Proclaiming the Feast of Christ the King: On Becoming the persons we are Called to Be

 Every year when we reach this last feast of the liturgical year I ask myself if Christ is more sovereign in my life than in past years. Have I grown in my openness to allowing Christ to be King or Ruler in my own life? Have I let go of the practices and attitudes that resist Jesus' sovereignty or the holy-making power of the mercy and love of the God Jesus calls Abba? A few years ago (about 5 and 1/2 years actually) I began writing about a process of inner growth and healing, a process of personal formation I had begun with my own director and I have commented on that a few times during these last years. The past year has been intense and of a somewhat different quality than the previous 4+ years; in October it was marked by a miracle --- yes, a literal miracle (there is no hyperbole or figurative language involved in that label) --- and throughout the year I experienced Jesus' presence in other ways that changed me, healed me, and too, challenged me to grow and mature in his love and friendship. The work I had undertaken proved to be powerful, and powerfully fruitful, and while the process continues (as a Sister friend recently reminded me, formation never ends!), its natural rhythm has led rather "neatly" (not that I really find anything about this work "neat") to this year's celebration of the feast of Christ the King, and a new liturgical year focusing on new beginnings, new life, and especially on a God who brings life out of barrenness!

One of the things I write about a lot in this blog is the way the phrase "stricter separation from the world" does not mean simply closing the hermitage door on the world around us. Instead it means changing one's heart, allowing our hearts to be loved into a wholeness that sees the world around us with the eyes of God rather than with the eyes of neediness, greed, acquisitiveness, and fear. To enter a hermitage or convent, for instance, without undergoing a significant metanoia of our own heart, is to make of the hermitage or convent an outpost of that world we shut the door on; to shut the door on "the world" in this way is to shut it up inside ourselves -- potentially a truly miserable-making situation for a hermit living physical solitude and external silence!! If our hearts are full of the woundedness and delusions regarding what is true, and which "the world" can cause, to live in silence and solitude within a hermitage can (will!) allow the screams of anguish one has distracted oneself from (or that one has become!), to come up freshly with increasing intensity and dominate one's personal reality. (Folks will know something of this experience because of the COVID-19 pandemic's need for social distancing and even outright "lockdown.")

But the world of the hermitage also provides the graced place and freedom to work with and in Christ to heal one's woundedness and to do battle (!) with the demons of one's own heart. This is the struggle to achieve what canon 603 calls "the silence of solitude" and requires of our lives as the charism and goal of diocesan eremitical life; it is also the gift a hermit will bring to her community whenever her vocation is lived rightly and well. I was very fortunate, the last few years especially, to have a director who either travelled to my hermitage every week or met with me by ZOOM so that we could work together with the frequency and personal accompaniment the work demanded. (It was a gift simply to find we could do this work via ZOOM!!!) 

I was aware that when the Church professed me under c.603 I had been given permission, indeed I had been commissioned to work with God in Christ to become the person he had made and called me to become! What other vocation allows for the space and time to attend to a call to holiness/wholeness in quite the same way as eremitical life? So, while I had never really anticipated doing the work I was doing, and despite some real risk that it could even mean I would need to consider leaving eremitical life for something else, the effectiveness of this work actually underscored my vocation rather than contradicting it. This year that means that I have come to a place where "stricter separation from the world'' means "greater adherence to the incredible life and potential of a God-given Self." It means "allowing God to empower and complete me" so I can be entirely myself and thus too, a clear expression of "God with us." 

And so, this year, as I review what has been during this past year, I am looking at a card my pastor gave me more than a year ago for my birthday. On the front it has a quote from e. e. cummings: [[It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.]] And that is certainly true; I have looked at that card several times a day this last 15 months, and been reminded of its deep truth. The world apart from God misshapes and distorts us each in all kinds of ways and still we are called to mature into the ones only God can fully envision, create, and complete. He is the potter, after all, and empowered by God's Spirit of Holiness we must find ways to allow ourselves to be clay --- God's own clay. This kind of growth and healing takes the grace of God in Christ who summons, accompanies, heals, transforms, and perfects us with his love and presence; often mediated by others who work diligently with us, it is this that empowers us to become the persons we are called to be. Letting the deepest, God-given truth in us --- the imago dei/imago Christi we are most truly --- live as abundantly as God wills it to is the work of a lifetime --- and the work of the God in Christ we are called to allow to be sovereign.

