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The Transfiguration – Fr. Romano Guardini

April 1, 2013
The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake of that transfigured life. To be saved means to share in the life of Christ. We too shall rise again, and our bodies will be transformed by the spirit, which itself is transformed by God. In us mortals blissful immortality will once awaken; read the magnificent fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake of that transfigured life. To be saved means to share in the life of Christ. We too shall rise again, and our bodies will be transformed by the spirit, which itself is transformed by God. In us mortals blissful immortality will once awaken; read the magnificent fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

The words with which Jesus informs his disciple more and more pressingly that he will have to suffer have something special about them. This is evident already earlier, when his enemies demand the great Messianic sign as proof of his identity. He retorts that he will give this unbelieving generation no sign other than that of the prophet Jonas. And there follows the mysterious hint: “For even as Jonas was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). And in three of the formal proclamations of his passion made on the final journey to Jerusalem he says that he will suffer and die and rise again

When Luke says that the apostles did not understand, that his meaning was hidden from them, he means that for them the idea of a dying Messiah was simply inconceivable; yet even less conceivable must have been the idea of his Resurrection. Clarity came only with Easter:

“And it carne to pass, while they were wondering what to make of this, that, behold, two men stood by them in raiment. And when the women were struck with fear and bowed their faces to the ground, they said to them, `Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. I remember how he spoke to you while he was yet in Galilee, saying Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men crucified, and on the third day rise.”
(Luke 24:5-8).

From words, as from the whole life of our Lord, one thing is evident: for Jesus there was no such thing as death alone. He accepted his death, spoke of it with increasing incisiveness, but always inseparably bound to to resurrection.

Did Jesus live our human existence? Certainly. Did he die our death? Most assuredly; our very salvation depends upon his being like us in all things, sin excepted (Hebrews 4:15). Yet there is something behind his living and dying that is more than life and death in the nearest meaning of the words. Something for which we really should have another name, unless we limit the word “life” to the special sense it has in John, inventing a new word, a pale reflection of this, for all other purposes. An illimitable abundance and holy invulnerability in Jesus’ person made it possible for him to be entirely one of us yet different from us all; not only to live our existence, but to transmute it, plucking the “sting” from both life and death (1 Corinthians: 15:56).

What a strange phenomenon this thing called life! It is the a priori of everything, foundation of existence which, when threatened, responds with that unqualified reaction known as self-defense, which has its own laws. It is a miracle so precious that at times the bliss of it is overwhelming. Life enjoys, abstains from, suffers, struggles, creates. It enfolds and permeates things, joins with other life resulting not in a mere sum, but in new and manifold vitality.

Foremost and fundamental, it is and remains an inexplicable enigma. For is it not strange that in order to possess one thing we must relinquish another? That in order to do anything of genuine value, we focus our attention on it and away from all else? That when we wish to do justice to one person we do injustice to all others, if only by not  likewise accepting them into our range of heart, simply because there is not room enough for everyone? That when we experience any powerful sensation, then only in ignorance of what it is, the instant we try to understand it, the current is cut.

Wakefulness is wonderful but tiring, and we long to lose ourselves in sleep. Sleep is pleasant, but how terrible to sleep away half our lives! Life is unity. It demands containment of things; demands that we preserve our entity in the superabundance around us, and yet that we throw the fullness of that entity into our slightest act.

In all directions runs the cracks. Everywhere we look we are faced with an either-or, this-or-that. And woe to us if we do not choose, for from the clearcut choice of the one or the other, depends the decency of existence. The moment we attempt to grab everything, we have nothing properly. If we try to do justice to everyone, we are just to no one, only contemptible. As soon as we reach out to embrace the whole, our individuality dissolves into nothing.

Thus we are forced to make clear decisions, and by so doing — woe again! — to cut into our existence. Really, life has something impossible about it! It is forced to desire what it can never have. It is as though from the very start some fundamental mistake had been made, as evinced by everything we do. And then the dreadful transitoriness of it all. Is it possible things exist only through self-destruction? Doesn’t to live mean to pass over? The more intensively we live, the swifter the passing. Doesn’t death begin already in life?

With desperate truth a modern biologist has defined life as the movement towards death. Yet what a monstrosity to define life only as part of death! Is death then better ordered? Must we surrender our deepest instinct to Biology? Research has pointed out that early man experienced death differently from us. He by no means considered it something self-understood, as the necessary antipode of life. Instinctively he felt that death was not only unnecessary, but wrong. Where it occurred it came as the result of a particular cause, of a spiritual power of evil — even in cases of accident, old age, or death in battle. Let us wait a moment with our smile and with an open mind try to accept the possibility of the primitive’s being closer to the truth than the professor.

Is death self-understood? If it were, we should accept it with a sense, however heavy, of fulfillment. Where is there such a death? True, here or there we find someone who sacrifices his life for some great cause; or another who has grown weary of the burden of and accepts death with a sense of relief. But does the man exist who from the very essence of his vitality, consents to death? I have never ,met him, and what I have heard of him was poppycock. Man’s natural stand to death is one of defense and protest, both rooted deep in the core of his being. Death is not self-understood, and every attempt to make it so ends in immeasurable melancholy.

Nevertheless, this life and death of ours belong together. When the romanticists attempted to make them the opposite poles of existence, comparing them with light and dark, height and depth, ascent and decline, this was aesthetic thoughtlessness under which lay a demonic illusion. But on one point they were right: our present forms of living and dying do belong together. They are two sides of the same fact — a fact which did not exist in Jesus.

In him there was something that towered above our little life and death. He lived more deeply and purely than it is ever possible for us to live. It has been pointed out that Jesus’ life was poor and uneventful in comparison with that of Buddha through which streamed all the good things of earth, both material and spiritual: power, art, wisdom, family life, solitude, wealth and its renunciation, and above all, length of days, which enabled him to experience existence in all its breadth and depth. Strangely brief, almost fragmentary by contrast, Jesus’ life and work. Yet how could it have been otherwise in a life whose essence was not richness, but sacrifice?

Nevertheless, what Jesus did experience, every gesture, every act, every encounter, he experienced with an intensity that out-weighted mere number and multifariousness. There was more to his meeting a fisherman, a beggar, a captain than in Buddha’s acquaintance with all the strata of human existence. Jesus really lived our life and died our death, real death (its terrors were only the more terrible for the divine strength and sensitivity of his life) yet everything was different both in his living and in his dying.

What decides the essence of a human life? In St. Augustine we find a thought which at first strikes us as strange, but which, carefully weighed, leads deep into existence. Asked whether the souls of men and the spiritual beings of angels are immortal, he answers: No. Naturally, man’s soul, being spirit, and hence indestructible, cannot die as his body dies; it cannot disintegrate. Still this is not yet immortality as the Gospels know it, immortality that comes not from the soul, but directly from God. (Unlike that of ox or ass, man’s body receives its life from the soul; his essential vitality is carried over from his soul in an arc of flame.) The life of those souls who appear in Revelation, however, comes directly from God in the arc of flame known as grace. In that life, not only the soul, but also till body participates in grace, and the whole fervent being, body .and soul, draws its life from God. That final stage then is true, sacred immortality.

God has shaped human life mysteriously indeed. Man’s essence is meant to leap up to its God and return with the life it has taken from him. Man should live in a downward-sweeping movement that begins in heaven, not from earth upward, as animals do. His body should draw its sustenance from his spirit, his spirit from God; thus man’s whole being would be infused with ever-circulating vitality.

But sin has broken this entity; sin that was the will to autonomous existence, that desired “to be as Gods” (Genesis 3:5). And the arc of fire burned out; the ardent circle collapsed. True, man’s rational soul, being indestructible, remains, but its indestructibility has become a shadowy Ersatz. The body also remains, since it is the soul’s necessary covering, but it now covers a `dead’ soul, one no longer capable of transmitting to the body that life which God intended it to have. Thus life has become simultaneously real and unreal, ordered and chaotic, permanent and fleeting.

It is this that was different in Jesus. In him the flaming arc still burned divinely pure and strong, and not only as grace, but as Holy Spirit. His humanity lived from God in the fullness of the Holy Ghost, through whom he was made man, and in whom he lived to the end — and not only as a God-loving man lives, but as God and man.

There is still more to this: only he can possess humanity like Christ’s who not only clings to God, but who “is” God. Such humanity is alive in quite a different way from ours. The curve of fire ‘between’ the inseparable Son of God and Son of Man is that mystery behind Jesus’ life and death that enabled him to live our human life and die our human death more profoundly than we ourselves. With him life and death assume new dimensions.

Matthew reports on the wonderful incident which took place on the last trip to Jerusalem.

“Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And his face shone as the sun, and his garments became white as snow. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking together with him. Then Peter addressed Jesus, saying, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here. If thou wilt, let us set up three tents here, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias.’ As he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, `This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him.’ And on hearing it the disciples fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid. And Jesus came near and touched them, and said to them, `Arise, and do not be Afraid.’ But lifting up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.

“And as they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus cautioned them, saying, `Tell the vision to no one, till the Son of Man has risen from the dead’ “
Matthew 17:1-9

By “vision” here is meant the particular kind of vision outside the realm of hitherto known experience, with all the mysterious and disquieting traits of an act of heaven: light which comes from no natural source but belongs to the spheres of inner reality; likewise the “cloud,” which has nothing to do with the meteorologic forms we know, but is something for which there is no satisfactory word — brightness that conceals rather than reveals, heavenliness unveiled yet unapproachable.

Further visionary characteristic is the suddenness with which the figures appear and disappear, leaving behind them the emptiness of an earth abandoned by heaven. This vision then is nothing subjective, no suddenly projected inner picture, but response to a spiritual reality, as the senses daily respond to physical realities. The event does not merely descend upon Jesus, or take place within him; it also breaks from him, revelation of inmost being, arc of the live flame within him become apparent.

In the gloom of fallen creation the Logos blazes celestial light but the dark asserts itself; “… grasped it not …” as John says in the opening of his Gospel. Thus Christ’s truth and love, which long for nothing but the freedom to spend themselves, are forced back into his heart — sorrow God alone can measure and comprehend. Here, on the mountain though, for one moment, they break through in all their radiant clarity. This was the Light which had come into the world and was powerful enough to illuminate it completely. On the way to death the glory of what may be revealed only after death breaks out like a jet of flame, burning illustration of Christ’s own words on death and resurrection.

What is revealed here is not only the glory of pure, angelic spirit, but of the spirit through the body, glory of the spiritualized body of man. Not the glory of God alone, not a piece of disclosed heaven, not only the sheen of the Lord as it hovered over the ark of the covenant, but the glory of the God-Logos in the Son of Man. Life above life and death; life of the body, but issue of the spirit the spirit, but issue of the Logos; life of the man Jesus, but issue of the Son of God.

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake of that transfigured life. To be saved means to share in the life of Christ. We too shall rise again, and our bodies will be transformed by the spirit, which itself is transformed by God. In us mortals blissful immortality will once awaken; read the magnificent fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

Such is the eternal life in which we believe. “Eternal” does mean merely endless; we are that as spiritual creatures of God anyway, “by nature.” But the general indestructibility of the soul is not yet the blissful, eternal life that Revelation describes. That comes to us from God. Actually, “eternal” life has nothing to do with the length that life; it is not the opposite of transitory life. Perhaps we come closest to the truth when we define it as life which participates in the life of God.

Such life has received from him its conclusiveness, its all-inclusivenes, its unity in diversity, its infiniteness and immanent oneness (things that our present life lacks, protest as we may and must for the sake of that dignity with which God himself endowed us).

In the new life such eternity exists for all, whether one is a great saint or the least “in the kingdom of heaven.” The differences exist within eternity itself, where, admittedly, they are as great as the differences in love. This eternal life does not wait till after death to begin. It already exists.

The essence of Christian consciousness is founded on its presence — through faith. The degrees of that consciousness are limitless and dependent on many factors: its clarity strength, and “tangibility” (the depth to which it is actually experienced and lived).

Whatever our measure, something of it is always behind our living and our dying, whether given by grace or seized by faith: something of that flaming arc which broke through for the first time on Tabor, to reveal itself victoriously in the Resurrection.

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The Meaning of Old Age – Fr. Romano Guardini

July 28, 2011

 

Old Woman Dozing by Nicolaes Maes (1656)

A reading selection from Fr. Guardini’s The Faith and Modern Man (1944).

What … is the meaning of old age? This can best be determined by proceeding from the most important element in the preceding period — the experience of reality. In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next. One has the feeling that a former generation has come to an end and that the following, one’s own, is beginning to crumble. Many enterprises one has seen collapse, many organizations break down. One has lived to see the end of trends and fashions and standards of values. Concepts of what is right and fitting that had appeared unshakable and part of existence have lost their validity.

