On Being Terrible with Titles and Following up on Abraham's Dialogue with God

[[ Hi Sister Laurel! I noticed you changed the title on your Abraham post and I was curious why. You also changed a few other things and I wondered if you do that a lot on posts once they are "finished." My pastor also gave a homily on bargaining with God and I think Pope Francis said something about this too one time. Couldn't Abraham be said to be bargaining or negotiating with God because it sounds to me like he is trying to convince God about what justice really means, especially that God shouldn't destroy the innocent with the evil.]]

Hi there yourself! Yes, I changed the title, mainly in an attempt to shorten it. I am not really good with titles (actually, I am awful with them!) and am always happy when I can come up with one I actually like. This is one place where I think of my former pastor a lot. He was great with titles and would ask me what title I would give a reflection I had done, for instance, as a way of summarizing and characterizing the piece. It's something I never managed to learn from him --- unfortunately, I could rarely come up with a good title!! On the Abraham piece I wish I had entitled it something like, [[God we know you love us, but how much?]] or [[Just how merciful is this God of Ours?]] or [[Justice AND mercy, how can God do both?]]

Notice in the lection as we had it for Sunday it is presupposed that God is one that destroys evil (and thus too, the innocent with it). This conception of God is almost hard-wired into religious folks' brains. Thus, floods were signs of God's wrath, as was illness, bad luck, famine and catastrophe of any kind. However, the reading itself does not say God is going to destroy the city, only that he is going to visit it and find out for himself if the hue and cry against it is warranted. Abraham is the one who raises the issue of destruction, not God. In fact, in the text of Genesis a few verses earlier there is no reference to God destroying the city; there is only the question when God muses to himself, [[Should I tell Abraham what I am about to do?]] We assume we know what God will do with evil --- if, of course, God has the power to deal with it at all.

This suggests to me that the lection as we have it, and the dialogue between Abraham and God which stands at its heart is meant to reveal something we believe we already know about God and about how God "does justice" or deals with evil, when in fact, we need to be taught the truth and allow the real God to be revealed to us. In other words, it is meant to correct our presuppositions and assumptions, especially the ones we hold about God and the way God works in our world (i.e., our idols and common blasphemies). I think it is also meant to correct assumptions we have about ourselves too, especially our assumption that we know better than God how to deal with evil or how to define and do justice. 

When I read Sunday's text, Abraham does not come across so much as a clever and just man as he does a bit of a fool in dealing with God as he does. This is another reason I tend to read the text not as Abraham himself bargaining with God or demonstrating a better justice to God, but more as the personification of a long debate going on in humanity and particularly in those who would become God's own people regarding what divine justice really looks like and just how merciful could God possibly be. Those questions are not definitively answered until the Christ Event, but Sunday's reading takes us a long way in preparation for that definitive answer.

So, while you are correct that the dialogue is couched in terms of haggling or bargaining (with bits of wheedling thrown in for good measure), and while Abraham's persistence in pushing the point with God gives another lesson re perseverance in prayer, for instance, I don't think we can say the reading is about bargaining with God (nor do we want to encourage folks to bargain or haggle with God). Instead, it is a literary way of representing perennial questions that occur in the face of suffering, loss, and actual evil, questions about the nature of Divinity and divine justice as well as about divine sovereignty and the existence of good in the midst of evil. I think too that the lection demonstrates how important God is to our ability to ask questions and to push them as far as we need to do without having to worry that that is not appropriate with God. 

Though this takes the reading in a very uncommon direction it is an important one for those who believe faith cuts off questioning in science, theology, etc. Quite the opposite is true and Abraham as the Father of genuine Faith demonstrates this; faith allows questioning. In fact faith in God allows and actually invites us to push our questioning as far as we need to push it as an expression of genuine faith. So, for instance, science and faith belong together, not only because they are compatible and complementary ways of knowing, but because faith, which affirms the existence of the One we know as infinite Mystery, assures us we can push our questions as far as we need to without ever reaching the end of what is knowable. It is the infinite Mystery we call God which makes faith necessary and science possible. 

Regarding Pope Francis, yes, you are correct he spoke about bargaining with God in a homily about this text once. I referenced that in a follow up question to the original post (published several years ago). I will see if I can locate it and put it up here -- perhaps as part of this response, but at least as a link.

Thanking God for Law that Serves Love!

[[ Hi again Sister Laurel! There is someone writing against you though she doesn't use your name; while I don't want to draw you into an argument I wondered what you thought about the following thesis: "The fruit in past hermits gives us guidelines by noticing their lives lived -- not any canon laws for there were none, nor . . .on some created church laws centuries after Jesus instituted his Church, never Himself speaking of laws positively except the Law of God which is the Love. All other church laws Jesus pointed out as hypocrisies and missing the point of God Himself. . ."]]

Thanks for your questions. First, I agree completely that some hermits' lives are instructive in major ways for those of us living the life today. The Desert Fathers and Mothers and many others come to mind here. On the other hand, there are many hermits throughout the centuries that have distorted eremitical witness and lived caricatures of authentic hermit life. Additionally, and to be frank, I think the thesis regarding law and Jesus' attitudes toward law represents either a very naive reading of texts or an anachronistic twisting of the Scriptures in order to take a swipe at those who support or write about c 603, or canon law more generally. I doubt I am the only one writing about c 603. 

It sounds to me like the author you cited is used to reading Scripture in a somewhat fundamentalist way, but whether that is true or not, there are some things that must be corrected. First, Jesus gave the Church the power to bind and to loose. In part that could (and over the centuries has implied) the authority to make laws to govern both the Church as a whole and individual segments of the Church. Second, Jesus never treated law per se as hypocritical. He was harsh with the Scribes and Pharisees who opposed him (not all did), but he esteemed the Law itself as a gift of God; moreover, he kept it himself, though not in a slavish way which was careless of the way it tended toward and required greater fulfillment and transcendence. 

Just a few weeks ago we heard a Gospel in which Jesus cured a leper and told him to show himself to the priests so the Law might be fulfilled. The laws that isolated the leper were meant for the good of society in a world with no answer to contagions of all sorts. The law Jesus referenced in this reading served love because it allowed the leper to be reintegrated into the society his disease had isolated him from.  Even so, while Jesus recognized Law as a good, he also recognized that people could be hypocritical and also, that laws could be interpreted or formulated and implemented in ways which were oppressive and unjust --- the precise opposite of what the Law of God actually does. So, Jesus treated law as good, a Divine Gift, but he also demanded that law serve Love -- as it was meant to do.

While I am not a canonist and tend not to be much interested in canon law except for canon 603 and the other canons which pertain directly to my vocation (I am very interested in these and what people write about them!), my sense is that these specific canons and canon law more generally were codified to function as law serving love. I think the Church generally (though not unfailingly) does the same and requires law in order to serve love effectively. I write about canon 603 precisely so it can be better understood and implemented by dioceses in a way which serves love both for and in those persons called to solitary consecrated eremitical life and for those to whom they minister in the silence of solitude.

