from The Duty of Fraternal Correction, Gospel Commentary for 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap:

When, for whatever reason, fraternal correction is not possible in private, there is something that must never be done in its place, and that is to divulge, without good reason, one’s brother’s fault, to speak ill of him or, indeed, to calumniate him, proposing as fact something that is not, or exaggerating the fault. “Do not speak ill of one another,” Scripture says (James 4:11). Gossip is not something innocent; it is ugly and reprehensible.

A woman once went to St. Philip Neri for confession, accusing herself badmouthing people. The saint absolved her but gave her a strange penance. He told her to go home, get a hen and come back, plucking the bird’s feathers as she walked along the street. When she had returned to him he said: “Now go back home and, as you go, pick up each feather that you plucked on the way.” The woman told him that it would be impossible since the wind had almost certainly blown them away in the meantime. But St. Philip was prepared: “You see,” he said, “just as it is impossible to pick up the feathers once the wind has scattered them, it is likewise impossible to gather gossip and calumnies back up once they have come out of our mouth.” (by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for this Sunday Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20)

from The Duty of Fraternal Correction, Gospel Commentary for 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap:

What Jesus has taught us about correction can be very useful in raising children too. Correction is one of the parent’s fundamental duties. “What son is not disciplined by his father?” Scripture says (Hebrews 12:7); and again: “Straighten the little plant while it is still young if you do not want it to be permanently crooked.” Completely renouncing every form of correction is one of the worst things that you can do to your children and unfortunately it very common today.

You must simply take care that the correction itself does not become an accusation or a criticism. In correcting you should just stick to reproving the error that was committed; don’t generalize it and reproach everything about the child and his conduct. Instead, use the correction to point out all the good things that you see in the child and how you expect much better from him, in such away that the correction becomes encouragement rather than disqualification. This was the method that St. John Bosco used with children. (by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for this Sunday Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20)

Also posted at Is It Possible?

The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd presents one tremendous stumbling block: in order to follow this method, one needs a dedicated space, or actually three dedicated rooms, in which the environment is carefully prepared.

Why is the necessity for rooms such a hindrance? If you're asking this question, you haven't done much parish work! Space in any parish is hard to come by, and it seems to be a part of our cultural belief system that the more functions a room has, the greater the virtues of the community it belongs to. Even requesting that a parish assign a room that would otherwise stand empty and unused to just one group, for its exclusive use, can sometimes draw quite a bit of anger and suspicion. Adding to this complication is the problem that catechists almost always begin by requesting a room for the youngest group to be catechized -- 3-6 year-olds -- a group that many believe are not ready for catechesis, or for whom catechesis is unnecessary. What? You want us to dedicate a room to the exclusive use of 3-6 year-old children, none of whose parents will contribute a cent toward rent? To do what?

After a long crusade for a room in one particular parish where I was starting up Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a good friend there said to me, "You know, Suzanne, when I first met you, I thought you were on fire for the kingdom, but as I get to know you better, I begin to think that all you actually care about is real estate." We laughed together about that one because, the same might have been said of Abraham and Moses, too.

Because I've moved several times since I first began as a catechist with the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, it happens that I am always leaving a place right after a parish has finally decided to give the catechists rooms for the atria. But now, after eleven years of wandering and making do, I belong to a group of catechists who have received not one, but three rooms in one of the Catholic schools that closed this year. When I first heard the news, I couldn't process it completely. Slowly, the reality of what we have been offered is starting to dawn on me. I took some "before" shots of the three rooms and will post the "after" pictures when we're up and running.

This is a miracle, one I'd forgotten how much I needed and wanted, after all the years of doing without it. I only pray to be worthy of such a gift.

As you can see, there is indeed much work ahead of us!

from a Gospel Commentary for 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap:

...During the Nazi persecution, many trains full of Jews traveled from every part of Europe to the extermination camps. They were induced to get on the trains by false promises of being taken to places that would be better for them, when, in fact, they were being taken to their destruction. It happened at some of the stops that someone who knew the truth, called out from some hiding place to the passengers: “Get off! Run away!” Some succeeded in doing so.

The example is a hard one, but it expresses something of our situation. The train of life on which we are traveling is going toward death. About this, at least, there are no doubts. Our natural “I,” being mortal, is destined for destruction. What the Gospel is proposing to us when it exhorts us to deny ourselves, is to get off this train and board another one that leads to life. The train that leads to life is faith in him who said: “Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live.”

Paul understood this transferring from one transport to another and he describes it thus: “It is no longer I who lives, Christ lives in me.” If we assume the “I” of Christ we become immortal because he, risen from the dead, dies no more. This indicates the meaning of the words of the Gospel that we have heard. Christ’s call for us to deny ourselves and thus find life is not a call to abuse ourselves or reject ourselves in a simplistic way. It is the wisest of the bold steps that we can take in our lives.

But we must immediately make a qualification. Jesus does not ask us to deny “what we are,” but “what we have become.” We are images of God. Thus, we are something “very good,” as God himself said, immediately after creating man and woman. What we must deny is not that which God has made, but that which we ourselves have made by misusing our freedom -- the evil tendencies, sin, all those things that have covered over the original...

...“Denying ourselves,” therefore, is not a work of death, but one of life, of beauty and of joy. It is also a learning of the language of true love. Imagine, said the great Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, a purely human situation. Two young people love each other. But they belong to two different nations and speak completely different languages. If their love is to survive and grow, one of them must learn the language of the other. Otherwise, they will not be able to communicate and their love will not last.

This, Kierkegaard said, is how it is with us and God. We speak the language of the flesh, he speaks that of the spirit; we speak the language of selfishness, he that of love.

Denying yourself is learning the language of God so that we can communicate with him, but it is also learning the language that allows us to communicate with each other. We will not be able to say “yes” to the other -- beginning with our own wife or husband -- if we are not first of all able to say “no” to ourselves...

The general intention chosen by the Pope: "That those, who because of war and totalitarian regimes have been obliged to leave their homes and country, be supported by Christians in the defense and protection of their rights."

The Holy Father also chooses a missionary intention for each month. In September he will pray, "That all Christian families, faithful to the sacrament of matrimony, will cultivate the values of love and community, so that they will be a small evangelizing community, open and sensitive to the material and spiritual needs of their brothers and sisters."

From my friend, Fred, at Deep Furrows:

getting our hands dirty

Wouldn't you love to be in Rimini in August, swimming in the sea of culture known as the Meeting?

Well, I would. But I console myself by reading back issues of Traces. Here's something from the Christmas Issue 2001: No. 10. The context and truth of this editorial ring out even more authentically now than it did when the dust was still settling in New York:

«The entreaty to Christ for the life of the world and the truth of our existence is the clearest and most useful action that we can carry out.

But the Christian judgment is not expressed as a pure wish, it does not float several feet off the ground without getting its hands dirty in the concrete and ambiguous workings of history. The Christian is not a comfortable observer of someone else's match, since "in any case he already knows how things stand." Christians are not persons who think they are already living in Paradise. We get mixed up in things like everybody else, in the approximations and contradictions that touch every human, personal, social, and political situation. Any position of detachment, of not wanting to get involved in facing problems, masks a presumptuousness about the Christian's mission — as if the judgment that arises from faith coincided with a devaluation of the circumstances of personal, social, and political life.»

Read more from: "Getting Our Hands Dirty"

Couldn't have quoted it better myself!

Rimini Meeting

The 29th edition of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples titled Either Protagonists or nobodies seeks to reflect on the concept of the person. The word protagonist, a positive nuacne of the concept of person, is much used in our society. This is why we must bear clearly in mind the historical context in which live... [click on title for the rest]

Cardinal: Religions Are Factors of Peace

Dialogue Council President Addresses Rimini Meeting

By Mirko Test

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Religions are factors of peace, and if they inspire fear, it's due to actions of those who have betrayed their faith, said the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

This was the message Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran communicated Monday at a colloquium on peace at the Rimini meeting organized by the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement. The annual meeting is under way through Saturday.Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini and Amre Moussa, secretary-general of the League of Arab States, also took part in the discussion... [click on title to read the rest]

Burundi "Angel" Tells of Rescuing Children

African Testimonies Impact Rimini Meeting

By Antonio Gaspari

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The hope-filled eyes of children helped the "angel of Burundi" find God in the midst of Burundi's civil war that cost some 200,000 lives over nearly a dozen years.

Marguerite Barankitse was one of three African women who gave their testimonies at the Rimini meeting organized by the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement. The annual meeting is under way through Saturday.

Barankitse saved thousand of people, both Hutus and Tutsis, during the country's civil war...

...

The other testimonies were given by two Ugandan women -- Rose Busingye and Vicky Aryenyo, founder and collaborator, respectively, of Kampala's International Meeting Point, an institution that cares for AIDS patients and their families, especially orphaned children.

Busingye, a nurse, explained that she found "in the infinite value of people" the strength to oppose so much evil.

"It is the recognition of the other that creates the reality, and that is present in the company of the Church," she said... [click on the title to read the full article]

Magdi Cristiano Allam at Meeting 2008, Rimini

Allam told the crowd that they are the protagonists with their certainty of truth in Christ, strong in a solidarity of values and determination to act. He expressed gratitude for CL which he called "my house of values". Within this house, I have met authentic witnesses of faith."

From the time Allam was first invited to the Meeting in 2003 until what he called the most wonderful joy of his life, his baptism on March 22nd by Pope Benedict XVI, in what seemed at first a chance encounter, providence gave this opportunity to him to take or leave... [click on title to read the rest]

Mary Ann Glendon at Meeting 2008, Rimini

Mary Ann Glendon, US Ambassador to the Holy See, addressed us on the Pope’s talk to the United Nations earlier this year. She said she witnessed the standing ovation for the Pope at the UN, but the message was complex and needs to be unpacked.

