Compassionate Love - Part 1

A COMMUNITY OF TENDER LOVE

by Fr. Robert Sharkey

In some of her writings, Catherine speaks of MH as being ‘a wounded heart’. She explains that a wounded heart is also an open heart, a listening heart, a heart filled with faith. In using these images, she is trying to get at what, in her mind, is the essence of MH. It is an ideal, a Gospel style of life, that the members of MH are called to; and that the Little Mandate tries to describe.

The central image Catherine grasps at, in trying to explain this, is the wounded heart. The heart is the center of the personality, the core of a human being, the place out of which our commitment to God and our highest aspirations come.

So, then, what does it means to have a wounded heart? A wound is a break in the integument, in the surface of a body, the skin which encloses the body. It’s a ‘breaking open’ of that surface and an exposing of what’s inside. Through a wound, what is inside us comes out, and things outside can come into our inner being. The deeper the wound, the deeper the exposure, and the more deeply the thing outside can penetrate.

Our individuality is like a ‘closing off’ of our personalities. By the very fact that we’re individual beings, we are separated from one another. In addition to this basic reality, we have all kinds of defenses that we erect to guard and protect our inner selves.

We make sure that nothing can get in; or, at least, only what we wish to let in. So, having a wounded heart means allowing our inner being to be ‘broken open’—to be exposed and unprotected; allowing what’s inside to come out, and what’s outside to come in.

That’s why a wounded heart is also a listening heart. As Catherine understands it, to ‘listen’ means to let the whole being of someone speaking to us ‘come into’ our very self. Through this wound in our personality, we let another personality enter into us, as much as is possible.

This demands faith. So Catherine regards a wounded heart as a heart filled with faith.

Reflecting on this notion of the wounded heart, I connected it with something Catherine talks a lot about: the Russian idea of umilenie (pronounced oomilenyee), from the Greek eleos, which we can translate as ‘mercy’ or ‘tender compassion’ or ‘love’.

Umilenie (eleos) is a scriptural idea. It is a tenderness of heart, a compassion of heart. The word ‘com-passion’ means to ‘feel with’—to take on the pain of others. It is a warmth, a love, an openness to others. This is the Russian ideal.

Different cultures are drawn toward different ideals of the Gospel and try to make them their own. You might say that they focus on what is, for them, a particularly attractive element in the Gospel. For the Russians, it was this umilenie, this tenderness of God, of Jesus Christ, that became their ideal. For them, this tenderness is the mark of the Christian, and the fullest expression of Christian life.

You see it in The Brothers Karamazov—especially in Fr. Zossima, the monastic elder who welcomes everybody with warmth, understanding, and tenderness, even the terrible old man Karamazov. In one scene of the novel, he gets up during a discussion and bows before the accursed man, acknowledging his pain and suffering. Alyosha, the youngest brother, is another figure with umilenie.

By the end of the novel, it’s as if this tender, compassionate, warm love is made the goal or ideal of life, and is put forward as the salvation of the world. This ideal is something very real and powerful in the Russian Christian mind.

Umilenie is a scriptural notion. The Hebrew word is hesed, a word used of God in connection with his covenant, his bond of commitment to the people of Israel—who, in turn, respond by committing themselves to him.

In this mutual attachment, there’s an involvement with one another. One factor of this sharing of life is hesed: the kind of love I’m trying to describe. No one English word captures it. ‘Covenant love’ is sometimes used to translate it.

God has this kind of love towards his people in their need, their weakness, their stumbling and sinfulness. He ‘takes them on’—totally! He embraces them and makes them his own. He involves himself in their lives. The word hesed implies a complete unity, a sharing in everything—including human weakness and degradation.

In response, the people are themselves called upon to return this kind of love to God, and to show it to one another. This is the underlying purpose of so many of the social laws in the Old Testament concerning widows, orphans, the poor and marginal. They are to be cherished.

Hesed is a characteristic of God; therefore, it must be a characteristic of God’s people. As God shows it toward them, so they must show it toward one another. They are to be a community of hesed, of tender loving-kindness.

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ shows the same tenderness toward us. He is the ultimate in God’s hesed, God’s compassion for us. Christ does not merely stand back and look at us, expressing sorrow for us and distantly feeling our pain. No, he actually ‘gets in there’ and ‘takes it on’—joining in it, living all of it with us, enduring it himself, just as we do.

Ultimately, he went to the limit of death, to the full extent of this ‘distancing from God’ that death is—experiencing death as no merely human being could ever experience it. And, through this experience, he brought us back to life!

Our Lady is also a symbol of this hesed, this tender love of God. The icon of Our Lady of Vladimir—also called Our Lady of Tenderness—is meant to portray this quality of tender compassion. That is why it’s such a favorite icon among the Russians.

What Catherine was inspired to establish in Madonna House was a community of hesed. In her writings, she keeps ‘walking around’ this idea, trying to talk about a family whose special focus is this umilenie—this tender, compassionate love.

This is the unique specialization of MH. What do we try to do here? Love! This is the meaning of the wounded heart, listening heart, faith, etc. When we think of the various elements in our Little Mandate, we see this same theme arising from it.

Identification with the poor: Not a bountiful giving from our riches, but a taking on of poverty and living it.

Take up our cross, and being one with the poor: That’s a work of com-passion, of feeling with.

Love without counting the cost: This means having a wounded heart. That’s what umilenie does; it loves without counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay there with me [God] … Go without fears into the depth of men’s hearts: When we are in umilenie, we’re in communion with God, because this is such a central attitude of God’s heart. When we are in this attitude, we are in contemplative communion with God, and, consequently, in union with others.

to be continued

Combermere Diary

LITTLE BEAUTIES AND JOYS

by Paulette Curran

As I write this, I can see outside the office window a common sight—an almost white sky, tall dark snow-covered trees, white ground, and more snow falling.