We cannot deny that the Church is, in part, an historical reality made up of historical elements including sinful people. Our God loved historical existence enough to create it, to call it good, and to become incarnate to dwell with his People. One day the Kingdom of God will be fulfilled "on earth as it is in heaven" and law will not be necessary, but until then, until we are all perfect rather than struggling to grow in perfection, church or canon law is a gift of God meant to and capable of serving Love. For some hermits it provides a needed "space" in which authentic eremitism as an ecclesial vocation may be lived in and for the benefit of a world that itself has little space for or understanding of hermits. We can thank God for it as well as for the Decalogue and law of all sorts!!!

Hanging onto the Promise: A Divine Love that is Stronger than Death

  There is a single theme running through yesterday's readings. Whether it is the reading from Revelations or from the Gospel of Luke, or the powerful refrain of the responsorial psalm, the authors are clear that we are called to be people who "hold onto" God's promise; holding onto God's promise is the essence of all prophetic vocations and the essence of Jesus' messianic life and calling as well. In the presence of turmoil and chaos, in the shadow of the cross and the threat of sin and death to be persons of faith is to be persons who make their own in every situation and circumstance the promise that the God who IS Love-in-act, loves us with a love which is stronger than death. 

The picture in the Gospel is powerful. Ordinarily we focus on the fact that Jesus threw the money changers out of the Temple and that is certainly appropriate. This action embodies the promise that God will act to transform not just the Jerusalem Temple but that in Christ he will make the entire world into a "house of prayer", that is, into the privileged place where God is present, active, and sovereign, where, in fact, he is truly worshipped and all reality is really as it is meant and made to be. In other words Jesus' enacted parable embodies the promise of a love that will do justice,  and an ultimate justice at that.

In the language of the first reading from Revelations, this "enacted parable" promises that the mystery of God will be brought to completion. It is striking that in the story of the cleansing of the Temple there are really two groups of people present. The first is the Pharisees  and other members of the Jewish leadership. They understand Jesus very well and are threatened by him; they have been seeking to find ways to put him to death but until now they have been thwarted. And here is the second very significant focus of the parable we should pay attention to in the same way we pay attention to Jesus throwing out the money changers; there is a second group of people, those persons who hold or "hang onto" Jesus' every word --- those persons who in some way have been touched directly by Jesus' ministry and the promise it embodies and mediates --- by the promise, the Word Jesus incarnates more and more fully throughout his life in every moment and mood of that life. And in light of the touch of this incarnate promise these fragile but divinely empowered people are those who, for the time being anyway, hold back the tide of darkness and violence the religious leadership are set to unleash on Jesus and (through the Romans) the world at large.

These are the people who have heard him teach and preach; they have had demons of all sorts cast out, been fed and nurtured by him. They have been listened to more profoundly than has ever happened to them until their encounter with Jesus and they have "been known", profoundly known and loved by him. They have been forgiven of their sins, reconciled to God and to themselves as well. They have found their shame transformed by an unconditional acceptance and esteem which heal at a person's core as Jesus called them by name and names (and thus effectively makes) them "friends" --- and friends of God. In every situation they encountered a man who effectively spoke truth to power (and to "powers and principalities") to unbind their hearts and free them for wholeness and abundant life. In every case Jesus is the One who confronts alienation, weakness, powerlessness and brokenness with the Incarnate Word or Promise of God: God loves them and all of creation with a love that is stronger than sin and death.

This is the promise, the Word of God Jesus himself stands in and from more and more fully --- even as he stands more and more clearly under the shadow of the cross; it is the promise in and through which he has been formed by prayer and struggle, by encounter after encounter of both love and rejection as his own sacred heart was enlarged and shaped into an image of the Living God. It is the promise which is the content of his own faith and the nature of the divine heart of the One he calls Abba. It is the living Promise he incarnates in our workl.

And so Jesus moves into the lion's den, so to speak; he casts out the money changers, takes up his place as teacher and in this way promises to make of this Temple and the whole of creation a house of prayer. His actions are provocative. They are a final instance of Jesus speaking truth to power, where the Divine promise encounters the world so in need of and hungry for that promise --- and also so implacably opposed to it. Jesus' action here will bring the entire establishment, both Jewish and Roman, down on his own head. And it will inaugurate the final showdown, the definitive encounter between godless death and the promise of a God who loves us with a love that is stronger than even godless death.

And the outcome of that showdown is well known to us. In Christ, the Love that is Stronger than death was subjected to death, even godless death; it was allowed to descend to the depths of that reality, and transformed it into the sacramental place where we may meet this Promise face to face. Cross and resurrection. The love of God encounters the very worst that human beings can do to one another, the very worst that human beings fear and build more and more securely into their world and relationships. And, in the face of death the Promise we call God is proven to be true: God loves us freely, gratuitously, prodigally, with a love that indeed is stronger than sin and sinful godless death.

The call we have each been given is the call to hang onto and be People of the Promise. This is the essence of faith. It is also the essence of prophecy, for to be People of the Promise is to speak and act with a power that changes reality. It is to speak and act in ways which accomplish the will of God in our world. But to be prophets in this way is not comfortable. As Revelations tells us the Promise is sweet like honey on our tongues. Our first contact with it as we take it into ourselves is wonderful in this way, but as we really digest it, take it into ourselves more deeply, it will also sour our stomachs. It will require that more and more deeply and extensively we speak truth to power in our own lives. It will mean that we confront the powers of sin and death still at work in our world with the Promise, the Living reality, of a Love that is stronger than death, a Love that does justice wherever it is truly spoken/enacted. As Christians --- priests, prophets, and rulers who are formed in and from this Promise this is always our vocation.

As we approach the end of our liturgical year and the Feast celebrating the sovereignty  (Kingship) of Christ, the urgency with which we are called to embrace this prophetic call today cannot be underestimated I think --- not because Jesus' own mission failed but because it did not. Thus too, through the crucified, risen and ascended Christ, it must continue in us. We must be People of the Promise, prophets and priests of a love that does justice and speaks and sings the future into existence. In this way God continues to create a new heaven and a new earth where (he) is truly all in all.

Faith built on Grace versus a Religion of Hypocrisy and Fear

Today's readings are from Romans and the Gospel of Luke (Rom. 4:1-8 and Luke 12:1-7). In the first lection Paul refers to Abraham and David, two pillars of the Jewish faith and notes that both of them call for a faith which rests on the faithfulness and love of God, not on good works. Both of them affirm that covenant existence (righteousness) is rooted in the free grace of God --- even without works! It is a startling conclusion for this scholar of the Law-turned-Apostle of the Gospel, but Paul cites both the example of Abraham who "believed God" and only boasted in God's faithfulness, as well as the writings of the psalmist where he says, [[Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not record.]] We can never overstate the earth shattering reversal this priority of Grace over works and God's faithfulness over our own achievements (and failures) represented in Paul's day and yet represents today.

Especially Paul saw that obedience to the Law produces a terrible trap when this is the ground of one's religion and has priority over faith in grace. One commentator (Buetow) on the readings from this week characterized it as producing an experience which is something like a dog chasing its own tail. We try to keep the law only to find that we cannot do so, and we turn to the law to empower us to be truly human and keep the law thus falling even further into sin, and so it goes, on and on, around and around in an inescapable circular trap.

