As I was navigating a tough decision that would impact my future, a priest-mentor of mine told me to chill out. Then he gave me a little lesson on God’s providence.
We’re prone to “make something happen.” It’s like a sickness. “Making” is an anxiety that replaces God’s providence with our own attempts to make a future for ourselves. It’s a self-made, bulletproof mentality. And, it’s everywhere.
There is a nugget of truth in maker-mentality, but it distorts it and collapses an understanding of God’s providence into the self. It fails to distinguish between Maker or Creator and craftsman, as John Paul II put it in his “Letter to Artists”:
The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator…What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God…God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman’s task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him. With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. Obviously, this is a sharing which leaves intact the infinite distance between the Creator and the creature.
There is an element of shaping and crafting to our lives, but it’s always in response to a prior given, it’s always dealing with prime matter that has been given a human nature.
On the flip side of the maker-mentality, we can see God’s providence as a kind of cruel game. This is the devil’s depiction that has haunted humanity since his dialogue with Eve. Here, the sinister, cruel God opens a door when we aren’t looking and only for a moment. Then he shuts it, just as we’re noticing it in our periphery. Once we miss it, well, tough luck. Guess you’re stuck making a future for yourself — on your own. Or, we see God’s will as that which asks us do what we least want to do.
In the face of the decision I needed to make, the priest gave me a more peaceful, more relational way to think about God’s providence. He said, “God’s providence is the intersection of his desire and ours.”
Divine providence consists of the dispositions by which God guides all his creatures with wisdom and love to their ultimate end. (CCC 321)
I pushed and pulled my way up the janky staircase. The uneven and narrow treads required some familiarity. Turning your foot at a slight angle made it easier, but no less awkward. At the top, muscle memory took over. I slid my hand down the wall, caught the switch and sent the basement into darkness. As I bounded into the kitchen and closed the door behind me, I heard a cry. Unsteady and unsure at first, it grew into a full-sized wail.
I had turned out the lights on him. It was unintentional, of course. A matter of habit. But as darkness shrouded his three-year-old body, it didn’t matter if it was an accident or not. He was afraid.
There’s something deep inside the child and deep inside all of us that reminds us we were not made for darkness. Darkness is not our “natural habitat.” Deep inside, I think we’re all afraid of the dark — it puts us on edge — especially the ultimate darkness of death.
Neither by darkness, nor for darkness
We were neither made by darkness, nor for darkness. This is clear in the creation account.
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth— and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters. Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. (Gen 1:1-3)
God speaks and there is light. Light appears in Act 1, Scene 1 and every other act and scene depend on it.
Light is God’s first creature. God speaks and light comes to be. God speaks and light is. God speaks light. He does not make or fashion light, like he makes and fashions everything else. No. He speaks light. His word itself is light.
The prologue of John’s Gospel offers further commentary on the Genesis account of creation.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (Jn 1:1-5)
“Word” in Greek is logos. Logos means word, but it also means reason, mind, and meaning. Logos is a wise word, a meaningful word. And the Word isn’t just an utterance of God, but the Word is God. Hence, the Word is the author of life. Through the Word, everything comes to be. Everything God creates bears God’s fingerprints. Better, everything bears his logos-prints. Everything is willed. Everything is purposeful. Everything is ordered. All of creation is meaningful. The universe is not a big cosmic accident.
God’s logos, his Word, his Light, is why all of creation is fundamentally good.
God’s meaningful creation reaches its high-point in human beings, made in God’s image and likeness, containing within themselves the divine spark, logos, mind, reason — walking the face of the earth as the sign of God’s presence and carrying out God’s work. Human beings are the only creatures who, because they are logos-like, can recognize logos (literally re-think what has been-thought), can “see” the meaningfulness of all reality.
Human beings are made by light, for light. Made by God for God. We are not made by darkness for nothing. Children know all this instinctively.
Desiring Darkness
But something terrible happens.
The Devil, disguised as a nāḥāš (serpent-dragon), confronts our first parents. This nāḥāš was Lucifer, the name attributed to the devil, a name that means light-bearer. Lucifer, created by God as a good angel, through his pride and selfishness, cuts himself off from God’s light and now bears only his own, dim light. Lucifer, the one who has become the prince of darkness and the father of lies, he confronts Adam and Eve and offers a counterfeit light. He offers them a different way of seeing and knowing everything — one not illuminated by God, but only by the self, by their own minds.
Tragically, they take hold of this evil fruit that darkens their intellects and hardens their hearts. They embrace an alternate kind of light, a black light, and perceive all reality according to its strange shadows.
Now, rather than living in right relationship with God, rather than living in the light, they collapse into themselves. They cover themselves and hide from each other. They tuck away behind trees. They hide from God in the long, dark shadows.
Genesis 3 depicts the first “game” of hide and seek, that is not a game at all, but a broken reality — where God, the good Father, the Father of light, the God who is light, cannot find his son in the darkness, cannot find his daughter in the darkness — and he calls out, “where are you?”
Darkness is not God. Darkness is not of God. Darkness results from sin. It is doubt, despair, and bondage.