The snow came late this year, just before Christmas with the exception of a few flurries. And, probably because it was late, we seemed to appreciate it more. "Isn’t it beautiful!" said one person after another. And so it was. It covered the grayness, dappled the trees, and cushioned our footsteps. One could feel, in the house and in the land, the subtle quieting that happens when snow comes.

Here in our cold northern land, in these rural areas, though it brings added work and makes driving difficult, snow is a blessing, a gift from God. It brings a white beauty to the gray, sleeping earth, and literally blankets—insulates—that earth.

If the snow comes first, before the cold becomes bitter, the ground doesn’t freeze deeply. Then, later, when spring comes, the snow seeps into the thirsty earth and remains there to nourish the vegetables, fruit, and flowers. Otherwise, much of the melt-off runs into the rivers, lakes and other low spots, causing flooded basements and worse.

Someone once estimated that fully one-third of the men’s work hours in the winter are, in one way or another, taken up by snow removal—sanding and shoveling paths, plowing and snowblowing roads, pulling snow down from roofs.

Yes winter, the quietest time of year, brings its own work. It is the time when the men of the bush crew cut down trees, and those of the maintenance department saw and chop and move and pile the wood so it’s ready to be used as fuel in our stoves and furnaces.

It is the time when the carpenters do their indoor jobs. This winter, they’re working on the annex, the place where our aging members will live and receive whatever care they need. The men have just put in the hand rails and counter tops and painted the closets.

It is the time when jobs are done that we let go of during the season when we grow our food. It’s the time when the women who work in the gift shop and handicraft center clean, polish, repair, price and store until summer what you send us to sell, and the time when the librarians catalogue books.

This year, it’s a time when we’re having a monthly lecture series for both ourselves and the local people on "A Christian Vision of Culture." And it’s a time when our applicants, in training to become members of MH, are given classes in Catherine’s spirituality to prepare them for the vocation they will be embracing.

Closely connected with the natural seasons, the Church gives us the liturgical seasons and feasts. The greatest feast of winter is, of course, Christmas. Is there any feast or season in which the divine and the human are more obviously interpenetrated?

This year brought us a special joy. On December 23rd, our good friends Ralph and Linda Pfoh entered the Catholic Church, making their profession of faith at the evening liturgy. Fr. Bob Papi, our associate, had instructed them, two of the staff—Ralph Edelbrock and Linda Lambeth—were their sponsors, and Fr. Pelton received them into the Church.

The Pfohs have been our friends for a long time—ever since 1972 when, while visiting friends, they decided to take a different route home, which led them to our gift shop. They later returned there, bought an organ, and became friends with Linda Lambeth, the head of the gift shop.

The next evening was the Vigil Mass of Christmas. Just before it began, Jean Fox carried the infant to Fr. Pelton who placed it in a cradle beneath the altar. "Christ is born!" we sang. "Glorify him! Christ is now on earth! Receive him!"

"Don’t be anxious about the shape your heart is in," Fr. Pelton told us in his homily. "Just bring it to the one who has come to bring us paradise. You belong in his heart.

"If you forget for a moment or hour or day how to get there, just say to Mary: ‘You know the way. Bring me there—where I can find my home in the heart of Jesus."

After Mass, we went home to a festive collation and, starting on Christmas Day, we had three days off with time for leisurely breakfasts and long conversations with one another. We skied, ice-skated, played cards, and read. All through the twelve days of Christmas, during festive suppers, individuals and groups sang carols from all over the world.

One night, Fr. Wild, playing the part of G.K. Chesterton, read us selections from that author’s writings about Christmas, telling us that fun and beauty have always been very much part of our Catholic tradition.

On New Year’s Eve, we had our traditional holy hour in which we prayed for every nation on earth by name.

The following night, a full moon shone on the snow, and though it was bitterly cold, it was clear and so exquisitely beautiful that two different groups braved temperatures of less than -25C to hike to cliffs overlooking the river.

Now we are back to Ordinary Time, but time here is never uneventful. It’s been a time of comings and goings—of visitors leaving after Christmas, of staff moving to other assignments (some short-term, some long).

This month, 22 of us took the third and final week of the ‘basic school’, an Elijah House course in prayer counseling that helps us to help others and to work through our own inner ‘blocks’ that get in the way of our living the Gospel life.

May God give all of us— and all of you, our readers—the eyes to see beauty, and the childlike trust to find joy, even in times of suffering, in all the little beauties and pleasures he strews in our paths in such abundance every season of the year.

Memories of Catherine

HAVE A SANDWICH OR TWO

by Joseph Cushing

When Catherine was living in Harlem, she was invited to speak to a service club in a Southern city.

She was sitting in the train, relaxing and reading a book, when the conductor approached her and told her that she wasn’t allowed to sit in the car she was in. She inquired why, and he informed her that it was for ‘Jim Crow’. She was told that she’d have to move ahead one car, which she did.

On arriving at the appointed city, she was ushered to the hall where the talk was to take place. Conversing with the club president, she said that there must be a convention in town.

He wasn’t aware of one, so she told him of the incident on the train. She assumed that, since a train car had been reserved for Jim Crow, there must have been a convention.

He looked at her and said, "Lady, are you pulling my leg?" She didn’t understand. Finally realizing that she didn’t know what ‘Jim Crow’ was, he told her that it related to black people, and that they weren’t allowed to sit in the same car as white people.