These impressions will be particularly strong in a period of historic upheaval, all the more so if the formative years belonged to the period preceding revolutionary change. Reality then becomes questionable — not as in youth, when time seems endless, but rather because now reality has been found not to be as real as it appeared in the realistic period of mature life. The view of things widens out. Under the pressure of reality, a person was limited to the present moment. But toward the end the whole comes again into view.

As in autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees, the view expands, and one is conscious of wide space. Reality engages the will in what is at the moment to be sought, done, mastered. But as the years go on one learns to loosen one’s hold. The urgency of will begins to slacken. Detachment is the next phase, and a person’s nature opens up to the whole, to a general view of existence.

Again we have reached a point that calls for decision, as, indeed, life continually calls for decision. Being is, in essence, ambiguous. It can always go right or left. The same feeling can turn out to be good or bad. The same virtue can work fruitfully or destructively. Just so here. The same detachment from reality, the loosening of one’s hold on things, the sense of the unimportance of whether a thing is done this way or that, the accumulation of disappointments, the many renunciations of a long life may simply point to the end.

Old age is that period of existence which life has been dreading all along — death spread out over years. That sense of the whole which more and more weighs upon us becomes the pitifulness of collective existence — the indifference of nature which kills as mercilessly as it gives life; the lack of consideration on the part of the persons around one who are put out by the presence of old people; the cruelty of the young who press ahead into life demanding space for themselves.

But this is not the true meaning of old age. That the will should lose its hold on things and on tasks generally, and that the hands be left free, should bring about a wider perspective in which that final thing, that real thing should become luminous. Out of that new condition grows a new form of belief. The danger in which aging men and women find themselves is that of capitulating to transitoriness, of having no more future, of living in their memories, of giving in to an existence which is ever more growing empty, of clinging to the fortuitous, of growing weak and tyrannical and at the same time powerless and helpless.

The same danger threatens their religious life. There is a kind of skepticism possible only to the old — the cynicism of hopelessness which also affects their faith. It is the attitude in which mutability has conquered. In it nothingness rules. Death of body and heart has assumed spiritual form. In direct opposition to this attitude stands the true faith of old age. It has cast aside the dreamy aloofness of childhood, renounced the endless demands of youth; it has experienced the transitory and seen how fleeting is human life, how questionable its works and its ways. Ever-changing life takes a new turn. Something final, something real has come through.

At first it appears to be life itself, or, as we say half humorously, half wryly, life as it really is. But behind that looms something else — eternity. Beyond the mere drifting toward the end lies nothingness, dark, empty horror. To save themselves from it the old grasp at the nearest thing, this special food, that particular armchair, their bank account, their having the last word at home. But nothingness is not eternity. Before eternity stands death, but eternity itself is pure reality, endless fulfillment.

To be sure, it must continually be won anew through courage and struggle. But, the conquest made, there comes into existence a breadth, a quietness, a clarity of a new kind.

This struggle presses on into wisdom. Wisdom is insight into things as they are, and is acquired only when one is near the end. It cannot be taught; each must learn it for himself or herself through their own folly and out of the bitterness of their own end. It is the understanding of the relationship of the particular to the whole, and this understanding is achieved only when the whole comes into view — that is to say, at the end.

It is the sense of what is important and unimportant, of proportion, of what is ultimately rewarding, and it is to be gained only when it is too late to change anything, but when there is still time for forgiveness, for contrition and for leaving everything in God’s hands. Of this nature is the true faith of old people. Their attitude grows very simple, one might almost say childlike. Childishness is the ugly form of something which can be very beautiful. Second childhood, like first childhood, feels that all is one, that everything is under protection, that all will be well. Such faith is broad, understanding, tolerant.

It is experience to the fullest — when it has humor in it. It is a wonderful thing, the humor of a religious person who carries everything into the boundless love of God, including the inadequate, the strange, the queer; who hopes for a solution when reason and effort can do no more, and who discerns a purpose where earnestness and zeal have long since given up hope of finding one.

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Faith and Doubt in the Stages of Life – Fr. Romano Guardini

July 27, 2011

Saint Luke as a painter, before Christ on the Cross, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1635-1640

A reading selection from Fr. Guardini’s The Faith and Modern Man (1944).

Christian men and women are situated in life exactly as are all other human beings. Their bodies are made up of natural elements and are subject to natural laws. They live in the community of family and nation. They participate in the events of history, and share in the economic, scientific and artistic life of their days. Their dreams, thoughts, ethical motives, standards of right living, hopes of fulfillment, are like those of everybody else. But in their consciousness they have thoughts of another kind too — of the heavenly Father who created all things and guides people by his providential wisdom, thoughts of redemption and of a new, holy life which springs from it, which begins here on earth and finds its fulfillment in eternity.

These thoughts do not derive from human knowledge and experience, at least not if they are taken in their proper sense. The truth that underlies them, the kind of mind they bespeak, the way of life to which they call, go back to one definite person — Jesus Christ. He claims to be the living revelation of the hidden God, the redeemer of the lost, the bringer of new life…

The Christian believer of whom we are speaking has, in some way, come upon Jesus Christ, either by steeping himself or herself in the sources which relate his history, or by having learned from others of his person and doctrine. They are convinced that Jesus Christ alone brings truth and salvation, that he alone sheds light upon the riddle of existence, that by his spirit alone can moral problems be solved, that he alone affords a final refuge to the human heart.

The lives of such men and women consist of a whole in which two worlds intermingle — the natural life with its realities, and everything which Christ makes known of truth and wisdom, and the strength which he imparts. This unity let us call simply the Faith. It constitutes a very highly organized, unified life — if it really is what it claims to be, the highest life of all. It comprehends ideas, values, powers, has strong purpose, and provides a certainty beyond any other certainty. At the same time, like every other highly organized life, it is extremely vulnerable — vulnerable, indeed, in a very special way.

When we consider how the gospel of Christ places a person under God’s judgment, how it demands of that person a change of heart, how it requires him or her to give up much to which human nature clings for some distant goal, it is clear from the start that these changes cannot come about simply as the result of almost automatic development, but only through decisions and conquests, continually renewed. Since faith is life itself, life in the fullest sense, it must undergo repeated crises, crises which concern not merely a single part of a person’s life, but their whole nature – their mind and all their potentialities…

Much more could be added on this subject; but this much probably has been made clear — that crises in faith are not simple matters. Only rarely are they concerned with uncertainties in understanding — the interpretation of this or that point of Christian doctrine, or this or that passage of scripture. Questions of this character can be readily disposed of. But usually, as the whole nature of the situation shows, they concern something quite different. When one has discussed these things with many people, one soon notices that the arguments put forward are in no proportion to the conclusions drawn from them.

They are, for the most part, characterized by a peculiar overemphasis, passion or bitterness or defiance, which points to something deeper than the reasons that are advanced — all the more so since the language which the objector uses is generally that of mere intellectual discussion, in which deep personal experience has no part. Doubts of faith almost always signify inner shifts of position, and the person whose religious life is at stake must recognize this fact — as must also those who have the responsibility for helping such persons.

The church says that people so afflicted may not set aside their faith, even for the time being. The ruling, in individual cases, may be felt as very severe, but it is right. It is based on the conviction that faith proceeds primarily not from human beings, but from God, whose power helps them to see as far into the question as is necessary and still to remain so closely bound to God that they will be able to persevere. Then, too, the ruling speaks from the knowledge that humans believe not merely with their intellect — that part of their nature which doubt seizes upon — but with their whole living being, so that they may place the center of gravity of their faith deeper, or at another point, and endure the difficulty until it solves itself.

However, when doubt has penetrated so deeply that conscience can no longer give assent, the situation changes. Here also one can only advise that a person take no rash steps to destroy the bonds which hold together the deepest meaning of life. There is a virtue which is of the utmost importance in the business of living, namely patience, and here it is particularly called for.

There are two sides of the relation of a person’s heart to God. On the one side is longing for God, longing for his sacred truth. But on the other side is aversion, distrust, irritation, revolt.

It is this twofold aspect which makes religious doubt dangerous. The moving force in the doubt is hostility toward God. This we need to know. Therefore, in any wrestling with doubt, one must resort to prayer. The most effective kind of prayer is that in which we place ourselves, in our hearts, before God, relinquishing all resistance, letting go of all secret irritation, opening ourselves to the truth, to God’s holy mystery, saying over and over again, “I desire truth, I am ready to receive it, even this truth which causes me such concern, if it be the truth. Give me light to know it, and to see how it bears on me.”

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Christian Marriage And Virginity

January 19, 2010

Fr. Romano Guardini holds court on what for many is one of the most confounding of Jesus’ teachings – that concerning Christian marriage and virginity. Yet it follows in line with our most recent posts on the Cardinal virtue of temperance as exemplified by Mother Teresa and Dawn Eden’s writings on the chaste life.

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell. “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Matthew 2:27-32

We have already pointed out that Moses’ Law was not an expression of original divine will (as this was revealed to Abraham, or in Paradise), it is the expression of a new order of things given fallen humanity by God after the original order of faith and freedom has been made void

The disciples are aghast Perhaps they are reminded of Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to the ancients, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ But I say to you that anyone who even looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5: 27) Then what a terrible bond marriage is. To be tied to one woman without hope of release, and the mere lustful glance at another already adultery. To this Jesus replies as he so often has. Not everyone can grasp this, but only he to whom understanding is given. It is another form of “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15), and it means that what he has just said cannot be taken purely intellectually, humanly juristically, but can be understood and obeyed only with the help of faith and grace.

Then the thought continues there is an order of things for those to whom understanding is “given” that is even farther removed than marriage from the usual conception of the relationship between man and woman renunciation of all sexual intercourse. And that there be no misunderstanding, Jesus differentiates clearly between the involuntary celibate whom either man or nature has rendered physically unfit for marriage, and the voluntary celibate “for heaven’s sake.” There exists an order and form of existence in which, a person directs the entire strength of his love to God and his kingdom, returning through these to his fellow men. (There is still less about such love in the law-books — mystery even greater than that of marriage; let him understand who can!)

Both orders stem from the same root. Both uphold a great mystery in the face of mere nature. Both are greater than what the average intellect can grasp. Neither can be simply traced back to the senses, or to the heart, or to the law of human society; both are truly recognizable only through revelation, acceptable only through faith, realizable only with the aid of grace.

It is said that Christian marriage is well suited to the nature of man. This can be correctly, but also incorrectly interpreted. It is appropriate to human nature, certainly, but to that nature as it was when it still bore the clear stamp of divine will, when it was directed Godwards and permeated with his grace. To men and women living in Paradise it would have been natural that marriage, which is contracted in the freedom and love of hearts obedient to God, must be unique and perpetual. But for fallen man?  Is the life-long bond between two people today something we can accept as natural — not after long rationalizing, sober consideration of its ends and values, its physical and spiritual advantages, but spontaneously, in affirmation of our own experience?

Primarily, nature is drive: the ceaseless urge to preservation and multiplication of self. But man’s fallen nature has become divided, insubordinate, discordant, dishonest with its conscience, blind, violent, inconstant and perishable, and consequently these characteristics color the relationship of any two people founded on it. The heart too is “natural,” vouching only for what it knows: the evident, present moment — not for what lies buried deep in the subconscious or in the future. The great theme of world literature is that of the heart’s fickleness.

Is it then natural for a person, and possible on the basis of his own strength, to remain bound life-long to another in the face of changing events and circumstances of his own development and that of his marriage partner? The bond made in unredeemed freedom is apt to be loosened by that same freedom

And man’s conscience? His judgment, power of decision, loya1ty? Are they still honest and dependable? He who claims they are shutting his eyes to the truth. And even if it were true that moral liberty is enough to guarantee a moral bond, marriage is so much more than this! Its sense lies over and above the flow of instinct, the existence of something that comes from elsewhere: a unifying energy that is not only stable and “good,” but also eternal and holy. That two human beings after the advent of sin into the world, variable as they are, confused, ready to revolt against the grace in their hearts, receive this sacred unity into their conscience and will, that this bond maintains and transfigures their community of life in spite of all its human shortcomings and tragedy — this is not “natural” but conceivable only to him who has faith.

Assuredly, indissoluble marriage conforms to the most profound sense of nature, and in the final analysis, even with all the destruction and suffering it sometimes entails, is the only practicable form of marriage Even so, it is an over-simplification to call it “natural.” We only risk distorting its sacred sense, and degrading it to an ethical social institution.

On the other hand, marriage comprehended in light of faith and lived in grace becomes ‘natural’ in a much higher sense, as the fruit of grace, the harvest of faith. It is not beginning , but end of Christian effort, and must be formed by the same power as that behind virginity: renunciation made possible by faith. Christian marriage is constantly renewed by sacrifice. True, it fulfills and enriches the lives of both partners through fertility and a ripening of the personality beyond the limits possible for each individually; not only through the fullness and creativeness of the joint life, but a1so through the sacrifices necessary to weather the temptations of brute instinct, inconstancy, never-ending disappointments, moral crises, changes in fortune and the general demands of a common life.