And throughout the ages, God works to overcome the darkness of sin — by manifesting his light in different ways through the created order. He does this to remind his children that they are children of light and they should live like it.
He finds Noah, a shining, righteous light amid the corruption of humanity — and recreates the world and puts Noah and his family as the beacon of light within it. But they sin and this sin again floods the earth in the chaos and confusion of the Tower of Babel and its fallout.
So God tries again with Abraham, who is illuminated by faith. Abraham is the one to whom God promises a future filled with descendents as numerous as the stars. But Abraham’s descendants, after what appeared to be a bright future in Egypt, end up in the bondage of slavery.
Again, God intervenes with light – a burning bush, a pillar of fire, lightning on Sinai, and Moses, the great prophet whose face shone with the glory of God.
Still, the people sinned, preferring darkness to light.
Eventually, when they reached the promised land, new bright lights emerged in David and Solomon. Solomon had the bright light of wisdom, but it flamed out due to lust and greed.
So God sent prophets to speak the light of truth, but the people did not heed their words. So God’s chosen one’s are are banished into the darkness of captivity. Yes, into the darkness outside of Jerusalem.
This entire story of a people speaks to a deeper truth. Israel’s journey is a physical manifestation of the real darkness. That darkness resides inside the hardened hearts of the people — the darkness of their sinful hearts.
Throughout the Old Testament, God uses created means, means created by his light —bearing his light — to remind his children of himself and of their call to bear forth his light. And over and over again, we snuffed it out — taking ourselves to be smarter than God and wanting to be our own gods.
All of this reminds me of my response to my son’s predicament. Recall that I had unintentionally turned out the lights on him. As soon as I heard his cry, I realized my mistake. I hurried to the top of the stair and flipped on the lights throughout the basement. His crying persisted.
“It’s okay, buddy. I turned the lights back on. I’m sorry,” I yelled down the stairs. He continued to cry. Flipping on the lights didn’t do the trick.
Light Shines in the Darkness
Let’s return to the story of salvation, because it’s in the fullness of time that God does something unimaginable (cf. Gal 4:4-7). Light itself (capital L), the second person of the Trinity, the Word, came into the world. The Word took flesh and dwelt among us. The Creator became creature, while remaining what he was — God.
The Word has taken flesh in the person of Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 1:14). And the Word is Light. Jesus says this about himself: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (Jn 8:12; also Mt 5:14).
The world, created by light, yet which rebelled against the Light, the darkness that had seemingly won, that had seemingly had the final word, this darkness was nothing for the Word and his Light, he, himself, his presence overcame it.
For us, in our fallen state, it seems created light is not enough. Amid the present darkness, we need the Light itself, the Word, to be present – really and truly, body and blood, soul and divinity.
The littlest children can teach us such things. This was the case for me. Turning the lights back on didn’t dispel the darkness my son had experienced. The horror of his situation could only be resolved by another human being who loved him. So, I made my way downstairs and embraced him. He stopped crying. In that moment, I became a kind of light shining into his darkness. I let him know everything was alright and was going to be alright.
In a much greater way, in an infinitely greater way, God is present to us. God is not distant; God has a face. His Light, too infinitely great for the small human vessel, this Light now breaks through our darkness as a presence in the person of Jesus Christ.
We can encounter this Light right now because Jesus, the Son of God, took flesh in history, suffered, died, rose from the dead, and ascended to the Father, because the Holy Spirit descended upon the Church at Pentecost, and because these events still happen in the world. These events happen now because the Catholic Church exists in the world to make them present through the sacraments. They happen because Jesus is alive. He can be encountered today with exactly the same results experienced by Andrew, James, John, Peter, Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Zacchaeus, and the criminal at the cross next to His.
They happen today because Jesus still wants to encounter us and lead us to the Father. They happen now because the Light still shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
From some bottomless well deep in my innards, a bellow of rage worked its way up and spurted out of my lips.
“Why did you do this to me?”
The words lashed from my mouth in the general direction of God.
Heat pervaded the whole surface of my face the way heat in a sauna does, but the heat came from the inside. I spent the rest of the drive in silence, waiting for some response. I was waiting on God to vindicate himself.
Nothing happened.
I turned into my neighborhood and coasted down the street. As I pulled in front of my house, the answer came. It came in a kind of interior awareness about the truth of things and it struck like a bolt of lightning — terrible and unexpected. It jolted me. Its voice was like an echo coming to me from the beginning of time. I heard in a place every bit as deep as the source of my original accusation and it split my insides.
“If I have any faith at all, I cannot ask that question. The person with faith can no longer ask that question, can no longer rail against God with an accusatory ‘why?’.”
This was a spiritual evisceration. Stunned, I breathed, deeply.
The inaudible voice continued: “You can only ask ‘who?’.”
In that instant, I became aware that the accusatory “why?” has no place for one who has faith. If God is who he says he is and if the Paschal Mystery really happened, then the one applicable question must be centered on the who. Who are you that you would enter into this or that situation with me? Who are you that you care for me despite my failings? Who are you, God of the universe who became so small that you took flesh? Who are you that you would enter into the depths of isolation and pain that result from my sin and being sinned against?