This hit her very hard. After it sank in, she decided to give a different talk than the one she intended. Vehemently condemning the treatment of black people, she told her white audience that all people were created equal in the eyes of God.

The reaction of the club members was far from civil. She was not thanked for her talk, and was ushered to the train station post-haste.

When MH took over the old hotel on the main highway—which became known as St. Joe’s—a group of Seventh Day Adventists picketed the place with placards reading, Heresy Preached Here.

Catherine, returning from a trip to Barry’s Bay, passed by St. Joe’s, got the picture of what was going on, and continued a half-mile down a side road to Madonna House.

There, she went to the kitchen, brewed some fresh coffee, and made a box of sandwiches. Returning to St. Joe’s, she approached the people on picket duty and said:

"It’s a bitterly cold day, and you’ve been walking back and forth. You must be tired and hungry. Have a sandwich or two, and some hot coffee."

They knew who she was. They set down their pickets, and had the sandwiches and coffee. They then picked up their pickets and left. Nothing more was said.

Attached to the back wall of St. Joe’s was a work shed and a woodshed. Some ten feet away was a smoke house, containing an old stove.

One day, Louis Stoeckle and a couple of other men killed a pig and cut it up. They hung the meat in the smoke house, built a fire in the stove, and left—expecting that the meat would be smoked.

A while later, the staff at MH noticed smoke coming from the direction of St. Joe’s. They rushed down there, and discovered that the smoke house was engulfed in flames.

There was great fear that the flying embers would set the sheds and main house on fire. So a pail brigade was begun, getting water from the nearby Madawaska River.

Catherine was running around, shouting orders. Fr. Cal stopped her, and said in a loud voice: "Go back to Madonna House and stay there!"

A momentary look of shock passed across her face; then she turned and left. People were somewhat amazed—they’d never seen that side of Fr. Cal before.

Fr. Dwyer, the parish priest, brought down a pump and fire hose; and with it the fire was brought under control.

And among the ruins of the smoke house was found some very well-done pork!

Summer school at MH usually attracted quite a number of young people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties.

Following lunch one day, the group wandered out to the yard. Just outside the main building, in those days, was a clothesline. And on the line were some women’s undergarments and brassieres. One young man glanced at them, made a comment, and laughed.

Catherine was just behind the group, and overheard the comment and the laughter. She called the young man back to the clothesline, and asked what he found funny about the objects on the line. He was, of course, embarrassed.

She used this incident as the topic for her after-dinner talk in the dining room. She stated that, in her days in Europe and Asia, there were two occasions on which a man would tip his hat: when passing a Catholic church, or on meeting a woman who was breast-feeding her baby in public. She went on to say that few things were held in higher regard or greater respect.

A few days later, I was sitting out front of the house, about ten feet from the river bank, chatting with a friend. Catherine and several staff were swimming. She came out of the water, grabbed her dressing gown from a chair, and sat down with us.

In the course of conversation, my friend made a comment that was loaded with scrupulosity. Catherine, almost unmindful of the comment, said: "When I get to heaven, I’m going to gather a pile of small bricks and spend an hour each day throwing them down to hit little scrupulous people on the head!"

With that she nonchalantly walked into the house.

Love One Another - Part 7

CALLED TO BE HAPPY

by Fr. Emile Brière

This column explores the dimensions and challenges of being a committed, dedicated, loving Christian in today’s world.

 

God is love: three divine Persons who are one God, and who love one another in an infinitely perfect manner, each totally for the others. Because of this, he wants to share this love with others; that’s why he created the angels, that they should be free as he is and loving as he is.

To each angel he gave a specific nature, each one more beautiful and perfect than the others. God created billions of such mighty spirits, each more beautiful than the others, and the most perfect, the most beautiful, the greatest, was Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the one to whom God entrusted the Light of Knowledge.

These angels were pure spirits, pure intellects; and their rebellion has been called the ‘Revolt of the Intellectuals’. The Book of Revelation indicates that one-third followed Lucifer in his flight from God, his "I shall not serve."

All of them became full of pride, totally incapable of asking for forgiveness or acknowledging their sin.

God created billions of these pure spirits so that they might love one another and him, responding to his love freely. All God’s power is love. All his wisdom is love. His entire will is that his creatures might love one another and him.

He created human beings—male and female he created them, according to his image and likeness (Gen 1:27)—to love him with their whole minds and hearts, and to beget children who would also become lovers of him and of each other.

Adam and Eve rejected his love, but since they were deceived by the evil one, God gave them a second chance. He promised them a redeemer who would reconcile the human race with himself. For centuries Israel, his chosen people, looked forward to the coming of the promised Messiah. How much God strove to make of Israel a people who would love one another.

Then the angel Gabriel came to Mary and said to her: "Rejoice so highly favored. The Lord is with you. … You are to conceive and bear a Son and you must name Him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High."

Mary said to the angel, "But how can this come about since I am a Virgin?"

The angel answered: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. …"

Mary said: "I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me" (Luke 1:29-38).

‘I am the handmaid of the Lord’. With these words began in earnest the divine work of our redemption.

God desires our unity with him and each other so eagerly that he has made us capable of achieving it by cooperating with his grace.

How much Jesus wants us to be one! How much the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth and love groans until that union be perfected!

How much the evil one tries to create divisions and hatreds among us by appealing to the vices we inherited from original sin!

But God is mightily at work in the Church, and in all persons of good will, who make the effort to love others, creating for His Son a beautiful bride to which He will be wedded at the end of time and for all eternity. We are all called to be that one Bride of Christ together.

Envy and jealousy should not exist among us. No one should try to enslave other people in any fashion. We are peers, all equally belonging to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, all called to be totally happy with God for all eternity. The best way to be a fruitful member of the Body of Christ is to seek to serve others, to seek to be the last, not the first.