Marriage is not only the fulfillment of the immediate love which brings a man and woman together, it is also the slow transfiguration of that love through the experiences of a common reality. Early love does not yet see this reality for the pull of the heart and senses bewitches it. Only gradually does reality establish itself, when eyes have been opened to the shortcomings and failures revealed by everyday life. He who can accept the other then, as he really is, in spite all disappointments, who can share the joys and plagues of daily life with him just as he has shared the great experience of early love, who can walk with him before God and with God’s strength, will achieve second love, the real mystery of marriage.

This is as far superior to first love as the mature person is to the child, as the self-conquering heart is to that which simply allows itself to be conquered. At the cost of much sacrifice and effort something great as come into being. Strength, profound loyalty and a stout heart are necessary to avoid the illusions of passion, cowardice, selfishness and violence. But how many long-married couples succeed in breaking through to this really triumphant love? We well understand why Jesus’ words about marriage pass on to the alternative virginity.

Here the quality of non-naturalness already present in marriage breaks out into the open.

Man is certainly not encouraged by nature to renounce his desire to love and be loved, to sacrifice his fecundity. Yet what Jesus means by virginity is not the mere uncomplaining acceptance of a physical handicap or the duress of harsh circumstance — that would be making valiant but scant virtue of necessity. Jesus means the voluntary renunciation of marriage, not out of weakness, or indifference, or for any philosophy of life, but solely “for heaven’s sake.” Once more precisely: not because any ‘religious duty’ commands it, but because is a unique opportunity of becoming the participant of an immeasurable love offered by God to anyone who desires to belong to him entirely. Today with psychology turning its beam upon the hidden root and background of all human behavior, it is necessary to mention something further.

One might object that Christian virginity was simply a transplanting of the object of affections, that often for very complex reasons a human being unable to attain his natural partner seeks him in the sphere of religion. In other words, that when he loves “God” or “heaven” he unconsciously means the person he has lost. Whether this is true (not only in falsely experienced isolated instances, or as the light accompaniment to the genuine religious motivation, but as the actual core of a man or woman’s virginity) that virginity is a terrible thing. Then the human is only being cheated of the most vital part of his existence, and is offering God a disposition that is dishonest and unclean. It is in this light that non-believers usually regard virginity; and there are certain aspects of Christian life which sometimes justify their attitude; however, the essence of genuine virginity is quite other.

What Christian virginity is cannot be deduced from our knowledge of man, but only from revelation. Christ says that it is possible for the human being to concentrate all his powers of love honestly, purely on God, for he is such that he can be loved with all the plenitude of life; that he can become everything, beginning and end, of man’s existence. Not as an Ersatz, not as a cloak for something else, nor as the object of a deflected human affection, but for his own sake. God is the sovereign Lover, he who loves and can be loved absolutely — indeed, in the last analysis, the only one who can be love without reserve. Doesn’t the experience of every loving heart, ever the richest and happiest, concede the impossibility of complete fulfillment?

Is it perhaps so, after all, that love cannot harness its entire force for any human need because no human is big enough to receive it; that it is impossible to embrace an earthly lover with perfect intimacy, because essentially he is always distant? Perhaps precisely through the never completely satisfactory experience of human love, man begins to sense the presence of another love, unrealizable on a merely earthly plane, to whom we not only can but must surrender our most intimate being — the love revealed by revelation. Here lies the secret of virginity. Compared with its tremendous mystery, all objections of psychology and ethics dwindle to pathetic presumption. This certainly does not mean that every individual is capable of realizing such love, and there is no fixed rule as to how it may be realized. “Not all can accept this teaching; but those to whom it has been given.” The passage is valid here in its strictest sense. Christian virginity is a special garden within the reservation of grace in nature as it exists in Christian marriage.

The power that has created both states of life is the power of Jesus Christ. Christian marriage, like Christian virginity, is not the product of sociological truth, however evident; nor of moral and personal strength, however valuable; nor of immediate, personal religiousness, however genuine. None of these even touches the essential. Both states are tenable only through the strength of Christ. Christian marriage is possible only when between the two “gathered together for my sake” is Christ “in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:18-20). He gives them the strength to bear and forbear, love, overcome, forgive “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).

This same strength, and no abstract “heavenly kingdom,” makes virginity possible. Not “God” generally, but Christ and all that radiates from his specific person: the ineffable fulfillment of all our aspirations. There is no collective word for such wealth, neither ethos nor any other. The only word large enough to contain him is that by which he is called: Jesus Christ, living Son of God and supremely beautiful offspring of men, personification of life and love. Both Christian marriage and Christian virginity become incomprehensible the moment the Nazarene ceases to be their essence, their norm and their reality.

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Book Recommendation: The Wisdom of the Psalms – Fr. Romano Guardini

December 1, 2009
 

Fr. Romano Guardini

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wisdom of the Psalms appears to be getting difficult to get a hold of. I got my copy from the library but I notice Amazon had only one copy for sale and other book purveyors on the Internet appear to be in the same boat. I’ve quoted the new revised standard version for each Psalm that Fr. Guardini takes up in my reading selections.  These are precious readings. Hope you enjoy them. dj

Psalm 115
1 Not to us, O LORD, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.

2 Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”

3 Our God is in heaven;
he does whatever pleases him.

4 But their idols are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.

5 They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but they cannot see;

6 they have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;

7 they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

8 Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

9 O house of Israel, trust in the LORD—
he is their help and shield.

10 O house of Aaron, trust in the LORD—
he is their help and shield.

11 You who fear him, trust in the LORD—
he is their help and shield.

12 The LORD remembers us and will bless us:
He will bless the house of Israel,
he will bless the house of Aaron,

13 he will bless those who fear the LORD—
small and great alike.

14 May the LORD make you increase,
both you and your children.

15 May you be blessed by the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

16 The highest heavens belong to the LORD,
but the earth he has given to man.

17 It is not the dead who praise the LORD,
those who go down to silence;

18 it is we who extol the LORD,
both now and forevermore.
Praise the LORD.

Reference Verse 8:  This is a truth we must recognize. What man is, is ultimately determined not by himself but by the divinity in which he believes. Rationalists are in the habit of saying that misconceives of divinity according to his character, his temperament and the needs of his life. Certainly there is something in this. But actually the situation is reversed; man becomes like the divinity in which he believes. And if he does not believe in any then it is this nothingness which determines his inmost being….If man conceives of divinity as pantheism conceives of it, as the world-spirit, the fundamental mystery or the basic nature of the universe, then there is no clear and binding “Thou,” but only hazy indefiniteness. Then this indefiniteness passes into his inmost being and he loses the ability to answer the decisive questions of existence by a clear yes or no; this way and not otherwise…If divinity is absolutely denied undereducated, and radical positivism dominates, tempter is an evil emptiness in the depths of man’s being. It may be covered by the coercion of power, the din of progress, the appearance of prosperity, but it is there, and it makes man  interiorly defenseless and leaves him at the mercy of the state.

The Dark Tragedy
We must never forget that our life of faith rests upon a dark tragedy. At first there was the destruction of Paradise and its unimaginable possibilities; then the chosen people accepted the kingship of God at Mt. Sinai but constantly rebelled against it, “stiff necked” so that the account of the journey through the desert is an account of the constant struggle of Moses against their opposition. At the end of the age of “Judges” they demanded an earthly king “such as all the other nations have,” and when Samuel was indignant at their delusion, God said to him, “Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to thee. For they have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them. According to all their works they have done from the day that I brought them out of Egypt until this day; as they have forsaken me and served strange gods, so do they also unto thee (1Samuel. 8: 6-8). The history of the Kings, who should have been God’s stewards, is a continuous succession of faithfulness and apostasy, and those who fell away were more numerous than those who remained faithful. And finally when he stepped into history,  Whom the prophets had foretold, the Messiahs, the Son of God, and wished to set up the kingdom of God in all the fullness of grace, then He was brought to trial because He presumed to claim royal dignity, and He was nailed to the cross. This is what happened. …We are living in a vast historical whole, a series of events stretching  from the beginnings of the human race to the present day, and going towards an end of which the Lord said no one knows when it shall be reached, “not the day nor the hour.”

We are living in the midst of these events. The great world powers have fallen away from the divine Lord and ever more definitely declared their independence. And now we are experiencing a new epoch: great nations, almost half of the earth, are saying not only, “without God” but, “away with God!” They not only permit atheism and encourage it but they persecute the faith, destroy it methodically and completely in adults and in the mind and heart of children, so that in comparison the hostility of the Roman Empire seems almost harmless.

John 1:10-14
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Reference: (John 1:10-14)
“The time is accomplished and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.” Then — this is the unexpressed continuation of the thought — it will arrive. Not in the sense of the eschatological kingdom the end of time, when Christ returns for judgment, but now, in the course of history, changing the conditions of the believers’ existence. This did not happen, for those addressed by Jesus did not receive Him, But his word was not destroyed.

The kingdom of God is not “here,” but always in the act of coming — in everyone of us if we repent and believe, in every community, in every work, every stage of history, if men accept the call. Of course, the work of the kingdom of God is laborious, and it is attacked from within and without, hoping for the final, victorious coming of the Lord, when He hall summon the whole of history before His judgment and His victory shall be revealed.

It is wonderful to thing that in me, in my great poverty, the kingdom of God can come. In what I am, how I live, in the way in which I carry out the duties of my state, in my family, in the way I carry my misfortunes, the kingdom of God can come. It can come in every thought, every action obedient to the call. This is the mystery of  God’s nobility; that is, he does not force His kingdom upon us, but makes it dependent on us whether we accept it or not.

Psalm 104

1 Praise the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

2 He wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent

3 and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.

4 He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.

5 He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.

6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.

7 But at your rebuke the waters fled,
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;

8 they flowed over the mountains,
they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them.

9 You set a boundary they cannot cross;
never again will they cover the earth.

10 He makes springs pour water into the ravines;
it flows between the mountains.

11 They give water to all the beasts of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

12 The birds of the air nest by the waters;
they sing among the branches.

13 He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;
the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

14 He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for man to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth:

15 wine that gladdens the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine,
and bread that sustains his heart.

16 The trees of the LORD are well watered,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.

17 There the birds make their nests;
the stork has its home in the pine trees.

18 The high mountains belong to the wild goats;
the crags are a refuge for the coneys.

19 The moon marks off the seasons,
and the sun knows when to go down.

20 You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.

21 The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.

22 The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens.

23 Then man goes out to his work,
to his labor until evening.

24 How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

25 There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

26 There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

27 These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.

28 When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.

29 When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.

30 When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.

31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works-

32 he who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.

33 I will sing to the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

34 May my meditation be pleasing to him,
as I rejoice in the LORD.

35 But may sinners vanish from the earth
and the wicked be no more.
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
Praise the LORD.

Reference: Psalm 104 (verses 29-30)

When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.

When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.

Spirit
The whole psalm speaks of the Holy Spirit, the Creator, the Lord of all beings…the word spirit brings this out openly…The history of the word shows that many meanings are combined in it. First that of breath, that mysterious thing which we cannot see but which we feel, which continually moves in an out in our breast, makes speech possible and sustains life. ‘then the wind, the breath of the world which is also invisible and yet real, whether a breeze or a storm; of which we  “know not whence he cometh and whither he goeth (John 3:8). Then the soul, the interior being, intangible yet so intensive, which feels pain and joy and desire, which knows and wills and in dreams lives a mysterious life. Then the concept passes into that of spirit, especially that which feels pain and joy and desire, which knows and wills and in dreams lives a mysterious life, spirit which surmises and beholds the vision, and which awakens in the prophet as inspiration. All this comes together in the concept of the Spirit of God, or rather, it becomes the material by which the experience of his infinite creative power is expressed. It was overwhelmingly revealed on the day of Pentecost when the entrance of the Pneuma into history revealed itself by the elements of wind and fire, by prophetic speech and interior renewal.

Beholding the World Prophetically
The believer of the Old Testament does not behold the world scientifically nor aesthetically, but prophetically, as a countenance through which God looks at him, God Who Himself dwells in light inaccessible. And we should ask ourselves if here is not something here that we should recover. In the course of modern development our eyes have become dim. Not our natural eyes — although even these do not see clearly enough, otherwise we would not say about man  the foolish things we say — but the eyes of faith. Have these eyes not forgotten how to see the world as a “work” and so to see Him who made it? To see it as a form which conceals and yet reveals Him? And do we not have occasion to ask God to enlighten us.