Madeleine Delbrêl was determined to do one thing: to relive Christ. She wanted to live the Gospel without limit. This did not mean working for Christ. Working for Christ was too distant, too transactional. She didn’t want to be Jesus’ functionary. She didn’t want to be his employee or volunteer. She didn’t want to be “used” by Jesus. No. She set out to “relive Christ in the midst of a de-Christianized world.” This was her aim. She wanted to be so united with Jesus as to relive him. She wanted to become Christ.
In this post, I’m happy to introduce Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, one of the lesser-known venerables in the US. However, her popularity is increasing with excerpts of her work published in the Magnificatand recent translations of her work published by Ignatius Press (The Dazzling Light of God and The Holiness of Ordinary People) and Sophia Institute Press (The Joy of Believing).
Biographical Information
Madeleine was born on October 24, 1904 in a small town in western France, not far from Bordeaux. She was the only child of Jules and Lucille. Her father was the manager of a train station and loved discussing politics and philosophy with his freethinking friends. Her mother was from a family of candlemakers. She appreciated the arts. They were essentially agnostic intellectuals. They handed on their keen interest in education, philosophy, and art to Madeleine. They handed on their unbelief as well.
Madeleine made her first communion, but after the death of her grandfather, the family’s faith practices fizzled. Sound familiar? This is the same story of so many Catholic families today. Over the years, her parents’ marriage crumbled, and they eventually separated after Madeleine left home.
A year after her grandfather passed, the family moved to Paris. It was 1916, the middle of WWI. Here, Madeleine became an atheist. She also became well acquainted with nihilism. She said that in her atheism “the world grew for me more absurd by the day.” At age 17, she wrote: “God is dead, long live death…Death of God makes our own more sure. Death has become the surest thing.” Peering through the years immediately following WWI, years marked by the absence of so many men, she said, “Death is doing just fine…Even if we muzzle the war, out of 100 men, 100 will continue to die, that is to say 100%.” For Madeleine, in her atheistic straightjacket, the world had become meaningless and death the only reasonable absolute. 1
Oddly enough, Madeleine did not despair. In fact, she did the opposite. She continued searching for meaning. This quest eventually led her to a small group of Christians and the question God’s existence rose on her mental horizon. But it didn’t stay there, as an intellectual pursuit alone. Because of this little community and their honest search, she prayed for the first time. And everything changed. She says that in this experience: “I believed that God found me and that he is the living truth, and that we can love him as we love a person.”2 We can love him as we love a person because God is personal. God is a Trinity of persons and God has taken flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. God is not abstract, far off, or untouchable. God is real, he is close, and he has flesh. Madeleine encountered this God and her life changed — all because of an honest prayer, all because of a fundamental openness to God. It’s reminscent of Blaise Pascal’s night of fire and his discovery of a personal, not purely abstract, God:
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.
During this time, she fell in love with Jean Maydieu, a member of the little Christian community. However, he eventually entered the Dominican novitiate, breaking Madeleine’s heart. Yet through Maydieu’s deeper entry into Catholicism, Madeleine rediscovered the Catholic liturgy and became acquainted with a parish priest who put Madeleine in touch with the Gospel. From then on, Madeleine read from the Gospels daily. Praying with Scripture daily became the beating heart of her spiritual life. Her Catholic roots had been restored, and new spiritual life was coursing through her veins.
Madeleine earned degrees in nursing and social work, and set off to work in Ivry, a working-class Communist suburb of Paris. She went there with two other young women (and eventually others), to do what? Help the poor. And to help atheists. (Remember, Communism was built on Marxism – an atheist philosophy.) She saw her vocation as not going on a special mission to some foreign land, but to be present to the poor and the unbelievers God put right in front of her. So, she and the women with her, founded a contemplative lay community, took vows of celibacy, and took up jobs within the community. The community became known as “the Charity of Jesus,” and they sought to incarnate the love of God wherever they were.
Madeleine was a prodigious writer, publishing articles and books. She died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage at her writing desk on Oct. 13, 1964. Madeleine’s cause for canonization was opened in 1988. This was validated by Rome in 1996, giving her the title “Servant of God.” In 2018, Pope Francis declared Madeleine “Venerable.” Because of her dedication to the social issues of her country, you might hear people refer to Madeleine as a “French Dorothy Day” — a nod to her American contemporary.
Everyday Holiness
With this biographical sketch in place, I’d like to shift focus just a bit. What does Madeleine teach us about living life well? What does she teach us about everyday holiness? What kind of vision does she give us for living with Christ at the center of our lives? So, what does she teach us about everyday holiness? What does reliving Christ look like?