God’s plan is so beautiful: total oneness among us and with him, but the price is high, since we must die to our selfishness. Yet not dying to our selfishness will make us more and more evil!

If I do not strive to curb my vices, I shall become more and more evil and in danger of eternal damnation. In other words, we must die to our selves in order to love others, to love God with our whole heart and soul. Such an attitude alone will lead to life, to joy, to union, to eternal happiness.

Let us pray for each other that we may fight the good fight of love and persevere unto the very end.

Edmonton

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

by David Linder

In late July I finished an introductory unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Edmonton’s largest mental hospital. CPE is an intense eleven-week course, giving training for ecumenical ministry in a hospital setting. It was an enlightening though exhausting experience.

Hey, what’s it like working with those ‘loonies’ out at the hospital?

The above question was addressed to me by one of the professors on the seminary faculty. My response: frustration and a need to defend.

As calmly as I could I replied, "I’m sorry. I don’t work with any ‘loonies’, but I do work with many beautiful people." He got the point.

God is most often found in the very ordinary things of life.

So spoke one of the patients, who struggles with bi-polar illness. She had just spent 15 minutes telling me about her spiritual life and faith journey.

The statement came as a surprise to me, for many times in similar circumstances, illness seemed to so overwhelm the person’s faith journey that I lost perspective. I presumed that ‘healthy’ religion or depth of faith was not all that possible among the mentally ill.

This particular patient’s sharing obliterated my prejudice. I realized that illness, whenever it strikes in a person’s life, only masks the beauty of faith already there.

Chaplain, there’s a definite serenity in you; things seem more peaceful when you’re around.

This was said to me by a chronic schizophrenic who was just pulling out of a deeply psychotic period. I had been away from the unit for a few days; in that time, this young man started to regain insight.

It was so beautiful to see his personality rise above the symptoms of his illness—like watching his very self emerge from a twisted cocoon. His words stunned me, prodded me away from attitudes that had given up on ever seeing his true self, a self buried under psychosis.

I celebrated this resurrection and prayed for eyes and ears to see and hear beyond the obvious, the external.

Do you know what it’s like to know that you’re never going to get better? Every time you try to reenter the community, you know they know…you feel the shame of it all and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Not spoken by any particular patient, these are words I heard from nearly all of them. This is the cry of their hearts, so consistent that it breaks my heart.

Every day I had the privilege of working with the powerless, the abandoned and the rejected. Whenever we work with people who are immersed in these realities, let us take off our shoes, for the Lord is very near.

Until the fullness of his Kingdom, Christ still hides himself amidst our infirmities, as One abandoned, powerless and rejected—for life was poured upon the world through a divine obedience that was willing to go to such places.

I thank God for the gift of this rich experience—even if I never minister in a hospital again, the skills, insight and self-knowledge will easily apply elsewhere. I thank God for the opportunity to take a break from my seminary studies as well.

But especially, I thank God for the people I encountered in the hospital. I carry them with me.

Our Lady of Combermere - Part 14

MOTHER OF THE POOR

by Fr. Emile Briere

The main purpose of this column is to remind you of the love and tenderness of God and his Mother, Our Lady of Combermere, for you.

 

Our Lady of Combermere is also Our Lady of the Poor, and God knows we need her intercession at this time of history to obtain for all of us who have an abundance of the world’s goods a great spirit of repentance. May the powerful, the wealthy, the economists, the politicians, turn their minds and hearts to a more equitable distribution of the wealth of this world which, in God’s plan, belongs to everybody!

The prophet Amos cried out: In the name of God, I have made my decree and will not relent, because they have sold the virtuous man for silver and the poor man for a pair of sandals. Because they trampled on the heads of ordinary people and pushed the poor out of their path …

I hate and despise your feasts. I take no pleasure in your solemn festivals. When you offer my holocausts I reject your oblations and refuse to look at your sacrifices of fattened cattle.

Let me have no more of the din of your chanting, no more of your strumming on harps, but let justice flow like water and integrity like an unfailing stream (Amos 2:6-7, 5:21-24).

Catherine had a passion for the poor, and for the holy virtue of poverty which she learned from contemplating the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Throughout her life after the Russian Revolution of 1917, with rare exceptions, she embraced poverty. Initially it was out of necessity. She, her husband, and her son were refugees and had little to live on. During this period she took any job she could find to support them.

Then came the time when God called her to embrace poverty voluntarily. She went to live in the slums of Toronto with the poor, then later in Harlem. Finally she came to Combermere, at that time a needy and neglected region of Canada.

Wherever she was, she begged for food, clothing, and books to share with the poor. She heroically strove to transmit this spirit to her spiritual family, the Madonna House Apostolate. Thanks be to God, we who are poor and beg are—through the generosity of our benefactors—able to share most of our goods with the poor. We pray mightily not to have greedy hearts and sticky hands.

Gradually, Catherine realized that everyone is poor, even the wealthy. She also saw that the poorest of all are those who have no faith. Responding to this, she prayed, fasted, and wept before the Lord, that they would repent and receive the gift of faith.

She taught that each of us is poor: we have nothing of our own, and are creatures receiving everything from God. We have no reason to boast of our talents, our good looks, our health, for everything has been given to us by God. We can, however, boast of his mercy and goodness towards us.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit" says the Lord, "for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt 5:3).

Who are the poor in spirit?

They are the anawim, those who depend on God for everything, who receive everything as coming from the hand of God. Of course, this often happens through the love and kindness which he has placed in the heart of those brothers and sisters who are our benefactors.

