Dominica 11 post Pentecosten
Evening, 30 July 2016 /
Church of St John the Evangelist / Agawam
Then he looked
up to heaven, and sighed; Ephpheta, he said
(that is, Be opened).
Whereupon his
ears were opened, and the bond which tied his tongue was loosed
and he talked
plainly (Mk
7:34-35).
Why not begin again with the collect?
Almighty, eternal God, who in your loving kindness far
exceed the merits and desires of those who pray to you: pour out your mercy
upon us, so as to drive away whatever conscience fears and supply what prayer
cannot anticipate.[1]
Every Roman collect begs for a
certain grace; here, however, we have a collect that is very profoundly
interior.—We do not, for instance, have a collect that asks for peace in temporibus nostris or for an
outpouring of devotion upon the Church or for the intercession of our Lady or a
saint. No, this collect drives deeply into our hearts today: to drive away or
scatter what conscience fears and supply what we cannot anticipate or presume
to ask. This collect is about the hidden, even inarticulate fears that we each
carry—individually, privately—and about the equally secret expectations and
hopes we offer to God.
Indeed, this Sunday’s collect invites
us to consider the mystery of the
interior life. Truly, we are so accustomed to judging by appearances and
feelings, that often the Catholic faithful can be disoriented when it comes to
deepening the spiritual life. The landscape of growth in holiness is, at times,
confusing and arduous.—Remember, that sin has darkened our intellect, weakened
our will, and disordered our passions. A commitment to the spiritual life is a
commitment to somehow disentangling all that with the constant help of grace; and
so to bring order to our wounded nature is not an intuitive process. We have
only to investigate the spiritual writings of St John of the Cross to see how
mysterious the way can be.
Note well: even the saints experience
the dizzying mystery of God’s activity in a human life. One contemporary
churchman expresses this very well when he says the following:
Faith does not presuppose any guarantees. The believer
walks in the dark, like a pilgrim seeking the light. What he knows he knows
only in the half-light of evening, walking with the help of a cognitio vespertina and not yet of a cognitio matutina, a knowledge of clear
vision. . . . The man who believes agrees, like Abraham, to become the prisoner
of the invisible God; he agrees to let the Father possess him in obedient
listening, docility of heart, and the lights of his intellect. His walk toward
God is consent and abandonment, without expecting to benefit from reassuring
guarantees.[2]
Beautifully said. Put differently,
like the man in this Sunday’s Gospel, we
are deaf and mute when it comes to the deep, hidden things of God.
None of that is to be a
discouragement, however. We have a tradition that is twenty centuries old to
help us to navigate the mystery of the spiritual life, and the Gospel is the
source and spring of divine wisdom.
1. Christ alone is the sure and
certain way of the human being’s walk to God. There was no one else who could
heal the deaf mute. The wonder of the crowds proves this to us, and truly did
they say of him, “Bene omnia fecit:
he has made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
2. Christ took the deaf mute apart
from the crowd. Solitude and freedom from distraction are essential if we are
to live with God; we must allow him to take us apart. And yet this is also a
lesson about detachment: for we must separate
from anything in our life that does not help us to draw nearer to God.
Therein lies a great obstacle for us, and many otherwise well-meaning Catholics
turn away from a life lived closer to God because we do not wish to carry out
this difficult work. It requires wisdom, honesty, and courage.
3. Christ touches and affects our
lives if we allow him to. At our Baptism, in the person of the priest, he
touched us in the same way he did for the deaf mute: he placed his hands on our
ears and our lips. From that moment, our ears became attentive to the teaching
of Christ and we recognized his voice as the truth. This is precisely why the
question of fidelity to the truth—no matter how unpopular—is essential to the
spiritual life. Drawing closer to God is a mystery, and we cannot do so
unaided. Adherence to the authentic
teaching of Christ’s Church is not a matter of having retrograde preferences or
the conservative instinct as such—rather,
it is about safety in the mystery. We need guideposts in the mystery, and
these guideposts are set up not by us, but by the God we seek. When Christ says
Ephphatha, the way is pointed out to
us and we receive help and sustenance we need.
The touch of Christ is not limited to
his teaching alone; as we know, the Sacraments are the efficacious signs of his
action. This separates us from all other Christians, the Orthodox excepted: we
have actual spiritual contact with Christ in his Sacraments.[3] Each Sacrament well
received heal us of our spiritual deafness and dumbness—or in the words of our
collect, drives away what conscience fears and supplies what we dare not ask.
[Returning to our collect, what a
wonderful prayer for the Year of Mercy. There is so much unexpressed and misunderstood
fear in the souls of our contemporaries, just as our aspirations as human
beings are limitless. And yet sadly, the world averts itself from the merciful
gaze of God—for it is painful to face our fears—and it settles for easy
pleasures—because to transcend ourselves, we must at times deny ourselves.]
In the end, we must not fear the
mystery of the spiritual life, if Christ our Master presides over us. Turning
away from reliance on feeling and first impressions in the spiritual life is
essential for us: this evening, we have discussed a few ways that we do this. As
always, much more could be said. Christ was the complete master over the
disability of the deaf mute; he is master of our lives, too, and the more
confident and steady we are, the more freely he will exercise that mastery.
Therefore, friends, do not be afraid of anything, either in the world or in
your own souls: the good God has heard the prayer we addressed to him—to drive
away what our conscience fears and to supply what we cannot anticipate. With
this done, away from the crowd of this world, he will gather us to himself
where, speaking plainly, we shall be all praise: indeed, he has done all things well.
[1]
Translation my own. Dimitto (here translated “drive away”)
means also “to scatter” or “disperse.” Further, an alternative final clause
might read, “and supply what prayer does not presume to ask.”
[2]
God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith, Robert Cardinal Sarah,
trans Michael J Miller, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), p 200.
[3] Which is why, if ecumenism must be
considered, sacramental communion can never be a secondary question.
No comments:
Post a Comment