During Holy Week I’ve encountered two very different and yet equally profound meanings in the act of a kiss.  The first, of course, is the act by which Judas symbolized his betrayal of Christ: a tender, intimate act which was a lie and a travesty.  The other was the act by which we show reverence for the cross of Christ in the liturgy of Good Friday.

I celebrated Good Friday liturgy with my family at Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts, home to a community of retired Jesuits.  There is a beautiful chapel there somewhat reminiscent of the baroque style of the Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, and being there calls to mind the grand sweep of Jesuit history symbolized by that church.  As I looked around the congregation, I saw men who have spent decades in service to Christ.  They have been professors, pastors, presidents.  They have served in Beirut, Beijing, Boston, and Botswana.  They have baptized, taught, built, preached, and given spiritual direction to thousands.  Now, here they live out what is likely their final assignment: they move slowly with walkers, or are pushed about in wheelchairs, and spend much time in silence.

The celebrant raised the cross as he and two other priests approached the altar: “behold the cross of Christ, on which was hung the salvation of the world.”  The three of them processed around the large chapel, pausing for those who were non-ambulatory, so that they might kiss the cross.  The rest of us later processed up the center aisle in order to similarly revere the cross.

It was the faces of those old Jesuits who inspired me.  For a moment, I saw not an old man in a wheelchair, but a missionary still responding to the Call of Christ the King.  They would raise their arms and lovingly bring the wood of the cross to their lips and kiss the feet of the One for whom they had toiled their whole lives.  There was something in their eyes. I could see it.  They are still in love.

Ignatius writes in the Spiritual Exercises, “love shows itself more in deeds than in words.”  A kiss is a small gesture, but it is a symbol, a manifestation of something deeper that stretches across years, lifetimes, and generations.  It is a deed by which a person can render back to God the love that God has given.  Once again the Jesuits have taught me something: the meaning of a kiss.

My new favorite description of love is the willingness to enter a mess. It’s a pretty decent description of the Incarnation (or kenosis for you theologians out there); it captures the spirit of that oft-quoted passage from Matthew 25 about feeding Jesus when you feed the hungry. It’s pretty close to the sentiment that Ignatius counsels in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the fourth week of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s certainly what was on Ignatius’s mind when he penned the beautiful Suscipe prayer: “take, Lord, receive all my liberty….” For if the spiritual life is coming to inhabit the place where God stands, and seeing the world as God sees it, and being willing to act upon what one sees from that place, well, that’s being willing to enter a mess.

Sue and I are sprinting toward a lovely mess. The amazing thing is that it wasn’t one we’d planned. It was one that God told us to enter last month when He e-mailed Sue the photo of a 7 year-old boy in China, Fu Yuan, who has a heart defect. God said, “yes, he’ll fit into your family nicely. You can get him some good medical care, you can give him older sisters who also started their lives in China, and you can help him make the transition because you, Dad, speak Chinese like a 7 year-old.” We protested that we couldn’t afford the fees; we’re taking care of Sue’s mom; we’ve had to deal with various work and school difficulties; yada yada yada. I went into a conversation with Sue thinking we’d have to say no, and came out of it convinced I’d be with my son by the end of the year. Thanks be to God!

There have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century.  Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.

In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.  The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical.  Yet I believe that they go hand in hand.  One nourishes the other.  Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion.  It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.

As I enter into an annual silent retreat with students, I am mindful of how great is the gift of silence.  We think too much; we speak too much.  We argue about concepts of God, we use limiting words for God.  To slightly modify a famous phrase from Meister Eckhart: I pray that God would rid us of all these words and thoughts about God!

Thinking is really a pretty terrible way of encountering God.  Words are even worse.  I come around again and again to a deep intuition of Ignatius: sensing, savoring God is what we’re after.  We must taste the bread of the Eucharist.  We must feel the scabbed hands of the leper, smell the deep fresh odor of the baby’s skin, listen to the wind through the trees, be awestruck by the sight of the kingfisher.

Words and thoughts are for helping others experience God, clearing away their obstacles to God.  Too often we pat ourselves on the back for our words and thoughts, though: we give grades, degrees, honors to those who use words well.  We get used to thinking of our intellects as hammers which make everything into a nail, including God.  (That is why atheism is a modern phenomenon, because only in modernity did people start conceiving of their intellects in such a disordered way.)