Job, during his days of great wealth, knew that everything came from God. When all his goods were taken away from him, he said: "The Lord has given, the Lord has taken back. Blessed be the name of the Lord!" (Job 1:21).

So a rich man can be pleasing to God if he is poor in spirit, if he depends on God for everything and praises God for everything and shares with those who have not.

Catherine used to say to people in the charismatic renewal: "You raise two arms in praise of God. That’s good. But how much better it is if you raise one arm in praise of God and use the other one to care for your neighbor! Thus, you implement both commandments: love of God and love of neighbor."

The epitaph she chose for the cross over her grave—she loved the poor—epitomizes her whole life. She loved the poor because she knew that God loved her, a poor woman; and because she saw Christ in the poor, present in a very special way. During the last years of her life, she cried out to Our Lady of Combermere:

"Take pity on us. Take pity on us, because we are the most pitiful people ever! You see us, Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, peoples of all religions. You see every one of us. And whereas the arms of your son were crucified, yours are outstretched to embrace the whole world.

"Your arms are ready to hold any of us who come to you; and you long to sing us a lullaby. You are always a mother. That is what you have been created for. To be the Mother of God and of all people."

Yes, we turn to our mother to ask her to obtain from the Holy Spirit for each of us the great grace of realizing that we have nothing of ourselves, that we are poor, that we can’t look down our noses at anyone and feel superior since we have nothing of our own that has not been given to us by the Father.

May we have a great love for the poor—everywhere in the world—and do everything in our power to assist them in their needs by prayer, fasting and almsgiving, as the Bible teaches! So often all that’s needed to help a person who feels lonely and sad is a smile, a greeting, a listening ear, a little time and concern.

All of this is possible if our hearts are open to every need of the people around us.

 

Let’s conclude this column with our usual prayer, saying it together:

Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you and praise you for giving us Our Lady of Combermere to be our mother, guide and director.

May we entrust our wills to her so that your divine will may be accomplished in us, namely that each of us becomes another Christ and that all of us together be formed into a living icon of love reflecting the love you share with your Son and the Holy Spirit. We ask this confidently through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Nazareth Today

THE PRODIGAL ELDER

by Denis Lemieux

"In this third year, the sense of being on a journey to the Father should encourage everyone to undertake a journey of authentic conversion" (Tertio Millennio Adveniente).

 

What does it mean to call God ‘Father’? I guess we could say that it’s simply the name by which he has revealed himself to us, and leave it at that. But what does it mean, really?

Ideally, we should be able to look to our human fathers for insight, seeing the face of God the Father reflected in their faces. But, as we all know, even fathers in the best families don’t always perfectly reflect the heart of Father God, and in these tragic times of broken homes and fragmentation so many grow up with no father at all, or with deeply flawed, distorted images of fatherhood.

Many experience a deep hunger to know the love of their Father; many experience deep insecurity which comes from lacking this sense.

This year of 1999 invites us to take a journey, a pilgrimage to our Father’s house, to discover there our true home, the place of security and refuge for which so many long.

The word of God is a good place to start this journey. Indeed, in the light of this call, the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) shines forth with special brilliance. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the scriptures, it reveals to us the depths of love, tenderness, mercy and compassion that are contained in the word ‘father’, especially as applied to God.

In reading this parable, my attention is always drawn to the elder son. I tend to see him as the central figure of the story. So the following meditation will focus in particular on the story from the point of view of the elder son.

Isn’t he the one most ‘good Catholics’ relate to, after all? All those faithful ones who never miss Sunday Mass, all the ones who earnestly strive, often at great cost, to live moral, godly lives?

Oh, that poor elder son! Can’t you just picture him, drudging his way along, slaving away out in the fields, invariably doing the right thing, always denying himself, year after gloomy year.

What was in his heart, all that time, while his brother squandered the family money on ‘slow horses and fast women’ so to speak? As he plowed and planted and weeded and hoed, harvested, winnowed and plowed again, what was going on inside him?

Resentment of his lot, perhaps? Envy (suppressed, of course) of his wicked younger brother? A sense of having received the short end of the stick, of having been left ‘holding the baby’ while Younger Bro went off carousing in the big city? Seeing the father grieve his loss, was he embittered at ‘not being appreciated’ for all his work? Probably all of the above—and more!

The years piled up, and the work never got any less. His heart began to dry up; his world shrank to a few acres of dusty farmland; his mind revolved, increasingly, around the drudgery of daily life and his list of grievances. Over time, he wrapped himself in those grievances, hugging them like a security blanket.

Oh, the poor elder brother! Oh, the poor ‘good Catholic’; that upright, responsible, solid citizen. Too many of us, obeying all the rules, never stepping an inch out of line, harbor such attitudes in our hearts and mind. So many of us—outwardly faithful—are, in our hearts, elder sons.

As far away as the younger son may have wandered, this elder son had travelled much, much further from his father’s house, without ever leaving it. Straying not an inch from his appointed path, doing exactly what he was supposed to do, exactly when and where he was supposed to do it, he had fled his father, had gone to the farthest end of the earth to avoid him, had squandered his fortune just as prodigally as his brother, and with even less to show for it.

He, too, experienced famine—a famine of love, of joy, of security, of real life. He, too—in his covert envy of his brother—yearned to fill himself with the ‘husks the pigs were eating’! He believed that the younger brother had somehow gotten ‘the better deal’; that a life of debauchery and vice (with, of course, the father taking him back in the end!) was preferable to his life of virtuous labor.

He, too, had lost his place as a son in his father’s house. Like the younger brother, he had made himself a servant—worse yet, a slave!—exchanging his dignity as son and heir for the squalid drudgery of life as a hired man.