Encountering Jesus
Reliving Christ first means encountering Christ. “It is necessary to rediscover the face of Christ with all its intensity,” Delbrêl states.3 Reliving Christ begins with this rediscovery — being encountered by him. This was the case for Madeleine and her moment of fire in prayer. This remained the case for her, because prayer has to do with allowing God to act on us, allowing God to act in us. Prayer, for Madeleine, had a concrete basis. It was no abstraction. The basis was twofold: Scripture and Sacraments, the Bible and the Liturgy. Madeleine says, “The Gospel is the Book of the Life of the Lord. It was made in order to become the book of our life. It was not made to be understood but to be approached as a threshold of mystery. It was not made to be read, but to be received in us. Each of its words is spirit and life…Alive, they are themselves like the initial leavening that will attack our dough and ferment it into a new way of life…The words of the Gospel knead us, modify us, assimilate us, so to speak, into themselves. The words of the Gospel are miraculous.”4
And what can we say about liturgy? Well, Madeleine claims that “it is in the Church that I live Jesus Christ, that I am in Jesus Christ; in the Church as a member of a body, as a cell in living matter. My personal Christian life is the result of this communal life of the Church. The communal prayer of the Church, the liturgical prayer, is inseparable from the sacraments; it is wholly based on the Eucharist.”5 Elsewhere, she says, “When love of the Church has bitten our heart, her own prayer becomes almost necessary to us.”6 We live from the Liturgy. We must learn to live from the liturgy, at the heart of which we find the Eucharist, in order to relive Christ.
To Be Acted Upon
Next, we can say reliving Christ means being acted upon by Christ. We must allow his love to animate our whole being, that we allow his love to act in our every circumstance no matter how ordinary and banal. Look at these passages:
Lord, Lord, at least let this rind that covers me not be a barrier to you. Pass through. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours. This woman so sad before me: here is my mouth so that you can smile at her. This child is almost gray, he is so pale: here are my eyes so that you can look upon him. This man so tired, so very tired, here is my whole body so that you can give him my seat, and my voice so that you can say very gently to him: “Sit down.” This boy, so smug, so foolish, so tough, here is my heart for you to love him with, harder than he has ever been loved.7
Let us take a very small piece of our life and set free the charity of Christ in it to everything it can do, everything it wants to do, and to let it do it. You change trains, you wait in the waiting room in the middle of the night. The charity of the Lord is in you in the midst of this waiting room. What is it going to do? What will that very polite lady, this very proper gentleman say when you share coffee from your thermos with the neighbor to your right, your bread and your cheese with the neighbor to your left, if you wrap that child in your coat…But what will Christ say if you do not do it? The holy Church expects saints, and saints are those who love.8
Holiness Here and Now
Madeleine teaches us that we are all called to be holy regardless of where God places us, regardless of the circumstances he gives us. She says:
There are some people whom God takes and sets apart. There are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not “withdraw from the world.” They are people who do ordinary jobs, who have an ordinary household or an ordinary single life. People who have ordinary illnesses, ordinary deaths. People who have an ordinary house, ordinary clothes, these are the people of ordinary life. The people we meet on any street…We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is, for us, the site of our holiness.
One need not be removed from the ordinariness of life to become holy. No. Ordinariness is the site of one’s holiness. The normal and mundane can become ground zero for God’s grace. Madeleine is pushing against this idea that sainthood, that holiness is only for priests and religious or the ultra pious or the mystical. She’s pushing against the idea of holiness being some extraordinary thing, some heroic accomplishment, and driving at the fact that holiness is possible for every person regardless of their station in life.
Everyone a Missionary; Everywhere a Mission Field
Finally, I want to highlight mission. Like her point about holiness not being a reality for an exceptional few or for those who have been removed from the hustle and bustle of life and cloistered, Madeleine sees mission, she sees evangelization as the call for every baptized person. Sharing the Gospel is not something that professionals do or priests do or sisters do. It’s something that every Catholic does. And, it’s not something that requires venturing to some foreign land — the land of missions. Mission-land is right here. So she describes her little group of lay women as “missionaries without boats.” They are missionaries on no strange land, but missionaries amid the strangers in their own land. For this reason, she says, “Let us descend into the depths of this world, to take there the Word of God lived with all the strength of our heart.”9
Delbrêl and the Anticipation of Vatican II
We could say much more about Madeleine Delbrêl, the everyday saint, but we can leave it here for now. In so many ways, she anticipated Vatican II, which said that every person is called to holiness, including lay people, and your station in life is the site of your holiness. It said that every baptized Catholic is called to evangelize and your mission field is wherever you are.
To carry the call, to relive Christ today, Madeleine made prayer the foundation of her life. This meant time with the Gospels each day and engaging in the liturgical life of the Church as much as her daily responsibilities would allow her to. And, she saw every circumstance in front of her as an invitation to exercise charity. She wanted Christ to exercise his charity through her — to love the people in front of her through her. She wanted him to love the poor, the Communists, the atheists, and even the people vastly different than her. Madeleine could love freely and without fear because she was secure in God’s love for her.
“In the beginning was the Word (in Greek, Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Thus begins John’s Prologue.
What is this all about? What does it mean that the Word is in the beginning and why does this matter?
The classical mind perceived the world as inherently meaningful — a unified whole filled with seemingly disparate parts, and one that was intelligible to the human mind. The Pre-Socratics (i.e., Greek philosophers before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), described the mystery of unity amid diversity as logos. Logos was this mysterious rationality that held opposites in tensive unity. Similarly, the Stoics saw logos as the fundamental principle that held all things together. Stoic thinkers foresaw a materialistic world consisting of active realities (energy) and passive ones (matter).
