the external action’s significance. The crucial importance of this finds expression also in the first scripture reading of this Sunday, which states that whereas human beings judge by mere superficial appearances, God sees the heart. The secret of discovering the deep joy of living requires learning to read God’s loving design of goodness etched into the whole of creation. This learning demands a contemplative serenity, or as William Wordsworth puts it:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. (Tintern Abbey)

This learning to see properly and truly implies a process of patient discernment of the good that can come even – and at times especially – in the midst of adversity and suffering. John Milton discovered the useful service he could offer through experiencing his ordeal of blindness. He expressed this in the famous line at the end of a sonnet:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Waiting can seem like an interminable dark night of knowing that we don’t know. But, as Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “Darkness is light with love of Thee.” By learning to wait in love our sense perceptions and our motives become purified. We have to turn to Christ, “the Light of the world’ (Jn 9:5), who, as depicted in the lovely painting below, stands at the door waiting for us to open the door to him, since the latch is on the inside. He’ll then illumines the inner eye of our hearts enabling us to perceive God’s design of goodness at work in others and throughout creation. To realise this we have to go by the way of living through life’s tortuous paradoxes. T.S. Eliot put it this way:

be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (East Coker)

 This life’s little day of waiting can be regarded as lingering in the shadows of the wings before making a debut on the floodlit stage of the great drama conceived by God. Or again, it may be compared to being a dress rehearsal preparing us to move steadily in the dynamism of paschal hope towards what St Augustine at the end of his Confessions described as the eternal Sabbath. By waiting prayerfully now in faith, hope and love the blindness of our limited outlook is healed, while the darkness of sin-caused confusion becomes dispersed. By celebrating the Paschal Mystery of Faith we gratefully praise God calling and enabling us to participate already, though yet not fully, in the joyous light of the Virgin Mary and the saints who behold and live in God’s Presence. As St Paul put it:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:12f.)

Our whole life becomes transformed in the light of worship, as the blind beggar’s life was in his encounter with Jesus, as seen above, that wonderful encounter through which he discovered he was loved by him who looked with compassion on his condition.

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William Holman Hunt, The Light of the world - St Paul's Cathedral London.



Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb.

With this phrase, John Donne closes a sonnet to the Virgin Mary about the Annunciation of the Incarnation. Marvellously in the span of fourteen lines the poet condenses and encompasses the sublime mystery of the Divine Word entering our human condition through Mary’s simple acceptance of God’s invitation addressed to her via his messenger. Her faith-filled response begins and is the exemplary answer which all humankind is called to make to what in fact is a divinely initiated dialogue.

 

     New beginnings are always difficult. They always present a challenge to overcome the residual inertia that resists being disturbed from accustomed ways or habits of acting. The greatest or even the smallest of the difficulties about beginning something afresh consists in not knowing what it may entail and fearing the end of the journey to which it may lead. On the other hand, to act hastily, boldly pretending and blindly presuming that we’ll solve our difficulties of ignorance or overcome our imperfect knowledge, is sheer imprudence that plummets us into the chasm of folly. But what is even worse would be to regard this throwing ourselves into a frenzied muddle of actions without consideration of the consequences as making progress. Wendell Berry thus wisely stated: ‘To trust “progress” or our putative “genius” to solve all the problems that we cause is worse than bad science; it is bad religion.’ (Life is a Miracle, p.11) The same author goes on to point out:

In our foolish insistence on substituting technology for vision, we forget that we are not the first to have seen “the whole earth” from such a distance. Dante saw it (Paradiso XXII, 133-154) from a higher level of human accomplishment, and at far less economic and ecological cost, several hundred years before NASA. (Ibid., pp.16f.)

     Wendell Berry reappraises all features and aspects of human experience as imbued with a significance that consists in being sign-posts, that is, having a sacramental value of something beyond themselves, namely the wholesomeness of wholeness in and because of God’s love for the world. As he states:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world... I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God. (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays.)

The significance of this world’s grandeur is proclaimed in the mystery of the Incarnation celebrated in the feast of the Annunciation.