The Pope’s approach was to offer friendly encouragement to the UN. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris. Cardinal Roncalli, later John XXIII, praised this work, as did John Paul II later; the latter called it the highest expression of human conscience of our times. The potential for peaceful change was seen in Eastern Europe and South Africa... [click on title to read the rest]

Living Without Lies: Solzhenitsyn

The Alexander Solzhenitsyn exhibit titled "Living Without Lies" is one of the premiere exhibits of the Meeting 2008. It is especially poignant at this time just a few weeks after his death. The famed Russian author personally loaned various items to the exhibit.

Our tour guide gave us a brief background of his biography. Although he came from a religious background, like many of his contemporaries, he was a communist and disregarded 2500 years of human thought as he was told what to believe... [click on title to read the rest]

Aharon Appelfeld at Rimini

[A few months ago, I posted a quote from Traces from an interview with the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld. I was very fortunate to hear him speak at Rimini yesterday and transcribe my notes below in first person. The title of the talk was "Bellezza e positività della vita" or "Beauty and Positivity of Life". He gave a very poetic and deliberate delivery, so I reproduce it as closely as possible.]

I refer to my generation, 1939'44, to children condemned to death. I was born in 1932 in Chernowitz in Eastern Europe which was Jewish and assimilated. My parents thought of themselves as European. My grandparents followed the Jewish commandments but without belief. They couldn't change their way of life. They had a sadness that was one of defeat.

The Holocaust buried us in suffering without distinction between believer and the alienated. Our suffering was physical as children, we had no soul-searching. For our parents, it was the loss of the world, their beliefs were overthrown. We were left only with naked Jewishness. It was an empty loss. Tens of thousands of Jews were separated from dear ones, deprived of everything, stigmatized with shame. Their heritage hemmed them in, blocked the path to full freedom. Together Jews from East and West were under an iron sky... [click on title for the rest]

Archbishop Paolo Pezzi in Rimini

Archbishop Paolo Pezzi of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo, newly elected to the Moscow diocese, addressed the huge crowd as one of the cielini. He recalled his own younger days of working at the meeting and setting up a stage similar to the one he was now speaking from.

He told us first that it is easy to work, to serve, to obey, as part of something bigger. Don’t tame life to make it easier. He said yes to the Mystery without being fully aware, but discovered over time the features, the face of Another. The real protagonists in history are those living a relationship with Christ.

When the Pope asked him to be the archbishop of Moscow, it was just a different task to serve the Mystery and to know whom to answer is to be free. It is to say yes to Christ just as when he was here setting up the stage. He is participating in a greater project... [click on title for the rest]

Medieval Art Exhibit in Rimini, Italy

MEDIEVAL ART REFLECTS CLASSICAL PAST IN RIMINI SHOW.
31 July 2008
ANSA - English Media Service

The inspiration medieval artists drew from Italy's classical past is spotlighted in an exhibition currently showing in the Adriatic coastal resort of Rimini. Entitled 'Exempla', the show explores the rebirth of classical taste during the 13th century, focusing on developments in the circles of emperor Frederick II, renowned for his love of culture and learning. Although this was not the first medieval passion for revisiting past glories, the variety and intensity of output under Frederick II made it one of the greatest.

The exhibit looks at how medieval artists used ancient Greek and Roman styles as models for their own work, seeking out and rediscovering past masterpieces... [click title for more]

News from Meeting 2008

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Pope's secretary of state, sent a message conveying Pope Benedict's support.

1974 division of Cypress one topic discussed at Meeting 2008. Clicking on the speaker icon at the link allows one to listen to this story in a bit more depth.

(25 Aug 08 - RV) The annual Rimini Meeting hosted by the Communion and Liberation Movement began yesterday in the Italian resort city. The 29th edition of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples has as its theme “Either Protagonists or Nobodies” and seeks to reflect on the concept of the person.

Participants come from around the world for the week-long event, discussing culture, religion, politics – and how they interact. One topic of discussion is the situation on the divided island of Cyprus, where the Turkish third of the island was split off from the Greek majority after Turkey invaded in 1974. Although the Greeks are Orthodox Christian and the Turks are Muslim, Chrysostomos Kykkotis, an Orthodox priest from the island, says religion is not the reason for the conflict... [click on title for the rest]

Michael O'Brien at Meeting 2008

 

The unassuming father of eight didn't come to speak about his books, however, but instead addressed the subject of fatherhood and particularly of God our Father, and of his silence which is total presence to us with an immense love.. [click on title for the rest]

Slide show of photos from the Meeting

Rimini Meeting Not Political, Says Organizer

700,000 Participated in Gathering

Archbishop: Mankind Needs the Church

Emphasizes Christian Proposal at Rimini Meeting

RIMINI, Italy, SEPT. 1, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Mankind needs the Church because the Church has the answers to life's toughest questions, says the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, who is also rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, said this Friday at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples held in Rimini.

The gathering, organized by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, ended Saturday. The archbishop participated in the forum titled "Church and Modernity: The Necessary Dialogue."

"Modern man needs the Church precisely because he is a disoriented man: he doesn't know where he comes from or where he is going," said Archbishop Fisichella. "He continues to wonder about the reason for pain and death."

The university rector said the currents of thought in vogue today and the tendency to reduce all questions to matters of science and technology isn't providing the answers man needs... [click the title for the rest]

Can we live like this?

The experience of Cleuza Ramos and Marcos Zerbini “Thank you for being part of my life”. With these moved words Marcos Zerbini, member of the State Parliament of San Paolo, concluded his own speech at the Meeting of Rimini in front of more than six thousand people. The meeting has been the first of a series named “Can we live like this?”. They will focus on several witnesses of meaningful experiences.
Giorgio Vittadini in the introduction of the encounter recalled the title of the Meeting and affirmed that “..protagonist is the one who has the reasons to behave” and as a consequence “..acts, creates experiences. He shows to live a different life. This different life has been simply told by Marcos and his wife Cleuza Ramos, responsible of the movement “Trabalhadores Sem Terra” of San Paolo, with the projection of a documentary about the phases of the life of the movement... [click the title for the rest]

From the Vatican Website (here):

 

JOHN PAUL I

GENERAL AUDIENCE

Wednesday, 27 September 1978

 

"My God, with all my heart above all things I love You, infinite good and our eternal happiness, and for your sake I love my neighbour as myself and forgive offences received. Oh Lord, may I love you more and more". This is a very well-known prayer, embellished with biblical phrases. My mother taught it to me. I recite it several times a day even now, and I will try to explain it to you, word by word, as a parish catechist would do.

We are at Pope John's "third lamp of sanctification": charity. I love. In philosophy class the teacher would say to me: You know St Mark's bell tower? You do? That means that it has somehow, entered your mind: physically it has remained where it was, but within you it has imprinted almost an intellectual portrait of itself. Do you, on the other hand, love St Mark's bell tower? That means that portrait, from within, pushes you and bends you, almost carries you, makes you go in your mind towards the bell tower which is outside. In a word: to love means travelling, rushing with one's heart towards the object loved. The Imitation of Christ says: he who loves "currit, volat, laetatur", runs, flies and rejoices (The Imitation of Christ ,1.III, c. V, n. 4).

To love God is therefore a journeying with one's heart to God. A wonderful journey! When I was a boy, I was thrilled by the journeys described by Jules Verne ("Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea", "From The Earth To The Moon", "Round The World In Eighty Days", etc). But the journeys of love for God are far more interesting. You read them in the lives of the Saints. St Vincent de Paul, whose feast we celebrate today, for example, is a giant of charity: he loved God more than a father and a mother, and he himself was a father for prisoners, sick people, orphans and the poor. St Peter Claver, dedicating himself entirely to God, used to sign: Peter, the slave of the negroes for ever.

The Journey also brings sacrifices, but these must not stop us. Jesus is on the cross: you want to kiss him? You cannot help bending over the cross and letting yourself be pricked by some thorns of the crown which is on the Lord's head (cf. St Francis de Sales Oeuvres, Annecy, t. XXI, p. 153). You cannot cut the figure of good St Peter, who had no difficulty in shouting "Long live Jesus" on Mount Tabor, where there was joy, but did not even let himself be seen beside Jesus at Mount Calvary, where there was risk and suffering (cf. Ibid.,140).

Love for God is also a mysterious journey: that is, I cannot start unless God takes the initiative first. "No one", Jesus said, "can come to me, unless the Father who sent me draws him" (Jn 6:44). St Augustine asked himself: but what about human freedom? God, however, who willed and constructed this freedom, knows how to respect it, though bringing hearts to the point he intended: "parum est voluntate, etiam voluptate traheris"; God draws you not only in a way that you yourself want, but even in such a way that you enjoy being drawn (St Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26.4).

With all my heart. I stress, here, the adjective "all". Totalitarianism, in politics, is an ugly thing. In religion, on the contrary, a totalitarianism on our side towards God is a very good thing. It is written: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates" (Dt 6:5-9). That "all" repeated and applied insistently is really the banner of Christian maximalism. And it is right: God is too great, he deserves too much from us for us to be able to throw to him, as to a poor Lazarus, a few crumbs of our time and our heart. He is infinite good and will be our eternal happiness: money, pleasure, the fortunes of this world, compared with him, are just fragments of good and fleeting moments of happiness. It would not be wise to give so much of ourselves to these things and little of ourselves to Jesus.

Above everything else. Now we come to a direct comparison between God and man, between God and the world. It would not be right to say: "Either God or man". We must love "both God and man"; the latter, however, never more than God or against God or as much as God. In other words: love of God, though prevalent, is not exclusive. The Bible declares Jacob holy (Dn 3:35) and loved by God (Mal 1:2; Rom 9:13), it shows him working for seven years to win Rachel as his wife; "and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her" (Gen 29:20). Francis de Sales makes a little comment on these words: "Jacob", he writes, "loves Rachel with all his might, and he loves God with all his might; but he does not therefore love Rachel as God nor God as Rachel. He loves God as his God above all things and more than himself; he loves Rachel as his wife above all other women and as himself. He loves God with absolutely and superbly supreme love, and Rachel with supreme husbandly love; one love is not contrary to the other because love of Rachel does not violate the supreme advantages of love of God " (St. Francis de Sales, Oeuvres, t. V, p. 175).