Our attempts to escape condemnation (i.e., to escape the consequences of our actions) lead to greater estrangement from God, to greater enmeshment in sin, to greater reliance on law, and so on. I like Harold Buetow's metaphor but in some ways I prefer another image. Once we have put our faith (trust) in the law and thus too, in our own ability to keep the law it will be rather like finding we have jumped from a cliff expecting we will be able to fly or change the course of things by our own efforts. You can imagine how much good it will do to tug hard at the tops of one's shoes in an attempt to slow down or stop one's fall --- much less launch ourselves upwards in the freedom of flight! We simply do not have the power to do that (heck, some of us can't even reach the tops of our shoes!), and if we try, if we put our trust in our own abilities and achievements, we will add presumption, fatal foolishness, and despair to our undoubted and ever-accelerating helplessness. We may even lead others to fall along with us!

In today's Gospel Luke paints a picture of the trap the Pharisees have fallen into in this way; he is also concerned with the consequences for themselves and others of the rapidly accelerating freefall they are still (ignorantly) in the midst of. In particular Luke is writing about two related forms of religion which are rooted in trust in works of the law rather than in faith in God's unmerited grace. The first form, represented mainly by the Pharisees, is a religion built on hypocrisy; the second and interrelated form, represented mainly by those ordinary Jews who cannot ordinarily keep the Law at all, is a religion which is built on fear.

The extended warning about secrets being revealed and all things being brought into the light of day or shouted from the housetops serves two purposes: the first is to remind the disciples and the Pharisees that all of the latter's plotting and planning, the secret judgments and betrayals will one day be fully revealed, first in the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, and later in the destruction of the Temple when their hypocritical and essentially empty personal religion will be fully manifested and come to judgment in such consequences. The second purpose is to remind the ordinary folks, Jew and Gentile alike, that their own small (or large) betrayals, infidelities, secret judgments, plottings, etc will be known by God, but even more, that they will have consequences which make them manifest to the world around them. At first this would increase everyone's fear of judgment --- just as the Law increases one's sense of and actual sin --- and it would temporarily sharpen the desperation that has the crowds trampling one another underfoot in their attempts to approach the One who incarnates the very mercy of God. (The trampling others underfoot is itself a great symbol of graceless religion and the trap it creates!)

But the solution to the trap, the ultimate resolution of any religion of either fear or hypocrisy, as Paul says clearly in the first reading, lies in the faithfulness of God and our own trust in the God revealed in Jesus --- just as the crowds in Luke's gospel lection have come on some level to know. At some point we have to stop chasing our own tails; we must stop grasping at our own "boot straps" and believe instead in God who holds us securely in the palm of his hand --- who, in fact holds the entirety of creation in the palm of his hand and proclaims it good. We must, as Luke's Gospel passage today affirms, believe God when he tells us he has numbered the hairs on our heads --- so precious does he consider us!

Once we do that, once we allow God's love to fill us with a mercy that justifies, we will be empowered to do truly good works. There will be no discrepancy between the inner and the outer person as there was for so many of the Pharisees, no conflict between the Law and the law of our hearts. While we live the law written on our hearts more purely and exhaustively, we will fulfill the Law itself --- and we will do both in Christ. Neither will we create a message of terrifying judgment or foster a religion of fear in others. Instead we will proclaim a Gospel of Divine mercy doing justice. But as Paul and Luke both knew this means "believing God" and letting go of any tendencies to trust ourselves alone. Both knew that life in Communion with God (righteousness) was a free gift, something we had to allow to take hold of us, not something we could ever achieve or grasp for ourselves.

My prayer today then is that each and all of us may be able to risk "believing God" and relinquish of any vestiges of a religion of either hypocrisy or fear. As in the Gospel antiphon today, we cry out to God, [[May your kindness, O LORD, be upon us;who have put our hope in you.]] With our whole hearts and lives may we each trust that it will be so according to God's own promises of mercy. After all, that is the very meaning of every Amen we say.

In Christ we are ALL Sons and Heirs, Sharers in the Patrimony of the Kingdom of God

In today's second reading from Romans for Trinity Sunday the text read, [[Brothers and sisters: For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a Spirit of adoption, through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”]] In my own parish  the text was amended slightly to read, "For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God."

Now let me say up front that I completely understand that amended usage; in the 21st Century it is an important shift required to indicate the equal place of baptized women and men in the life of the Church; inclusive language is critically important. But to be honest, I believe in this single case, the original reading is as challenging to those glorifying masculinity over femininity as it is profoundly consoling to women who feel disenfranchised by the text's focus on sonship to the apparent (but only apparent) exclusion of daughterhood. I believe it is more effective theologically than the inclusive language version in calling us to a true Christian egalitarianism. In truth the text first addresses both Brothers and Sisters and then affirms that in the Holy Spirit God raises both male and female to the status of Sons of God in Christ, the only-begotten Son --- human anatomy, physiology, and gender politics of whatever stripe notwithstanding!! In other words, to be baptized each and all of us as Sons of God in Christ's own death and resurrection means this new identity we have assumed transcends human biology and gender. Moreover it transcends these while allowing and requiring their full expression. Therefore, while I only posted this at the beginning of the month, I believe I will close the month with it as well.

Today's readings struck me in several places. One of these was the responsorial psalm whose antiphon we repeated several times:  "You are my Son, this day I have begotten you." I know that many persons will change the language here so that it does not seem sexist but I think we have misunderstood what is being affirmed in this reading if we hear it in a sexist way. We are losing the countercultural sense of the usage in such a reading, blunting its sharpness and capacity to undercut our usual ways of seeing reality. Jesus made no distinctions between who became heirs of the Kingdom of God, whether women or men, no distinction based upon gender was involved here. Moreover to be called God's Son meant that one had been baptized into Jesus' own death and were indeed an heir to his resurrection and the Kingdom of God. The use of the term "Son" indicates an identity dependent upon and a literal share in Jesus' OWN Sonship, an identity we share in without losing our own unique masculine or feminine characteristics. It meant one was a new creation in whom godless death had been transfigured by the very presence of God. We, as heirs of this Kingdom have become responsible for proclaiming the Good News in season and out --- a good news that turned the gender-based society of the time on its head. (Please check out an original post on this subject: Driven into the Desert by the Spirit of Sonship)

The second place I was most struck was in the story of Jesus' farewell  as he promises that he goes to the Father to prepare a place for us. So long as we think of heaven a some space separate from (though including) God Himself we will not understand how incredible this affirmation is but as we prepare for the Ascension and Pentecost we need to start thinking about this. Once upon a time our world had no room for God, and certainly not for a God who assumed human life and turned a human face toward us so that he might be fully revealed both in the sense of being made fully present and in the sense of being made fully known to us. This revelation of God walked among outcasts, ate with sinners (and here we mean BIG TIME sinners), touched the untouchable, made the rich poor and raised them to the humility of those who know they are loved by God no matter what! That has all been blunted somewhat by the Greek notion of God's omnipresence but we must see the original scandal, the terrible offense of such a God.