Life’s significance unfolded in a great mystery

The Annunciation is entirely about the miracle or wonder of human life’s richest significance and purpose unfolded in a great mystery. At this event the Virgin Mary accepted God’s design in sheer and undaunted faith – “Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.” Her acceptance wasn’t without questioning God’s purpose, but was a questing to understand, as faith must always be: fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’ - as St Anselm put it). In other words, although she didn’t and couldn’t conceive any more than our humanly limited vision allows, yet, conceive she did, in a most tremendous way! She embraced in love the end, the purpose God mercifully intended in the beginning to shed anew the Light of his Presence on the face of our sin-darkened condition of woe and misery. More wonderfully than when “darkness was upon the face of the deep,” and he said, ‘let there be light’” (Gen 1:2-3), his freshly uttered Word reveals the dawning of a new creation, being indicated by the tenses of two verbs in the following sentence: “The true Light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (Jn 1:9).

     This announces something wholly wonderful, the birth  of a new language, the actual coming into the world of a fresh kind of knowledge, a knowledge that isn’t abstract or impersonal, a mere passing on of information, but truly a transforming knowledge of an intimate and gracious outreach to heal and strengthen what is frail and disordered in being human, namely, “flesh” (sarx). The Annunciation of this is proclaimed in that amazing sentence: “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). This is communication in the most vital, world-transforming sense – communication that would be, however, a dead letter, unless it were received and responded to, believed in as empowering human beings to become God’s children (Jn 1:12). This Annunciation opens up a culture of a conversational reality – that dialogue of God and humankind being-related initiated by and spreading from God to us and between us. The Annunciation of the Incarnation is precisely the unveiling of the mystery of the Spirit-filled Word of Life (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-4; Jn 6:63), genuine communication of realistic hope-giving “Good News” – evangelisation regarding the Presence of the Person of Jesus Christ, God and Saviour.

This Presence particularly invites our reciprocated response for God’s gracious Gift. His Word’s Presence among us indeed requires more than a formalistic verbal articulation of belief about it as a fact or elaboration of the creedal truth in theological discourses, valuable as these are. The only fitting response to this Presence is in the gift of our selves, the offering of our whole lives, minds and hearts to him their Life-Giver, like Mary did through living out the implications of her availability as God’s faithful humble servant.  

The mystery of Incarnation is closely linked and continued in the Eucharistic mystery, the whole purpose of which is Communion, the “pledge of future glory” (in St Thomas Aquinas’ lapidary phrase). The realisation of this richly profound truth was expressed by St Peter-Julian Eymard, the “apostle of the Eucharist,” who especially near the end of his life sums up the teaching of the Fathers of the Church – a teaching carried on by the French School of Spirituality:

"Communion is the extension of the Incarnation. It is the same Jesus who comes into us who was incarnate in the womb of Mary... The end of the Incarnation is Communion. You, the faithful, are the end of the sacrifice and the consecration." (27 June 1867, sermon at the end of an Octave of Corpus Christi – PO 18,15)

 The whole of the liturgy, in fact, proclaims the divine Word, becoming most wondrously the eternally life-giving Flesh and Blood of the Son of Man (cf. Jn 6:53). By his dwelling among us God requires and shows us how to do the same as Mary in our particular situation. She tells us, as she did at that life-celebrating event – the marriage of that couple in Cana of Galilee - to do whatever Jesus requests (Jn 2:5). She helps us never to forget, to keep in mind and heart and deed the mystery that Jesus communicates of his Paschal Presence: “do this in memory of me”... Our remembering is impregnated and made fruitful by attending to and letting the Spirit lead us into the truth of the Word of Life (cf. Jn 16:13f.). Through the Holy Spirit, the interpreter, we are enabled to translate our ritual enactment of gratitude and praise for his Paschal Mystery into the whole texture of the liturgy of living in generous and joyful service, worship of God and service of one another and all people.

 

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Image above:

Annunciation (1898) by Henry Ossawa Tanner,

                     Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Image at the end:

                   First sign,  the Marriage at Cana in Galilee by Giotto (1304-1306),
                   Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

 





Angelus Bell

Thrice daily a church bell

bids us to recall and tell

that tale of Light and Hope

ent’ring and wid’ning the scope

of life, lest we might forget

on rising to pay to God our debt,

or amid our toil at noontide

to let work set God aside,

or when our day its course has run

we turn our steps to rest with the sun.

Yet clearly that bell resounds in time

a message our hearts mustn’t decline,

but like the Virgin Mary give assent

in grateful praise for Life that’s given not lent.