And for your sake I love my neighbour. Here we are in the presence of two loves which are "twin brothers" and inseparable. It is easy to love some persons; difficult to love others; we do not find them likeable, they have offended us and hurt us; only if I love God in earnest can I love them as sons of God and because he asks me to. Jesus also established how to love one's neighbour: that is, not only with feeling, but with facts. This is the way, he said. I will ask you: I was hungry in the person of my humbler brothers, did you give me food? Did you visit me, when I was sick (cf. Mt 25:34 ff).

The catechism puts these and other words of the Bible in the double list of the seven corporal works of mercy and the seven spiritual ones. The list is not complete and it would be necessary to update it. Among the starving, for example, today, it is no longer a question just of this or that individual; there are whole peoples.

We all remember the great words of Pope Paul VI: "Today the peoples in hunger are making a dramatic appeal to the peoples blessed with abundance. The Church shudders at this cry of anguish and calls each one to give a loving response of charity to this brother's cry for help" (Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 3). At this point justice is added to charity, because, Paul VI says also, "Private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditioned right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities" (Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 23). Consequently "every exhausting armaments race becomes an intolerable scandal" (Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 53).

In the light of these strong expressions it can be seen how far we—individuals and peoples—still are from loving others "as ourselves", as Jesus commanded.

Another commandment: I forgive offences received. It almost seems that the Lord gives precedence to this forgiveness over worship: "So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (Mt 5:23-24).

The last words of the prayer are: Lord, may I love you more and more. Here, too, there is obedience to a commandment of God, who put thirst for progress in our hearts. From pile-dwellings, caves and the first huts we have passed to houses, apartment buildings and skyscrapers; from journeys on foot, on the back of a mule or of a camel, to coaches, trains and aeroplanes. And people desire to progress further with more and more rapid means of transport, reaching more and more distant goals. But to love God, we have seen, is also a journey: God wants it to be more and more intense and perfect. He said to all his followers: "You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth" (Mt 5:13-14); "You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). That means: to love God not a little, but so much; not to stop at the point at which we have arrived, but with his help, to progress in love.

h/t Terry at idle speculations.

This morning at breakfast, my husband Stephen, told me some details from a witness given by Cleuza and Marcos Zerbini at the Communion and Liberation Responsibles' International Assembly, in La Thuile, 2008:

In São Paulo, the Zerbinis had made an arrangement with a local university to provide reduced tuition for the landless students in their movement. The university also provided them with a room in which to meet. Then, suddenly, the university reneged on this arrangement. The Zerbinis had a contract with the university that stated that even if it wanted to raise the tuition for movement members, it would allow those students already enrolled to complete their studies at the reduced rate and would also allow the movement to continue to use the room until all those students graduated, but now university officials were insisting that the tuition rates would change for all the students, even those enrolled, and they were demanding that the movement vacate the meeting room.

Cleuza and Marcos had planned to go on a short vacation that weekend, and they decided that they might as well go because it takes so long for anything to happen in the courts of São Paulo that nothing would change while they were away, but during that weekend, they received a call that the clerk of the court had arrived at their meeting room with the police and they intended to remove all the chairs.

Marcos suggested that they call someone to go there to deal with the situation for them, but Cleuza insisted that they leave immediately and go there themselves, saying, "Are all the hairs of my head counted or not?"

When they arrived at the room, the clerk of the court was in the process of removing the chairs. Cleuza told him he must stop, immediately, because each of those chairs represented a human being, and it was wrong to treat them like things.

The clerk asked her where she got the authority to tell him not to move the chairs, and she laughed and said, "It took me 15 years to discover the answer to this question for myself, and now you want me to explain it in two minutes?" But she began speaking with him about the history of the Landless Workers Movement of São Paulo, and then about meeting Communion and Liberation. Somewhere in this explanation, she told him about the ten lepers, cured by Jesus.

Then the lawyer for the university arrived and insisted that the clerk of the court continue to clear out the meeting room, but the clerk, pointing to Cleuza, said to him, "Oh no! It's clear to me that she's the one in charge around here."

Then he began to tell Cleuza that he had done many bad things in his life, but that he wanted "to be a leper, too." Since that day, he and Cleuza have been speaking weekly.

Meanwhile, she and Marcos knew that they had to find another room in which to meet. They owned another meeting room in the city, but it was too small to meet with all the students from the university there. Next door to this room, there was an evangelical church that was for sale -- evidently, the church wanted to move out of that location because too many of their congregation were attending the School of Community next door! The church had been on the market for some time, but they were asking too much for it. The Zerbinis offered to pay them a more reasonable price and to give them the money right way, if they could begin to use the church space that weekend. The church leaders agreed to the sale, the Zerbinis knocked down the wall between their meeting room and the church, and the new space was even larger than the meeting room they'd had at the university.

With Jesus you cannot not be middle-of-the-road. Either he is what he claims to be, or he is not a great man, but rather a great lunatic lifted up by history. There are no half-measures. There are buildings and structures made of steel -- I believe that the Eiffel Tower in Paris is one -- made in such a way that if you touch a certain point or remove a certain element, everything will come down. The edifice of the Christian faith is like this, and this neuralgic point is the divinity of Jesus Christ.

But let us leave aside the responses of the people and consider the nonbelievers. Believing in the divinity of Christ is not enough; you must also bear witness to it. Whoever knows him and does not bear witness to this faith, indeed even hides it, is more responsible before God that those who do not have this faith.

In a scene in Paul Claudel’s play “The Humiliated Father,” a Jewish girl, beautiful but blind, alluding to the double meaning of light, asks her Christian friend: “You who see, what use have you made of the light?” It is a question that is asked of all of us who claim to be believers (from a meditation by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pontifical Household preacher. The readings for this Sunday are Isaiah 22:19-23; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20).

Confusion on a fundamental matter

from Καθολικός διάκονος:

If Sen. Obama is making a poor judgment by claiming not know when life begins and permitting unlimited abortions anyway, then Sen McCain, in addition to not knowing how many houses he and his wife own, or the difference between Shi'a and Sunnis, is just as confused. When answering the same question that was above Sen. Obama's pay grade, which evasion on such an important issue comes dangerously close to disqualifying him from leading, McCain boldly asserted that life begins at conception. My question here is, If life begins at conception, then how can you support embryonic stem cell research?

Michael Sean Winters, writing over on America magazine's In All Things blog observes:

"So, if he truly believes that human beings acquire rights at conception, he is evidently willing to overlook the rights of some unborn children on behalf of research to assist other already born adults. And, let us be clear here. The right he is overlooking is the right to life which he purports to be championing."

When it comes to life issues, if conscience is acting in accord with knowledge, it seems that Sen. Obama needs to do some research and Sen. McCain needs to act consistently on the basis of his correct judgment about when life begins.

From Faithful Citizenship. Click on each image to enlarge. To listen to podcasts and pray along:

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After reading a very insightful post called "A few brief thoughts on chastity and teens" over at Deacon Scott's blog, Καθολικός διάκονος (I highly recommend it -- check it out!), I've been thinking a lot about parenting teens and parenting in general.

When I was in grad school for social work (before I was married), I went through a period where I was working in the field of child abuse and thus I read a lot of Alice Miller, a PhD in Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology. Dr. Miller approaches the question of Christ as an atheist would (and thus she has serious blind spots), and yet her writings and her advocacy for children leads her to make reference to Jesus and the Holy Family:

Long before his birth Jesus received the greatest reverence, love, and protection from his parents, and it was in this initial all-important experience that his rich emotional life, his thinking, and his ethics were rooted. His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants, and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him. [The Truth Will Set You Free, pp. 190-191]

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic, and wise person able to experience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He could see through insincerity and mendacity and he had the courage to expose them for what they were. [The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 191]

So, we see her greatest blind spot: she is incapable of recognizing that Jesus' (or anyone's for that matter) person and character are more than the result of personal experiences in childhood. Still, she has an interesting point, one that I thought about long and hard in those days: what if, as parents, we approached our children as though they are indeed children of God? What if we had the same attitude toward them that Mary and Joseph had toward the Son of God? What if we saw them as holy? What if we were approach them with all the reverence we reserve for the Eucharist? Because, in fact, from the moment of their Baptism, they are one with Christ, as we all are.

Children are temples of the Holy Spirit. What if, as we bathed them, fed them, spoke to them, listened to them, we did all these things as if in the Presence of God?

Pope Benedict XVI meets with South Africa's Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma (R) after delivering an address at the United Nations headquarters in New York April 18, 2008.

Precisely from this comes the great responsibility of the ecclesial community which is called on to be a house hospitable to everyone, both sign and instrument of communion for the entire human family.

How important it is, especially in our time, that every Christian community should always deepen its awareness of this in order to help civilian society and overcome every possible temptation to racism, intolerance and exclusion, and to organize itself with choices that are respectful of every human being!

One of the great conquests of humanity is in fact overcoming racism. Unfortunately, however, new manifestations of it are taking place in different nations, often linked to social and problems which nonetheless can never justify racial scorn and discrimination.

Let us pray so that respect for every person may grow everywhere, along with responsible awareness that only with the reciprocal acceptance of everyone is it possible to construct a world of authentic justice and true peace. (Pope Benedict Angelus message 8/17/08)

[...] Intellectual humility is the primary rule for whoever seeks to penetrate the supranatural realities, starting with the sacred Book. Humility obviously does not exclude serious study, but to make it spiritually profitable, allowing one to truly enter into the profundity of the text, humility is indispensable. Only with this interior attitude can one listen and finally perceive the voice of God.

On the other hand, when it comes to the Word of God, understanding means nothing unless it leads to action. In the Homilies on Ezekiel can also be found that beautiful statement according to which "the preacher should dip his quill into the blood of his heart; this way, he will be able to reach the ear of his neighbor."

Reading his homilies, one can see that Gregory truly wrote with the blood of his heart and therefore speaks to us even today.