In some ways this piece feels to me like it is "all over the place" --- probably because there is so much to say in a brief space, along with the need to be discreet (and especially reverent) about some of it. But I need to return to writing regularly on this blog; I am hoping this is an opening piece which will allow me to do that. Sharing the spirit of this day then, I sincerely invite readers to regard your own lives and ask yourselves if Jesus is more truly King or Ruler in/of your life on this Feast day than he was at the beginning of Advent last year? Are you more fully alive? More true? More fruitful? Do you regard "the world" around you as something to be despised,  or do you view it more rightly as something to be loved because you see it with the eyes of God and engage creatively with it according to your calling? 

Human perfection is a matter of being in the process of coming to committed maturity (or responsible freedom!!) and fullness of life; it is about being on the path to that. Are you more perfect today than you were last year?  More complete or whole (because this truly indicates the sovereignty of God in your life)? Do you know (and so, accept) your own innate poverty and the mercy of God more fully? Are you more yourself, more moved by truth, generosity, courage, and compassion? Are you less tolerant of untruth in all of its various, subtle and not-so-subtle forms even as you love better those somehow wed to untruth? If, and to the extent you are any of these things, you know what it is to acclaim -- and proclaim with your life -- Christ as King/Ruler of creation. Alleluia, Alleluia! Let us celebrate this truth together!!

Addressibility: Called by Name to be that we Might Call Others by Name to be

[[Hi Sister, could you say a little more about what you call "addressibility" and the way that refers to what it means to be made in the image of God? I have never heard this before and don't know how to think about it. I don't know who Gerhard Ebeling is. Thank you!]]

Sure, I would be happy to say a little more about it. I have probably written about this before in posts about the invocation to the Lord's Prayer. It is critical to the notion of prayer, for instance, that it is understood in terms of the capacity to address God by name and to be addressed by name ourselves. When we address another by name or are addressed by name ourselves it implies giving one or being given a personal place to stand in the life of the other. Without this act of address we might impinge on another in a less than truly personal way with our physical presence, but we do not have a personal place to stand in their lives. Address by name empowers and summons to personal presence. It is an implicit promise to allow the one addressed to be themselves and more, to reveal themselves in whatever terms they may do. Since names include and transcend any characteristic or collection of characteristics a name symbolizes the indefinable mystery of the person and it was this that Semitic peoples especially saw and reflected in their Scriptures.

To call upon God by name as Abba, is not to describe God as fatherly (though it may also do this); it is to give God a place in our lives which respects God's mystery and allows (him/her) to reveal (him/herself) on God's own terms. In last Sunday's first reading God reveals his name as "I will be who I will be" (often translated as I am who am despite this lacking the dynamism of the original). This Name captures both God's indefinability or mystery and the dynamic of revelation on one's own terms.   Likewise, to call upon God by name is to enter into a covenant relationship where God calls us by name as well and therefore allows that loving act of address to summon us to be our truest selves. To be called by name is to have the entire mystery of our personhood addressed, not just the characteristics which make us successful in the world around us, not just our strengths and virtues, not even just our weaknesses and sins. It is the way God creates, loves, and shows mercy --- and it is  the way we share in that power. (It is no small matter that God is portrayed as entrusting us with the naming of the animals in the Genesis account of creation.) I don't think other beings share in this capacity to name, call by name (or tragically and sinfully, to betray this capacity and to distort or otherwise deprive others of a name or the gift of being called by name). It is unique to us as imago dei.

Again, name symbolizes the WHOLE person who is always more than the sum of her parts and invites her to be her truest self. When God calls us by name to be it is a creative act. It recognizes and even mobilizes the entire mystery of the person in a way no other word does. When we act similarly it is similarly creative; it gives others a place to stand in community with us which the person cannot create herself. Again, to call another by name is to constitute them in freedom not least because it extends membership in a human community to them, a necessary condition of possibility of human growth and fulfillment. It is an act of profound compassion, perhaps the highest we can exercise.