( © MG-P)

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 Image above poem: Annunciation (1393) by Ilario of Viterbo,

           Porziuncola Chapel, Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, Assisi.

An obedience of faith... working in love

Ora et Labora

The feast of St Joseph this year is transferred to the following day, since the liturgy of the Third Sunday of Lent takes precedence. This in a way is an illustration of his whole life being a shining example of humble and faithful response to God’s design. His response was no less than the perfect fulfilment of this design by his spouse, the Virgin Mary. It took deep and daring faith for him to accept and carry out what the Angel Gabriel disclosed to him regarding the extraordinary event of God’s design to enter our ordinary world (cf. Mt 1:18ff.). But, Joseph of Nazareth was an extraordinarily ordinary human being whose response to the heavenly envoy’s message expresses what the Apostle Paul summarized as an obedience of faith... working in love (cf. Rom 1:5; 16:26; Eph 4:15f.).

     Many recent popes, especially St John Paul II in his Apostolic Exhortation on St Joseph, recommend following this holy man, whose response shows how to live fully, to carry out – that is, realise in practice - Jesus’ teaching regarding the essence of divine worship, which consists in being adorers in spirit and truth, whom the Father seeks (cf. Jn 4:23f.). Living worship embraces both prayer and work. It is the interior disposition or spirit enlivening each of these components of human life.

Joseph of Nazareth in this respect can be regarded as a model of the Benedictine motto: “ora et labora" ("pray and work"), which became the hallmark of action flowing from contemplation, or rather, action permeated by a contemplative looking to God, that is strikingly indicated in the lives of saints like Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Peter-Julian Eymard and, within living memory, Theresa of Calcutta. Apart from these splendidly illustrious examples of holiness, countless lay persons persevere in living their prayer, like St Joseph, in the hidden and unknown ways of the service they provide for their families. Many housebound elderly persons or those who are disabled or infirm have the privileged vocation of offering their sufferings patiently, trustingly and resiliently in prayer with the deep conviction that nothing can separate them from the love of Christ, who even after enduring his passion continues now at the Father’s right hand to intercede for all people, especially those in distressing situations (cf. Rom 8:35; Heb 7:25).

Finely sensitive to the lonely path of sufferings that so many people have to travel, Caryll Houselander, that somewhat eccentric bespeckled English mystic, perceived Christ’s passion continuing in the terrible disturbance to the lives of many during the fierce bombing of London in the Second World War. She pointed to St Joseph as that saint to whom all can turn for encouragement. She says, although he is quite misrepresented by those plaster “grey-beard statues of him that we are used to, and drugged by,” he was a person of sterling courage and quiet strength, “who accepted hardship and danger, and renounced self to protect the little and the weak.” His only concern was how to save and shelter Mary from the world: “He, like those who cherish the life of an infant, had to give up all that he had in order to give himself.” She states elsewhere that in virtue of having in common those two qualities, love and trust, which spring from an interior spirit of prayerfulness, Joseph and Mary were empowered to do the smallest, insignificant things extraordinarily well.

On the occasion of the feast of St Joseph, therefore, it is appropriate to reflect on the profound implications of the motto of the rich Benedictine tradition - ora et labora. For, in this is rediscovered the basis of our whole cultural heritage in Western society, which Blessed Pope Paul VI recalled to its roots of becoming a “civilisation of love.” This radical basis in a calm balanced way presents the kernel of Christian spirituality, which has its focus oriented towards mystical union with God the Father through, with and in the Spirit of Christ. The balanced perspective of this basis gives priority to neither prayer nor work; in other words, it does not overemphasise contemplation over action or vice versa.

But, rather, insofar as human existence comprises contemplation and action, a balanced approach of Christian spirituality to these two fundamental aspects of truly living humanly in the world recognises the due importance of each, holds them in proper proportion as complementary to one another, and maintains them in harmonious tension, rather than seeing them as separate from each other. What binds them together is love. This is beautifully illustrated by St Paul’s image of the reciprocal interaction of members of the Christian community. The eye of faith (contemplation), thus, does not look down, askance, at the foot or the hands of Christ’s Body, but each respects the other as needed for the proper function of the whole (cf. 1 Cor 12:14ff.).