[...] The principal inspiration that links the various discourses can be summarized in the word "praedicator": Not only the minister of God, but even every Christian, has the task of making himself the 'preacher' of whatever he has experienced intimately in following the example of Christ who became man in order to bring the good news of salvation to all.

The horizon of such a commitment is eschatological: the expectation of the fulfillment of Christ in all things is a constant thought in Gregory the Great and ends up as the inspiring motive for his every thought and action. This, his incessant calls for vigilance and for commitment to good works.

[...] The great Pontiff, nonetheless, insists on the Pastor's duty to recognize daily his own poverty, so that pride may not render in vain, in the eyes of the Supreme Judge, the good that he has done.

Thus, the final chapter of the Rule is dedicated to humility: "When one is pleased at having achieved many virtues, it is good to reflect on one's insufficiencies and be humble: instead of considering the good one has achieved, one must consider that which one failed to achieve."

[... Gregory expressed a] profound conviction that humility should be the fundamental virtue of every bishop, and more so, of a Patriarch. Gregory had always remained a simple monk at heart and therefore was decisively opposed to grand titles. He wanted to be - and this was his expression - servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God.

This expression, which was coined by him, was not just a pious formula from his lips, but the true manifestation of the way he lived and acted. He was intimately struck by the humility of God, who in Christ, made himself our servant, who bathed us and washed our dirty feet. Thus he was convinced that a bishop, first of all, must imitate this humility of God and thus follow Christ.

His desire was really to live as a monk in permanent conversation with the Word of God, but for the love of God, he made himself the servant of everyone in a time full of tribulations and sufferings - he knew how to be the 'servant of the servants of God'. And because he was this, he is great and shows us the true measure of greatness. (From a translation of the Holy Father's catechesis at the General Audience 6/4/08, in which he spoke about the writings of Pope St. Gregory the Great, provided by Papa Ratzinger Forum)

Caravaggio

I posted a big block of text yesterday -- a fascinating account of the Assumption of Mary from an apocryphal text attributed to Joseph of Arimathaea. What strikes me the most in this text is the way that Thomas receives a pretty harsh rebuke from St. Peter: "And seeing and kissing each other, the blessed Peter said to him: Truly thou hast always been obdurate and unbelieving, because for thine unbelief it was not pleasing to God that thou shouldst be along with us at the burial of the mother of the Saviour."

Now, if it were me, I think I might have said something like: "Come on, Pete! I repented of that. Get over it already! You wouldn't want me to be constantly reminding you of how you denied our Lord, would you? Besides, you don't know what you're talking about, because I might not have been with the rest of you at that burial, but I witnessed something pretty darn amazing myself..."

But dear Thomas only responds thus: "And he, beating his breast, said: 'I know and firmly believe that I have always been a bad and an unbelieving man; therefore I ask pardon of all of you for my obduracy and unbelief.' And they all prayed for him."

This is how I want to respond, too! It's so much more attractive, so honest, so much saner. And so counter-cultural, I might add!

And then the whole truth comes out, and Thomas is vindicated: "And the apostles seeing the belt which they had put about her, glorifying God, all asked pardon of the blessed Thomas, on account of the benediction which the blessed Mary had given him, and because he had seen the most holy body going up into heaven."

What did Thomas say to this? Did he proclaim, in triumph, "Ah, see! I'm not so bad after all! I'm just as cool as the rest of you... You better never look down on me again, because I rock!"? No, the text says, simply, "And the blessed Thomas gave them his benediction, and said: 'Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!'"

Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!


Dearest St. Thomas, please pray for all of us because if we want to dwell together in unity, so much needs to be sacrificed! Help me to be this in love with destiny, Lord!

I was so intrigued by this icon and wondered about the little guy, floating near Mary and receiving something from her. Who could he be? I found this explanation on Wikipedia, and further research turned this up:

Then at the third hour there were great thunders, and rains, and lightnings, and tribulation, and an earthquake,^26442644 Or, earthquakes. while queen Mary was standing in her chamber. John the evangelist and apostle was suddenly brought from Ephesus, and entered the chamber of the blessed Mary, and saluted her, and said to her: Hail, Mary, full of grace! the Lord be with thee. And she answered: Thanks to God. And raising herself up, she kissed Saint John. And the blessed Mary said to him: O my dearest son, why hast 593thou left me at such a time, and hast not paid heed to the commands of thy Master, to take care of me, as He commanded thee while He was hanging on the cross? And he asked pardon with bended knee. Then the blessed Mary gave him her benediction, and again kissed him. And when she meant to ask him whence he came, and for what reason he had come to Jerusalem, behold, all the disciples of the Lord, except Thomas who is called Didymus, were brought by a cloud to the door of the chamber of the blessed Mary. They stood and went in, and saluted the queen with the following words, and adored her: Hail, Mary, full of grace! the Lord be with thee. And she eagerly rose quickly, and bowed herself, and kissed them, and gave thanks to God. These are the names of the disciples of the Lord who were brought thither in the cloud: John the evangelist and James his brother, Peter and Paul, Andrew, Philip, Luke, Barnabas, Bartholomew and Matthew, Matthias who is called Justus,^26452645 It was Joseph, the other candidate for the apostleship, who was called Justus (Acts i. 23). Simon the Chananæan, Judas and his brother, Nicodemus and Maximianus, and many others who cannot be numbered. Then the blessed Mary said to her brethren: What is this, that you have all come to Jerusalem? Peter, answering, said to her: We had need to ask this of thee, and dost thou question us? Certainly, as I think, none of us knows why we have come here to-day with such rapidity. I was at Antioch, and now I am here. All declared plainly the place where they had been that day. And they all wondered that they were there when they heard these things. The blessed Mary said to them: I asked my Son, before He endured the passion, that He and you should be at my death; and He granted me this gift. Whence you may know that my departure will be to-morrow.^26462646 ms. C adds: And she showed them the palm which the Lord had sent her from heaven by His angel. Watch and pray with me, that when the Lord comes to receive my soul, He may find you watching. Then all promised that they would watch. And they watched and prayed the whole night, with psalms and chants, with great illuminations.

And when the Lord’s day came, at the third hour, just as the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles in a cloud,^26472647 ms. C has: just as the Holy Spirit appeared in a cloud to His disciples, viz., Peter, James, and John, when He was transfigured, so, etc. so Christ descended with a multitude of angels, and received the soul of His beloved mother. For there was such splendour and perfume of sweetness, and angels singing the songs of songs, where the Lord says, As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters,^26482648 Cant. ii. 2. that all who were there present fell on their faces, as the apostles fell when Christ transfigured Himself before them on Mount Thabor, and for a whole hour and a half no one was able to rise. But when the light went away, and at the same time with the light itself, the soul of the blessed virgin Mary was taken up into heaven with psalms, and hymns, and songs of songs. And as the cloud went up the whole earth shook, and in one moment all the inhabitants of Jerusalem openly saw the departure of St. Mary...

...Then the apostles, alarmed by so much brightness, arose, and with psalms carried the holy body down from Mount Zion to the valley of Jehoshaphat...

Then the apostles with great honour laid the body in the tomb, weeping and singing through exceeding love and sweetness. And suddenly there shone round them a light from heaven, and they fell to the ground, and the holy body was taken up by angels into heaven.

Then the most blessed Thomas was suddenly brought to the Mount of Olivet, and saw the most blessed body going up to heaven, and began to cry out and say: O holy mother, blessed mother, spotless mother, if I have now found grace because I see thee, make thy servant joyful through thy compassion, because thou art going to heaven. Then the girdle with which the 594apostles had encircled the most holy body was thrown down from heaven to the blessed Thomas. And taking it, and kissing it, and giving thanks to God, he came again into the Valley of Jehoshaphat. He found all the apostles and another great crowd there beating their breasts on account of the brightness which they had seen. And seeing and kissing each other, the blessed Peter said to him: Truly thou hast always been obdurate and unbelieving, because for thine unbelief it was not pleasing to God that thou shouldst be along with us at the burial of the mother of the Saviour. And he, beating his breast, said: I know and firmly believe that I have always been a bad and an unbelieving man; therefore I ask pardon of all of you for my obduracy and unbelief. And they all prayed for him. Then the blessed Thomas said: Where have you laid her body? And they pointed out the sepulchre with their finger. And he said: The body which is called most holy is not there. Then the blessed Peter said to him: Already on another occasion thou wouldst not believe the resurrection of our Master and Lord at our word, unless thou went to touch Him with thy fingers, and see Him; how wilt thou believe us that the holy body is here? Still he persists saying: It is not here. Then, as it were in a rage, they went to the sepulchre, which was a new one hollowed out in the rock, and took up the stone; but they did not find the body, not knowing what to say, because they had been convicted by the words of Thomas. Then the blessed Thomas told them how he was singing mass in India—he still had on his sacerdotal robes. He, not knowing the word of God, had been brought to the Mount of Olivet, and saw the most holy body of the blessed Mary going up into heaven, and prayed her to give him a blessing. She heard his prayer, and threw him her girdle which she had about her. And the apostles seeing the belt which they had put about her, glorifying God, all asked pardon of the blessed Thomas, on account of the benediction which the blessed Mary had given him, and because he had seen the most holy body going up into heaven. And the blessed Thomas gave them his benediction, and said: Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!^26522652 Ps. cxxxiii. 1.

And the same cloud by which they had been brought carried them back each to his own place... (from The Passing of Mary, a text attributed to Joseph of Arimathaea)

"The community is literally and physically Jesus, who does these things, Jesus present" (Luigi Giussani, Is It Possible to Live This Way, page 75).

"And how does one learn to be educated in freedom, so that freedom truly becomes the force in our life and therefore the dignity of our life (man's dignity lies in freedom, because freedom is the relationship with the infinite)? By following: by following the companionship in which the Lord, who calls us, has placed us. Following, nothing is more intelligent than following (Luigi Giussani, Is It Possible to Live This Way, page 76).

This is a summary of the first 38 pages of The Risk of Education, by Monsignor Luigi Giussani:

INTRODUCTION:

1) "...for behind the diversity of different cultures, customs, and expressions, the human heart is one and the same: my heart is your heart, and it is the same heart... The first concern of a genuine and appropriate educational method is the education of the heart of man just as God made it..."