Science And Faith
The world was created by spirit, not out of dull necessity by nature. It’s glory could not move a man so much if it were merely the result of dead causality. Certainly there are natural forces and natural laws, but they are more than what science and general culture behold in them. Every form of nature is a mysterious document, plain to him whose eyes are open….the Unjust are those who say, “There is no God.” Then, as now, they declared that the world is autonomous, a structure of natural forces and natural laws. And they think this explains everything. In reality they make the world barren and dark. It would be vain for man with his little mind to try to bring a little light into such an existence. Then, after a few thousand or million years the earth would be glaciated an all would be silent and dead….True scientific research is something noble; it is striving to reach by natural intelligence what it can attain: the laws of nature, the course of history, the structure of language, the system of law. But all this, in spite of its importance and the abundance of its material is not the end. Beyond it there is mystery, and it is of this that faith speaks.

But it becomes disastrous if science claims to be able to explain matters of faith. Then it is doing something for which it cannot be responsible. Similarly, it would be disastrous if one who is speaking about revelation and faith would claim by means of these to be able to judge the things that belong to science. That would not be fitting. Everything must be kept in order. Then everything serves God.

Psalm 148

1 Praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD from the heavens,
praise him in the heights above.

2 Praise him, all his angels,
praise him, all his heavenly hosts.

3 Praise him, sun and moon,
praise him, all you shining stars.

4 Praise him, you highest heavens
and you waters above the skies.

5 Let them praise the name of the LORD,
for he commanded and they were created.

6 He set them in place for ever and ever;
he gave a decree that will never pass away.

7 Praise the LORD from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,

8 lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
stormy winds that do his bidding,

9 you mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars,

10 wild animals and all cattle,
small creatures and flying birds,

11 kings of the earth and all nations,
you princes and all rulers on earth,

12 young men and maidens,
old men and children.

13 Let them praise the name of the LORD,
for his name alone is exalted;
his splendor is above the earth and the heavens.

14 He has raised up for his people a horn,
the praise of all his saints,
of Israel, the people close to his heart.
Praise the LORD.

 

Praise, Creation And Nature
What does it mean, to praise? Let us turn to the simplest reality. If we praise a person, what do we say? “You did that well.” — that refer to his work; or perhaps, “You are wise.” — that concerns himself. Praise means that whatever is well done, good or beautiful is recognized and valued as such and that the person who has accomplished it or to whom it belongs is told this. Then it brings joy to him who hears this and also to him who unselfishly expresses it.

But can this be done in relation to God? Evidently it can. He himself did it. In the story of creation we read that whenever a day was ended and the work stood in its perfection, “God saw it and it was good.” And at the conclusion, “God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good.” God approves of everything that was brought into being by His creative power and gives it the right to exist. He declares that it is good and it should be and that it is an honor to God that He created it. His honor is the glory of being who He is and of having created what He created. “I will not give my glory to another.” (Isaiah 42:8) He said. No one shall ever say that someone else created the world or that it is uncreated and exists in its own right. No one shall ever say that the world is meaningless or wrong insofar as He created it. And God will demand a reckoning of everyone who by sin or negligence spoils His work.

When man praises he freely accepts this glory of God. He recognizes the wonder of God’s work and expresses this in works. Actually, the world should praise God, but it is unable to do so. Trees, beasts, sea and stars are voiceless. The soul and heart of man must know and feel His glory and his mouth must convey the praise to God.

Is it easy for man to think this way?…Something gets in the way, something which determines the thought of modern man within the last few centuries — the concept of nature. This is for him the simply existent, the self-evident, self-valid, and self-based; that for which one cannot conceive a beginning or an end, and whose cause cannot reasonably be sought for. The man whose mind is ruled by this view can only say, “How mighty is the world!” He can feel its fullness and say, “How good that the world exists!” He may be lifted to enthusiasm by its beauty. But all this is not what the Psalm means by the praise of God, for the world so conceived of claims to exist by its own power.

But the world is not “nature” but “creation.” This concept of course includes all that philosophy, poetry and science can say about nature, but it takes on a different meaning. The concept of creation restores the world to God’s hand. Anyone who tries to realize this recognizes also how difficult it is. But it must be done, otherwise we fall into unbelief, living with the idea that the universe which knows nothing of God and only adding a few Christian accents.

The Function Of Man Is To Praise
But what is praise? …it is something conscious, lofty and festive….(In Psalm 148) the heaven and earth and stars are called upon  — it is they who should praise. But they cannot do this; they have neither consciousness nor freedom, nor speech. In them praise is fettered, it sleeps. So man comes, takes all this into his heart and gives speech to that which has been voiceless….this is man’s function, to translate into words of praise the essential praise that lies in all things

Misunderstanding The Work Of Creation
The work of creation — we think of it according to the teachings of science — is so ordered that it can be misunderstood as autonomous nature. The fact that something has been made obtrudes itself the more strongly the more imperfect it is. The more perfect it is, the more it is, so to speak, released from dependence upon the maker and appears to be self-sufficient. The world has this mysterious quality and that is what we misunderstand when we speak of “nature.”….It is not like the work of man, which is made today and disintegrates tomorrow. It remains. This does not refer to the variations which also belongs to that which we call “nature”: the rhythms of light, the movements of the constellations, the seasons, the birth and death of individual beings. All this is part of an order that abides. But the reference is to the structure of the whole, the impression of solidity, reality, dependability which every element of creation produces. And in a deeper sense the fact that no mythical, demonic power of destruction prevails over the existence of the world.

The Ability To Praise
The man who voices this praise is close to all things. Not in pantheistic fashion; for him too the word is valid, “He commanded and they were created.” There is no mingling of God and the world, but the closeness which he feels is that of creature to creature. In their createdness all things are brothers and sisters, In this intimacy he can set free the word that is bound in them and lift it up. God  receives, as it were, the glory of the work that he expended on creation, receives it back from the mouth of the man who believes in Him and loves Him….The word of praise has largely disappeared from our lips, just as today the joy in beauty seems to be disappearing. Poets vie with each other in words of strife and anguish…We must reacquire the ability to praise…The world is created, the heavens, the light of the sun, the mountain, the trees, all are created, and praise be He who has created them — all this is prayer and we must strive to acquire it again.

Psalm 139

1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.

19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!

20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.

21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD,
and abhor those who rise up against you?

22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.

24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

The Region Of God’s Light
Everything that is, is known. Everything moves in the region of God’s light. Everything by its being and enduring expresses the image of truth which the thought of God implanted it it by creating it….Our self-knowledge is the endeavor to think that which God knows about us. Our truth is in His knowledge, and we know only so much about ourselves as we know through Him…This is a thought that can give us peace — peace and breadth of vision. How wonderful it is that everything abides in truth and that untruth is only a shadow between us and all that it….We can understand the piety of the Old Testament only if we remember that there everything is penetrated by the experience of God’s reality…God was not merely an idea, but more real for the Jews of that time than the ground on which they stood…No distance in space, no remoteness offshoot, no veil of potential futurity is able to withdraw anything from the glance of God…We stand not merely in the light of his glance but in the verdict of his judgment.

The Good Shepherd

John 10: 10-15

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep….

Christ comes in the freedom of his love to lead them to life, to the fullness of life, abundant as flowing water. He knows those who believe in him and they know him. It is the intimate knowledge of he Redeemer and the redeemed…Christ cares for them because they are his, bought at the price of his atonement. …Christ knows his sheep as the eternal Father knows the Son and as the Son knows the Father…the relationship between the shepherd and the flock is drawn into the abyss of divinity…the intimacy of Jesus with his own extends even through the end, through death…perhaps we have at some time had a presentiment of our own death, have envisioned the final hour of absolute loneliness, when everything will fall away; everything will abandon us. And he more ambitious the words that were spoken, the more completely shall everything which they promised disappear including wealth, progress and culture. Only our confidence in Christ will not be deceived. He remains. He accompanies us. He dies with everyone who believes; and he will “raise him up again in the last day (John6:39)

 Nature in the Old Testament
In the Psalms we encounter nature…It is not nature in he way in which it is treated by our lyric poets…Nature is the work of God’s creative power, a revelation of his glory, the instrument of His might. His word I active in all things. There is as yet no conception of what we call the laws of nature. The Old Testament knows nothing of this yet…here the word of God, His will that rules, bestows and punishes, takes the place of the laws of nature. When it rains it is God who sends the rain….ultimately it really is God who causes these things, but He does it by intermediary causes: the energies of nature, the power of the growth of the seed, the organs of life. But these intermediary causes play no part in the conceptions of the Old Testament, and God does everything immediately even to the last detail. Hence the religious intensity of the language….But in a different sense that in mythology, everything is filled with God. Yet he is never Nature itself, neither its order, nor its soul. God is very close to nature but there is never a fusion. Always He is the Lord, Lord of nature because He is Lord of himself. His hand fashions all that exists; His word is active in every occurrence; but He does not need nature nor does He intermingle with it. Nature never succeeds in being God or becoming a part of Him. He always rises above it, is far beyond it, sufficient unto Himself, unapproachable in His majesty.

The World in the Old Testament
The world does not need to exist. It is not a natural necessity; it depends upon the free will of God. Man is the final expression of the world. His conduct determines the meaning of its existence.  If he is guilty, the possibility arises that God may recall the decree of creation (Gen 6:6) “It repented him that he had made man o n the earth and he was touched inwardly with sorrow of heart.”

 Science
The activity portrayed in Psalm 28 — that the creatures of God, the angels, but also man who prays and sings, behold what happens upon earth and bring it into their adorations — are we today capable of this?…It was not difficult for medieval man. He viewed the world as a cosmos. If we look at Dante’s Divine Comedy we find it most complete image. The world appears as an enormous sphere, filled and penetrated by the powers of God….But then the exact sciences began to prevail and they created the modern concept  of “nature.” Medieval man could never have understood what this means. For him everything had a symbolic meaning; everything revealed God. The medieval cathedrals express this divine symbolism which underlies every object and every relation. But science asks for the natural how and why. Everywhere it finds the fact which is as it is, immovable and unchangeable, proved by experiment and expressed by a law which states what must happen, and  how and why. At the same time man begins to conceive of the world as not only great but infinite. Where then is God? Man no longer seems to have a proper place for him. So he tries to draw him into the world and a modern pantheism arises which conceives of God as the World-Soul…

A Revolt Against Absolute Truth
This God of the Old Testament has created the world and man — each one of us. He did this not because he was compelled to by some necessity but in complete freedom. He willed it because He willed it. And he did this, we say, out of love. The meaning of this — when God who has infinite love and fruitfulness in himself, has love for the finite, for man — surpasses all reason.  It is not God who constitutes the problem, that is, whether He is or how He is, but the finite, that is how it can be and why, and for what reason. God is not the question, but man — man and the world. Therefore, in a conversion, a metanoia, of thought, which we must accomplish in sheer reliance on revelation, the question which we have asked is reversed, and so is the answer. Atheism, which constantly spreads and grows ever more decidedly states just he opposite: man, nature, and the work of man which uses eh stuff of nature, ae the only realities and suffice for everything. “God” is a creation of man, necessary and meaningful as long as man is still immature. Now man has become mature and takes the final step of maturity. Now he no longer needs “God.” Man and his world constitute the whole. This satisfies in many persons the self-love of present day man. Actually it is the revolt against absolute truth. To believe means to make a decisions in favor of the truth. The believer sees the greatness of the world, overcomes the claim of its apparent independence, and, in faith and prayer, restores it to the hand of God.

Doing Good
He who attacks God’s truth condemns man to folly. Hence the dreadfulness of the experiment which is being tried today to form men without God, nations without God. This is being undertaken for the first time…but if we ask “What shall I do?” Wisdom replies, You must learn to distinguish. You must bring into your life things that are of divine character, things that do not merely pile up or excite, but that have value…And what has value? Wisdom replies “the good!” When we have performed a duty, even thought it was unpleasant, the situation changes, the action is past, but something remains: the good that has been done. This has divine character.

Touched By Grace
What happens when a man is touched by grace and believes? He is not magically transformed. No magic power of  good comes upon him; he does not suddenly become a different person. To hear the call of God and to stand within the covenant — or let us speak of ourselves: to hear the word of Christ and decide to follow him, does not mean to be at once a changed man. The new thing comes into man as a germ and he is as he is. A word a truth, a scene form the life of the Lord falls into the soul and begins to grow.

No One Can Say “I am a Christian.”
Strictly speaking no one can say “I am a Christian,” but only “I want to be one.”…We must not despair of ourselves. Sometimes we are tempted to lose courage when we notice again and again the same faults: anger, uncharitableness sloth, untruthfulness. Shall we ever escape them? There is only one answer to this: you must go on, day by day, hour by hour, for you are not yet a Christian but by honest effort you will become one.

God’s Name
God’s name is “I-am the I-am” It means that God is the one who alone is real of Himself and possesses all power. We as men “are” not in the true sense. But God is He whose essential nature means that He is. An abyss of a name. An abyss for the mind which ponders upon it. A vaster name for the heart which experiences it. When this takes place there opens within the man himself, the finite man, a corresponding unfathomable depth, of which he is otherwise unconscious…You cannot say ‘God is here and I also.’…You are only ‘before him’. The unapproachableness of God’s majesty stands between. Then it may happen that we receive the grace to experience the name of God.