The contemplative dimension must be present in every member of Christ’s body, whose activities of every kind are illumined by its gentle light. Likewise, the worth of human activity must be respected by contemplatives. The intrinsic harmonious reciprocity of action and contemplation constitutes the overall life of worship, which glorifies God and at the same time realises humankind’s salvation. In the concise expression of the second century Father of the Church, St Irenaeus of Lyons: “The glory of God is human beings fully alive; human life is the vision of God.”

To return briefly to where these reflections began, it seems highly appropriate to celebrate the feast of St Joseph in Lent. Although the characteristic of this season is penitential, the penitential or ascetical aspects of the works of Lent – fast, abstinence and service of others through almsgiving – become transformed and elevated to the level of authentic mysticism as they are united in the mysteries of faith through prayer in-deed, Christ’s “work of redemption” that we enact in an obedience of faith... working in love. The humble life of the Carpenter of Nazareth simply shows us how in whatever we do it is possible as well to pray always without ceasing (cf. 1 Thess 5:17; Eph 6:).

Our real business, by not becoming swamped and smothered in a flurry of futile busyness, is to do God’s “will on earth as it is in heaven,” in the way the Lord Jesus taught us to pray. Moreover, by uniting all our actions and especially ourselves with Christ’s total sacrifice of himself to the Father, we carry out his command, or rather, invitation to offer the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, that is, the supreme Eucharistic action of contemplative communion. Thus, as St Paul encourages, our grand task is “to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1).

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Image above: The Joseph Portal  by Antoni Gaudí
First quarter of the 20th century, carved in stone
East façade, Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Barcelona.

On the left is the Flight into Egypt, on the right the Slaughter of the Innocents.

 

Response to Jesus’ thirst

On this 3^rd Sunday of Lent the passage from the Gospel of John calls us to contemplate Jesus, who like a weary beggar longs for someone to quench his thirst, but who at the same time stirs up in us, as he did in the depths of the Samaritan Woman, a yearning for living water, of which he reveals he is the font and wellspring: “If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (Jn 4.10)

It is not insignificant that this account states that Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan Woman took place at the sixth hour. At this same hour, the same Gospel recounts that dying on the Cross Jesus cried out ‘I thirst’; in response he was offered by a Roman soldier a sponge soaked in vinegar (Jn 19.28f). In recalling these two related instances we may well reflect on the kind of response we make to him, especially during this Lenten season of being called to follow him more closely and faithfully in accordance with our baptism, as suggested by the water.

Few persons have experienced the yearning of Jesus for the loving response from human hearts as deeply and intensely as that frail little woman of love, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It was on 10 September 1928 during her journey by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat that she was overwhelmed by a sense of the pathos of Jesus’ longing expressed in his cry on the Cross. Jesus’ cry ‘I thirst’ was her ‘call within a call’ – that is, she realized that she was being challenged to leave the comfortable condition of her religious vocation as a Loreto sister, teaching upper class girls, in order to devote herself entirely to Jesus by serving him in the street people of the slums.

To focus the attention of the Missionaries of Charity, the congregation founded by Mother Theresa, there is in every chapel of their communities a large crucifix behind the altar and on the wall beside it the words in capital letters: “I THIRST.” These words, Mother Theresa often insisted, present a constant reminder of why this congregation exists: to quench the thirst of Jesus for souls, for love, for kindness, for compassion, to respond by doing “something beautiful for God.”

Mother Theresa’s response to Jesus’ thirst was no mere sentimental pity for the impoverished condition of others’ misery. Nor was it an individualistic kind of turning to a pietistic ‘Jesus and me’ attitude. It transformed her to become robust in the exacting practice of what care entails, like Jesus’ loving unto the end (cf. Jn 13.1). Only this kind of responsible action flowing from contemplation of his presence in the Eucharistic sacrifice can overturn a callous indifference to the world of suffering, on the one hand, or, on the other, that formalistic kind of attitude in many do-gooders, an attitude that is sneered at in the ironic expression ‘cold as charity.’ The little woman of Calcutta presents a challenging and encouraging example of the vast implications of what it means to be a worshipper in spirit and truth (cf. Jn 4:23f.). She realised that her consecration as a religious deepened the meaning of her baptism, the living waters of which Jesus is the wellspring: her whole life was plunged into his death and resurrection (cf. Rom 6:3ff.). But, furthermore, this realisation of being a consecrated person committed and impelled her with a passionate mission of outreaching love to serve others with unstinting generosity. In this way her life was true worship, a fusion of acknowledging God with the worthwhile divine service of people, whose worth she recognised and respected tenderly as God’s children. She was not a person  given over to ritual, but spent herself entirely in the liturgy of living love.