I would argue that the basic truths of our faith can be understood to some extent, either directly or indirectly, in terms of this act of address and the empowering of addressibility. Addressibility and the spoken Word of address is a key to understanding creation, creatio continua, redemption and reconciliation,  the nature of mercy, revelation, and justice because all of these hinge upon the dynamics involved in and symbolized by being called and calling upon another by name to be. For instance the imperative that we transform aliens into neighbors literally depends upon this dynamic.  It is a task we are called to undertake as part of the ministry of reconciliation. The notion that Christ calls us friends not servants reflects this same dynamic since we address friends differently and with a different level of intimacy than we do servants.

When I wrote the piece you are asking about (cf., Embracing a Surpassing Righteousness) I had used parts of it as a reflection for a Communion service. One member of the assembly was reminded of a song she knew and sang it for me afterwards. I think it captures perfectly what I have described here --- with the addition of the great yearning we each have to be called by name and made true by God --- or, to a more limited extent, by anyone else who might do similarly.

Please call me by my true name,

Please call me by my true name,

That I may wake up,

wake up,

And the doors of my heart can open wide, the doors of compassion.

The doors of compassion.

P.S., Gerhard Ebeling is a Lutheran systematic theologian. Besides writing about the nature of faith and a full length commentary on Galatians, one of the areas in which he specializes is that of theological linguistics. His focus on the Word and on the human capacity for Word is very powerful. His small book of nine sermons on the Lord's Prayer with a profound insight into the nature of the invocation is wonderful and very readable. His Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language is equally profound --- though I wouldn't suggest this for the casual reader! Several of Ebeling's other books focus similarly on Word and on Proclamation. God and Word is a small and precious gem of a book for theologians and non-theologians alike. I'm afraid I haven't kept up with him or his work beyond the 1970's-80's.

Letting God Remake our Hearts: Embracing a Surpassing Righteousness

When I read the warning in Friday's Gospel, "Unless your righteous-ness sur-passes that of the Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven," I was reminded of a question I was once asked by a hermit candidate. I think I have related it here before. He wondered how it was I balanced the "hermit things I do and the worldly things I do"? When I asked what he meant by worldly things he began to explain  and listed things like laundry, cleaning the bathroom, washing dishes, etc. When asked what he meant by hermit things he explained he meant prayer, lectio, Mass, fasting, and all of the other "spiritual" things which were or were becoming a part of his faith life.  In response I tried to explain that at some point --- once he was truly a hermit in the sense he needed to be, especially in order to be professed under c 603, he would come to see that all of the everyday things he did became "hermit things" because after all, he would be a hermit with the heart of a hermit and these were the things done by him. One could not divide one's life into spiritual things and worldly things in such an arbitrary way. The aim of his life with and in God was to allow all things to breathe with the presence of God --- and as a hermit, to witness to the fact that this occurs in the silence of solitude.

There was a corollary. What was also true was that it was possible for him to do all the things a hermit does every day and never become or be a hermit. Unless his "hermitness" came from within and defined everything he did he would remain a person living alone and doing things many many people of many different vocations would do every single day. What had to change was his heart. At some point, if he was truly called to eremitical life, he would develop the heart of a hermit, that is, the heart of a disciple of Christ shaped and nurtured through the events and circumstances of his life as these are transfigured by his dialogue with God in solitude and silence. Righteousness is a matter of the heart existing in an empowered and transfiguring relationship with God and then with others. Merely observing laws may not imply the profound dialogue with God which constitutes real righteousness.

Rule of Life and the Personal Call of God:

A second story might also help explain what concerned Jesus in Friday's Matthean lection. When seeking admission to profession and consecration under canon 603 I, like all diocesan hermits, was required to write a Rule or Plan of Life. There were many possibilities for constructing such a Rule but there were two main options: 1) create a Rule which was essentially a list of things I was to do or avoid doing each day. Such a Rule would include rules for hospitality, allowances for limited active ministry, forms of prayer and devotions to be done, allowed frequency and circumstances associated with leaving the hermitage, daily schedule (rising, recreation, hours of prayer, rest, meals, study, work, retiring, etc, etc.), use of media, times for retreat, spiritual direction, contact with friends and family, the role of the Bishop and delegate, vows, etc. Over all it would be a list of do's and don'ts which constituted laws.