He didn’t know, could never have known or had a share in what was in his father’s heart. Upon his brother’s joyous return, the bile and anger within finally spilled out. His final refusal to enter the house is nothing more than the external manifestation of a reality long festering in his soul.

Isn’t this one of the great spiritual dangers that face the ‘good people’ of the world; those good, church-going Christian folk? God has called us all to be his sons and daughters; that is, to enter into a deep communion of love with him, receiving the life he pours out for us eternally, being transformed and purified by his Spirit to become true sons of his in the pattern of Jesus Christ.

Only then does a life of service and fidelity become what it is meant to be: not the drudgery of slavish, fear-ridden obedience, but a process of divinization, of transformation into the image of Christ, himself the perfect image of the Father.

Many of you who read this article may, at some point in life, have resembled the prodigal son—flat on your face, having been brought low by sin and degradation, with your life totally messed up.

In the long run, though, the more dangerous situation by far may be that of the older son. How perilous it is to live a life of external fidelity—to do ‘the duty of the moment’ while inwardly refusing communion with the Father! How hard it is for God to overcome this attitude of heart!

Yes, we’re called to go on a pilgrimage this year, to arise inwardly and return to our Father. Where are we starting from? Outside the banquet hall, sullenly refusing to enter? Do we close our hearts to our brothers and sisters, in judgment? If so, are we not closing our hearts to the Father as well?

Will we dance and sing this year? Will we rejoice in God’s mercy to sinners? Or will we stay outside the hall, outside God’s mercy?

There’s no real ‘ending’ to this parable. Father and son remain together, outside the door of the banquet hall.

"My son, you are with me always, and all that I have is yours. But it was only right we should celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life, he was lost and is found."

The story has no tidy resolution, no easy answer. There’s a choice to be made, a call for us to enter the Father’s heart, to make his love, his mercy, his compassion our own. All that the Father has is ours. He offers it to us freely.

He offers a banquet this year for all his scattered and sinful children. Will we go there? For many of us, it is ‘a long road home’. Will we accept that we are all prodigal children, that we were all lost and now have been found, all dead and now returned to life? Will we enter the hall and rejoice? The choice is ours.

The Pope’s Corner

THE SENSE OF LOST DIGNITY

by Pope John Paul II

We continue to excerpt from the 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy) in this ‘Year of the Father’.

In this section, the Holy Father begins a detailed exposition of the parable of the Prodigal Son as the "most evident" Gospel expression of the Father’s mercy and love.

 

In the teaching of Christ, the image of God’s mercy—inherited from the Old Testament—becomes at the same time simpler and more profound. This is perhaps most evident in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:14-32). Although the word mercy does not appear in it, it nevertheless expresses the essence of divine mercy in a particularly clear way.

This is due not so much to the terminology, as in the Old Testament books, as to the analogy that enables us to understand more fully the very mystery of mercy—as a profound drama played out between the father’s love and the prodigality and sin of the son.

The son receives from his father the portion of inheritance due to him and leaves home to squander it in a far country in loose living. In a certain sense, this represents man in every period, beginning with the one [Adam] who was the first to lose the inheritance of grace and original justice.

The analogy at this point is very wide-ranging. The parable indirectly touches upon every breach of the covenant of love, every loss of grace, every sin.

There is less emphasis than in the prophetic tradition on the unfaithfulness of the whole people of Israel—although the analogy of the prodigal son may extend to this also.

After he spent everything, the son began to be in great need, especially as a famine arose in the country to which he’d gone after leaving his father’s house. He would gladly have fed on anything—even the pods that the swine ate, the swine that he herded for one of the citizens of that country. But even this was refused him!

The analogy turns clearly toward man’s interior. The inheritance the son received from his father was a quantity of material goods; but more important than these goods was his dignity as a son in his father’s house.

The situation in which the son found himself should have made him aware of the loss of this dignity. He hadn’t thought about it previously, when he’d asked his father for the part of the inheritance due to him, in order to go away. Even now, he seems not to be conscious of it, for he says to himself: "How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger."

He measures himself by the standard of the goods he has lost, while the hired servants in his father’s house possess them. These words express his attitude toward material goods; but beneath the surface is concealed the tragedy of lost dignity, the awareness of squandered sonship.

At this point, he makes a decision: "I will arise and go to my father and say to him: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants."

These words reveal more deeply the essential problem. Through the complex situation in which the prodigal son found himself because of his folly, because of sin, the ‘sense of lost dignity’ had matured. When he decides to return to his father’s house—and ask to be received, no longer by virtue of his right as a son, but as an employee—he seems, at first, to be acting by reason of the hunger and poverty he had fallen into.

This motive, however, is permeated by an awareness of a deeper loss: to be a hired servant in his own father’s house is certainly a great humiliation and source of shame. But he is ready to undergo this humiliation and shame. He realizes that he no longer has any right except to be an employee in his father’s house.

His decision is taken in full consciousness of what he has deserved and of what he can still have a right to in accordance with the norms of justice. Precisely this reasoning demonstrates that—at the center of the prodigal son’s consciousness—the ‘sense of lost dignity’ is emerging, the sense of dignity that springs from the relationship of the son with the father. And it is with this decision that he sets out.

In this Gospel parable, the term justice is not used, not even once; just as in the original text the term mercy is not used either. Nevertheless, the relationship between justice and love (manifested as mercy) is inscribed with great exactness.

It becomes evident that love is transformed into mercy when it is necessary to go beyond the precise—and often too narrow—norm of justice.