Words and thoughts are gifts, artful productions.  We must consider them more as something we do in love, rather than as objects we produce.  Today, we use words and thoughts to conquer the world.  We must rather use them to serve the world, to offer them to the world in love.  When I conceive of a thought, I rejoice that God has given me a mind.  When I speak a word, I rejoice that through speaking this word I might draw another to the truth.

“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” (Ps 51:15)

Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, 1513-16, Louvre

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dotMagis.

The word “God” is a pronoun whose antecedent we do not know.

When we are struck by beauty, when it lays claim to our attention and nearly takes our breath away, or when beholding the beautiful makes us for a moment deeply aware that there is much more in the world than we can possibly understand, even if we should read all the books and gather all the data–then we are beholding God.

When we allow ourselves to fall in love–to release ourselves to love, to be overpowered by love such that we cannot control the cascading of emotions (heartsickness, profound desire, anguish, overwhelming joy), we are allowing ourselves an experience of God.

When we act in faith–that is, orient our lives toward something we can only partially understand right now, like who we’ll be when we grow up, or how we’ll make our way in the world, or how our talents might unfold in the future–we are breathing the breath (Lat. spiritus, Heb. ruah, Gk. pneuma) of God.

These and other experiences remain only experiences until the point at which we begin to reflect on who God is.

God is, as Augustine says, “more intimate to me than I am to myself.” But just as I may be unaware of the most interior parts of myself, I may be unaware of God. If I am of a discerning mind and heart, I will come to acknowledge God, but I will never come to know him. Only God can reveal himself to me.

We cannot name the experience of God, lest we limit it and thereby lose its full meaning. We cannot explain it to another, even with the cleverest of parables or allegories. The best we can do is point others to how they too might name their experiences of God. In the ancient days, the prophets reminded Israel that God was at the heart of who they were as a people. God revealed himself as the giver of the law, the principle of right action for the individual and the community.

John the Baptist, another prophet, said that the one who is to come will show us God. He reminded us that sin gets in the way, and that repentance is a clearing of obstacles to knowing God.

Jesus taught in parables in order that we might turn from sin toward God. Jesus showed us the way to the Father. He is the supreme parable, icon, sacrament of God.

Following him, what remains is the life of deepening friendship with God, whereby we gain our freedom. We deepen the life of God in us and move ever closer to God.

Dean Brackley, the late Jesuit educator who spent many years teaching in El Salvador, wrote a beautiful meditation on what it feels like to fall in love because of the ministry of the poor. The text comes from a piece he wrote in 2000 for Salvanet, “A Publication of Christians for Peace in El Salvador,” published as a PDF file here.

Writing of those who visit El Salvador for the first time, he says:

The visitors feel themselves losing their grip; or better, they feel the world losing its grip on them. What world? The world made up of important people like them and unimportant poor people like their hosts. As the poet Yeats says, “things fall apart;” the visitors’ world is coming unhinged. They feel resistance, naturally, to a current that threatens to sweep them out of control.

They feel a little confused–again–like the disorientation of falling in love. In fact, that is what is happening, a kind of falling in love. The earth trembles. My horizon is opening up. I’m on unfamiliar ground, entering a richer, more real world. We all live a bit on the periphery of the deep drama of life, more so, on average, in affluent societies. The reality of the periphery is thin, one-dimensional, “lite,” compared to the multilayered richness of this new world the visitors are entering. In this interchange with a few of their representatives, the anonymous masses of the world’s poor emerge from their cardboard-cutout reality and take on the three-dimensional status of full-fledged human beings.

That is what love is like: “entering a richer, more real world.” Of course many are like those in Plato’s cave, content with the small pleasures, unwilling to take the risk of love. For love is demanding. It changes your whole world. It is always holy ground, the place where we experience the terror of not being in control. That is why love is the least inadequate way of conceiving of God.

Image by logostoni under Creative Commons license.