Jesus’ cry signifies not so much a desire to be glorified or to have his own physical suffering relieved, but it expresses his compassionate concern for the agonies endured by the poorest of the poor, whom he identified as members of his Mystical Body in need of consideration and care. More deeply, this cry from the Cross expresses the Saviour’s longing to draw all humankind up to his level of self-giving (cf. Jn 12.32), at-oning us in the communion of God’s love for the world, than which there is none greater (cf. Jn 3.16f.; 15:13). His real presence continues today in the myriads of people, who exist not only in squalid slums, but also who suffer the modern dis-ease of loneliness in the most affluent high-rise apartments of our conurbations.

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Image above: Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well – Georgia, illuminated manuscript, Jruchi Gospels II, 12^th century.

Whole, Divinely Human

The mystery of Jesus’ Transfiguration on Mount Tabor before his three disciples Peter, James and John, has an important place at the heart of the Christian community’s life of faith. Not only is this mystery celebrated on the Second Sunday of Lent, but also on the 6^th of August. These celebrations are based on the lived experience of the event by the disciples named above – that event which is so significant that it is related in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and also in the Second Letter of Peter, which states “we were eyewitnesses of Jesus majesty” (2 Pt 1:16). St Leo the Great comments that in that event those three disciples were given a glimpse of Jesus’ divine identity in order to prepare them not to be dismayed when they accompanied him to the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, where they saw him agonized in prayer, and then, disfigured in his terrible Passion, albeit following from a distance out of cowardly fear.

Considering that John was present at Tabor, it is perhaps surprising that the Fourth Gospel provides no account of this event. However, the entire Gospel of John is, as it were, bathed in the light of Jesus’ glory. In the Prologue of this Gospel there is the affirmation: “we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (Jn 1:14). The ‘glory’ of this divine Son, however, was the reversal of the glamour of this world – exultation of pleasure seeking, human vanity or pride (cf. 1 Jn 2:16). His glory revealed the total outpouring of himself – the blood and water from his pierced side that is beheld and witnessed by the disciple who stood with the Mother of Jesus at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:35ff.)

All this background of the earliest Christian disciples’ experience in coming to terms with the true identity of him whom they were following, Jesus Christ, has its profound importance for us in Lent. For this holy season is meant primarily to focus our attention likewise on him, as the Way to the Truth of Life (cf. Jn 14:6). In order to be authentic followers or disciples of Jesus we must listen to him, as those three disciples at Tabor were told (cf. Mt 17:5). This implies, moreover, sharing in and entering fully into the Paschal Mystery of his Passion and Death, only through which we are led to the Risen Life of becoming the children of God (cf. Jn 1.12). To shilly-shally with the follies and foibles of our sinful inclinations, to hide in the shadows of our fears or doubts about facing Christ’s way of the Cross, would be to evade in a shallow manner encountering the reality of him, the Splendour of the Truth about being whole, divinely human, for he above all is the true Light coming into the world (Jn 1:9; 8:12).

We don’t stop at contemplating only the Lord Jesus in his glorious state. Neither do we stop at the Transfiguration in the fourth of the Mysteries of Light, which St John Paul II introduced as a new path to reflect upon the life of Christ in the Rosary with the Blessed Virgin Mary. But we pass on, to contemplate Jesus’ gift and mystery of the Eucharist, his Body given and Blood poured out to nourish and strengthen us to go on - as Abraham our father in faith was told to do (Gen 12:1f., the first reading for the Second Sunday of Lent). We have to leave our comfort zone of self, in order to discover his presence afresh in the beleaguered members of his Body in the suffering and the poor, to the victims of the world’s violence and cruelty, nearby, in our neighbour, the lonely housebound aged person… It is here, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s contemplation led him to realize, that

                    Christ plays in ten thousand places,
                    Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
                    To the Father through the features of men's faces.