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Romano Guardini on the Imitation Of Christ

July 21, 2009

 

Among the instructions that Jesus gives the Twelve before sending them out into the world are the following:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  
Matthew 10:34-39

Jesus’ message is one of good will. He proclaims the Father’s love and the advent of his kingdom He calls people to the peace and harmony of life lived in the divine will. Yet their first reaction is not, union, but division. The more profoundly Christian a man becomes, the deeper the cleft between him and those who refuse to follow Christ — its exact measure proportionate to the depth of that refusal. The split runs right through the most intimate relationship, for genuine conversion is not a thing of natural disposition or historical development, but the most personal decision an individual can make.

The one makes it, the other does not, hence the possibility of schism between father and son, friend and friend, one member of a household and another When it comes to a choice between domestic peace and Jesus, one must value Jesus higher, even higher than the most dearly beloved: father and mother, son and daughter, friend or love. This means cutting into the very core of life, and temptation presses us to preserve human ties and abandon Christ. But Jesus warns us: If you hold “life” or the world fast, sacrificing me for it, you lose your own true life. If you let it go for my sake, you will find yourself in the heart of immeasurable reality.

Naturally this is difficult; it is the cross. And here we brush against the heaviest mystery of Christianity, its inseparableness from Calvary. Ever since Christ walked the way of the cross, it stands firmly planted on every Christian’s road, for every follower of Christ has his own personal cross. Nature revolts against it, wishing to ‘preserve’ herself. She tries to go around it, but Jesus has said unequivocally, and his words are fundamental to Christianity: He who hangs on, body and soul, to “life” or the world will lose it; he who surrenders his will to his cross will find it — once and forever in the immortal self that shares in the divine life of Christ.

On the last journey to Jerusalem, shortly before the Transfiguration, Jesus’ words about the cross are repeated. Then, sharply focused, the new thought:

“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul?”
(Matthew: 16:26).

This time the point plunges deeper. The dividing line runs not between one person and another, but between the believer or one desirous of belief and everything else! Between me and the world. Between me and myself. The lesson of the cross is the great lesson of self-surrender and self-conquest. The passion of the Lord is the time that we turn to Christianity’s profoundest, but also most difficult mystery: Why did Jesus come? To add a new, higher value to those already existent? To reveal a new truth over and above existing truth, or a nob1er nobility or a new and more just order of human society? No, he came to bring home the terrible fact that everything, great and small, noble and mean, the whole with all its parts — from the corporal to the spiritual, from the sexual to the highest creative urge of genius — is intrinsically corrupt.

This does not deny the existence of individual worth. What is good remains good, and high aspirations will always remain high. Nevertheless human existence in toto has fallen away from God. Christ did not come to renew this part or that, or to disclose greater human possibilities, but to open man’s eyes to what the world and human life as an entity really is; to give him a point of departure from which he can begin all over with his scale of values and with himself. Jesus does not uncover hidden creative powers in man; he refers him to God, center and source of all power.

It is as though humanity were one of those enormous ocean liners that is a world in itself: apparatuses for the most varied purposes; collecting place for all kinds of passengers and crew with their responsibilities and accomplishments, passions, tensions, struggles. Suddenly someone appears on board and says: What each of you is doing is important, and you are right to try to perfect your efforts. I can help you, but not by changing this or that on your ship, it is your course that is wrong; you are steering straight for destruction.

Christ does not step into the row of great philosophers with a better philosophy; or of the moralists with a purer morality; or of the religious geniuses to conduct man deeper into the mysteries of life; he came to tell us that our whole existence, with all its philosophy and ethics and religion, its economics, art, and nature, is leading us away from God and into the shoals or onto a reef. He wants to help us swing the rudder back into the divine direction, and to give us the necessary strength to hold that course. Any other appreciation of Christ is worthless. If this is not valid, then every man for himself; let him choose whatever guide seems trustworthy, and possibly Goethe or Plato or Buddha is a better leader than what remains of Jesus Christ whose central purpose and significance have been plucked from him.

Jesus actually is the Rescue-Pilot who puts us back on the right course. It is with this in mind that we must interpret the words about winning the world at the loss of the essential; about losing life, personality, soul, in order to possess them anew and truly. They refer to faith and the imitation of Christ.

Faith means to see and to risk accepting Christ not only as the greatest teacher of truth that ever lived, but as Truth itself (John 16:6). Sacred reality begins with Jesus of Nazareth. If it were possible to annihilate him, the truth he taught would not continue to exist in spite of the loss of its noblest apostle, but the Truth itself would cease to exist. For he is the Logos, the source of Living Truth. He demands not only that we consent intellectually to the correctness of his proclamation –  that would be only a beginning — but that we feel with all our natural instinct for right and wrong, with heart and soul and every cell of our being, its claims upon us. We must not forget: the whole ship is headed for disaster. It does not help to change from one side of it to the other or to replace this or that instrument. It is the course that must be altered. We must learn to take completely new bearings.

What does it mean, to be? Philosophy goes into the problem deeply, without changing being at all. Religion tells me that I have been created; that I am continuously receiving myself from divine hands, that I am free yet living from God’s strength. Try to feel your way into this truth, and your whole attitude towards life will change. You will see yourself in an entirely new perspective. What once seemed self-understood becomes questionable. Where once you were indifferent, you become reverent; where self-confident, you learn to know “fear and trembling.” But where formerly you felt abandoned, you will now feel secure, living as a child of the Creator-Father, and the knowledge that this is precisely what you are will alter the very tap root of your being. . . .

What does it mean to die? Physiology says the blood vessels harden or the organs cease to function. Philosophy speaks of the pathos of finite life condemned to aspire vainly to infinity. Faith defines death as the fruit of sin, and man as peccator(Latin for sinner) (“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6:23). Death’s arm is as long as sin’s. One day for you too its consequences and those of death’s disintegration will have to be drawn. It will become evident how peccant (sinful, guilty) you are and consequently moribund.

Then all the protective screens so elaborately arranged between you and this fact will fall, and you will have to stand and face your judgment. But faith also adds, God is love, even though he allows sin to fulfill itself in death, and your Judge is the same as your Savior, If you were to reflect on this, over and over again until its truth was deep in your blood, wouldn’t it make a fundamental difference in your attitude towards life, giving you a confidence the world does not have to give? Wouldn’t it add a flew earnestness and meaning to everything you do?

What precisely is this chain of acts and events that runs from our first hour through our last? The one says natural necessity, the other historical consequence, a third, something else. Faith says: It is Providence. The God who made you, saved you, and will one day place you in his light, also directs your life. What happens between birth and death is message, challenge, test, succor — all from his hands It is not meant to be learned theoretically, but personally experienced and assimilated. Where this is so, aren’t all things necessarily transfigured? What is the resultant attitude but faith?

Religion then!  But there are so many, one might object, Christ is just another religious founder. No, all other religions come from earth True, God is present in the earth he created, and it is always God whom the various religions honor, but not in the supremacy of his absolute freedom. Earthly religions revere God’s activity, the reflections of his power (more or less fragmentary, distorted) as they encounter it in a world that has turned away from him.

They are inspired by the breath of  the divine, but they exist apart from him, they are saturated with worldly influences, are formed, interpreted, colored by the historical situation of the moment. Such a religion does not save. It is itself a piece of “world,” and he who wins the world loses his soul.  Christ brings no “religion,” but the message of the living God, who stands in opposition and contradiction to all things, “world-religions” included.  

Faith understands this, for to believe does not mean to participate in one or the other religions, but: “Now this is everlasting life, that they may know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou hast sent, Jesus Christ” (John 17:3) Men are to accept Christ’s tidings as the norm of their personal lives.

My attitudes towards things to be done may be various. One follows the principle of maximum profit with minimum effort. This is the clever or economical approach. I can also consider a specific task in the light of duty the fulfillment of which places my life on a spiritual and moral level. Christ teaches neither greater cleverness nor a higher sense of duty, he says.

Try to understand everything that comes into your life from the viewpoint of the Father’s will. If I do, what happens? Then I continue to act in accordance with cleverness and utility but under the eyes of God. I will also do things that seem foolish to the world, but are clever in eternity. I will continue to try to act ethically, to distinguish clearly between right and wrong and to live in increasing harmony with an increasingly dependable conscience. All this, however, in the living presence of Christ, which will teach me to see things I never would have noticed alone. It will change my concepts and trouble my conscience — but for its good, stripping it of  self-confidence, of moral pride, and of the intellectual stiffness that results from too much principle-riding. With increasing delicacy of conscience will come a new firmness of purpose and a new energy (simultaneously protective and creative) for the interests of good.

Similarly, my attitude to my neighbor may be ordered from various points of view I can consider others competition, and attempt to protect my interests from them. I can respect the personality of each. I can see them as co-sharers of destiny responsible with me for much that is to come, and so on and so forth. Each of these attitudes has its place, but everything is changed once I understand what Christ is saying. You and those near you — through me you have become brothers and sisters, offspring of the same Father.

His kingdom is to be realized in your relationship to each other. We have already spoken of the transformation that takes place when fellow citizens become brothers in Christ, when from the “you and me” of the world springs the Christian “we.” Much could be said of the Christian’s attitude to destiny and all that it implies in the way of injustice, shock and tragedy: things with which no amount of worldly Wisdom, fatalism or philosophy can cope — and preserve its integrity This is possible only when some fixed point exists outside the world, and such a point cannot be created by man, but must be accepted from above (as we accept the tidings of divine Providence and his all-directing love). St. Paul words it in his epistle to the Romans (Chap. 8): “Now we know that for those who love God all things work together unto good….“This means an ever more complete exchange of natural security self-confidence, and self righteousness, for confidence in God and his righteousness as it is voiced by Christ and the succession of his apostles.

Until a man (or woman) makes this transposition he will have no peace. He will realize how the years of his life unroll, and ask himself vainly what remains. He will make moral efforts to improve, only to be come either hopelessly perplexed or priggish. He will work, only to discover that nothing he can do stills his heart. He will study, only to progress little beyond vague probabilities — unless his intellectual watchfulness slackens, and he begins to accept possibility for truth or wishes for reality. He will fight, found, form this and that only to discover that millions have done the same before him and millions will continue to after he is gone, without shaping the constantly running sand for more than an instant. He will explore religion, only to founder in the questionableness of all he finds.

The world is an entity. Everything in it conditions everything else. Everything is transitory. No single thing helps, because the world as a whole has fallen from grace. One quest alone has an absolute sense: that of the Archimedes-point and lever which can lift the world back to God and these are what Christ came to give.

One more point is important: our Christianity itself must constantly grow. The great revolution of faith is not a lump of reality fallen ready-made from heaven into our laps. It is a constant act of my individual heart and strength I stand with all I am at the center of my faith, which means that I bring to it also those strands of my being which instinctively pull away from God. It is not as though I, the believer, stood on one side, on the other the fallen world Actually faith must be realized within the reality of my being, with its full share of worldliness.

Woe to me if I say: “I believe” and feel safe in that belief. For then I am already in danger of losing it (“So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.”– 1 Corinthians: 10:12). Woe to me if I say: “I am a Christian” — possibly with a side-glance at others who in my opinion are not, or at an age that is not, or at a cultural tendency flowing in the opposite direction. Then my so-called Christianity threatens to become nothing but a religious form of self-affirmation. 

I “am” NOT a Christian; I am on the way to becoming one — if God will give me the strength. Christianity is nothing one can “have”, nor is it a platform from which to judge others. It is movement. I can become a Christian only as long as I am conscious of the possibility of falling away. The gravest danger is not failure of the will to accomplish a certain thing, with God’s help I can always pull myself together and begin again. The real danger is that of becoming within myself unchristian, and it is greatest when my will is most sure of itself. I have absolutely no guarantee that I shall be privileged to remain a follower of Christ save in the manner of beginning, of being en route, of becoming, trusting, hoping and praying.

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The Child Model

July 8, 2009

Let The Children Come To Me

Fr. Romano Guardini, A Reading Selection from The Lord
Following the rancor over who will sit on the left and right hand of Jesus in Heaven,  Jesus replies with a demonstration that in Mark’s text is rendered with great precision: the Lord fetches a child, leads it into their midst and seating himself, puts his arm around it: Look, you wrangling, self-interested grown-ups here is the opposite of the lot of you! This child can teach you how to evaluate and behave! God’s kingdom is not like the world’s, where some command and some obey, where there are quick ones and slow ones, astute and stupid, those who succeed and those who fail. There it is the contrary!