2) Three essential points laid out by Giussani:

1. "In order to educate, we must present the past in a suitable form... For tradition is like a working hypothesis with which nature throws man into comparison with all things."
2. "We should present the past to our youth only from within the context of a life experience that highlights a correspondence with the heart's deepest needs."
3. "True education must be an education in criticism... 'to criticize' means to take hold of things; it does not necessarily have a negative meaning... The ultimate, innter standard of judgment is identical for all of us: it is a need for the true, the beautiful, and the good.

"We insist: an education must be critical. The student must be exposed to the past through a life experience that can propose that past to him and justify it. He must take this past and these reasons, look at them critically, compare them with the contents of his heart, and say, 'This is true,' or 'This is not true,' or 'I'm not sure.'"

3) "I believe it is a crime to conceive, propose, and live one's faith as if it were a premise that is not followed through, a premise that has nothing to do with life. By life I mean life today... Life is the here and now.

4) "What is clear to me is that the event faith speaks of must be lived through, not read about or discussed... The event in question is that God took on our human flesh -- he became human and is present among us... He is truly present every day! ... We must give ourselves up to this presence and live our life within it and under its influence, being judged, illuminated, and sustained by it."

5) "We ... are used to looking for whatever sliver of goodness is in each and every thing; we exalt it, feel it close to us, as a companion on our journey. Thus Christian faith is a universal embrace."

PRELIMINARY COMMENTS:

1) A Problem of Method: "It was thus clear that the problem [in 1950's Italy] lay in the method of transmitting and developing the contents of the Christian tradition."

2) Risk as Verification: "We also run a risk hen we say that a conviction can be born out of an experience, for we are not talking about a feeling to be evoked or a pietistic emotion to be called forth, but of a commitment that cannot be faked. In short, we are at the mercy of the quicksands of freedom."

3) The Common Path of Educator and Student: The First Step: "To say ... that in God is the ultimate identity or the 'definitiveness' of the human being means that the definition of the human being and of his or her destiny is a mystery..."

4) Recognizing the Mystery: The Root of Moral Tension: "In order to follow the mystery, we are always called upon to come out of ourselves, to go beyond our modes of perception... If morality simply meant to 'perform' something, there would be no tension, no urgency, for we usually try to do what is required of us. To say that morality is a state of tension means that we are in a position that is continually directed toward something that is Other."

5) Our Security is Housed in the Mystery: "We tend to identify even Christ with a mental image or fantasy, which in the end is sentimental, while Christ is this Man who is mystery. Not a distant mystery confined to the heavens but a mystery that appears in the minutiae of our everyday lives such as eating, drinking, resting, and even dealing with everyday annoyances... The educator and the student are called upon to travel together, and it is on this path together, defined by the ultimate goal of destiny, that they learn what the path is. This is the explicit risk involved in accepting the call and the challenge of that definition of humanity, of that mystery Who urges us to recognize that he has created us."

6) A Movement Born of a Method: "Our mind finds it impossible to grasp what is truly meant when we say, 'Christ is my salvation,' just as it cannot 'naturally' understand that we are defined by another being. Even less can we conceive that we change, that we move closer to truth through the mercy and compassion of an Other... In summary, we could say that the educational method of a movement such as that born of these insights and observations consists in contributing toward the creation of conditions of life that smooth the path toward this understanding."

The morning of Wednesday, August 6, Pope Benedict XVI met with some 400 priests of the diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone in the local cathedral. He was welcomed by the local bishop, made some brief opening remarks, and then took six questions. The pope spoke in German and Italian; the following is an excerpt from a rush NCR translation of the transcript of the exchange released this morning by the Vatican. Published by National Catholic Reporter and translated by John L. Allen, Jr.

Well, I can’t give an infallible answer right now, I can only try to respond based on what I see. I have to say that I’ve followed a path similar to yours. When I was young I was rather more severe. I said: the sacraments are the sacraments of the faith, and when the faith isn’t there, where there’s not practice of the faith, the sacraments can’t be conferred. When I was Archbishop of Munich I always discussed this with my pastors, and there too there were too factions, one severe and one more generous. I too in the course of time have realized that we have to follow instead the example of the Lord, who was very open also with the people who were at the margins of Israel at that time. He was a Lord of mercy, too open – according to many of the official authorities – with sinners, welcoming them or allowing himself to be welcomed by them at their dinners, drawing them to himself in his communion.
Thus I would say in essence that the sacraments are naturally sacraments of the faith. Where there is no element of faith, where First Communion would just be a party with a big lunch, nice clothes and nice gifts, then it can’t be a sacrament of the faith. But, on the other hand, if we can see even a tiny flame of desire for communion in the church, a desire also from these children who want to enter into communion with Jesus, it seems right to me to be rather generous. Naturally, for sure, it must be part of our catechesis to make clear that Communion, First Communion, is not automatic, but it demands a continuity of friendship with Jesus, a path with Jesus. I know that children often have the intention and desire to go to Sunday Mass, but their parents don’t make it possible. If we see that the children want it, that they have the desire to go, it seems to me almost a sacrament of desire, the ‘vow’ of participation at Sunday Mass. In this sense we naturally should do everything possible in the context of sacramental preparation to also reach the parents and – let’s say – also awaken in them a sensibility for the path that their children are taking. They should help their children to follow their own desire to enter into friendship with Jesus, which is the form of life, of the future. If the parents have the desire that their children should make the First Communion, this somewhat social desire should be expanded into a religious desire to make possible a journey with Jesus.
I would say, therefore, that in the context of catechism with children, the work with parents is always very important. It’s an occasion for meeting the parents, making the life of faith present also to the adults, so that they themselves can learn anew from the children – it seems to me – and to understand that this great solemnity makes sense only, and it’s true and authentic only if, it’s realized in the context of a journey with Jesus, in the context of a life of faith. The challenge is to convince the parents a bit, through the children, of the necessity of a preparatory path, which reveals itself in participation in the mysteries and begins to foster love for those mysteries.
This is a fairly insufficient response, I would say, but the pedagogy of the faith is always a journey, and we have to accept today’s situation, but we also have to open it up little by little, so that it’s not directed at the sole aim of some exterior memory of things, but so that the heart is truly touched. In the moment in which we become convinced, the heart is touched, it’s felt a bit of the love of Jesus, and it’s experienced a bit of desire to move in this direction. In that moment, it seems to me, we can say that we’ve accomplished a real catechesis. The true sense of catechesis, in fact, should be this: to carry the flame of the love of Jesus, even if it’s small, to the hearts of children, and through the children to their parents, thereby opening anew the places of the faith in our time. (Pope Benedict XIV)

My good friend, Paul Zalonski, has started a new blog:

Check it out!!

Naming things is one of the essential things we do as humans. It is a sacred task, given first to Adam. To assign the correct name to the correct object is not such an easy task, either. I can't help but think about T.S. Eliot's observation about the naming of cats:

The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

When the Bible speaks of names, it refers to something more and deeper than the the mere sound we use to indicate one object rather than another. "Hallowed by thy name...": a person's name indicates the person in his completeness, his totality, his intimate being -- his deep cellular structure, his genetic, even molecular reality, his true essence. Using names correctly, then, means to engage in an art. The various scientific quests; philosophic research; studies in light, form, or color; historical documentation and analysis are all caught up in this divine imperative to discover and use the correct names for everything we encounter. To misuse names is to lie, and Satan is the Father of Lies.

Here is something from Father Giussani that I keep taped above my kitchen sink:

How interesting it is to read all the liturgical literature of Easter time, where the word “generate,” or “regenerate,” is continually quoted and recited. I wanted to choose a phrase that is more expressive than others: “Grant us to be renewed in Your Spirit, so as to be reborn in the light of the risen Lord.”22 “To be reborn in the light”: a human being who is born is an awareness of reality, an intelligence of reality, and a precise affection for reality, an acceptance of reality, an embrace of reality, an immersion in reality; you are immersed in reality exactly like you are immersed in the Mystery of Christ risen. So what characterizes this rebirth or this regeneration? Is there something to which we can reduce the event of this regeneration, the event of this rebirth (I am an other; I am no longer myself, but something else living in me;23 I am a new “I”) as its essential characteristic? What characterizes the new “I” is the truth of things, the truth of reality, a new intelligence of reality in its truth, a love for reality in its truth, an immersion in reality as truth, an immersion in the truth of reality (Giussani, The Risen Christ: The Defeat of Nothingness).

When one is "reborn in the light of the risen Lord," one receives a new intelligence of reality, a deeper capacity to name. Because the Resurrection changes everything. The presence of Christ in the world changes everything. There is still the same sun, the same mountains, the same clouds and rain. But now the mountains dance, and the rivers clap their hands. Do we see and hear these things with our five senses and our intelligence? No, we see these things with "new eyes" and "new ears." The power of the Resurrection gives us the capacity to see Something within something -- the truth of reality, to wit: goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, and life is stronger than death; God has a plan (as St. Paul tells us) "for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph 1:10); that all things work together for good; that the history of God's tenderness toward humanity is a history of hope and redemption; that the kingdom is indeed at hand, and it is the size of a speck of dust but dynamic and charged with life.

Moreover, Christ calls us from within reality. Our vocation comes to us through the precise circumstances of our lives. Exactly those things that I face today, this minute, were placed in my path -- or I was placed in their path -- so that I can see and hear him say to me, "Suzanne, do you love me?...Feed my sheep." Every banal, tedious, onerous task given to me this day is for this precise purpose. If I don't hear him, if I don't see him in these tasks, then I need to beg to see him. He's there whether I can perceive him or not. My judgment is that he is indeed here, he is indeed risen, and he has indeed charged even my most distracted and abstracted moments with his Life. The most insignificant details, my most menial tasks, are given to me for a Reason. Out of a deep tenderness for my humanity, God has given me these precise circumstances, and no others, so that he can call me to him, so that I will recognize his voice, so that I will hear him say my name, so I will follow him in these "insignificant" details. After all, what seems insignificant and menial to me has eternal value to God -- who else sits around counting my hairs?