The prodigal son, having wasted the property he received from his father, deserves—after his return—to earn his living by working in his father’s house as a hired servant; and possibly, little by little, to build up a certain provision of material goods, though perhaps never as much as the amount he had squandered.

This would be demanded by the order of justice, especially as the son had not only squandered the part of the inheritance belonging to him, but had also hurt and offended his father by his conduct.

Since this conduct had in his own eyes deprived him of his dignity as a son, it could not be a matter of indifference to his father. It was bound to make him suffer; it was also bound to implicate him in some way. And yet, after all, it was his own son who was involved, and such a relationship could never be altered or destroyed by any sort of behavior.

The son is aware of this; and it is precisely this awareness that shows him clearly the dignity he has lost, and that makes him honestly evaluate the position he could still expect in his father’s house.

to be continued

 

My Dear Family

IT’S A QUESTION OF LOVE

by Catherine Doherty

In response to the Pope’s call for a ‘renewed appreciation and more intense celebration of the sacrament of penance’ this year (Tertio Millennio Adveniente), we continue to print some of Catherine’s reflections on this subject.

 

I was so astonished when I found that people were afraid of confession. Who is afraid of being kissed by Christ? Who can be afraid when he knows he is held tenderly in the hands of Jesus Christ?

Deeply ingrained in so many people is what I think is a wrong idea of sin. People literally are afraid when they talk about sin. A sort of panic gets hold of them.

Sin seems to be a mirror that changes them. It’s like in a carnival midway: you look in one mirror and you are fat, you look in another mirror and you are thin. The idea of sin seems to change people. They think of themselves as ugly, unpleasant, unlovable, all because they say to themselves that they are sinful.

Well, let’s look at sin. First, I wish we Christians thought of ourselves as saved sinners, because that’s what we are. The Lord died on a cross, the Lord resurrected and ascended. What for? To save us. To reconcile us with his Father. Isn’t it nice to be a saved sinner? It makes you feel kind of immediately more cozy, more warm, doesn’t it?

What is sin? At Mass today, one of our priests explained that the word sin means ‘forgetting’ in Hebrew. It’s a very good definition of sin. Sin means forgetting God. It’s a separation from him, a turning of our backs to him.

We usually examine sin from the moral aspect. Well, that’s a good place to start, but for Christians, it goes deeper than that. Sin is my rejection of God. I simply say to God:

"Look, I’m tired of your commandments, and what you eternally ask of me in the name of love. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, and how I want to do it. I don’t want you to dictate anything to me."

To sin is to get outside of something that is beautiful, healing, and renewing. When we sin, we reject God, much as the Pharisees and a lot of other people Christ knew rejected him. Suddenly we find ourselves free to do what we want to do, as we want to do it, when we want to do it.

Then begins a great tragedy in our souls, because we find that we are absolutely tired out! Doing what we want, as we want, when we want, doesn’t seem to be exactly what we thought it was. We’ve entered into something that makes us thoroughly unhappy (and incidentally makes a lot of psychiatrists happy).

To sin is to tear ourselves away from God’s embrace. It’s not a question of fear of hell. It’s a question of love, and the rejection of love.

It might have nothing to do with an outward act such as stealing. It might have to do with our inner life, with an unfaithfulness to the Beloved in a thousand ways that aren’t visible to the naked eye.

Sin is a terrible thing, an alienation from God, as if we cut with a knife his tenderness, his love. All that he covers us with, we reject. We, not he. He will still be there, even if we have rejected everything. We might leave the Church, but the Church hasn’t left us! That is the great difference: Christ hasn’t left us.

You know the greatest sin—not to love! All the others flow from this sin of uncharity. If you want to go to bed with a dame and she isn’t your wife, or you want to go to bed with a guy and he isn’t your husband, it is a sin against charity! It’s a sin of disrespect of one another.

If you really love somebody, you don’t go to bed with them. You wait until the blessing of God is upon your love.

If you steal something, it is against charity. You have deprived someone of their goods, and that is most uncharitable. If you murder someone, that is very uncharitable.

All sins are against charity. All sins, no matter how small or how big, mortal or venial, hurt love in some way. They hurt our love toward God—and that is tragic! The saddest thing in the world is to be alienated from God. Let us run into God’s arms and make up!

It is so simple. "Father, I’ve sinned against charity." That’s all there is to it, fundamentally!

Oh, it’s all right to define things and so forth, but fundamentally you only need to say, "Father, I’ve sinned against love."

It is like a dirge in your soul that rises and sings its lament. Suddenly Christ bends and kisses you. The kiss of Christ is the pain of Christ, but it is also the freedom of Christ.

When you open your heart in confession and say, "Lord, I’ve sinned against love, have mercy on me," down comes this mercy, and you return to being a child of God.

The greatest thing we have is ‘free will’! We can choose to sin, or not to sin. We can do good, or we can do evil. That is the difference between us and all the rest of creation.

The amazing thing is that God, in his infinite mercy, took the power he had—for God is all-powerful—and restrained it, in regard to man. He gave man the commandment of love, and then left him free to practice it or not.

It’s up to you! You don’t have to! Nobody is putting a pistol to your head. You can do whatever you like.

This is the miracle of God’s goodness and mercy. He has such a strange, incomprehensible respect toward us. He could annihilate us in a second. He could make us slaves if he wanted to, so that we’d act like little puppets.

But he doesn’t do any of those things. He leaves us free! This is the most beautiful thing in the world—to be free before God! To choose between good and evil.

God has created us in his image. He has allowed us to choose—and to know that he is also there to help.

We can never condone sin, but we must always love the sinner. It is as simple as that.