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Image above: The Transfiguration of Christ – Fra Angelico – Florence, San Marco Museum



 

Grace transforming temptation

     The two acts in the drama of human salvation history are represented in the scripture readings of the Eucharistic celebration for this first Sunday of Lent. The first act, described in the first reading from the Book of Genesis, is about the failure of Eve and Adam, seduced by the devil’s temptation. The second, portrayed in the Gospel, relates how after his baptism and being led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where though weakened by fasting for forty days and nights, Jesus overcame and thwarted the devil in presenting three insidious temptations. Both these acts are summarized in the second reading taken from St Paul, who contrasts the ‘first Adam’ with the ‘second Adam’ (Christ).

     This drama is beautifully described in Blessed John Henry Newman’s memorable hymn, Praise to the Holiest in the height:

                                   O loving wisdom of our God!
                                   when all was sin and shame,
                                   a second Adam to the fight
                                   and to the rescue came.
                                   O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
                                   which did in Adam fail,
                                   should strive afresh against the foe,
                                   should strive, and should prevail.

     The illustration above is that of the last of Jesus’ three temptations, depicted in Sandro Botticelli’s fresco on the opposite wall to the same artist’s painting of the Trials of Moses in the Sistine Chapel. Thousands of people visit this UNESCO world heritage site, named after the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV, who in 1477 ordered the rebuilding and decoration of the former Capella Magna. They cannot but be moved by the sheer beauty surrounding them in this environment of grace.

The atmosphere of grace, hope and love

In the light of faith ultimately, as Dostoevsky put it, “beauty will save the world.” This most deeply means that the grace of Christ will triumph despite a situation of myriad allurements leading people to forsake the real beauty of the art of living. The logic of sin really consists in living ungraciously. There is nothing original about sin, however, since everyone continues in the inherited and habitual tendency of doing what they have seen others do! – Così fan tutte, which is the theme of Mozart comic opera that ridicules human fickleness, that he presents typified by women. – But how innovative and unoriginal sin is! Yet, we, like all people, haven’t learnt to shake ourselves free of this ingrained yoke of misery. In other words, we continue preferring selfishly to grasp God’s gifts, rather than praise and thank him, their gracious “Giver of Breath and Bread” (in G.M. Hopkins’ lovely phrase).

     In the first volume of his great trilogy, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict when discussing Jesus’ temptation hit the nail on the head in saying “God is the issue” (p.29). He pointed to the common human tendency to go after what we regard as ‘real’ in what’s there immediately before us – bread, money, power – instead of seeking and persevering in pursuing what is of ultimate importance: acknowledging, being grateful for Christ coming to relate us to God.

     Notoriously we are deceived, however, by what we think are good intentions. The saying is true: the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Furthermore, even in seeking to do all things for God’s glory – as expressed by the Ignatian axiom, Ad majorem Dei Gloriam – it may happen that we’re really acting out of vain glory or secretly priding ourselves for our purity of intention. The poet T.S. Eliot has Thomas à Becket on the eve of his martyrdom express his realisation of the greatest of all kinds of temptation:

             Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
             Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
             The last temptation is the greatest treason:
             To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

     The Christian community works by a different, contrary logic to that of a sin-bent outlook – that of God’s Word (Logos), who by uniting himself to our weakness without sinning transforms us. Thus, the Christian community is not focused on sin as such, as the wise old Canon points out in Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest. Rather, its entire perspective opens the way to live in celebrating with joy faith in Christ, who issues in an atmosphere of the grace, hope and love.

     St Peter-Julian Eymard, the apostle of the Eucharist, encouraged people in a sermon on frequent communion to appreciate the transforming beauty of Christ giving himself freely and generously to all who approach him with the right dispositions of expressing their needs: "Go to the holy table, come to visit the Blessed Sacrament. Ah! Believe deeply in the atmosphere of grace in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and in the places where it dwells. Would we come without asking him for anything; we’ll be amazed and changed. The atmosphere! The Eucharist is a perfume that is experienced even by ungodly people."

 (21 March 1867 – Œuvres Complètes, PP 23,3)

Despite Dostoevsky’s warning about people choosing bread to satisfy material wants rather than the word of God, the Eucharistic community, nevertheless, is indeed the divine milieu in which beggars are nourished and strengthened to tell others, their sisters and brothers, where to find the true Bread of life.