This Stoic worldview differed from that of Plato, who held that there was a world of ideas beyond our world that our world was based upon. The problem for Plato had to do with how the ideas became reality. How did the ideas move from abstraction to reality?
Philo (1st century Jewish philosopher) squares Plato’s circle. Commenting on Genesis 1, the creation of the world, Philo blends Platonic and Stoic thought. He puts the ideas, the reasons in the mind of God, and it is God’s word, utterance, that speaks the ideas into reality — hence giving meaning to the world. The thoughts in the mind of God are spoken — creating a coherent reality. John the Evangelist would have known of Philo’s work and takes it one step further — identifying the Logos with the person of Jesus Christ. In other words, the God of the philosophers is taken up with the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who takes flesh in Jesus making his Trinitarian identity known, making his love known.
In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with/toward God, and the Logos was God.1
Meaningfulness in the Christian Vision of Reality
Therefore, in the Christian vision, the whole of reality is inherently meaningful. All of reality comes from the Word. Meaningfulness is written into and through all of reality. Additionally, all reality is marked by an inherent relationality that, foundationally, finds itself in relation to its Creator (i.e., the Word, which is in relation to God, the Father, Being itself).
We see this meaningfulness of creation as John’s text goes on:
He was in the beginning with God.
John 1 is a commentary on Genesis 1. Note that in Genesis 1, the word itself is the uncreated light through which all that is created comes to be. “Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). God speaks light. He doesn’t make light. All the other creatures are made or fashioned in some way. Not light. God’s speech is light. God’s word is light. God is light.
The human mind, human reason, corresponds to God’s mind, God’s reason, God’s truth — logos. The human mind can come to know and grasp the truth precisely because, made in the “image and likeness” of God, the human mind is logos-like. It can perceive. It can recognize meaning (that word recognize is to re-cognate, to re-think what has already been-thought by God. All human thinking is simply re-thinking).
Let’s take this a step further — all human speaking is (or ought to be), a re-speaking, a re-stating that which has been spoken. By extension, then, all human writing is (or ought to be), a re-writing of that which has been spoken. Writing is a participation in the light — an expression of the truth that breaks darkness, an echo of the meaningfulness written into all of reality. Writing, then, is a human participation in and expression of the truthfulness written into all reality.
In fact, we see this participation in God’s creative word from the very beginning. God, logos, invites human beings to participate in naming created realities (Gen. 2:19-20). Stratford Caldecott describes this as sort of mediation of logos. He says:
Naming is our first task, our mission. It is to connect the Ideas in God and the things in the world. We are to be the mediator, the recognizer. The Ideas are somehow in us, or we could not recognize them. Made in god’s image we are also an image of the whole world. The other creatures reflect the same reality but more partially, in a fragmented way. It is man who puts the pieces together, who sees how they belong and where they should go.2
Human beings are that part of creation capable of giving utterance to logos. We speak. We name. We utilize language to express the inherent meaningfulness of created realities. But we do not name God. “This would imply that we have some kind of power over him,” Caldecott says. “In fact, the most archetypal act of naming is not Adam’s naming of the animals, but God’s naming of himself. In the encounter with Moses at the burning bush, God names himself ‘I am.’”3
In addition to Caldecott, St. John Paul II engages with this task of mediating the logos, albeit with different imagery, in his Letter to Artists. He says:
The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator….What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing…and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God. God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman’s task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him.4
The human person mediates logos, word. The human being does not create logos, word, but shapes and crafts the prior word — allowing its light to shine brightly amid the darkness and nothingness that threatens to consume every corner of creation. Writing, in its own way, engages in this mediation of the truth.
Writing and Tradition
Writing, that is, the written form of language, is, in itself, an exercise of living tradition. We enter the stream of human “handing over” (which is what the word tradition literally means) — at once the grateful recipients of a cultural inheritance of language laden with meaning and simultaneously those entrusted with handing it on afresh. According to Caldecott, tradition “is not something we simply manufacture, nor something cooked up by our parents, but something our parents themselves have received with gratitude and respect…Tradition is based on the act of faith. I adhere not simply because it has been handed down to me, but because I believe it is true, even if I cannot directly verify its truth for myself.”5
This is precisely where Descartes goes wrong. He imposes a universal skepticism on all tradition, history, and any sense-knowledge, yet he relies on tradition (in the form of language) to express such skepticism and the resulting conclusions. This effectively amounts to sawing off the branch he’s sitting on, for even those famous words of the cogito ergo sum, each relies on a legacy of linguistic tradition. Without such tradition, the words would mean nothing, and Descartes’ pure thought evaporates into oblivion. Matthew Crawford’s conclusions about such a way of thinking are apt in a case like this. When it comes to knowing anything, Crawford says, “Other people (and the resources of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are partial, and may sediment as idiosyncratic bad habits.”6
Tradition is a gift of logos and it contains a task of handing on logos. We are recipients of this gift. We are tradition’s beneficiaries. And this gift comes with a task. The gift is the truth, and the task is faithfully handing it on. Writing, the written word, is one means of participating in the vast movement of logos, in the flow of tradition, concretizing it in the form of pen and paper (or words on a screen, I guess). Writing, that we can write, is a gift that invites us to give — to offer ourselves, on paper, to another, thus participating in the tradition of handing on meaning.