I realized this wouldn't work for me for a couple of reasons. First I would be setting myself up for failure. Sometimes this failure would be due to my own weakness, not only my own resistance but illness, lack of stamina, etc. Secondly though, I knew that such a Rule would not have the ability to inspire me or empower faithfulness and growth. In the short term or over the long haul such a Rule would not serve me or my vocation well. It simply would not speak to my heart or reflect the redemptive way God worked in my life. It would be about external things, important things, yes, but still only external matters. While I had to include such matters, the Rule needed to allow God to continue working within me and therefore, to create the opportunities I personally needed in order to hearken more and more fully to God's call. It needed to allow for a greater righteousness than mere codified law could ever do. In other words, it needed to reflect and express the ways God makes me truly myself. It needed, so to speak,  to be stamped with my Name on every page and too, to call me by Name to be every day of my life.

Surpassing Righteousness: Living the Law of our Hearts

Just as my Rule expresses God's personal call to me, so it expresses my truest self, and therefore, the "law written on my heart." That law, that identity or truest self is symbolized by my name. In true prayer we call upon God by name ("Abba!") as the Spirit empowers us; we give God a sovereign place to stand in our lives and world. But at the same time God calls us by name and gives us a place to stand in his own life. This is the essence of the dialogue of love that occurs between us, the way in which we are made true and empowered by God to a surpassing righteousness. Similarly, it empowers us to call others by name to be, to give the incredible mystery each person is and is called to be a place to stand in our own world without violating or judging them.

To learn to call others by name in this way is to act towards them with the same love God shows us. It was striking to me last week as I reflected on Friday's Gospel that all of this stood in direct counterpoint and contrast to a law which judges and fails to respect the mystery, the sacred and sacramental wholeness of our selves. It is this more external and lesser law which allows us to call another "Raqa" or to judge them to be a fool. It is the same imperfect and partial law which divides and allows us to accept the division of reality into spiritual and worldly things or which remains merely external to ourselves. Moreover, it is the law which drives so much of the world around us which is geared to success and competition at others' expense or to label some "neighbors" and others "aliens" and even to deprive them of names and supplant these with clinical designations or even with numbers.



Artist, Mary Southard, CSJ

Theologians like Gerhard Ebeling have noted that it is "addressibility," our divinely rooted capacity for receiving and extending personal address which is both the essence of love and, at the same time, the really unique and most human thing about us. Betrayal of this capacity is the deepest and perhaps the most dehumanizing sin we know. To name and to call upon another by name are two of the most profoundly creative acts we undertake by means of language because these allow another to genuinely exist as a person rather than as an anonymous "other" with no real place to stand in our lives or the world of human community.

I have begun thinking of "addressibility" as one central meaning of the notion that we are created in the image of God (imago Dei) and thus too, the law which God carves on our hearts; it is the "law," this "image," which Lent seeks to allow us to live more fully. Whether we do that through prayer where we call upon God and allow God to call us by name, through penance where we learn  to hear our own deepest names and become aware of our common humanity with others, or through a true almsgiving where we do not merely give things to others but rather gift them in ways which summon them to their truest dignity, where, that is, we give in ways which call others by name to be, addressibility is the gift and law we embody most profoundly; it is the surpassing righteousness to which we are called. Billy, an 8 year old described it this way, [[You know you are loved by the way someone holds your name in their mouth.]]

My prayer is that we each take seriously our call to the surpassing righteousness which allows us to call upon God as "Abba" and simultaneously lets him call us by name to be. May we allow God to remake our hearts in terms of the law written there and symbolized by our truest Name; may we be similarly inspired to "hold one another's names in our own mouths" with the genuine reverence God teaches us by the way he loves and addresses us.