Dorothy Day’s 1934 Letter to an Agnostic is republished in this week’s America Magazine.  In it, she writes about her own struggles with belief and unbelief, sounding this very Ignatian note:

We are taught that our souls never exercise just as our body does, otherwise it will never be healthy and well, and if it is not in a healthy state, of course we feel morbid. And prayer is that exercise for the soul, just as bending and stretching is the exercise of the body. It is intellectual pride, the arrogance of youth which makes the physical act of prayer difficult.

Read the whole thing here.

Saint Augustine Portrait by Botticelli

The last straw which led to Saint Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was the voice of a child, playing a game in which he chanted “take and read, take and read.” The voice led Augustine to pick up the Bible and read a passage from Romans which made him look upon himself and the world in a new way.  And he was set free.

How many are the moments in which we can be Christ for others! Now is the moment: do not delay. The bridegroom is coming. Trim the wicks of your lamps. Perhaps next to you, perhaps now reading your e-mail, perhaps sleeping next to you, perhaps in the cubicle next to yours, perhaps on the other end of the classroom, perhaps on the playing field, is someone whom Christ must touch right now. And perhaps yours are the only hands, the only voice, the only smile, the only embrace, the only look that he can use to touch his beloved. Be alert! The moment will never come again. Trust yourself to God, and he will act.

The French philosopher Pierre Hadot has studied the origins of spiritual exercises among Greek philosophers.  There seems to be a straight line from Hellenistic philosophy and its influence on Church fathers like Ambrose and Augustine, to the early monastic tradition, to the medieval monks who influenced Ignatius of Loyola.  (At one point Ignatius wanted to be a Carthusian and even permitted members of his order to transfer into that order and return later.)  Ignatius borrowed from a very long tradition of spiritual exercises, of which Hadot writes the following.

What’s interesting about the idea of spiritual exercises is precisely that it is not a matter of a purely rational consideration, but the putting in action of all kinds of means, intended to act upon one’s self.  Imagination and affectivity play a capital role here: we must represent to ourselves in vivid colors the dangers of such-and-such a passion, and use striking formulations of ideas in order to exhort ourselves.  We must also create habits, and fortify ourselves by preparing ourselves against hardships in advance.  (Philosophy as a Way of Life, Blackwell 1995, p. 284.)

What the ancients understood, and what Ignatius recaptured, is that people are not really governed by reason.  We are governed by passions, and we can learn to master them or be mastered by them.  Spiritual exercises are about choosing to act only on those passions which originate in God and lead us back to God.

Image: Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, from the Glyptothek, Munich, courtesy of Bibi Saint-Pol.

In his forthcoming book Catholicism, Fr. Robert Barron makes the passing observation that Jesus was a layman: he was not trained in one of the formal rabbinical schools, or a priest or scribe of the tribe of Levi.

Jesus was not, to use contemporary language, part of the religious “establishment.”  Some would make him therefore into a kind of hero of liberation–the gritty iconoclast who critiqued the Powers That Be.

Yet that kind of image speaks more of us than of Him.  We love the stories of the pilgrims, the pioneers, the cowboys, the rebels: those who forge their own path, who choose (to use Robert Frost’s image) “the road less traveled by.”

Jesus the layman was not Jesus the rebel.  On the contrary, he sought God’s kingdom.  He sought to unite Israel and to bring people of other nations together under the kingship of the Father. What he hoped for was the perfection of the establishment that God had already begun in Israel over its history.

In imitating Christ, our aim is not to forge our own way, but to work with vigor toward the establishment of that same kingdom, to build a church of real people and not of vague ideas.  Our aim is perfect conformity to God’s will in communion with others.

Whether we are cleric or lay, we are called in service to different roles in the building up of that kingdom.  We imitate Jesus the layman who becomes Jesus the new High Priest precisely because his will and the will of the Father are one.

The task of the lay person today is thus in one sense no different from that of the cleric: to embed ourselves in the life of the Church in order that our will might be conformed to that of Christ.  His church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic: established to serve the Father, of one united will to reflect God’s greater glory.  One of the great tasks of the spiritual life is to learn how one’s own will might decrease in order that His might increase.  Let us sit at the feet of Christ’s body, the church, and learn how to participate in the building of that kingdom.