But heaven means a share in God's own life and sovereignty, wherever that exists! It is not a space somehow surrounding God but separate from Him where God is a Being --- just a Supreme Being. Instead, since God is not A Being but instead the ground, source and goal of all being, the hope of Christians is that one day we will all dwell in God's own life. When Jesus says he goes to prepare a place for us it means he goes to the Father with whom he is in the most intimate union and through his mediation human life will now have a place in God's own life. God's and Jesus' descent and kenosis is mirrored by an ascent and glorification or movement to pleroma or fullness. This is simply part of God's becoming All in All. It is the Love that does Justice, that sets all to rights. We focus on the first movement (descent and kenosis) but not sufficiently on ascent and pleroma. Imagine a God who has made room for us in his own life! A God who has taken sinfulness and death inside himself and not been destroyed by them! Imagine a God who humbles by raising us to life within the delight of his gaze, who forgives guilt and heals shame with a simple embrace, who makes whole by making us and the whole of creation one with himself!

This, after all is God's will, the desire and intention that one day God will be all in all. It is a vision with cosmic scope but at the same time does not exclude the smallest portion of God's creation, not the greatest sinner or the most humble saint, the smallest virus or the largest star. As Sons of God we are part of a new creation which calls upon us to see with new eyes. Old exclusionary ways of doing business, conceiving of justice and of entrance into God's presence must be jettisoned as some of the baggage belonging to a different story and Kingdom. 

We are all Sons, heirs of the Kingdom of God's own Life

Today's readings struck me in several places. One of these was the responsorial psalm whose antiphon we repeated several times:  "You are my Son, this day I have begotten you." I know that many persons will change the language here so that it does not seem sexist but I think we have misunderstood what is being affirmed in this reading if we hear it in a sexist way. We are losing the countercultural sense of the usage in such a reading, blunting its sharpness and capacity to undercut our usual ways of seeing reality. Jesus made no distinctions between who became heirs of the Kingdom of God, whether women or men, no distinction based upon gender was involved here. Moreover to be called God's Son meant that one had been baptized into Jesus' own death and were indeed an heir to his resurrection and the Kingdom of God. The use of the term "Son" indicates an identity dependent upon and a literal share in Jesus' OWN Sonship, an identity we share in without losing our own unique masculine or feminine characteristics. It meant one was a new creation in whom godless death had been transfigured by the very presence of God. We, as heirs of this Kingdom have become responsible for proclaiming the Good News in season and out --- a good news that turned the gender-based society of the time on its head. (Please check out an original post on this subject: Driven into the Desert by the Spirit of Sonship)

The second place I found quite striking is the story of Jesus' farewell with the promise that he goes to the Father to prepare a place for us. So long as we think of heaven as some space separate from (though including) God Himself we will not understand how incredible this affirmation is but as we prepare for the Ascension and Pentecost we need to start thinking about this. Once upon a time our world had no room for God, and certainly not for a God who assumed human life and turned a human face toward us so that he might be fully revealed both in the sense of being made fully present and in the sense of being made fully known to us. This revelation of God walked among outcasts, ate with sinners (and here we mean BIG TIME sinners), touched the untouchable, made the rich poor and raised them to the humility of those who know they are loved by God no matter what! That has all been blunted somewhat by the Greek notion of God's omnipresence but we must see the original scandal, the terrible offense of such a God.

But heaven means a share in God's own life and sovereignty, wherever that exists! It is not a space somehow surrounding God but separate from Him where God is a Being --- just a Supreme Being. Instead, since God is not A Being but instead the ground, source and goal of all being, the hope of Christians is that one day we will all dwell in God's own life. When Jesus says he goes to prepare a place for us it means he goes to the Father with whom he is in the most intimate union and through his mediation human life will now have a place in God's own life. God's and Jesus' descent and kenosis is mirrored by an ascent and glorification or movement to pleroma or fullness. This is simply part of God's becoming All in All. It is the Love that does Justice, that sets all to rights. We focus on the first movement (descent and kenosis) but not sufficiently on ascent and pleroma. Imagine a God who has made room for us in his own life! A God who has taken sinfulness and death inside himself and not been destroyed by them! Imagine a God who humbles by raising us to life within the delight of his gaze, who forgives guilt and heals shame with a simple embrace, who makes whole by making us and the whole of creation one with himself!

This, after all is God's will, the desire and intention that one day God will be all in all. It is a vision cosmic in scope but at the same time which does not exclude the smallest portion of God's creation, not the greatest sinner or the most humble saint, the smallest virus or the largest star. As Sons of God in Christ we are part of a new creation which calls upon us to see with new eyes. Old exclusionary ways of doing business, conceiving of justice and of entrance into God's presence must be jettisoned as some of the baggage belonging to a different story and Kingdom. 

A Little on Witnessing to a Love that Does Justice in the Face of Tyranny

 [[Dear Sister, I am new to your blog and I haven't explored it very much. I am surprised to find a hermit writing about current events. Do you really not hate ISIS? I think I do. I think I shouldn't but I can't control what I feel when people kidnap and threaten to burn children alive! But here are my real questions. From other articles it seems that your vocation is pretty new and not very well known. I know we don't have any Canon 603 hermits in our parish or diocese. How many of you are there in the US? Do Canon 603 hermits exist in other countries as well? Are there many of them? Do you mind if I ask other dumb questions before I read much of your blog?]]

Welcome to Stillsong Hermitage's blog then. To be honest, I don't write very much about current events but I was asked to write about the situation in Syria and I was very moved by the murder of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. That this occurred just as we were preparing for Lent and the ritual of being marked with the sign of the cross in ashes made things immensely more weighty in my own mind and heart. Add to that the fact that I was just beginning to read the Scriptures with eyes more newly sensitized to the place of honor-shame in Middle Eastern cultures and to see many of Jesus' encounters with family, religious leaders, and so forth as violations of honor, occasions leading to dishonor and shame for some, and you can see why these stories had a special poignancy for me.

You see I have recently come to understand freshly the difference between what guilt-sin-individualist cultures like ours and honor-shame-collectivist cultures like those of the Middle East perceive as honorable. Consciences in these two types of society are formed in vastly different ways from one another. It is not necessarily that consciences have been turned off, as a friend recently commented to me, but rather that they are formed very differently, namely as an instance of group conscience according to what the group determines to be honorable or dishonorable. In light of this I came to see even more clearly how Jesus could be crucified or the cross could be a symbol of the most abject dishonor/shame an individual could know. I have also recently been freshly sensitized to the epidemic quality of shame in our Western culure and to how extraordinarily thin in number and depth have been the reflections of systematic theologians on this aspect of the Gospel and Cross of Christ despite the fact that exegetes regularly remind us that the Gospel writers focus on not the physical pain Jesus experienced but the shame associated with his crucifixion.

These and other threads came together for me recently within a short period of time and all of them were and are critically important. We have either lost or never had an adequate sense of how very counter cultural Jesus and the Kingdom he proclaimed were and are. If we are to begin to understand ISIS and to deal with them adequately we must recover and/or cultivate this awareness. If we are to love our enemies as well as our brothers and sisters in the faith, we must understand this. I suppose it is particularly ironic that a very small piece of this reflection on current events in light of Jesus' Kingdom message and behavior comes from a diocesan hermit living a relatively hidden and certainly silent and contemplative life. But this really is the role of contemplatives and hermits in the Church. Living in silence at the center of existence makes this possible and sometimes, anyway, even imperative. I am reminded of something Thomas Merton once wrote:

I make monastic [eremitical] silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and, when I speak, it is to deny my faith and my Church can ever seriously be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices, and believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also and perhaps against these most of all.