Jesus’ jubilant words upon his apostles’ return from their wonderfully fruitful mission suggests this same idea of complete revaluation: “I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and the prudent, and didst reveal them to little ones” (Matthew 11:25-26). St. Paul is later to reiterate the same idea in his first Corinthian epistle: “For consider your own call, brethren; that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. But the foolish things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the ‘wise,’ and the weak things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the strong” (1:27)…

What does Jesus mean when he sets up the child as a model? If we read the texts carefully, we see in them three distinct ideas.

One of them is in the words: “And whoever receives one such little child for my sake, receives me.” To receive means to accept, to make room for, to respect. Unconsciously we reserve such regard only for the person who is able to prove himself, who accomplishes something, is useful and important. The child can prove nothing. It is only a beginning, has not yet accomplished anything; it is still only a hope. The child cannot force the adult to take it seriously. Real people are the grown-ups; the child counts only as a fraction. This opinion is not to be found solely among stern realists and egotists, but also — indeed often to a greater extent — among affectionate, motherly or pedagogic types; the form it takes here is that of excessive protectiveness.

The usual attitude of the adult toward the child is one of either friendly or unfriendly disregard all too evident in the forced, playful tone which he feels obliged to assume toward the young one. To this Jesus says: You do not receive the child because it cannot enforce respect. For you it is unimportant. But let me tell you, wherever there is something defenseless, there am I! A divine chivalry protects that which is unable to protect itself and declares: I stand behind it!

And then the final thought: “Amen I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” This then the prerequisite of heaven: child-likeness.

Yet what terrible abuse the word has suffered! What sentimental silliness, oppressiveness, what human and religious mediocrity have fed upon it! What weakness and dependency have excused themselves as “childlike”! What inability to associate with independent and mature people has referred itself to this adjective! It is high time to look closer at this word of the Lord!

What is it that the child has which the adult in Jesus eyes so sadly lacks? What norm is this by which one’s very suitability for heaven is measured? Certainly not childish charm; that would be a lyricism, something Jesus had nothing to do with. Innocence perhaps? But the child is not innocent. The Bible is much too realistic to call a child innocent. It knows human nature, and that even the one-day-old infant is a carrier of evil. And the small child? Already it contains all the ingredients of wrong-doing — to be sure, mainly dormant, though often astonishingly awake and active. No serious pedagogue can claim that children are innocent. The “innocent child” is an invention of grown-ups eager to stake a sentimental claim to the vanished purity of their own childhood.

If neither its charm nor its purity, what is it then that Jesus praises in the child? Apparently the exact opposite of the chief (and negative) characteristic of maturity. The grownup seeks security, and in the process, becomes sly and hard. He is afraid, and fear abases. The child, on the other hand, does not yet have the instinct of self-preservation — at least not nearly so strongly; he lives in a world of unruffled trust. This attitude is no credit to him, for it springs from ignorance rather than virtue; nevertheless, it is there, and engenders an unconscious courage toward existence.

The adult has aims toward which he selects and applies his talents. He sees everything with an eye to its usefulness, thereby rendering everything unfree. He has intentions, and nothing so hampers existence, altering it for the worse, as these, which trammel action and falsify vision. The child has no intentions. (This is, of course, exaggerated; of course it has intentions too, as well as fear and everything else that grown-ups have, for it begins to grow up with its first breath.) Strictly speaking, the child too desires this and that; but for Jesus’ purpose here, which is to illustrate an idea rather than demonstrate psychology, it is correct to say: the child meets reality as it is with simple acceptance. Therefore in his presence things can move freely; he permits them to be themselves.

In the adult there is much unnaturalness. He does not leave life alone, but constantly tries to improve it. The result is what is known as culture and has many precious values, but values bought with artificiality and distortion. Between man and man, heart and heart, person and thing, everywhere loom intermediates, shutting out reality. Everywhere considerations, precautions break life’s spontaneous élan. This, that and the other natural reaction “is simply not done”; the phrase stands at every walk of life, an invulnerable policeman, guarding it from itself.

The child is completely natural. It says what it thinks — often to the embarrassment of the adults — and shows what it feels; hence it is considered ill-mannered. Manners, for the most part, conceal feelings rather than cultivate selflessness, understanding and love. The good manners of adults are heavy with dishonesty and guilt. By contrast, the child is simple and candid. This is due to no virtue on its part, but to the fact that it does not yet feel the inhibitions that make it so difficult for the adult to be honest. The child’s honesty is untried, but it is there, a living reprimand.

The adult is self-centered; he is constantly examining, testing, judging himself. Herein lies the earnestness of life, which consists of a feeling of responsibility, conscious living. The immediacy of things and people is broken in the grown-up world, for the adult is constantly projecting himself between them and him. The child does not reflect. His life moves outside himself. He is open to the world and everything in it. Unconsciously he stands straight and looks straight at things as they really are. Then comes the change; gradually his open doors close upon a room of reflection and self-assertion of which he is the center.

In the child’s attitude toward life lies his humility: as Jesus says, he does not count himself for much. He does not drag his small ego into the foreground; his consciousness brims with objects, people, events — not himself. Thus his world is dominated by reality: that which is and really counts. The grown-ups’ world is cluttered with unrealities: with formalities and illusions and substitutes, intermediaries and trivialities all taken with tremendous seriousness. The child, accustomed to dealing directly with things as they are, is surprised and confused by the hardness and narrowness he confronts in his elders.

Naturally here too we must guard against exaggeration. We must not substitute the romantic notion of childish innocence with a new romanticism. Nevertheless, roughly speaking, this is what Christ means by childlike; this is the attitude of heart whose lack he so deplores in adults.

Because the child is natural, open, without intentions or fear of failing to assert itself, it is receptive to the great, revolutionary ideas in Christ’s teaching of the kingdom. The same teaching is met with reserve by the maturer listener. His cleverness condemns it as impossible; his caution warns him of the consequences; his self-esteem is soon up in arms; his hard grasp cannot let go. He has encysted himself in artificialities, and fearful for his brittle little world, he prefers not to understand. Fear has made his eyes blind, his ears deaf, his heart dull; as Jesus would say, he is over-mature.

The Jewish people, the Pharisees and Scribes and high priests, how ‘grown-up’ they are! The whole heritage of sin with its harshness and distortion looms at us. How old they are! Their memory reaches back more than one and a half millennia, back to Abraham — a historical consciousness not many nations can boast. Their Wisdom is both divine gifr and fruit of long human experience; knowledge, cleverness, correctness. They examine, weigh, differentiate, doubt; and when the Promised One comes and prophecy is fulfilled their long history about to be crowned, they cling to the past with its human traditions, entrench themselves behind the Law and the temple, are sly, hard, blind — and their great hour passes them by. God’s Messiah must perish at the hands of those who ‘protect’ his law. From his blood springs young Christianity and Judaism remains prisoner of its hope in the coming of One who has already come!

The child is young. It has the simplicity of eye and heart which welcomes all that is new and great and salutary; it sees it for what is, goes straight to it and enters in. This simplicity, naturalis christianitas, is the childlikeness to which the parable refers. Jesus means nothing sentimental or touching; neither sweet defenselessness nor gentle malleability. What he values is the child’s clarity of vision; ability to look up and out, to feel and accept reality without ulterior motives. Fundamentally, the attitude of the child is precisely the attitude suggested by the word “believer”: the natural attitude of a faith which is open to all that comes from God and ready to accept the consequences. In other words, something great and holy, and clearly not to be had for the asking. Not for nothing does the text read: “…unless you turn and become as little children…” unless you outgrow maturity, turn back to the beginning and build from the ground up…This is a long and difficult process.

The spiritual childhood Jesus means emanates from God’s fatherhood. Everything comes to the child from its father and mother is related somehow to them. They are everywhere, the origin, measure and order of all things. The adult soon distances himself from his parents; in their place stands the world, irreverent, disinterested or hostile. Once the parents have gone, everything becomes homeless. For the child of God a fatherly Someone is again omnipresent; to be sure, he must not be distorted to a super-projection of a earthly father, but must remain who he is, as he has revealed himself: God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ who helps us to accomplish his will.

The childlike mind is the one that sees the heavenly Father in everything that comes into his life. To do this requires a great effort: wisdom must be sucked from the naked continuation of cause and effect; love from the accidental. To do this sincerely is difficult. It is the “victory that overcomes the world” of which St. John speaks. To become a child in Christ’s sense is to reach Christian maturity.

Benedict XVI says that the Our Father does not project a human image onto  heaven but shows us from heaven — from Jesus — what we human beings can and should be like. The figure of Jesus is the mirror in which we come to know who God is and what he is like: through the Son we find the Father….Through him and only through him, do we come to know the Father. And in this way the criterion of true fatherliness is made clear.

We are not ready-made children of God from the start, but we are meant to become so increasingly by growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus. Our sonship turns out to be identical with following Christ. To name God as Father thus becomes a summons to us: to live as a “child,” a son or a daughter. “All that is mine is thine” [John 17:10] and the father says the same thing to the elder brother of the prodigal Son [Luke15:31]. The word “Father” is an invitation to live from our awareness of this reality. Hence, too, the delusion of false emancipation, which marked the beginning of mankind’s history of sin, is overcome. Adam, heeding the words of the serpent, wants to become God himself and to shed his need for God. We see to be God’s child is not a matter of dependency, but rather of standing in the relation of love that sustains man’s existence and gives it meaning and grandeur.

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When Jesus Spoke of Justice

July 2, 2009

Fr. Guardini examines the theme of Justice as presented in two popular Biblical parables. The first comes from the Prodigal Son, the second from the Parable of the Day Laborers.

 

Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son

Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”
Luke 15:11-32

Justice And The Elder Son In The Return Of The Prodigal Son
It was the elder son who had to bear responsibility and the main burden of the estate. The father had probably never thought of pleasing this undemonstrative, sober offspring who seemed so entirely absorbed by his work, and he never would have asked for favors, whereas the younger one took everything that came his way as light-heartedly as he scattered gifts. How otherwise are we to explain the bitterness of the complaint that not even the smallest animal was ever slaughtered for his pleasure or that of his friends? When his younger brother set out into the world with half of their heritage, he left behind him one heart filled with rancor and disdain. Now the spoiled profligate is back, penniless only to be received like a prince! The father’s reply to his eldest objections fails to impress.

But what if the father had agreed with him? If he had said to the home comer: Go your way! You’ve had what you wanted! Then justice would have been restored. The older brother would have been satisfied. Or would he? Completely? If he was a good man, certainly not. The sight of his brother would have robbed his peace. Contrary to all feeling of “justice” a not to be stifled small voice would have insisted that somehow he had missed a sacred opportunity.

Justice is good. It is the foundation of existence. But there is something higher than justice, the bountiful widening of the heart to mercy.  Justice is clear, but one step further and it becomes cold. Mercy is genuine, heartfelt; when backed by character, it warms and redeems. Justice regulates, orders existence; mercy creates. Justice satisfies the mind that all is as it should be, but from mercy leaps the joy of creative life. That is why it is written that heaven rejoices more over one sinner who does penance than over a hundred who have no need of it. High above all the stupidity and evil mankind arches the spacious dome of mercy. When justice enters here insisting on its narrow rights it becomes repugnant. We catch the undertone in the gently disdainful words about the ninety-nine “just”; that heap of righteousness so excellent and respectable, is incomparably less than one penitent over whom the angels can rejoice (Luke 15:7).

If we look closely we begin to wonder whether perhaps justice’s protest isn’t in reality directed against penance. Does the person stiff with justice really want the sinner converted? Doesn’t he somehow feel that he is thus escaping his just deserts, endangering the existent order? Wouldn’t he prefer to see him remain locked in sin and forced bear the consequences? Perhaps he considers the return to grace a more or less underhanded trick played at the expense of justice. What would things come to if everyone like that scamp there, after wasting half a fortune, extricated himself from the affair by turning virtuous! And actually, the true conversion does break the bounds of mere justice. It is a creative new beginning—in God, as theology teaches us, since the sinner alone and unaided is incapable of true repentance. According to the logic of evil, sin produces blindness, which leads to fresh sin, which in turn leads to deeper blindness, ultimately ending in complete darkness and death. Conversion breaks this vicious circle of cause and effect, and is thus already grace. If there is seraphic joy in heaven over the conversion of a single sinner, it is because that conversion is a victory of grace. To the so-called pure sense of justice, conversion is a scandal. For justice runs the risk not being able to see beyond its borders to the realm of love and creative liberty where the renascent forces of the human heart and divine grace are at home. Woe to him who insists on living in mere justice. Woe to the world in which justice alone reigned!

 

Jacob Willemszoon de Wet's The Parable of the Workers in the Vinyard

Jacob Willemszoon de Wet's The Parable of the Workers in the Vinyard

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o”clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o”clock, he did the same. And about five o”clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o”clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
Matthew 20:1-15 

Justice And The Parable Of The Day Laborers
For if those who have worked but a few hours receive the same as those who have toiled all day, their wage is devaluated. And the landowner’s answer is anything but placating: Can’t I do with my money as I please? No, you cannot! There is a law concerning your money and your power, the law of justice. You and your property are subject to this higher law and we accuse you before it!