Image at the top: Christ's third temptation and thwarting of the Devil
(detail from Sandro Botticelli's Temptations of Christ, Sistine Chapel)

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ASH WEDNESDAY

 Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, a day in the midst of our working week. This day gets its name from the rite of the priest making the sign of the cross on our foreheads with ashes, as he says one of two alternative formulas. One of these is more than just a sobering reminder: “Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” As complementing these words the priest may say the alternative encouraging formula: “Repent, and believe the Gospel.” Both these formulas express a challenge. This rite brings us down to earth. It is not meant in any way to humiliate us, but calls us to genuine humility. This virtue is often forgotten or dodged because our memory’s cunning tendency to evade what is uncomfortable and uncongenial to our pride and vanity, enticing us to indulge in every kind of fantasy and false notion of our grandeur! But, by reminding us of this virtue the rite of the ashes invites us to recognize in the candid light of truth the radical condition of being human. For ‘humility’, like ‘human’ or ‘humour’, are words derived from the common Latin root, humus, meaning soil.

This takes us back to our origins and also focuses on our high destiny, which are both implied by the call to remember who we are and called to be. We are reminded not only of being created from the dust of the earth like Adam the first human being, but also that we have been given an ennobled worth to be sharers in the divine nature (2 Pt 1:4). This is thanks to Christ, the Second Adam, who in obedience to the Father’s merciful design lowered or humbled himself to become one with us in all things, except sin, taking on our condition of being of the earth (humus); for this he was raised up and became the embodiment of our true grandeur (cf. Phil 2:6f.; Heb 4:15).

It is good to be recalled to this very realistic truth that though we are earthly creatures we’re not merely earthbound. Thanks to God’s mercy shown by Jesus Christ, death, which sin brought into the world, can’t hold us bound in the dust of the grave; nothing, in fact, can hold back God’s loving outreach to us. Jesus didn’t put us down, but lifted up our spirits: “you are the salt of the earth,” he said in the Sermon on the Mount, “you are the light of the world” (Mt 5:13,14). Remembering this is very salutary in restoring a healthy, balanced attitude regarding our quality to bring savour to the lives of all people and to enlighten them by the light of Christ, who went on to say: “Let you light so shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:16).

Ash Wednesday can be regarded as the most significant Remembrance Day of the year. For, while Remembrance Sunday in England or the International Holocaust Remembrance Day turns our thoughts and prayers to those who are dead, because of war, Ash Wednesday calls us to live realistically and fully the open-ended condition of the present. This condition isn’t one that is spoilt by looking back in regret or frustration about what went wrong. But it issues in a whole season of remembering and reliving the most significant narrative of God entry into humankind’s history to save us from continuing the disaster of being wrecked that began with disobedience to his design for our true welfare and happiness.

This time of remembering is most salutary, since it is a grace-filled season of growth in the gracious truth of genuine wholeness and health. Being called to re-member, especially during Lent we are impelled to respond to the desire of God our Father to unite us as members of Christ’s Mystical Body. Our response consists in allowing the Spirit of God to gather together or assemble into one community, all members of our human family, as the Ezekiel prophesized in the imagery of the dry bones turning to dust becoming enlivened by the breath of his Spirit of love.

It is most salutary since it involves caring properly about our body, not merely for our individual bodies, but, rather, also for other persons, who are members participating in the Body of Christ. This way of taking proper care is fostered by means of those three traditional practices of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. This trio intrinsically belongs together insofar as each of these springs from and is oriented towards learning the true meaning of love – a meaning that entails discovering the beauty of how to care.

Caring is anything but being anxious. Rather, it bespeaks an attitude of being trusting and grateful and generous. Each of these is expressed through prayer, fasting, almsgiving. Through exercising all three of these in harmony we entrust ourselves to God, to whom we are grateful for his gifts by joyfully and generously sharing them with others. In this way we are lead to realise the significantly deepest and fullest dimension of how to care, namely, turning, being converted, to Christ. He shows us God our Father’s loving care for the world. In providing the supreme gift of himself in the Eucharist he heals our carelessness about what really matters, supporting and accompanying our endeavours to heed our brothers’ and sisters’ needs and cultivate the wellbeing of creation.

This theme of genuine care is repeatedly expressed by T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday. With rich allusions to the Scriptures, as well as to the poet Dante’s words about peace being in accord with God’s will (cf. The Divine Comedy: Il Paradiso, Canto III), this poem concludes with the following lovely prayer to Mary, who is our model in caring as the faithful “servant” of the Lord and “dispenser” of his divine mysteries to us:

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

                  And let my cry come unto Thee.

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