Of course, in the situation with ISIS the self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny are not those of the Church nor of Islam. But they are those of religion more generally. It is against just this kind of tyranny that Jesus stood, and against which we should stand in our own lives today. This is the reason theologians often distinguish religion from faith. Faith does not allow us to hate. Often it calls us to be weak and lacking in control but still it empowers us to love. This is so because it is rooted in trust in God's love and the power of that love to create justice. So, ordinarily my own protest is carried out in silence and prayer. Martyrdom, witness, takes many forms. When so many threads some together as happened recently, it may be time to speak.

Numbers of Canon 603 Hermits in the US and Elsewhere:

As for your "real" questions. . . numerically the diocesan hermit vocation is quite rare. While there have always been hermits --- especially in the Eastern Church (their course has been more variable in the Western Church, sometimes dying out altogether) --- diocesan hermits only came to be a possibility in 1983 with the publication of the Revised Code of Canon Law. The model and original impetus for the establishment of this new form of consecrated/religious life was a group of about a dozen hermits who had once lived solemn vows as monks in community; when they discerned a call to solitude they each had to leave their monasteries and solemn vows and become secularized; this was because there was no provision in their own congregation's proper law for solitary life, nor was there any provision in canon law --- the more universal law of the Church. Eventually they came under the protection of Bishop Remi de Roo who came to see the significance of their vocation. Bishop Remi then made an intervention at Vatican II sincerely pleading with the Church Fathers to recognize the eremitical life as a way of perfection. Nothing happened at Vatican II but the plans for a revision of Canon Law were initiated and these eventually included Canon 603 which provides for solitary consecrated hermits in universal law for the very first time.

In the US there are about 80 diocesan hermits, perhaps a small number more or fewer. The Vatican has begun to include numbers of c 603 hermits in their statistics on religious and consecrated life but I don't think any have yet been published. In some countries there are none at all. I have a friend in New Zealand who is a diocesan hermit; she is the only one there. In other countries, France and Italy, for instance, there are more than in the US but the number is still relatively small. Because canon 603 is part of a universal Code of Canon Law binding on the Universal Church, not just a single diocese here or there (as was once the case with hermits or anchorites in Europe, for instance), there are now diocesan hermits all over the world. As you can see though, relatively speaking diocesan hermits are an infinitesimally small percentage within the Universal Church.

Finally, please don't worry about questions being "dumb". I have asked in the past for folks to pose whatever questions they have. A few people do that and some even ask questions on an infrequent but more or less regular basis. They are all very helpful to me. For instance in a post I put up earlier I was able to answer a question about the meaning of the term "institutes". It never occurred to me that word could be a source of misunderstanding for someone reading canon 603 ("Besides institutes of consecrated life, the Church recognizes the eremitic or anchoritic life. . .") but it was a really great question because it made something clear to me I had not known. I think all questions can do that but quite often it is the most obvious ones that don't get asked and could be most instructive for readers, and for myself as well! So while I do encourage you to read posts linked to the labels on the right of this blog, please know all questions are more than welcome.

God Humbles us by Raising Us Up

[[Dear Sister Laurel, I have a friend who attributes every bad thing that happens to her to the will of God. She claims that God humbles us and that sometimes he "brings us very low indeed" through all kinds of catastrophes, persecutions, and disasters. Somehow this humiliation is supposed to move the person away from sin and even let them make reparation for sin. It helps them to deal with pride and other things, but I admit that I don't really understand it. Surely God is not One who teaches lessons in this way; surely God does not will disasters and catastrophes in our lives! What kind of God would that really be? And yet, what else might be the source of unremitting tragedies and disasters in my friend's life? Is there any way to help her let go of the theology she has embraced? She reads your blog by the way.]]

God Humbles Himself and Raises Us Up:

Thanks for the question. Let me assure and reassure you both of my prayers in this situation then. I will keep both you and your friend in prayer. I admit, I do not believe that God wills catastrophes and disasters. I don't believe God humbles us by bringing us low in pain and torment. I don't accept that evil of any sort is the work or will of God. You see, God has a much more effective way of humbling us and "bringing us low". (Note the difference in the word here; humbling and humiliation are different realities.) He does so by loving us, by reminding us how precious we are to him, how there is nothing we must or even can do to change that. God humbles us by asking us to set aside all of our own preconceptions about God, our own autonomous goals and projects, our own brief forays into the world of power and influence, of status and prestige for God's own Kingdom, God's own Lordship, God's own projects and commissions. In effect God says I love you with an inalienable, exhaustive, and unconditional love; I want the best for you; you will have that by serving me; you will serve me by letting me love you and treat you as infinitely precious. This is a humbling which raises up, not a humiliation which demeans even as it brings torment and catastrophe in its wake.

In yesterday's first reading from Paul's letter to the Philippians we listened to the great Pauline kenotic hymn: God empties himself to create the world; God empties himself even further by taking on sin-stained and broken human existence (flesh) out of love for us and commitment to the coming of the Kingdom. He empties himself by accepting death even death on a cross (that is, sinful, godless death) and he does all of this so that one day all might be redeemed, reconciled, and God might be all in all. In none of this is there a sense that God's work is inadequate or that reparation for sin is something you or I must or even can make. God reveals his very nature in all of these ways, but especially in Christ via the Incarnation, passion, and resurrection. These events are not contrary to God's nature. They are the paradoxical way he exercises his divinity --- not as something to be grasped at but as something lived for and freely given to others so that they might share God's life and he theirs.


Now, it is true that God's victory over sin and death is not complete. We experience relative godlessness in many ways for God is not yet all in all. I wrote about this just recently. Sin and death, chaos and catastrophe are still present and effective in our world but not in the same way they were before or apart from the Christ Event. They have been defeated in an ultimate way and no longer have ultimate power. They will never be the bottom line (or the final word or final silence) in our world or our lives and because they cannot be these things, they have lost much of the power they had to frighten, control, and destroy. God's love has proven more powerful. That is the new bottom line, the new and definitive last word we so needed to hear. God's love has penetrated the deepest darkness imaginable and has raised Jesus to new life; it has subsequently taken humanity into itself in the Ascension. It has entered into the unexpected and even the unacceptable (the literally godless) place and established the truth of the hope that one day the victory of God over sin and death will be complete and God will be all in all.

God's Justice is Neither Distributive nor Retributive

But what we must also hear in all of this is that God's justice is NOT retributive. He does not overcome sin by punishment but by love. He does not demand we pay the price for sin, whether that which besets us or that which we commit as a symptom of the sin that besets us. The price paid for sin is God's own price, the price God himself pays; God gives himself so that things may be set right, so that justice may be accomplished. He quite literally loves death and sin out of existence just as he does with nothingness and chaos in creating all that is. Not least, he does so by taking death within his own life without being destroyed by it, but (when the Christ Event is seen from another perspective) he also does so by transforming godless reality into a sacrament of his presence among us. He does this in the world at large, he does this in our own hearts, he does it in his own heart of hearts. God's love is a love that does justice; it destroys sin and death and the demeaning violence associated with these and replaces them with God's own love and life in abundance. Wherever this happens, and to whatever extent it occurs, the Kingdom of God has arrived and we have a new heaven and a new earth which one day will be a single seamless reality.