Nevertheless, the proprietor’s unwelcome reply hits the nail on head. We begin to understand when we realize that he represents God. The parable means simply this: He who distributes work and wage and the various destinies of men is the Lord of all existence, God. He is the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Primal One.

Everything that is, is his. There is no law higher than he. His decision is always valid. Do we agree? Sincerely? No. Even from God we demand justice. We expect his omnipotence to be curbed by his justiceThis expectation is not irreligious. There is a whole book in Bible on the self-assertion of justice in the face of God: the Book of Job. Job knows he has not sinned, at least not so as to have deserved anything like the terrible afflictions that have been sent him. Therefore he sees himself a victim of injustice. Job’s friends appoint themselves his judges and declare that he must have sinned, for such misfortune can only be punishment.  However, the palaver comes to a sudden end; they are disdainfully silenced by God himself, who personally appears to Job, wrapped in the mantle of living mystery. Whereupon all discussion ceases. What does this mean?  That we attempt to call God to order in the name of justice only as long as we are intrinsicalliy ignorant of who he is.  As soon as the essence of his holy being even begins to dawn on us, our objections wither away. For everything comes from God, has its roots in God.  Justice is  not a law superior to everything, God included, God is Justice.  As soon as justice ceases to be considered a thing in itself, it becomes a crystallization of the living, divine essence. Never can it be an isolated platform from which man can confront his God; he who stands on its stands ‘within’ God, and must learn from him who is more than justice what living justice means….

The parable of the day laborers culminates in the words: “Or art thou envious  because I am generous?” Divine liberty surpassing all judgment, that there is no higher instance to invoke; the whole is the mysteryof God’s goodness, of his bounty and love. The New Testament another word for it: grace. Man is warned against locking himself in justice rather than opening his heart to the goodness of divine reason and action; he is told to surrender to grace, which is higher than justice, if he would be free.

A curious thing happens to the spokesman of justice in this parable. He is accused of envy. What a reply to one convinced that he has suffered an injustice! Instead of hearing as he expected, that untamperable right will be restored, he must learn that his real motive for intervening was inferior! Yet if we accept Scripture as holy word, we learn a strange rule about human nature: that when it becomes necessary to invoke justice, that irreproachable value and crystalline motive, almost always something is rotten in Denmark. Too often ‘justice’ is used as a mask for quite different things.

Human justice is highly problematical. It is something man should strive for but not lean upon. Perhaps we come closest to the true sense of the New Testament if we say that genuine justice is not the beginning but the end, and that the other justice so pompously displayed as the fundament of morality is a dubious thing. True justice is the fruit of bounty, and practicable by man only after he has been initiated into the school of divine love where he has learned to see people as they really are, himself included. Before one can be just, one must learn to love.

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Romano Guardini On Revelation

June 18, 2009

 

Lazarus At The Gate

Lazarus At The Gate

There was a certain rich man who used to clothe himself in purple and fine linen, and who feasted every day in splendid fashion. And there was a certain poor man, named Lazarus, who lay at the gate, covered with sores, and longing to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. And it came to pass that the poor man died was borne away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; but the rich man also died and was buried in hell. And lifting up his eyes, being in torments, he saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.’ “But Abraham said to him, ‘Son, remember that thou in thy life hast received good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now here he is comforted whereas thou art tormented. And besides all that, between us and you a great gulf is fixed, so that they who wish to pass over from this side to you cannot, and they cannot cross from your side to us’”
Luke 16:19-26

The account is thought-provoking. Above all, we are struck by the warning that eternity is being prepared now, during these fleeting days of our worldly existence is precisely when we are deciding our eternal existence. In John 9:4 it says: “I must do the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.

Both beggar and worldling live forever; not simply as a continuation of their former lives, but as those lives of earthly existence are evaluated by God, once and forever.  Decisive in our parable here was that the one (Lazarus) through a life of privation and misery still held fast to God, whereas the other (the rich man clothed in purple and fine linen ) enjoyed himself and forgot both God and mercy.

But there is more to it than this, as the final sentences reveal. The damned one begs Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them to think of their own hereafter. Abraham replies for this they have Moses and the prophets: in other words, revelation as it stands in Holy Scripture and is taught daily. That will not help, pleads the other; what is read from Scripture or preached in the temple no longer has the power to impress. But, he suggests, should eternity itself in the form of a dead man confront them, they would take heed.

But Abraham only remarks: If they do not heed Scripture and the teachings of the faith, they would also be unimpressed should someone return from death to admonish them. And we are reminded of that other Lazarus who actually made the dreadful return and lived among just such demanders of flesh and blood proof. And the result? They assemble the high council who declares the sign dangerous to the welfare of the people and debates how it would best to put Lazarus out of the way! (John 12:10-11).

So this leads us to the question: How can the reality of God make itself known to men? Is it easier for some people to grasp revelation than for others? Why doesn’t God speak to us himself, since he upholds and transfuses all being? Why must we depend on printed and spoken matter, on teachers and preachers?  It is difficult to say. Ultimately the reply will be: Because it is not God’s will. Still, we can guess a little.

Certainly, God speaks through everything and to everything, also to me. Everything that is reveals him; everything that happens is an effect of his guidance and somehow affects the conscience; he is palpable at the core of me. But all this remains vague. It is not enough to live by, not to live as I feel I must. It is ambiguous and needs the ultimate clarification that can come only through the word of God, and this he does not speak to everyone.

Specific revelation of reality and God’s will comes to us only through people. Divine Providence selects an individual with whom he communicates directly. The chosen one pays dearly for the grace; we have only to think of what has been said of the lot of prophet and apostle. In him we see what it means to stand in immediate contact with the word of God how uncompromisingly it isolates him from the rest of humanity strips him of the ordinary joys of existence. The one who has received the call passes it on to the next. “Thus speaketh the Lord God!” This is the way God has chosen to convey his will to us, and he who wants to understand, will. Moreover, he will soon realize that this method of divine communication is the only one suitable to human nature.

The idea that everyone is strong enough to bear immediate contact with God is false, and conceivable only by an age that has forgotten what it means to stand in the direct ray of divine power, that substitutes sentimental religious “experience” for the overwhelming reality of God’s presence. To claim that everyone could and should be exposed to that reality is sacrilegious. God is holy and speaks specifically only through his messengers. He who refuses to accept him through his chosen speakers, who insists on hearing his voice directly shows that he either does not know or will not admit who God is and conversely who he himself is.

We can also put it this way: God has established both man’s essence and his salvation on faith. Faith, however, seems to come into the full power of its intransigence and purity only when applied to one sent by God. He who insists on hearing God himself shows that what he really desires is not to believe, but to know; not to obey, but to react to his own experience. It is entirely fitting and proper that man hear his God through his fellow men, for all lives are inextricably interwoven into the one great community of human existence. No one life is self-sufficient.  My existence draws on the core of my being but simultaneously on others in order to exist. Plantlike, we sprout from our own seed, but we grow by feeding upon other growth. In the same way we arrive at truth through personal recognition; the ‘ingredients’ which go into that recognition, however, are brought us by others. Man is humanity’s way to life — and of course, to death. Man is humanity’s way to God, and it befits us that God’s word personally penetrate each of our hearts, but that it be brought to us by others.

God’s word through the lips of man: that is the law of our religious life. It demands humility, obedience, docility. At the same time, it is reassuring, this sharing of experience, for the prophet does not simply pronounce words; he voices something that has passed through his own life. He, the called one, stands behind his words; his conviction carries them; on his faith the faith of the others is kindled. This is not essential, for the divine word exists in its own God-given power, independent of the private faith or doubt of the speaker. Still the speaker’s faith is a help for the hearer.

In Christ, the living God speaks from our midst. Not as science speaks or cold law. God’s Son does not write his message on the walls of validity, demanding that we read and obey. His thought is formed in his human intellect, experienced in his own heart, and sustained by his love. He is consumed by “the zeal” for his Father’s house and burns for love of the Father’s will. He is the living Word. And from his holy life at once human and divine flies the spark that lights the flame of our own faith.

To this day Christian faith glows from the warmth, security and love of truth which burned in Jesus’ soul. The vitality of the divine word in him is other than that which so stirred the prophets. The prophet cried: Thus speaks the Lord God! Jesus says: “But I say unto you . . .” His word does not serve, it is; creative, activating force. The ardor with which Jesus lives the word he speaks, gives it its vital fire. We believe in Christian teaching as it was brought to us warm from the lips of the Lord. Were we to attempt to isolate his word from the living person behind it, taking it for itself, it would no longer be the word God meant. Were we to apply a single statement of his directly, from “God” to hearer, it would cease to be Christian. Christ is not only Messenger, but also Message, “the Word” that we believe. What he says is what it is only because he says it; the Speaker , whose speech is an act of self-revelation.

Good. But then the question returns, more pressing than ever: Why aren’t we permitted to warm ourselves in Christ’s fire? Why may we not we hear his message from him? Since he is the living truth of God, corporeal Epiphany of the hidden Creator, why aren’t we permitted to see him for ourselves? Weren’t the men and women of his day incomparably more privileged than we? What wouldn’t we give hear the accents of his voice, to see him cross a street? What immeasurable assurance it would be to catch his eye and feel his power surge through us, to know with every cell of our being who he is? Why isn’t this granted us? We must know.

Did those who saw him really have an advantage over us? Was “hearing” then fundamentally different from what it is today? One thing makes us pause: if it was so advantageous to personal faith to see the Lord, why did those of his day fail to believe? For with the exception of a very small group (possibly no larger than that of his mother, the two Marys and John) they did fail! Apparently then, it is erroneous to think that Jesus’ bodily presence necessarily overcame resistance to belief. It is equally erroneous to think that immediate enthusiasm can replace the real essentials of faith: obedience, effort, responsibility. What would God’s visible light make easier, the decision? The quitting of self for the things of God?  Obedience? Surrender of soul? He who wishes to facilitate such things is underestimating the earnestness of faith; he is prone to seek refuge from obedience in sensational religious “experience.” Probably he also has false conception of what divine light itself is, humanly enough imagining it as an overpowering sensation straight from the realm of the religious rather than from that of simple Christian faith. If we suppose that direct contact with Jesus would have automatically eliminated the intrinsic risk and struggle that are the elements of genuine faith, we are far from comprehending the Master of souls! Never would he have permitted this.

The person swept to him on a wave of enthusiasm would have to stand his test later. The unavoidable hour would surely come in which he would, be forced to a fresh decision — without benefit of transport, in which he too would have to take the step from the “direct experience of Jesus” to faith in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word and Messenger of God.  Isn’t this precisely what was demanded of the Apostles at the Lord’s death, then at his Resurrection, and above all at Pentecost?

What then is really the Incarnation? It is the fulfillment of revelation, in which the unknown God makes himself known, the remote God suddenly steps into human history. Incarnation is literally what the word says: the living, actual Word of God, the Logos, Son in whom all the mystery of the Father is gathered, becomes man through the Holy Ghost. Do we see the essential now? Becomes man — not “enters into” a man. The Heavenly One is translated to the earthly scene; the Remote One becomes temporal reality. As Jesus was quoted in John 12:45:  “And he who sees me” need no longer guess; he “sees him who sent me.”  The Hidden One steps out into the open in human form, identifying himself with the form, content and sensory realm of the Word made man.

Incarnation: the “deus absconditus,” a hidden God revealed in flesh and blood — strange how this very self-revelation hides him from us. How difficult it is to accept as God’s living messenger, as the long awaited Messiah, this Son of Man whom we see eating, drinking, walking the streets; who is threatened by countless enemies; who suffers. How am I to recognize in this transient, already doomed figure the ultimate measure of being for all ages?

God speaking human words from human lips, speaking from a human destiny, opens eternal doors to us. To enter them is what is known as faith; it is to know, too, who God really is: not the “absolute” or the “ground of being” but — let us dare the word — the “human” God. Precisely here lies our chief difficulty, in his humanity. God cannot be so! We protest. His flesh and blood is simultaneously revelation and veil. The tangible erects walls; that which makes revelation what it is also makes the “foolishness” that shapes our “stumbling block” (as St. Paul once put it)

We know only too well how difficult it is to hear Christ solely through his messengers. And not only through those first inspired ones who had been his witnesses and whose words bore the power of the Holy Spirit, but through messengers of messengers, thousandfold removed. Spokesmen, moreover, who are not always swept along by their own vital conviction, sometimes indeed little more than hired teachers. We know what an added difficulty it is that the sacred word has been worked over and over by the centuries, and not without endless controversy and hatred and resistance; that it has been dulled by usage, lamed by indifference, abused by greed and the thirst for power. On the other hand, it is a help to know that so many have given their minds and lives to it; that two thousand years of history have lived in it; that so much humanity vibrates in the divine tidings.