If the things that God places in our path irritate us, seem useless or hopeless, cause us to feel imprisoned or hated or demeaned, make us bored or restless or puzzled -- and they will, and they do! -- we need our friends to tell us: "Lazarus, come out!" I need my friends to say to me, "Lazarus, come out!"

(And I understand if you have to hold your nose, but do please be a little more discreet about it)

I had several long, earnest conversations with my grandmother this weekend. She was so beautiful, her face rounder and fuller than I'd ever seen it before. She explained to me that life had been good to her since we'd last seen each other. Which was at her funeral, in 1996. We met in several strange places I had never visited before; one of them was a huge, outdoor amphitheater where she arrived in a limo to receive a prestigious award, something like a Nobel prize.

I also did a lot of catching up with Mike. He told me to stop worrying about him and that going for that Baptism when he was a teenager was one of his best moves, ever. I asked after Uncle Asa, and Mike said that he still isn't taking any vacations; evidently he's got escape plans and contingency escape plans (at least plans A-F, and working on G) detailed down to the finest points for everyone he loves and in between he explores the galaxies, double checking them for enemy incoming. This work has put him in line for the award my grandma received. As for Mike, the word he gets from hq is to keep playing, so though he mostly loses, he plays every time for me. When I looked kind of skeptical about this activity, he assured me that where he is now, winning and losing are so not the point. In fact, the more he loses, the better it goes for me. I told him it's actually more or less the same with me down here. I couldn't help but ask after Wally and Mary. That made Mike a little sad. Mary's doing great, she spends every day cheering for him; Wally, though. The big guy put him to work as a fact checker, and Wally still can't get it through his head that this is a good thing, like the Best Job they give out there. Once he gets it (and Mike doesn't know how long this will take, he's not holding his breath), then he'll also probably start to notice that the water doesn't actually taste like water where they are. More like Dewar's single malt whiskey. Only better.

My grandma had some interesting things to say about my life here. She said I worry too much (this seemed to be the theme of the weekend, actually). She said life is too short for all the things that fill my head. She said to read more and argue less. She said I don't move my body enough: "Remember how you used to dance and dance?" She also told me that all those years she had spent pining for her son Billy were stupid. When she finally got reunited with him, she saw suddenly, that they'd never been parted in the first place. She said I should just enjoy Stella now, while I have her. I asked how? and why not let me hold her now, before she gets too big for that later? and Grandma just laughed like I'm a great joker (everyone knows I'm not!). So then I'd spend the rest of the visit staring over people's shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of Stella, and no matter where I was when I started into looking for my baby girl, the scene would change and someone would have stolen my clothes, and I'd be hiding along the side of the highway, or behind some unknown dark house, or on a stage somewhere wondering what to do next. Kind of distracting. And not at all funny, by the way.

It's probably a good thing that the fever's come down to a measly 102 degrees.

Stock photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday I received a completely unexpected phone call from a woman I barely know (well, she's been to my home twice, but if you know what my parties are like, you'd understand!). She said that another one of my friends (someone who knows me too well!) had told her that I am a doula. Well! Some history is needed to explain...

Once upon a time, when I was an obstetrical social worker at the University of Chicago Hospitals (covering the prenatal clinic, the antenatal inpatient unit, Labor and Delivery, and the postpartum unit), I developed close relationships with many of my clients, all of whom were beset with multiple social problems (all were coping with poverty, lack of medical insurance, and high risk pregnancies). Some of my clients from the prenatal clinic began to ask me to accompany them at their births. Having never had a child (yet!) and never seen one born, I felt really unqualified to venture into Labor and Delivery with them, so I took a basic course to become a midwife's assistant (or doula). I happened to live four blocks from the hospital, and my work required me to carry a pager, so it was easy for me to hop over to the hospital when one of them called. In this way, I was deeply honored to be present at several births (I've forgotten how many now, but my guess is fewer than twenty). Each one of these births was singular and extraordinary. One of my clients was a blind single mother who needed me to be her eyes in the delivery room. Two women wanted to give their babies up for adoption and didn't want to see their babies, or even hear about them; so I came as "guard dog." A few had used drugs during their pregnancies and were terrified lest their children be born with deformities; they wanted me there to receive "the bad news" first for them and help them to cope with it. Several were teen mothers whose own mothers were so furious with them that they refused to come to the births, so I had to step in as temporary Mama.

How can I describe what it is like to be present at a birth? Perhaps there is nothing else quite so thrilling and beautiful and wonder-inducing as witnessing this extraordinary miracle: first there is just the mother, alone, and then there is another, complete human being suddenly with her. I would almost always cry (as I certainly did for all my own births!). Because a human being, when you first meet him or her, is never what you expect, is always more than you could have ever imagined. And the knowledge that the trajectory of an entire life is beginning, at this very moment, is holy. There is no other way to describe birth but with the world "holy." As Catholics we have a similar experience at each Mass, the the moment when a scrap of bread gives birth to the Son of God. Birth is the foreshadowing of Baptism, which is a greater birth (yep, I always cry at Baptisms, too!).

So, I received this call yesterday from my new friend, Chandra, who had spoken to the only person who could have divulged my secret past. Chandra told me that when she was at Mass, she saw another friend who is nine months pregnant (a week past her due date). The pregnant friend looked really troubled, so she approached her to ask what was wrong. There had been a miscommunication with her doctor, and what he'd said had really frightened her. Chandra wanted to know whether I (as a doula!) would come with her to meet her pregnant friend and her husband, to help them to make sense of what the doctor had said. Can such a summons be anything other than the announcement of the Angel Gabriel for us? Of course I said yes! This meeting was very fruitful, and at a certain point I was made to understand that everyone in the room wanted me to speak with the doctor on the telephone! This conversation went very well (he is a very sweet man), and I was able to clarify several points with him -- and this was very helpful to the parents. Now it seems as though they would like me to be present during her labor! Part of me hopes that they would prefer to have Chandra (who has quite a bit of experience herself, having begun training as a lay midwife several years ago), so that I can be present for my own children, but my girls have assured me that they think I should go, and the older ones have promised to help the younger ones in my absence. This is a side of their mother they hadn't known about! Of course, if the parents ask me, I'll be there -- trembling, honored, madly in love with the mystery of birth -- how could I refuse?

This evening we had the GS kids over for a cookout and to read one of Joshua Stancil's letters from prison together. It was another beautiful evening, so we were able to eat out on the front porch. After dessert, we stayed where we were to read the letter and discuss it. There were ten high school kids gathered with us -- the largest group we've ever had -- four of whom had never heard of CL before this evening. We found ourselves returning to the following passage, trying to understand what it could mean for our lives:

...until recently my experience of our faith has been more or less solitary: I converted alone, attended Mass alone, had no Catholic family members or friends, my girlfriend was Jewish–my spiritual journey has, for the most part, been a solo flight. I learned about the faith from books, which is fine, I guess–I’m grateful to have been given the grace to know of Jesus at all, even through books–but it produced in me a tendency to look at Catholicism, at faith, at God Himself, as merely a cerebral exercise. I reduced Jesus to a set of doctrines, a rigorous and strict moral code (a moral code, by the way, I consistently flaunted). Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not downplaying the importance of doctrines and morals, not at all. Rather, my whole approach to the faith, by making it a dry, academic exercise I could engage in privately, almost reclusively, robbed those doctrines and morals of any real hold or effect on my life. My encounter with CL, which is ongoing, is showing me a manner and a method of living those doctrines and morals, not merely knowing and reciting them. Before encountering CL and the charism of Father Giussani, I never gave much thought to Presence, that this Presence could touch me and mold me and rebuild me, and that I could do all of that because It–rather, I should say “He”–loved me and loves me still, now, in spite of my repeated failings and frequent ingratitude. God was for me a concept, not a Presence. He was Somewhere Else, a benevolent but distant figure I’d perhaps get to meet some day after my body had assumed room temperature. I never thought of Him as a Presence that can be experienced–that wants to be experienced–here and now, in this life, at this very moment. It certainly never occurred to me that this Presence could be experienced through other people, even through the most unlikely of people. In my world there was me and only me: no room for anyone else, not even a Presence. Now, much to my delight, I find my world greatly expanded and I find myself open to it all. (from "Letter From Prison")

The words in bold were particularly striking to us. We began to think about our own here and now, as we sat around the table together -- this unlikely group of teenagers -- and what a miracle it is that we were in this place, gathered in his name. It is hard to tear oneself away from the idea that God is a private affair, that we feel his presence when we're alone with him, in our thoughts. It is particularly hard to recognize him when he sits in front of us, but this is precisely what it means to be Catholic!

After we had spoken about these things, we sang together, there at the table. One of the teens had chosen songs and created song sheets for the occasion. She led us in the singing, too. We managed to sing for a long time and with a great deal of enjoyment -- GS a cha cha cha, Povera voce, A New Creation, You, Folsom Prison, Wonderwall, Can't Help Falling in Love, Viva la compagnie, Romaria, Oh Freedom, Waitin on the World to Change, You Won't See Me, Wild Rover, and others. I am always so moved and grateful to be able to sing with friends. These opportunities are so fragile! They rest on the willingness of others to step away from their personal self-consciousness to build something beautiful together.

We are going to get together again on Saturday to go swimming and to read one of the Pope's homilies from WYD in Australia together. Maybe the kids will even be willing to sing by the pool!