In the 1960’s the hippies, the intellectuals, and the liberals began to excuse sin. Nowadays the sense of sin has almost disappeared. People sin and don’t know they’re sinning. Sin is called anything but sin.

An interesting book called Whatever Became of Sin?—by Dr. Karl Menninger, an outstanding psychiatrist—says that people who’d been supposedly ‘liberated’ by psychiatrists became worse off later on. Eliminating the notion of sin did not bring healing! Now, coming from a world-renowned psychiatrist like Dr. Menninger, this is really something.

The average Russian would never deny that sin is sin. He will say that adultery is adultery, and I have committed adultery. Fornication is fornication, and I have committed fornication. Stealing is stealing, and I have stolen.

In the 1960’s, the lines got blurred. We have to watch out for this if we are to be instruments of God’s healing.

There was a girl who came to me and said that she slept with 48 men. Well, that was back in the hippie days, and she was egged on by her Catholic friends, for she was at a Catholic college.

As we talked about it, I was struck by three aspects of the situation. First, she was very innocent when she left home for college. Secondly, she was exceedingly frightened of sex. (Mama was a Jansenist and had warned her much too much.) Thirdly, she was pushed into it by her peers.

We discussed all this: what was her sin, what was not her sin, what was the sin of Mama, what was the sin of the kids who pushed her. Finally I asked, "How do you feel?"

She responded: "Like a secondhand piece of goods, sold in some lousy basement on some tenement street."

She knew perfectly well that—ultimately—she was not guilty before her mother, or before her peers. That’s when she fell on her knees, put her head in my lap, and started crying. She knew that she was guilty before God.

This is when I said: "Go to confession to receive the kiss of Christ. It will erase all the evil kisses, those no-good kisses you’ve received through the years. For God is merciful."

Adapted from Kiss of Christ, pp. 10-15, available from MH Publications.

The Father’s Plan - Part 2

THE LORD OF CREATION

by Fr. Thomas Rowland

At some point before time as we know it began, God the Father, the infinite, eternal God who is complete within himself and has no need of anything outside of himself, created the universe, a universe which we are still learning new things about in our own time.

Anthropological studies show us that people have always pondered their own existence and that of the world they lived in. A brief review of these studies can be found in Articles 283 to 286 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church. For those with access to the Roman Breviary, a study of the Office of Readings for the first week of Ordinary Time will show how this question loomed large in the discussions of the early Fathers of the Church.

This question is so pervasive for all peoples that God, in his infinite and tender love, revealed the mystery to us, at least to the extent that we are able to understand it.

Thus the first book of the Bible begins by stating that: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This account in Genesis, which is the first reading for the narrating of the Father’s plan of salvation during the Easter Vigil, tells in a classic Hebrew poetic style the story of creation in such a way that people of that time, with their limited knowledge of astronomy and physics, would be able to understand this marvel of God’s goodness.

Note how the first three days describe God’s work of separating various elements: light from darkness, the waters above the dome of the sky and the waters below, the waters and the dry land with all the plants that are part of it.

Then on the fourth day God put the sun in the daytime sky and the moon in sky at night. On the fifth day, God put living creatures in the waters and in the sky. On the sixth day, God put living creatures on the dry land, the greatest of whom were the male and female human beings.

It would be a mistake for us to use our modern knowledge of the physical sciences to disprove the Biblical story of creation. For instance, we know that the earth is not a flat table sitting on some kind of a foundation surrounded by water. The sky is not a plastic dome complete with a sprinkler system through which to release the water above it onto the earth. Nor are there tracks in that plastic dome in which run the sun, moon and stars!

On the other hand, we all watch educational television programs or read popular scientific books and magazines that describe for us the complexities of nature in terms that we can understand. Even though these explanations are not completely accurate from a scientific point of view, they help us understand these complex mysteries of nature which would be totally ‘greek’ to us if we were given an accurate explanation.

Thus, we see the goodness of God in describing the story of creation in a primitive way that could be understood by the people of those times.

The Book of Genesis then turns to the story of those first human beings, Adam and Eve. We discover that God had a special plan for them. Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Paradise. Not only were they given everything necessary for human existence, they were given extra gifts as well.

They had the gift of intuitive knowledge. This is shown by the fact that Adam was able to give names to each and every creature without having to compare them with each other. They also had the gift of control of their desires. This is indicated by the statement that they were naked but were not ashamed. As we know from the punishments they received, they were free from sickness and death.

They enjoyed an intimacy with God who came and visited with them in the Garden. There was, however, a limit to this idyllic existence. They were to trust God and live according to his plan for them.

Genesis describes how they were tempted and how they resisted until the devil undermined their trust in God’s word. The scriptures then describe the result of their sin. Because they disobeyed God, they became aware of their human desires and made clothes for themselves. They hid from God because they were naked.

Thus, Adam and Eve destroyed God’s original plan for the human race. They were expelled from Paradise, they now would know pain and death, they would have to work for their food, they would have to learn by experience, they would be aware of the struggle between their human desires and God’s plan.

Genesis very quickly tells how the sons of Adam and Eve were victims of this struggle when Cain, in a fit of jealousy, murdered his brother Abel.

Yet, in the midst of this story of original sin and the loss of the gifts God had given to Adam and Eve, we find the at the same time the tender, forgiving love of God the Father.

God did not abandon the human race. He did not write us off and begin again with some other type of creature. In Genesis 3:15, God gives the promise of the Messiah, a redeemer who would establish a new covenant, a new relationship between God and the human race. How great is the mystery of the Father’s love!

It is this promise of God that occupies the central place in the revelation of God to his people in the Old Testament. Next month we will look at the story of Abraham, and how God chose this special man to help implement the Father’s plan for our salvation.

to be continued