Of course, we must allow ourselves to be loved in this way, sinners though we are. We cannot instead make ourselves judge, jury and executioner in this matter. Human beings mainly think of justice in retributive and distributive senses. We think in terms of giving others what they deserve or of exacting (retributive) punishment in the name of "rehabilitation" for instance. We even project such notions of justice onto God so that God becomes the one who punishes us for our sin, demands reparation for it (impossible though that would be -- in this Anselm was surely correct!), gives us only what we truly deserve, etc. The God of Jesus Christ, however, does not think or act in these terms, and for this reason one of the things we must let go of, one of the bits of "dying to self" we must accomplish (so to speak) involves our renunciation of the idea of a God who exacts retribution or reparation from us for sin. Again, it is humbling to think that there is nothing we can do to "make things up" to God. It is humbling to be faced with a love which is eternal,  inalienable, and unconditional. But this is the humility Christianity calls for and it is the foundation for everything else in Christian life.

This is the source of real contrition. When we realize that the only good we do is the result of a grace we can never earn while the evil we do is the result of needing to justify ourselves (which includes the need to punish ourselves or refuse God's free gift of love), we are empowered to repent, to let God be God, to accept God's love even more fully and to hand it on to others who are as helpless to help themselves as we are. The turn from self to God in this matter is the essence of conversion. We let go of the various idols we have created for ourselves (or been given by others): the God of vengeance, of course, but also the God of a justice different than one rooted in unconditional love. We allow our minds and hearts to be remade in the name of THIS merciful God, the God who empties himself and suffers for us so that sin might be healed rather than asking us to suffer in reparation for sin.

The Source of the Catastrophes and Disasters:


I don't know the immediate source of the catastrophes in your friend's life except to point in a general (and less immediate) way to sin and death, which, because of the many ways human beings choose that which is not of God, are powers still at work in our world. As Bonhoeffer pointed out during his struggle with Nazism, and as I have posted here before, [[ Not everything that happens is the will of God, but inevitably nothing that happens does so outside the will of God.]] It becomes crucial that your friend not blame God for things which are destructive or personally harmful. She must understand that there are powers and principalities still at work in this world in which God is not yet all in all. Similarly, she must understand that attributing evil to God, suggesting that God demands retribution or reparation for sin from us, substitutes an idol for the real God revealed in the Christ Event. That way would produce a terribly dark and deadly spiral in a person's life --- a spiral in which the Holy Spirit is actually rendered powerless to redeem the situation. Not only would such a position make of God a kind of Golem, (or, as one friend suggested, a Mafia Godfather kind of figure), but it would make the person who saw God in these terms far less open to the message of the Gospel of unconditional love and mercy. It would also cause the person to be open to attitudes and acts of self-sabotage and other forms of capitulation to or collaboration with the powers of sin and death in the name of a false piety.

I hope your friend trusts and listens to you, especially to your own knowledge of God because to be honest I  don't believe you will be able to get through to her otherwise. I also expect this to take time and real patience on your part. You are asking her to let go of an entire "theological" vision and to embrace a very different one --- one where she is not a victim and where the meaning in her life does not come from victimhood. Let me be clear, you (or I, in any case) use the name God in a vastly different way than your friend apparently does. You say the same sounds (God, love, justice, dying to self, conversion, humility, etc) but signify antithetically different things by them. Moreover, the God your friend believes in allows her to blame God for things which may truly be her own fault or at least the result of choices she has made which collude with death and chaos.

The degree of humility and self-emptying required of her for letting go of all of this is immense. The grace of God is present seeking to empower and heal her in this, but she seems caught (trapped or bound) in a way which reminds me of what Scripture calls the sin against the Holy Spirit. In that sin the person cannot be forgiven, not because God withholds it (he does not), but because they can no longer hear (or they otherwise refuse to ask for) the graced word of forgiveness God makes present there. When the word justice, for instance, speaks to us of retribution and the demand for personal reparation rather than of a Divine love that is entirely sufficient and sets everything to rights (thus bringing heaven to earth) then the Holy Spirit has been rendered mute and powerless by our own deafness.

Choosing Life, not death: The choice of humility rather than humiliation, victory instead of victimhood:

Unfortunately it is possible to find older theologies of reparation and retribution that support your friend in her victim stance. These tend to be psychologically and theologically discredited today. Today when we read the Scripture about "making up what is lacking in Christ's sufferings/cross" we understand that Paul is referring to allowing God's love and the new life of resurrection and ascension to fill and transform us. That work still needs to be done and if we don't allow it through the grace of God, it will not happen. The Christ Event changed reality; God can now be found in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place --- but knock, call, invite, attempt to seduce us, etc, as God might, if we are really saying yes to a different God, if we are embracing the Golem that accompanies and grounds our ultimate victimhood, then we are rendering God's Word void and making Christ's Cross of no account. It must always be remembered that Christianity is built on a singular victimhood embraced by God so that NONE OF US would EVER have to be victims again!!! Especially, we would never need to be the victims of a vindictive God whose idea of justice is that of human retribution-writ-large!!

The choices before your friend are those of humility versus humiliation or victory instead of victimhood. We are humbled and made victors (raised up to new life) in Christ by a God who loves us without condition or limit as Jesus' Abba does; we are humiliated and made victims (cast down into the depths) by a "God" (Golem) who demands retribution and reparation for our sin and thus sends catastrophes our way regularly. Here is another version of the choice put before us during Lent: Choose life not death!!! Today,  it must be said clearly, victimhood is truly the way of the world, the way of "worldliness" in all its tragedy and distortion; those who reject that which is worldly, and choose instead the Kingdom where God is sovereign, reject victimhood and any false theology that tends to make them victims rather than victors. It is my sincerest prayer that your friend can find the courage to reject the ways of the world and embrace those of the Kingdom and that you might have some small place in helping this occur!

I wish you both God's own peace, hesychia (stillness), quies, shalom!

Responding to Questions Critical of the Sisters of the LCWR

[[Dear Sister, I have read your blog for some time and have admired a lot of what you have written. You pursue a hermit life of holiness and prayer in separation from the world but how can you speak of the Sisters of the LCWR and Network as though their lives are also about holiness and prayer? They are too immersed in the world. They are too involved in social justice. When the Church talks about "consecration" she means "set apart for God". These sisters are consecrated but who can tell? They don't dress like it, act like it, or live like it.]] (Redacted)

Thanks for your comments and questions. I assume these are in response to my post about Holiness as a Love that does Justice so I would prefer not to repeat what I already wrote there. Let me just say that the active, effective love of God that reconciles, heals, and therefore does justice (sets everything to rights) always spills over into ministry. Reconciliation is not only about our own souls, but about our entire lives, the lives of everyone around us, and in fact, our entire world. It always impels us to reach out to others and work for their own dignity and welfare, their own human wholeness and holiness. It compels us to work for the Kingdom of God --- that realm in which God is truly sovereign and so, that realm marked by a covenantal love that makes completely just. For a very very few of us that means a solitary life of prayer and penance, a life of the silence of solitude. We believe such a life signals to the whole church that there is a foundational relationship which is the source and ground of our lives, identities, and integrity. The very nature of human life is dialogical, and in fact, covenantal; hermits call attention in an especially vivid way to one dimension of this truth in particular.