 

An excerpt from The Nazarene, by Sholem Asch; an exchange between Cornelius, second in command to Pilate and the narrator of the first third of the novel, with his friend, the Centurion whose slave had been cured through Jesus' word:

I [Cornelius] looked at him in astonishment and distress.
"These are fantasies, fantasies," I returned, vehemently. "Right sense, with its feeling for reality, can make nothing of them. Moods like these are fit only for fatalists who lack the will, energy, and power to command their own destinies. Such men have never known the privileges and never felt the characteristics which make up the Roman; they are devoid of prowess, and therefore do not know the delight of battle, and they have never drained the beaker of victory, they have never experienced the peculiar intoxication which comes with the conquest and mastery by the sword. And just as they are completely alien to such joys, so their character is alien to discipline. Submerged in their passion of submission, they know nothing of the true will to love, will to mastery, to revenge, to combat. They know nothing of life and the world. How, then, should one of them render judgment? This people has been content to accept as its lot the sands and rocky hills of its tiny country. Earth is niggardly to them -- so they lift up their eyes to the heavens and dream of a life above the clouds. What have we Romans to do with such things? Are our national heroes not enough for you? Would you exchange the great Marius, Sulla, Caesar, the god Augustus, our own commander Germanicus, who conquered the world for Rome, in favor of the Jewish patriarchs, so that you may sit with them in the kingdom of heaven?" I ended up jestingly.
But he answered me in full earnestness:
"The achievements of our heroes? Who can number them? They have planted the Roman eagles at the extremities of the world, they have brought under Roman rule countless peoples. Who shall deny their valor? But could they command spirits in the same way as they commanded their soldiers? Could they change their own destinies, determine new fates for themselves? Could they spread out a net beneath themselves to save them when they fell into the bottomless abyss of death? Could they with all their arms and armies dull the tooth of the invisible worm which is called time -- which gnaws so insolently the bodies of the great and the small? Or could they, with all their valor, conquer for themselves a single day, a single minute of time beyond their share, or demand as war tribute one more breath than had been assigned to their lives? Could their triumphs yield them one second of pure joy unembittered by the sick remembrance of the end? What is all their wealth if it consists of the realities which are measured with the gauge of destruction? What are their victories, if victor and vanquished share the same fate, are flung together into the same pit of endless night? What are their deeds, if they are ground by the millstones of destruction and carried away by the winds of the past and extinguished by the nothingness of our limited being? Victory is that which creates eternal values, which are not subject either to time or to poison. Victory is that which creates the eternal joy of ever-enduring possession. Prowess is that which conquers evanescent passions and desires, those that satisfy without fulfilling. Victory over yourself prepares you to receive the great benediction of belief in one perdurable power, which in the fullness of its grace has taken you under its protection, and keeps guard over you in all the worlds, through all time, in all the forms and existences to which you are consigned. Oh, they may crush my bones, my blood may run out on the battlefields of life: God will assemble my shattered bones and gather up my spilt blood, and weave them again into a single wholeness. What fires can destroy me then? What wars can prevail against me? I am the eternity in him. Only one kind of might can give me ultimate victory: the might which comes from fellowship in the union which the only eternal divinity has set up with man. And no one can assure me of fellowship in this union if I do not find it in the faith of the barbarians over whom we rule -- the Jews."
I was staggered by this speech. I took my friend's hand; I said:
"Centurion, what ails you? To whom do you belong?"
"Cornelius, you will not understand me. You are blind and you will not see. I feel that something is being born in me, a door is opening for me, and you cannot pass through it. The name of that door is -- faith."
I said no more to him. I saw that he was a lost man... (pp 176-178)

To adhere, you just have to be sincere, to affirm the correspondence; and thus, to be reasonable. Reasonableness means to affirm the correspondence between what you've stumbled upon and yourself and your own heart. To deny this, you'd have to have a preconception. You'd need to be attached to something you want to defend. If you have something to defend in front of the evidence and the truth, you no longer see the evidence... I used a word that works for everything, the word "scandal," which comes from the Greek word scandalon which means "hindrance" -- like a boulder on a mountain that falls in your path: you need to run to town to get a crane, if you can. Scandal is the objection that comes from an interest that is not professed in the name of truth, in search of the truth. • Luigi Giussani, Is It Possible to Live This Way? pages 59-60

One of the biggest boulders in my path to seeing the beauty of Christ in Communion and Liberation was the way in which language was used (or abused) by people in the Movement.

In the beginning, the word that bugged me the most was judgment. I kept hearing people in CL talking about the need to judge everything, and my first thought, after remembering Christ's words: "Judge not, lest ye be judged," was that this use (and overuse, in my opinion, but that's another point) of the word represented faulty translation. Surely, I thought, Fr. Giussani must mean something like discern? Because the word judge also carries within it the sense of the word condemn -- and in fact, I thought I sometimes discerned a tendency to condemn others, their behavior and their beliefs and their very persons, in some of the judgments my CL friends made. The word judgment can also refer to a legal process, and indeed, sometimes my CL friends seemed to approach life with a burden of legalism. Finally, the word judge calls to mind a figure who sits above others, and I also thought I detected a whiff of superiority among those who insisted so strenuously on judging everything. It bothered me so much, and I often thought: if only Fr. Giussani's translators had chosen the word discern instead, so many wouldn't have been led into error!

I also have an allergy to jargon. Here's how Merriam-Webster defines jargon: 1 a: confused unintelligible language b: a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialectc: a hybrid language or dialect simplified in vocabulary and grammar and used for communication between peoples of different speech2: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group3: obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words. This definition is very helpful because it encapsulates the problem -- certain words are made to stand in for Big Concepts, and the poor little words aren't strong enough to hold them up. Meanwhile, while the person, who is speaking the word, would like it to stand in for a long string of words, that long string might not be the same long string that the listener fills in when he hears the word. It may even be that neither the speaker nor the listener is fully aware of the precise long string of words that spells out the heavy burden of meaning that the poor word is meant to carry. I am speaking about words like Encounter, "I," Experience, Judgment, Freedom, Companionship, Unity, Presence, Reason, Reality, Being, Mystery, Event, Preference, Nothingness, Awareness, Infinite, and Belonging. When Fr. Giussani uses these words, he almost always explains and clarifies them, but sometimes, it seems to me, when his followers use them, they appear to think that no explanation or clarification is necessary. Even a single speaker will use the same word, several times in a conversation, and mean different things each time he uses it! When words are treated this way often enough, it bleeds them of meaning. Even the person speaking may no longer be aware that there is a string of other words behind these words -- the long string of words turns into a cloud of feeling, and the truth that wants to be communicated turns into mush.

The other problem with jargon (besides the degeneration of meaning) is that it tends to foster exclusivity because there are those who have mastered the jargon and those for whom it is unintelligible. Using the jargon is a shortcut to becoming an authority, to being a part of the in crowd.

In my opinion, all of this is actually antithetical to the charism of Fr. Giussani. This is why it is so important for us to avoid ever being lazy or facile with our words. Using our words carefully and with precision, and never using one flashy word to do the work of eight or ten others, is to practice the kind of ascesis that Fr. Giussani calls us to. It also makes it possible to do the important work of mission. Unless we can speak a language that is intelligible to all, we are just trading useless chatter with the in crowd; in other words, we're trading personal comfort for the truth.

A friend of mine, Fred, helped me to see another side to this issue, though. He wrote:

Jargon can be a crutch even in CL, but I'm of several minds about this. I think it's always worthwhile to express one's experience in one's own words - to strain at describing things with rigorous detail. I also thought many things in CL were untrue, people just repeating something they heard - the latest example is this: people saying that Christ showed his face to them through their kids. But then it happened, so now I can't say if someone's just repeating. It may have happened to them too.

The other thing (and I argue this point with Karen) is that as a student of language and history, I know that the words that Fr. Giussani used were not a presumptuous imposition of his notions on reality, but words that more often than not had a different meaning than they do now. They're important words that express the contours of distinctly Christian experience, and we shouldn't give them up to the common mentality. We should fight for them and reclaim them. Like he reminds us in Is it Possible to Live This Way?: a child says "mama" and repeats that word for years and decades until as an adult it has a completely different depth to it. So, perhaps some of this jargon is people baby talking, trying out the words as they look for the experience.

What's interesting is this: so much of what we learn in CL can be reduced to a series of cliches that are printed everywhere we look. What's different for us, I hope, is the recoil. I love this word recoil (like the recoil of a gun). Is this a CL word? There's a seriousness and a depth that goes all the way down. We don't need new words so much as to mean the ones that we use.

I asked Fred for permission to quote what he said to me, and he just granted it, on the condition that I also quote the following passage from Fr. Giussani:

We'll have you repeat words heard as discourse or words spoken as prayer that you don't understand. Not because we're fools and we make you do things that you don't understand. We know that you don't understand them. We didn't understand them either when we were young like you. Yet it's only by repeating them that you understand. What a two-year-old calls "mama" he'll refer to by the same word when he is fifty. That same word, not another word, will be profoundly different, understood more deeply, loved more deeply, judged more deeply ... but still one he has repeated his whole life long. The method we use to go to God is like this. This is how we come to terms with Christ.

This came to mind when I heard "We regard no one from the point of view of the flesh." Do you remember reading this? You mean you don't remember it any longer, you've already forgotten it? "If one is in Christ, he is a new creature." If I were to say to you, "Explain this sentence to me," none of you - except some genius, still unknown - would be able to explain it to me. Would anyone be able to explain it to me?

If you don't know what it means, why repeat it? Because you're told to repeat it! And why are you told to repeat it? Because it's a form of asking... You're asking Christ. You don't understand the formula you use to ask. This will emerge in your experience as it matures over time
(Is it Possible To Live this Way? pages 79-80).

So, okay. People need to repeat certain words that they don't fully understand. I do the same thing, really. I'm fully aware that I don't truly understand mercy, or freedom, or even love. Yet I use (and yes, misuse) them every day. I hope I am nearer the truth than when I first began to use them!

What crane did I use to remove this particular obstacle from my path? Why does it no longer bother me when I feel as if people in the Movement are using jargon? Because Fred's insight, and the passage from Fr. Giussani that he has me quote here, were only recently given to me, but my irritation at the use and misuse of certain precious words has been gone for some time...

There are so many things that are exceedingly precious to to me -- language among them -- but there is something far more precious than all these things. It is the voice of my Beloved asking, "Suzanne, do you love me more than all of these?" It has taken me so long to relinquish the urge to protect and defend what I count as precious. But, unless I do indeed relinquish my sense that it is my duty to save these things, I will lose what is most precious. And then everything else dries up and turns to dust, too. I do love him, more than I love everything, even language. And loving him means viewing the people who speak to me in a completely new light. As Angelo once said, "My reactions to others are one billionth of what they are." And it is the other 99.99999% of them that interests me now.