Back to the Word
Tradition always points to its origins, however. And this we must never forget. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, “To honor the tradition does not excuse one from the obligation of beginning everything from the beginning each time.”7 Thus, every time we engage with words — with truth and with words (whether written or spoken) — we have the opportunity to remember that logos who was in the beginning, with God, and who is God. We have the opportunity to remember that logos took flesh and dwelt among us, such that there is not only objective meaning in this world — which can be carried forth in the craft of writing, for instance — “but that this meaning knows me and loves me…in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.”8 And, for this reason, we remember that “the Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, a word which is ‘not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.’”9
1 The Logos is God and is in relation with God. The interpersonal reality of the Trinity is already emerging.
I was on my phone, busy with an inconsequential email. The older kids were at school and my wife had the baby at an appointment. It was just me and the boy, whose requests I’d been batting away all morning. I was distracted, my attention split between pacifying my son, while handling house chores and juggling work demands remotely.
Without looking up, I said, “Um…yeah. Yeah, go get the gloves.”
He hunted for mitts, which bought me enough time to send the email.
When he returned, I put down the phone and we went into the yard for a catch. I put on my glove. Its worn leather hugged my hand. He situated his and heaved a crooked throw. I plucked it out of the sky and reciprocated, the scuffed ball grating across my fingertips with the toss. My son’s smile was speckled with sunlight, and his giggle was with excited nerves.
I’m not sure how much time passed. I lost track.
There’s nothing like having a catch with your son. Playing catch is a waste of time, when you think about it, especially with a three-year-old who can’t catch. It serves no practical purpose. In our pragmatic, utilitarian lens, it is utterly unproductive. Heck, the amount of time the ball was on the ground proves it wasn’t even an effective game of catch. But, it’s a delightful waste of time.
Later that day, it occurred to me that I’d experienced a moment of true leisure, leisure in the form of a game of catch.
Leisure is not having free time, doing nothing, or “vegging out.” It’s not binge-watching, drinking after a long week, or doomscrolling on social media. It’s not the weekend or vacation, though one can enter into leisure on the weekend or vacation. It’s certainly not utilitarian — resting for the sake of working again.
Instead, leisure is an attitude. A mental and spiritual one. It’s an interior reality and not a circumstantial one, though circumstances can help. Leisure is stillness. It’s a disposition, an interior silence that is actively open to reality — to life as it really is. Josef Pieper, the great German philosopher of the 20th century, says that:
Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness…Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.
Leisure is a state of being. It is stillness, an interior silence (which doesn’t mean everything around you is perfectly still or silent). This kind of interior stillness opens me to receive what is really real in an increasingly artificial world. It allows me to accept myself, to be at one with myself, with my place in life. It allows me to acquiesce in my own being. And such acquiescence is rest.
Ironically, we have to work for leisure. Our interior lives are often disheveled, our hearts hectic. There is work involved in putting things in order, stilling ourselves. Think of the game of catch above. I had to work to put the phone down, put on the glove, and engage in the game. Catch with a three-year-old who insists on using a hard ball is hard work. Yet focusing through this one activity stilled my heart and allowed me to receive the realest thing in front of me all day — my relationship with my son. Not only did I receive it, but I enjoyed it.
Liturgy is similar. Liturgy is work leading to leisure, stillness, all for the sake of encountering the God who is really real, indeed, reality itself. This is why Mass is the pinnacle of leisure, and why praying the Mass is hard, but worth it.
Leisure connects us with the real, not by escaping it, but by penetrating it. By entering deeply into life and time in this way, we get a foretaste of eternity, those moments where time seems to stand still or you find yourself saying, “It seemed like just five minutes had passed, but it was an hour.” This can happen at Mass, on vacation, or when you’re having a classic, midsummer catch with your son.
This article originally appeared in the St. Gertrude Church bulletin on June 23. It has been reprinted here with permission.
Our actions are to be a glove of soft leather on the fingers of the Holy Spirit.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl was determined to relive Christ. Reliving Christ does not mean working for Christ. She didn’t want to be Jesus’ functionary. She didn’t want to be “used” by Jesus. No. She set out to “relive Christ in the midst of a de-Christianized world.” This was her sole aim. She wanted to be so united with Jesus as to relive him. She wanted to become Christ.
Reliving Christ is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Ven. Madeleine Delbrêl offers a striking image of the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives that is worth reflecting upon. Here’s what she says:
A love like this [i.e., love of the martyrs—of witnesses] is a costly, expensive love…You have to pray a lot to obtain this love. God does not give the salvation of others to active people but to actions. Not to active people for whom activity is full of bad leavening from our old nature. But to actions, which are a glove of very soft leather on the fingers of the Holy Spirit.
I would like to offer seven points of reflection on Delbrêl’s image:
A “hand-in-glove” — this idiom gets at intimacy, deep collaboration, and “the perfect fit.” A glove that’s too big or too small is annoying, cumbersome. The “fit” of the Holy Spirit into our lives is the perfect fit. It is something deep and intimate.