But the rest of the Church calls attention to this truth in other ways, focusing on different facets of it. In Baptism all of us are consecrated into this truth and commissioned to discern how it is God calls us to make it real in our society and world. But note that consecration here has two interrelated senses. First it means set apart in and for holiness BY God --- for only God who is the Holy One consecrates. Secondly it means set apart for God, for his will, for all that he holds precious. For the majority of people this means vocations which are secular. As leaven in bread most express their consecration in the world. They do so in the world they are immersed in, the world of family, business, politics, economics, academia, etc. As Vatican II emphasized, ALL are called to an exhaustive holiness no matter the context of their lives and mission.

Men and Women Religious are also called to this SAME exhaustive holiness. However, their own call means letting go of various possibilities so that they may live out this call to holiness in a life which is more clearly countercultural and more explicitly set apart by and for God. Through their profession of the evangelical counsels they forego some ways of living which may mitigate or distort this countercultural stance. They do not build themselves into their worlds by having families, pursuing wealth, creating business empires, and the like. They live compassionate lives of prayer focused on their call to live a holiness where God's love does justice. These two dimensions of their lives allow them to address the world which God loves with an everlasting love with greater vision and generosity than THEY might otherwise be capable of --- NOT necessarily with greater generosity than others who are called to a different vocation are capable of. They are not, as you say, immersed in the world yet neither are they uninvolved in it nor ignorant or uncaring of it; neither are they called to live apart from it in the same way a hermit or cloistered religious is. They are called, again, to live countercultural lives which summon the world to become the Kingdom God wills it to be --- the Kingdom where the Divine completely interpenetrates reality and all of us live as brothers and sisters in God. Afterall, this incarnational way of working for the Kingdom is precisely the way Jesus lived it and summoned his disciples to do.

Remember that "separation from the world" can have a number of meanings and expressions. While some treat this term as meaning separation from anything except a convent, monastery, or hermitage environment and life, in canon law it means separation from that which is resistant to Christ and NOT from the whole of God's good creation. Given this latter sense women religious who live more radically countercultural lives rooted in prayer and commitment to a love that does justice can be said to be every bit as faithful to this element of their lives as anyone else. In fact, to the extent they really are grounded in the countercultural values and vision of Christ, they may be more sincerely faithful to it than the so-called hermit who closes the door of her hermitage out of selfishness or individualism and does whatever she wants, or the Sister who lives comfortably in her convent pursuing personal holiness but who cannot or will not muster the compassion or real concern she should have for those living in poverty and/or in separation from love that makes whole.

You complain that the Sisters whose congregations belong to the LCWR are too involved in social justice to the detriment of any personal pursuit of prayer and holiness. But remember that Jesus spoke often about things like feeding the poor, visiting prisoners, etc, and one of the Gospel counsels we have is, "Whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, that you do for/to me." Apart from what I have already mentioned above about commitment to a love that does justice and flows from personal holiness, what seems to be critical for the Sisters we have been speaking of is the reason they are engaged in social justice. Sister Simone Campbell, who was featured in the video I posted, once noted that early on in the days of the civil rights movement she scanned the room in which a lot of fellow demonstrators were clustered and realized that while they all agreed on the action taken, no one else there was there on behalf of the Gospel of Christ. The Sisters who are involved in social justice activities are involved not only because of a holiness which issues in a love that does justice, but precisely because they take the Gospel counsels seriously --- including the counsels about the poor and least. I would suggest to you that this may not be maintained UNLESS the person is deeply grounded in prayer.

The life of women and men religious is a large and vital reality. It is composed of many streams and tributaries. We mustn't make the mistake of identifying one stream or current as the sole representative of a religious life of holiness and prayer, nor one as the only cogent expression of separation from the world. At the same time we cannot draw an absolute dichotomy between social justice and concern with individual holiness and lives of prayer. To do so is to call Jesus and the Gospel of Jesus liars. I hope this answers most of your objections and questions. The question of garb is one I will write about separately if you don't mind.

Personal Holiness is driven by a Love that does Justice: Reflecting on Nuns on the Bus

I have read a lot of comments in response to the Sisters of LCWR and Network being too political, not sufficiently concerned with holiness or grounded in prayer. I have to say that my own understanding of the Gospel supports the clear connection between concern with social justice (which implies political engagement), holiness, and the prayer that is the source of both. Even hermits whose lives are focused in the ways of solitary prayer and the silence of solitude know that genuine holiness stems from prayer and issues in compassion while compassion issues in ministry and ministry is a form of love doing justice. We see this dynamic clearly from the remarks of Sister Simone Campbell as she and a group of Sisters begin their Nuns on the Bus trip.



I am reminded in Sister Simone's emphases (social justice and prayer) and the way they dovetail so well that one of the truly wonderful renderings of the NT's term "righteousness" is "covenant behavior". This is a translation that NT Wright uses. What this means is that we are righteous when we act out of the fact that God is actively and truly our God and we (together) are actively and truly God's People. Both words in this translation are critical: covenant, which points to the dialogical or communal nature of our existence, and "behavior" which focuses us on the living, compelling, and effective nature of the love which stands at the heart of this covenantal reality and also issues from it. Another word for the righteousness that results when God's reconciling love does justice within us and within our world, is "holiness". Unless there is a "love that does justice" at the heart of our being, and therefore, a love which impels us beyond ourselves to extend this justice-making love to our brothers and sisters, our society, and our world, we are not dealing with that "covenant behavior" --- that holiness --- which Jesus' life, death, and resurrection made real in our world. Genuine holiness does justice; the two simply cannot be separated from one another, and they certainly cannot be separated from one another in the lives of ministerial or apostolic religious.

It is not always easy to be transparent about one's prayer. Neither is it easy to make it clear that for Sisters involved in either apostolic or ministerial religious life a passion for social justice stems from prayer, is supported by prayer, and leads back to prayer. (Too often in discussions and debates critics arbitrarily draw lines between faith and political action, for instance, and we are left with a truncated and inadequate perspective on what it means to be a person of faith, a person committed to holiness, to covenant behavior in our contemporary world.) But Sister Simone managed all this in her comments above. My thanks to her for so clearly revealing the heart of this vital form of religious life.

Feast of the Sacred Heart

We are faced today with a feast that seems sometimes to be irrelevant to contemporary life. The Feast of the Sacred Heart developed in part as a response to pre-destinationist theologies which diminished the universality of the gratuitous love of God and consigned many to perdition. But the Church's own theology of grace and freedom point directly to the reality of the human heart -- that center of the human person where God freely speaks himself and human beings respond in ways which are salvific for them and for the rest of the world. It asks us to see all  persons as constituted in this way and called to life in and of God. Today's Feast of the Sacred Heart, then, despite the shift in context, asks us to reflect again on the nature of the human heart, to the greatest danger to spiritual or authentically human life the Scriptures identify, and too, on what a contemporary devotion to the Sacred Heart might mean for us.