Several months ago, I called Chris Bacich to ask him how to maintain unity with someone else when the other person didn't want it. I had already read the passage in The Journey to Truth Is an Experience:

One thing best demonstrates how much the community affirms the freedom of the person: it is realized even if others do not acknowledge me, even if they refuse me. If I want them, if I accept them nonetheless, then there is a more conscious, vigorous and thus ever truer communion with them. For this reason, no sign of personal greatness is more sublime than forgiveness. Freedom seizes in love even one who hates; not even the most dogged enemy can elude my love, and thus my freedom seizes him and dominates him much more deeply than he can violate and conquer me.
"Forgive them Father": abandoned by everyone, Christ created the universal community. (page 26)

In fact I read it and reread it, and I ask for the grace to live it every day.
But what I wanted to know from Chris was if this "invisible" unity was "good enough" given the circumstances (which had to do with the way the Movement is organized). I wanted to know what my responsibility was and whether there was anything I could or should do in this situation. He told me that this person and I, Fr. Carron and I, Fr. Giussani and I, he and I, we were all one thing. By virtue of our Baptism, we were already one thing. There is nothing that we can do to "make" unity or to enhance it. The only question is whether we are aware of this unity that already exists. How do we live this awareness? How does this awareness shape our lives?

This answer is so satisfying on so many levels. It is a terrible burden to imagine that unity depends on us or to imagine that we have the power to injure it. Along with this burden comes the idea, conscious or unconscious, that we are responsible for another person's response (for example: If I say x the wrong way, the other might be offended, and that could potentially destroy our unity). Pretty soon, this "unity" becomes an idol, to which we sacrifice our humanity, our zest, our freedom.

Our unity already exists. As I recognize this reality more deeply, I begin to see more, understand more, appreciate more, and enjoy life more. Not simply in those cases where there is a problem -- when it is necessary to forgive, or "to tolerate difference" -- but in everything that happens, if I give priority to this unity and if I love it more than I love myself or the particular people for whom I have affection, strange and impossible things begin to happen. I see miracles every day!

It seems morally repugnant or contrary to everything we understand and hold to be true to say one ought to love something, a "concept" or an "abstraction," more than one loves one's children or spouse. But unity is not a concept or an abstraction -- both of which are the sorts of things human beings invent. Unity is a Person, the Body of Christ, actually present in the flesh, here and now. Christ fulfills his promise to stay with us, until the end of the age, through our unity (which is made concrete and visible through the one bread that is broken and shared among us). And unity thus transcends any preference we may have -- it is the great leveler. The love and forgiveness that exist between spouses is a sign of the unity that binds us all.

To live an awareness of this original unity requires several steps along a path. The first step is to become convinced (to conquer decisively, to overcome totally) that this unity exists; only then will we begin to see it and recognize it, which is the second step; then the third step is to follow it wherever it leads.

What does following unity entail? I will give an example: back in March, Fred posted a question here, concerning the news that the Landless Workers of São Paulo had given their movement over to Communion and Liberation. Fred wanted to know why we should consider this event a breakthrough. When I read his question, I was, as usual, busy with many things. To try to focus my already cramped and cluttered thoughts on things that were happening in Brazil seemed like work that would take me from more immediate concerns, and I quickly decided to let better minds tackle his question. But then he wrote to me personally and asked me to respond. I didn't know why he did (he told me later it was because of my experience of homelessness -- not in the sense of having no house to live in, but because the majority of my life has been spent in temporary housing), but because of this personal invitation, I knew immediately that I would take a serious stab at his question. Why did I disregard the invitation when it was made generally, to the group; and why did everything change with the one personal invitation? I'm not sure, but John 10 comes to mind: "The good shepherd calls his own by name, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice..." Ordinarily, I feel "called by name" when an appeal is made concerning a subject that interests me deeply, when I recognize the "voice" within whatever is calling me. But there exists something even more attractive than the topics that interest me, and that is friendship. It is the highest expression of unity ("I call you friends..."). I recognized that gesture of friendship, and I knew with deep certainty, that I would follow it.

Well! Following Fred's invitation opened up a great adventure for me! When the invitation came (that is, when I made my decision to follow it with seriousness), I could not imagine where following would take me. You could say that I was conducting an "experiment," as when the disciples cast their nets on the other side of the boat. I placed myself in Someone else's hands to undertake a project that was not my own and that would (or might not) yield results that were impossible for me to anticipate or determine in advance. In this particular case, the Someone else to whom I entrusted myself bore the face of unity. We may not be called, ever, to give our lives to the point of dying for unity, but we are called every day to give our work, which makes up the texture of our daily lives, to unity. And this is how we witness (are martyrs -- O.E., from L.L., from Gk. martyr, earlier martys {gen. martyros} in Christian use "martyr," lit. "witness," probably related to mermera "care, trouble," from mermairein "be anxious or thoughtful," from PIE *(s)mrtu- {cf. Skt. smarati "remember," L. memor "mindful;" see memory}.) to unity: by living (with intensity!) this particular sacrifice.

Now I recognize that Fred's original invitation (before he appealed to me personally) was to the same adventure, exactly the same one; but in the first case, I was too distracted to recognize the invitation. The greatest knowledge that I gained from my adventure in Brazil, was the recognition that any invitations posted here are for my life. Because of that particular adventure, I could see the unity that helped me become "convinced that the commitment I have to my blogging companionship is just as important as the commitment I make to my School of Community. Each is a commitment to Christ, alive and active and incarnate in my life" (my statement that struck Sharon). Before reaching this conviction, I was (I'll admit it freely!) intimidated by the discussions posted here (thus letting "better minds tackle the questions"). Once I saw this unity at work, though, I stopped comparing myself (even stopped being able to compare myself) and began following.

Thus, Fred's personal invitation became a "come and see" moment for me. I've typed all this text, just to say that it seems to me that the only gesture, in my experience, that will help us to build companionship (besides: "Come Holy Spirit, Come through Mary," the gesture par excellence) is invitation.

Here's one last etymology: INVITATION: c.1445, from L. invitationem (nom. invitatio) "invitation," from invitatus, pp. of invitare "invite, treat, entertain," originally "be pleasant toward," from in- "toward," second element obscure, one suggestion is a lost word *vitus "pleasant." Meaning "the spoken or written form in which a person is invited" is from 1615.

Now, I'm only an amateur at this, but it seems to me that the word "vitus" looks a little like "vita" -- life. So, I would like to propose the following definition for the word "invitation": to set life before another. What do you think?

Over on Cahiers Péguy, Sharon posted a question about blogging that has generated several interesting responses. Most of all, I have been thinking about responsibility. To whom and to what am I responsible?

God, obviously! In fact, everything I do or say is a response to God, whether I am aware of this fact or not. I don't remember how old I was when it occurred to me that if God sees everything I do and hears everything I say, then prayer cannot be contained between the parentheses of "Dear God..." and "...Amen." Folding our hands is not like picking up a telephone; when we say, "Amen," the line doesn't go dead. What I say to my children, I am saying in the presence of the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. What I do or don't do happens under the watchful gaze of the one who counts all the hairs on my head.

What does it mean to respond to God? Unlike Samuel, I don't hear any disembodied voice, calling my name. Unlike Mary, I have not received any strange greetings from the angel Gabriel. God summons me with the voices of my children, my husband, my friends and neighbors, and even with the voices of strangers I meet. Everyone he places in my path bears his face.

What is my responsibility, in light of this awareness? First, I must discern what God is saying or asking. What he requires of me doesn't match up neatly with the requests and demands that those around me are making. In many cases, a "no" to the person in front of me constitutes a "yes" to God -- and sometimes it's cruel to be kind.

So, the regular responsibilities that I have in front of me come from many places -- many of them are things that I've said yes to, and now I need to follow through. Other things are spoken or unspoken expectations -- some of which I ought to question, or even neglect.

Do I have a responsibility to this blog? Only to the extent that it requires certain of my capabilities that I don't or can't exercise while carrying out any of my ordinary duties; in other words, I have a moral responsibility to use the gifts I've been given or risk burying them in the ground.

In fact, an example of an activity that eats up a significant amount of my time and carries no duty, whatsoever, is gardening. How can I justify the time I spend gardening? Anyone who visits our home can see in a moment that the plantings have gone way beyond what is necessary to keep the property maintained and attractive. There is a riot of flowers out there! What's the point? My house (on the inside) is messy and disorganized, I'm using family funds to support this habit, and most importantly, my children have all sorts of interests that don't involve digging in the dirt.

And yet, I learn valuable things from watching a plant start from a seed and develop into something miraculously other. Weeding and pruning resolve inner dilemmas that no amount of talk or thinking can seem to touch. But more important, something inside of me blooms when I spend time with my plants. These benefits spread to all other areas of my life and become an inseparable part of the way I approach my duties -- with greater joy, openness and perhaps even wisdom. Before I began to spend time in the garden, I was a different, poorer person, and this poverty was evident in how I lived all my responses in daily life. By fostering this relationship with botanical life and with beauty, my heart has become richer. Am I not responsible for seeing that my children and the life that I encourage within my house will grow and bloom?

Likewise, time spent with this blog has expanded my horizons, helped to deepen and enliven the questions that accompany me as a parent and a person, and made me happy.

I think that the adage, "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy," is a cop out, and most of what parenting entails is sacrifice -- deeper and deeper sacrifice with each passing year. But I also know that sacrifice made without joy is a dead thing that kills whatever it intends to build.

If I look at the blog (and my garden) this way, there is no dichotomy between my responsibility in front of God and my "responsibilities."

And thinking, "Well, if I were a better person, I could take care of all my duties and not need blogging or gardening..." is like insulting God, who gave me this life, this self, these needs. Why did he make me this way if he didn't want me to learn and live in this way?