A glove does not move itself, but must be moved by the hand that animates it. This is how the Holy Spirit should be in our lives. The Spirit is the animator within us who moves us.
A glove manifests the movements of the hand within it. When someone wears a glove, you do not see their hand moving, but the glove. Our lives, too, should show forth the movement of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, who is invisible, becomes visible through our lives.
When wearing a glove, the fingerprints of the hand are on the inside of the glove. The fingerprints of the Holy Spirit are on the interior of our lives — our interior life. The spiritual life is the life in the Spirit. We want the “fingerprints” of the Holy Spirit all over the interior of our lives.
Madeleine Delbrêl points out that the glove is soft leather. Leather needs to be worn in. Think of new leather shoes or a new baseball glove. That leather is stiff and needs to be worn in, softened. You wear in a baseball glove by applying oil, working it, pounding it with a rubber mallet. You have to work it. The key is, something outside the leather itself has to work on it, move it, bend it. The same is true for us. The Christian life is all about opening up to someone else — God — to be worked on, to be worked in.
You often use leather gloves for work. Work gloves made of leather allow a person to handle rough and difficult things without damaging or injuring the hands. So too, as Catholic Christians, we are often called to handle tough situations. Really, the Spirit wants to handle the tough situation. Our lives, our actions are simply his glove — the means by which it is handled.
But, you can also use a leather glove to handle delicate things as well. When handling a rare jewel or piece of artwork, one uses a glove so as to not mar the surface of the image in any way. Such items are handled with a certain delicacy. So too with the souls entrusted to our care by God (by this, I mean ever person we encounter in any given moment). We are to handle them with delicacy, regardless of how rough they are.
Over the next several months, I intend to peel back the layers of parish consolidation (aka parish mergers) to consider the spiritual or theological underpinnings of such efforts. Namely, are there any? Is there a deeper core to these often painful realities that might serve as a solid basis? Is it possible to go beyond clever marketing and painful bureaucratic processes in the course of such mergers? Does the parish have much of a chance in today’s culture anyway? Or, is all of this a huge waste of time and resources — an exercise in futility? What role can the parish play for the Church moving forward?
These are formidable questions and I’m not entirely sure where to begin. But, we have to begin somewhere. So, let’s look at the nature of a parish. What is it?
On the word “parish”
The origins of the word are Greek. Here’s how it breaks down: para means “near” and oikos means “house.” So, a parish literally has to do with houses that are near one another—a neighborhood. There’s a bit of geography involved. Relational geography and physical geography. It’s a matter of proximity.
In Latin, the word would come to refer to “sojourners.” With this, we add an element of movement. We’re dealing with a certain type of people, namely, those who are on a journey.
The result of the combination of meanings is rather beautiful. A parish refers to pilgrims who are sojourning near each other on their way to a heavenly homeland. You see the individual and the collective come together. The individual is on his or her way, on his or her path, together with all the others who are on the Way. Communion lies at the heart of the concept of parish. We are dealing with the movement of a person, and persons, being drawn into communion with Christ, while simultaneously being drawn into communion with one another. The parish is the meeting place of what we might call the “vertical” and “horizontal” elements of communion — communion with God and with others.
The parish, the Great Commission, and Canon Law
Why does the Church structure herself into dioceses and, even more minutely, into parishes? To answer this, let’s consider the origins of the Church’s mission.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commissions his followers to “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19-20).
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature” (Mk 16:15).
Acts of the Apostles contains a similar message: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:6).
A parish is a tiny part of “the whole world.” It is a certain pastor’s and his people’s “ends of the earth.” It’s their little corner of the vineyard. The concept of a diocese and a parish makes the universal call concrete. I have in mind a line from Ven. Madeleine Delbrêl: “We do not truly love the whole world unless we love the people who are close to us in a practical way.” Organizing herself into dioceses and parishes is the Church’s way of loving everyone in a practical way.
According to Canon Law, a parish “is to be territorial” (Can 515 §1); it is “a certain community of the Christian faithful stably constituted in a particular church, whose pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor” (Can 518). This line draws out the pastoral nature of a parish. A pastor must care for this flock, for these members of the faithful. This means tending the flock, feeding the flock, defending the flock.
But there’s a missional component as well.
Within the geographical area of the parish, the pastor “is obliged to make provision so that the word of God is proclaimed in its entirety to those living in the parish . . . He is to make every effort, even with the collaboration of the Christian faithful, so that the message of the Gospel comes also to those who have ceased the practice of their religion or do not profess the truth faith” (Can 528 §1). The parish does not exist only for those “registered parishioners” or “pew-sitting Catholics.” The parish is not a kind of separatist venture. It’s not about isolating a certain group of people from those who live in the same neighborhood for the sake of self-preservation. Surely, there are elements of separation, of boundaries, of preservation, but all for the sake of mission — insertion into the life of the community, destruction of barriers, sacrifice for the sake of the other. It is incumbent on the pastor, with the collaboration of the lay faithful, that the Gospel be proclaimed within the parish.
When it comes to why a parish exists, the answer is fairly straightforward: the parish exists for parishioners and for all who live within our boundaries, that they might know the love of God in Jesus Christ and respond to it.