As I have written here before, the heart is the symbol of the center of the human person. It is a theological term which points first of all to God and to God's activity deep within us. It is not so much that we have a heart and then God comes to dwell there; it is that where God dwells within us and bears witness to himself, we have a heart. The human heart (not the cardiac muscle but the center of our personhood the Scriptures call heart) is a dialogical event where God speaks, calls, breathes, and sings us into existence and where, in one way and degree or another, we respond to become the people we are. It is therefore important that our hearts be open and flexible, that they be obedient to the Voice and love of God, and so that they be responsive in all the ways they are summoned to be.

Bearing this in mind it is no surprise that the Scriptures speak in many places about the very worst thing which could befall a human being and her spiritual life. We hear it in the following line from Ezekiel: [[If today you hear [God's] voice, harden not your hearts.]] Many things contribute to such a reaction. We know that love is risky and that it always hurts. Sometimes this hurt is akin to the mystical experience of being pierced by God's love and is a wonderful but difficult experience. Other times love wounds us in less fruitful ways: we are betrayed by friends or family, we reach out to another in love and are rejected, a billion smaller losses wound us in ways from which we cannot seem to recover. In such cases our hearts are not only wounded but become scarred, indurated, less sensitive to pain (or pleasure), stiff and relatively inflexible. They, quite literally, become "hardened" and we may be fearful and unwilling or even unable to risk further injury. When the Scriptures speak of the "hardening" of our hearts they use the very words medicine uses to speak of the result of serious and prolonged wounding: induration, sclerosis, callousedness. Such hardening is self-protective but it also locks us into a world which makes us less capable of responding to love with all of its demands and riskiness. It makes us incapable of suffering well (patiently, fruitfully), or of real selflessness, generosity, or compassion.

It is here that the symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus' is instructive and where contemporary devotion to the Sacred Heart can assist us. The Sacred Heart is clearly the place where human and divine are united in a unique way. While we are not called to Daughterhood or to Sonship in the exact same sense of Jesus' (he is "begotten" Son, we are adopted Sons), we are meant to be expressions of a similar unity and heritage; we are meant to have God as the well spring of life and love at the center of our existence. Like the Sacred Heart our own hearts are meant to be "externalized" in a sense and transparent to others. They are meant to be wounded by love and deeply touched by the pain of others but not scarred or indurated in that woundedness; they are meant to be compassionate hearts on fire with love and poured out for others --- hearts which are marked by the cross in all of its kenotic dimensions and therefore too by the joy of ever-new life. The truly human heart is a reparative heart which heals the woundedness of others and empowers them to love as well. Such hearts are hearts which love as God loves, and therefore which do justice. I think that allowing our own hearts to be remade in this way represents an authentic devotion to Jesus' Sacred Heart. There is nothing lacking in relevance or contemporaneity in that!

Do you Love Me Peter? On being made human in Dialogue with God

Tomorrow's gospel is the pericope where Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him. It is the first time we hear much about or from Peter since his triple denial of Christ --- his fear-driven affirmations that he did not even know the man and is certainly not a disciple of his. After each question and reply by Peter, Jesus commissions Peter to "feed my lambs, feed my sheep." I have written about this at least three times before.

About two years ago I used this text to reflect on the place of conscience in our lives and a love which transcends law. At another point I spoke about the importance of Jesus' questions and of my own difficulty with Jesus' question to Peter. Then, last year at the end of school I asked the students to imagine what it feels like to have done something for which one feels there is no forgiveness possible and then to hear how an infinitely loving God deals with that. The solution is not, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have termed it, "cheap grace" --- a forgiveness without cost or consequences. Neither is it a worthless "luv" which some in the Church mistakenly disparage because they hear (they say) too many homilies about the God of Love and mercy and not enough about the God of "justice". Instead, what Jesus reveals in this lection is a merciful love which overcomes all fear and division and summons us to incredible responsibility and freedom. The center of this reading, in other words, is a love which does justice and sets all things right.

But, especially at this time in the church's life, tomorrow's gospel also takes me to the WAY Jesus loves Peter. He addresses him directly; he asks him questions and allows him to discover an answer which stands in complete contrast to and tension with his earlier denials and the surge of emotions and complex of thoughts that prompted them. As with Peter, Jesus' very presence is a question or series of questions which have the power to call us deeper, beyond our own personal limitations and conflicts, to the core of our being. What Jesus does with Peter is engage him at the level of heart --- a level deeper than fear, deeper than ego, beyond defensiveness, and insecurity. Jesus' presence enables dialogue at this profound level, dialogue with one's true self, with God, and with one's entire community; it is an engagement which brings healing and reveals that the capacity for dialogue is the deepest reflection of our humanity.

It is this deep place in us which is the level for authentically human decision making. When we perceive and act at the level of heart we see and act beyond the level of black and white thinking, beyond either/or judgmentalism. Here we know paradox and hold tensions together in faith and love. Here we act in authentic freedom. Jesus' dialogue with Peter points to all of this and to something more. It reminds us that loving God is not a matter of "feeling" some emotion --- though indeed it may well involve this. Instead it is something we are empowered in dialogue with the Word and Spirit of God to do which transcends even feelings; it is a response realized in deciding to serve, to give, to nourish others in spite of the things happening to us at other levels of our being.

When we reflect on this text involving a paradigmatic dialogue between Peter and Jesus we have a key to understanding the nature of all true ministry, and certainly to life and ministry in the Church. Not least we have a significant model of papacy. Of course it is a model of service, but it is one of service only to the extent it is one of true dialogue, first with God, then with oneself, and finally with all others. It is always and everywhere a matter of being engaged at the level of heart, and so, as already noted, beyond ego, fear, defensiveness, black and white thinking, judgmentalism or closed-mindedness to a place where one is comfortable with paradox. As John Paul II wrote in Ut Unum Sint, "Dialog has not only been undertaken; it is an outright necessity, one of the Church's priorities, " or again, "It is necessary to pass from antagonism and conflict to a situation where each party recognizes the other as a partner. . .any display of mutual opposition must disappear." (UUS, secs 31 and 29)

But what is true for Peter is, again, true for each of us. We must be engaged at the level of heart and act in response to the dialogue that occurs there. Because of the place of the Word of God in this process, lectio divina, the reflective reading of Scripture, must be a part of our regular praxis. So too with prayer, especially quiet prayer whose focus is listening deeply and being comfortable with that often-paradoxical truth that comes to us in silence. Our humanity is meant to be a reflection of this profound dialogue. At every moment we are meant to be a hearing of Jesus' question and the commission to serve which it implies. At every moment then we are to be the response which transcends ego, fear, division, judgmentalism, and so forth. Engagement with the Word of God enables such engagement, engagement from that place of unity with God and others Jesus' questions to Peter allowed him to find and live from. My prayer today is that each of us may commit to be open to this kind of engagement. It makes of us the dialogical reality, the full realization of that New Creation which is truly "not of this world" but instead is of the Kingdom of God.