Doesn’t Christian community mean helping one another to understand God’s word? Haven’t we all known some person who has made Christ’s message clearer to us, has taught us to pattern our lives more truly after his? Who is not grateful to some personage of the past, whether a great mind or a great saint or anyone who has taken his faith seriously?

When we reflect a little we begin to wonder whether Christ’s contemporaries really had such an advantage over us. Was faith easier when Jesus wandered through Galilee, or after Pentecost when St. Paul preached in the cities, or during the persecutions, when the endurance of the martyrs blazed triumphantly or in the centuries of the great saints of the middle ages, or now? A hundred years or five hundred, how much do they affect the eternal truth of God? To believe means to grasp what is revealed by the spoken word, the historical figure — through the veil that covers them both. The initial revelation must have been wonderfully powerful; but often insurmountable too the question: who is that man?

Then the first barrier fell, barrier of God as a contemporary. After that he could be seen and interpreted only in retrospect, through the glowing experience of apostles stirred by the power of the Spirit. But the more this indirect revelation spread, the thicker, simultaneously, grew its veil, woven of the human weaknesses of its messengers and the distortions and abuses of human history. The problem of the later-comers, that of excavating the living Son of

God from sermon, book and example, from the sacred measures of divine worship, from works of art, pious practice, custom and symbol, is difficult, certainly, but probably not more difficult than that of recognizing him in the son of a carpenter.

And the conclusion? Aren’t we almost forced to conclude that faith’s situation remains essentially the same? Always both are present: what reveals and what veils. Always the demands remain the same: that our desire for salvation meet the desire for our salvation voiced in the sacred word. Naturally, in the course of time much changes; at one period a specific obligation is easier, at another more difficult; but the essential demand remains unchanged: the hearer must discard the familiar ground of human experience and take the plunge into the unknown. Always he must lose his life in order to find it (Matthew 10:39).

How this happens in each individual instance, it is impossible to say. Fundamentally there is but one essential requirement: readiness on the part of the hearer to receive revelation.  Something in him must keep constant watch, listening, straining for the reply to his unceasing qui vive? (French:Who goes there?) No longer may he find full satisfaction in this world; he must constantly be on the look-out for signs of the other. Then when one day that other actually presents itself, he will recognize it.

The form of one approaching through a fog is at first ambiguous. It can be almost anyone. Only two will know him: he who loves him and he who hates him. God preserve us from the sharp-sightedness that comes from hell. Let us keep to the keen perception of love, even if it is only that of beginning love; keep our desire to love one day with heart and soul for the coming of God’s Son into our lives. Then when he does come, we shall recognize him. There is no rule for the manner of his coming, nor for the hour.

It may be that the profoundest presentation has nothing to say to us, whereas a simple admonition or the magnanimity of a human heart may bring light. It can come instantly but it may take years of waiting and perseverance in obscurity. You must persevere in the truth!

 It is better to continue to bear uncertainty than to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence. Genuine readiness already contains the seed of faith; untruth, on the other hand, that self-deception that pretends to view it does not really hold, and the violence with which we force ourselves to a creed which does not root in the heart, already contain the seeds of destruction.

This does not mean that doubts are already the beginning of a fall from faith. Questions can always arise to trouble us, particularly as they are usually afflictions of the heart that have assumed intellectual form. As long as our faith has not yet passed over to the beatific vision it will be constantly challenged — particularly in the glare of this over enlightened, all-destructive age, bare of vision and unwarmed by the glow of experience, where it can survive only by the sheer force of fidelity. Moreover, there are profound questions that return after every supposed solution, mysteries whose intrinsic meanings, not solved but lived, increasingly c1arify the faith of those who live them.

 

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Fr. Romano Guardini: Four Meditations from The Lord

June 3, 2009

 

Fr. Romano Guardini
Fr. Romano Guardini

Just over forty years ago, Romano Guardini (1885-1968) died in Munich. In her biography of him, Hanna-Barbara Gerl called the Italian-German philosopher and theologian “a father of the 20th-century Church.” Guardini’s books nourished the most lively segment of Catholic thought during the 1900′s. And one of his students was special – he’s the current pope. When he was a student not much over the age of twenty, Joseph Ratzinger had the chance not only to read, but also to listen in person to the man he chose as his great “master.” As theologian, as cardinal, and also as pope, Ratzinger has repeatedly acknowledged in his books that he intends to proceed along the pathways opened by Guardini. In “Jesus of Nazareth,” he declares from the very first lines that he has in mind one of the classics by his master: “The Lord.” Here are four selections from that great work, part of a series listed under Scriptural Exegesis.

Baptism: A Spiritual Event  
Jesus arrives at the Jordan, the profound experience of childhood and the long process of maturity behind him. He is fully aware of the stupendousness of the task before him and of the powers that rise to meet from the depths of his being. Yet his first gesture, first words are an expression of deep humility. No claims to special privileges; no: that may be the law for others, but not for me! He goes up to John and asks to be baptized. To demand baptism implies readiness to accept the word of the baptizer, to admit oneself a sinner, to do penance, and accept willingly all that God sends, however difficult. No wonder John is startled and tries to dissuade him! But Jesus quietly takes his place in line. He refuses to be an exception; voluntarily, he places himself within the law that is valid for all.

This humble descent to the human level was immediately answered by an outpouring from above. Since the fall of man (and the resultant corruption of nature — Romans 8:20-22) a barrier had separated us from the beatific presence of the omnipresent God in his heaven. For a moment this barrier was removed. While Jesus stood there praying, writes Luke, stressing that it was a spiritual event, an infinite encounter took place: the illimitable abundance of the divine Father streamed into the Son’s heart. Event “in the spirit” obviously; yet also an act as real, or more real, than any tangible reality.

The Holy Spirit lifts man beyond himself in order that he may experience God the Holy One and his love. We have already spoke n of the mystery of Jesus’ existence: he is the actual Son of God, bearer of the living godhead which streams though him, illuminating every cell of his being; yet he is also true man, like us in all things, sin excepted. In other words, he grows, he increases with the years in wisdom and grace, and not only in the eyes of the world, but also in the eyes of God… At this point the mystery deepens: Jesus is the Son of the Father. At all times “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” (John 14: 11-12). Yet it is also said that he “comes” from the Father and will return to the Father, and what is still more baffling, upon the cross he cries out in an agony of forsakenness (Matthew 27:46).

Jesus’ every act is governed by the Father; hence the Spirit (through which the Lord was conceived and made man) is always with him, for it is the bond of love uniting Father and Son. Yet we read that the Holy Spirit “comes’ over Jesus, just as one day, sent forth from the Father, it will come to all whom Jesus calls his own. The intellect cannot cope with such paradoxes, though it somehow senses the reality beyond all reality, the truth beyond all truth. Precisely here lies the danger. The mind must never allow itself to be misled into seeming ‘comprehension,’ into facile sensations or phrases with nothing solid behind them. The whole problem is a mystery, the sacred mystery of the relationship of the triune God to his incarnate Son. We can never penetrate it, and the knowledge of this incapacity must dominate our every thought and statement concerning Jesus’ life.

The Father’s Will:  Following The Logic Of God
Again and again Jesus speaks of his Father’s will. This paternal will is not to be understood as a fixed, preconceived program including everything that will ever occur in the course of time. Rather, it lives, takes shape in Jesus, directing him during the progress of events according to the need of the hour; The Father and his will are with him always, upholding, surrounding, fulfilling and urging him constantly on. Jesus, who stands alone in the world, is at home in this will; so much so that its fulfillment is “food” to him (John:4:34).

From time to time this volition condenses’ to a specific demand or will issues its precise instructions. It is to these that Jesus is referring when he speaks of his “hour”. This direct and intimate bond between the Father and Son is wonderful, but it is heavy too, and often inflicts severe pain. We are reminded of the conflict that is the prophet’s constant lot. He stands squarely in the turmoil of a daily life moved by necessity, pleasure and earthly values. Men desire to eat and drink; to live and possess; to work, create, reap honor and power. In a world of such desires, comprehensible to all, the prophet is necessarily a foreign body. He obeys a different logic, the logic of God: “For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thought above your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9).

Thus the prophet’s acts must seem folly, if not a source of actual danger to those about him (Jeremiah). He reacts to a different stimulus, that of the Spirit, wind that “blows where it will” (John 3:8) The sudden, inexplicable words and actions that it inspires must often seem arbitrary and senseless to those ‘outside’ that will.

If this is already so true of the prophets, how entirely true must it be of Jesus! John’s gospel is filled with references to the impression Jesus makes on the practical Pharisees and Sadducees. They are uneasy, shocked , indignant. They feel their order shaken and the safety of their people dangerously undermined. This alone explains that otherwise blasphemous passage: “Are we not right in saying that thou are a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” (John 8:48)  — in other words, half pagan and at mercy of demonic forces.

A ray of light falls from hereupon that strange verse in Mark’s account (3:20-21): “And they came to the house, and again a crowd gathered so that they could not so much as take their food. But when his own people had heard of it, they went out to lay hold of him, for they said ‘He has gone mad.’ And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebub,’ and, ‘By the prince of devils he casts out devils.’” Then follow the lines telling how his mother and brothers, alarmed, appear outside and call him.

From incidents such as these we sense something that holy, awful law under which Jesus stands; the deep , intimate, inexorable power that guides him, slashing like a sword into his daily life and into that of his loved ones, causing infinite pain to all. We feel the terrible loneliness about him and realize what it must have cost to believe in him and to follow him to the end.

And yet, the Father’s will is the Father’s love. Though his complete acceptance it, Jesus enters into the intimacy of God, where all things are luminous with his tenderness and power. This will is constantly forming directives for all needs as they present themselves.

Thus also here at the wedding-feast Jesus’ hour is to come. Mary is little daunted by her Son’s rebuke. She feels the approaching moment of decision and instructs the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” Then it happens: water is transformed into choicest wine — symbol of the divine abundance which streams from above, waiting to find its way into human hearts.

Scandal
Mark notes that Jesus teaches as one “having authority not like the Scribes” and Luke points out that all “marveled the words of grace that came from his mouth.” Here ”grace” must be understood in its full Greek sense; simultaneously pure heavenly gift that came neither demanded nor forced, and loveliness, delicate, mobile beauty. The words amaze and delight his hearers with their power and charm. Yet swift as an adder, the objection strikes: “Is this not Joseph’s son?” Into the moment, luminous with the beauty and holiness of Jesus’ message, darts something malignant. It comes from the blackest, basest dregs of human nature. The Lord recognizes it at once: the enemy…

Here counter-revelation — revelation of scandal and hate. Outburst of man’s irritation against God and the essence of God: holiness. Scandal is a revolt against the living God. At the bottom of the human heart , side by side with the human longing for the eternal source and fulfillment of all things, lurks resistance to that source: elementary sin its lair. Seldom does it confront holiness openly; almost always it strikes at the bearer of holiness; at the prophet, the apostle, the saint, the confirmed believer. Such people do irritate. Something in us finds the very presence of one dedicated to God unbearable. We revolt against him, ‘justifying’ our distaste with his shortcomings (naturally, there are always shortcoming) or with his sins. How could such a person be the bearer of sanctity! Or perhaps it is only his weaknesses (which from our dour viewpoint of rejection immediately swell perniciously), or his eccentricities that are so maddening — nothing is more trying that the eccentricities of a saint! In short ,the fact that he is a human, finite being is too much to bear.

Jesus and Human Suffering
Jesus is not merely a great figure of charity with a boundless heart and tremendous capacity for service. He makes no attempt to track human suffering to the root in order to eradicate it. He is no social reformer fighting for a more just distribution of material wealth. The social reformer aims at lessening suffering; if possible at removing it. He tries to meet human needs in a practical manner: to prevent misfortune, to readjust conditions in order that happy, physically and spiritually healthy people inhabit the earth.

Once we see this clearly, we realize that for Jesus the problem is quite a different one. He sees the mystery of suffering much more profoundly — deep at the root-tip of human existence, and inseparable from sin and estrangement from God. He knows it to be the door in the soul that leads to God or at least can lead to him; result of sin but also means of purification and return.

This is obviously what is meant by his words about taking up the cross and following him (Matthew 16:24). Perhaps we come nearer to the truth when we say: Christ did not avoid pain, as we try to. He did not ignore it. He did not insulate himself from it. He received it into his heart. Sufferer himself and realist, he took people as he found them, with all their shortcomings. Voluntarily he shared their afflictions, their blame, their need.

Herein lies the immeasurable depth and breadth of Christ’s love. Its power is the triumphant power of truth in a love which seizes reality and lifts it out of itself. Jesus healing is divine healing; it reveals the Universal Healer and directs towards him. It is inseparable from faith. In Nazareth he is unable to work miracles because the people there do not believe. To force the supernatural upon them would be to destroy its intrinsic sense: the faith from which it springs.

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