Any and all considerations about consolidation or mergers would do well to start from such foundations, rather than talk of buildings, resources, population, October counts, priest shortages, and the like. This deeper understanding starts to send us down a path toward renewal and revitalization.
Pentecost Sunday brings to mind fiery images of an Upper Room filled with wind and flame. The noise of a gale blowing through the window toppling whatever’s in its path. The din of confusion and surprise. Lights and sounds. The babbling of tongues. Excitement all around. Acts of the Apostles presents the coming of the Holy Spirit with vivacity.
The Gospel of the day, from John’s Gospel, offers a different scene, however.
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
—Jn 20:19–21
Here, peace abounds as love displaces fear. It is the peace of a presence. It is the peace of Christ. And Christ breathes the Holy Spirit upon these dead and doubting disciples, like the Lord breathed life into Adam in Genesis 2. It is an image of intimacy. It is an image of creation.
The juxtaposed accounts from Acts and from John remind us that the Spirit comes to us in many and various ways. The Spirit comes to us in the manner of God’s providence. God gives us the Spirit in the way in which we need the Spirit. Pentecost was, and Pentecost is. We still need the Holy Spirit, and it’s not up to us to determine what that coming looks like now versus then, or what it will look like in the future.
“The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
—Jn 3:8
Our responsibility, then, is one of disposition — to assume a posture of openness to the movements of the Spirit, whether they are fiery or delicate.
Parents, for their part, play a central role in shaping the experience of Advent for their children beyond the formal liturgy. Not surprisingly, living Advent in the home is a radically countercultural affair. To be sure, living Christian in the home is a countercultural affair. The Catechism reiterates this point: “In our own time, in a world often alien and even hostile to faith, believing families are of primary importance as centers of living, radiant faith” (1656).
As parents, we have to stop Christmas from coming (early) on a daily basis throughout Advent — waiting to decorate the house, bake cookies, and listen to Christmas music. Advent is about embracing waiting.
To be sure, embracing waiting, especially with little children, may cause you to pull your hair out. It’s a good thing they’ve all been accounted for (cf. Lk. 12:7). But, it doesn’t have to be torture, this season of waiting. Lights Out is one interesting way to engage Advent while coming deeply into contact with the really real — that is, the way things are.
Let me explain Lights Out, then I’ll pull out some of its deeper meanings.
Lights Out
On Fridays during Advent, once the clock strikes 6:00pm, our children announce “lights out!” and abruptly turn off every light switch in the house. We power off cell phones and close laptop screens.
The gray, December twilight fills the house. Eventually, this will be consumed by the cold dark blackness of a winter night. With the winter solstice approaching, each passing week brings more darkness. Heavier darkness. Colder darkness.
We light the candles and dig out a few flashlights. Often, we’ll light a fire in the fireplace. It’s a tech-free, electricity-free night. It’s like a self-imposed blackout (lights out, not heat). It’s like a self-imposed desert. Cardinal Robert Sarah notes the importance of the desert:
It is vitally important to withdraw to the desert in order to combat the dictatorship of a world filled with idols that gorge themselves on technology and material goods, a world dominated and manipulated by the media, a world that flees God by taking refuge in noise.
Lights Out is a microcosmic experience of the quiet of the desert. In Lights Out, the desert meets the home.
Practically speaking, Lights Out means finishing dinner and cleaning up in the dark, putting jammies on squirrelly kids in the dark, not checking text messages, praying the Sorrowful Mysteries by candlelight, engaging in some highly competitive family game, not checking text messages, and reading stories aloud – oh, and not checking text messages. It’s both incredibly annoying and incredibly liberating all at once.
Lights Out is a family-friendly way households of any size can engage more deeply in Advent.
Lights Out brings the family together, both because it’s a legitimate challenge. You have to work together in new ways. It’s also fun, because it opens new possibilities for engaging with one another. It pushes against the mind-numbing and relationship-numbing force of digital media, and invites being together.
The Lights Out experience educates on a deeper level, too. It helps us engage with the reality of darkness, with the reality of nature. Electric lights cannot extend the daytime, well, because we don’t turn them on. The darkness liberates his circadian rhythm from artificial nemeses. As we spend time together, we pray, read, play games, and then fall asleep much earlier than we would on a well-lit Friday night.
Deeper still, we enter into that spiritual movement of a people waiting in darkness — longing for morning, longing to see the great light of the sun flicker and flit on the horizon, thus dispelling the darkness (cf. Is. 9:2). The simple Advent practice of Lights Out helps us to anticipate and to long for that divine breakthrough that only comes to us because this dramatic Christmas event has shaped our entire existence — and we need it to reshape it again. Lights Out invites us to enter more fully into Advent as it strips away the distractions that press upon life. In removing such trappings, we physically feel the longing for the light of day and a spiritual longing for the Lord. By coming into contact with a reality we cannot control, namely night, we beg God to break it apart with the rays of his light. It’s a deep experience of the darkness into which He, the light of the world, has been born, is born, and will be born — a darkness that cannot overcome the Light of Christ.
Brad Bursa 