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Archives for March 2015
Just One Thing
“Think Globally, Act Locally” for Catholics might be: “Think Universally, Act Creatively”.
The main way we have to change the world is to become more free, and creatively invite others to freedom!
I wish more Catholics were as clear as those with modern, greenie bumper stickers that small, local, personal decisions and actions matter very much – not just morally, which we do get, but in terms of making huge sea waves of change in the world around us.
Fr. Luigi Giussani (founder of Communion & Liberation), uses the term ‘gesture’ for a response to reality that embodies the judgment of the actor about that reality he encounters. The judgment must ‘have heart in it,’ according to Fr. Giussani. When the encounter with reality is provoking – when it questions our faith, our understanding, our experience, our preconceived notions – then we have an opportunity.
It will take some time to answer that ‘call’ (see the –vok in provoke that is the same ‘call’ as in ‘vocation’?) and form a clear judgment. The process cannot be rushed along. We must consider what we’ve run up against in light of our heart’s response, and our reason’s information. Then, taking both into consideration, we must formulate a response that, again, is a mere gesture – an attempt to convey in actuality a judgment formed in response to reality.
This gesture then has the potential to be transformative – for us, and for the people around us. As a free act, it expands immediately our own sphere of freedom. As a new fact, it in turn provokes those who encounter it – invites them to answer the call of reality, form their own judgment, and create a response. That’s one model for thinking about the ripples of provocation and freedom, goodwill and humanity that can spread from each particular person. I imagine there are other ways to think about it, but this one has completely captivated my attention because it corresponds so beautifully to my lived experience.
Can you think of one small thing you could do right now to respond to this call of mine?
* Spend the Time * Clean the Mess * Cook the Meal * Sing the Song
*Learn the Skill *Take the Step *Write the Letter * Make the Call
*Give the Gift * Right the Wrong * Speak the Word
*Stop the Violence * Move the Money *Ask the Question
*Offer the Help *Bake the Bread *Finish the Job
*Pray the Prayer *Make the Commitment *Change the Pattern
*Toss the Junk *Kiss the Wound *Embrace the Friend
* Craft the Poem * Keep the Sabbath
Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity
I love Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, and wanted to share her with you:
Elizabeth Catez was born July 18, 1880 in Avor, France. A lively, brunette chatterbox, she was known for her “high-spirited gaiety” and love of fun. As she matured, she “felt an increasing hunger for prayer”. Throughout her conservatory studies (Elizabeth was an accomplished pianist), dances, parties and travels, she continued to yearn to enter the Carmelite order, and could hardly bear the waiting.
The seemingly interminable wait to become a nun, made longer by her mother’s illness and resistance to the loss of her young daughter, finally ended as, at 21,Elizabeth was received behind the grilles of the Dijon Carmel. Leaving behind the family she adored, the elegant clothing and sophisticated entertainments she had once enjoyed, and the many suitors “attracted by her radiance, her vivacity and quiet dignity”, Elizabeth Catez became Elizabethof the Trinity at last.
Elizabeth experienced trials with scruples and interior darkness, emotional distress, spiritual confusion, and struggles in prayer – even times “when prayer was so repugnant to her that she was tempted to walk out”. But she persevered.
To a seminarian, she wrote:
Sometimes it is so strong, this need to be silent, that one would like to know how to do nothing but remain like Magdalene, that beautiful model for the contemplative soul, at the feet of the Master, eager to hear everything, to penetrate ever deeper into this mystery of Charity that He came to reveal to us. Don’t you find that in action, when we are in Martha’s role, the soul can still remain wholly adoring, buried like Magdalene in her contemplation, staying by this source like someone who is starving; and this is how I understand the Carmelite’s apostolate as well as the priest’s. Then both can radiate God, give Him to souls, if they constantly stay close to this divine source. (L 158)
In 1903, Elizabeth was diagnosed with Addison’s disease. She suffered from fatigue, stomach problems, debilitating pain and immune system breakdown, but her absorption in God and tenderness toward others constantly increased. Her writings as she endured this ‘via dolorosa’ reveal her yearning to be holy – to be consecrated to the power of God’s love so that every aspect of her life would echo the Eucharist in praise of His glory. She began to sign letters with her ‘new name’ – taken from the Latin text of Ephesians 11:12 (God has created us for the praise of his glory.): Laudem Gloriae (Praise of Glory). During her final months,Elizabeth wrote a small booklet for her sister, Guite – a married woman with children – in the form of a ten-day retreat. Contemplating Mary as the ideal ‘Praise of Glory’, she wrote:
A praise of glory is a soul that lives in God, that loves Him with a pure and disinterested love, without seeking itself in the sweetness of this love; that loves Him beyond all His gifts….A praise of glory is a soul of silence that remains like a lyre under the mysterious touch of the Holy Spirit so that He may draw from it divine harmonies; it knows that suffering is a string that produces still more beautiful sounds; …A praise of glory is a soul that gazes on God in faith and simplicity; it is a reflector of all that He is; it is like a bottomless abyss into which He can flow and expand; it is also like a crystal through which He can radiate and contemplate all His perfections and His own splendor. (HF 41-44)
With great effort, she spent several of her last days writing a treatise of spiritual guidance for a young friend. In this passionate testament to her own union with Christ, Elizabeth wrote:
A supernatural soul never deals with secondary causes but with God alone. Oh! How its life is simplified, how it resembles the life of the blessed, how it is freed from self and from all things! Everything for it is reduced to unity, to that ‘one thing necessary’, of which the Master spoke to Magdalene. Then the soul is truly great, truly free, for it has ‘enclosed its will in God’s’. …I feel already as if I were almost in heaven here in my little cell, alone with Him alone, bearing my cross with my Master….If you only knew how delicious the dregs are at the bottom of the chalice prepared by my Heavenly Father! (GV 1-13)
Visitors were in awe of the dignity, self-possession, and tender concern for others Elizabeth displayed during these last days. She died peacefully, “her eyes wide-open now, …in ecstasy rather than agony”. Though her body was horribly ravaged, her face was so beautiful “the sisters could not take their eyes off her”. As she died they recalled the work she had hoped to accomplish after death:
I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them go out of themselves to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement, and to keep them in this great silence within that will allow God to communicate Himself to them and transform them into Himself. (L 335)
Quotations from Jennifer Moorcroft’s biography of Elizabeth, “He Is My Heaven” (ICS Publications, Washington, D.C., 2001)
Moorcroft Quotes from Elizabeth’s writings:
L: Letter – “The Early Letters” (#1-83) in JTD, v. II*; “The Letters fromCarmel” (#84-342) in Works, v. 2.
HF: “Heaven in Faith” (+par. no.) in Works, v.1.
GV: “The Greatness of Our Vocation” (+par. no.) in Works, v. 1.
*Moorcroft’s original translation from the French edition.
Freedom and Duty
There is a dimension of freedom I consider to be its highest realization. I tell my kids all the time that the highest form of freedom is to do in freedom what you must do. Good luck with that! It’s easier said than done, but it’s also not as impossible as it sounds. It’s a paradox!
Are you free if you are obligated to act? It sounds like a contradiction, but a high form of freedom is to fulfill obligations with an interior freedom that is not sacrificed, but placed in service. In freedom, we bind ourselves to religious vows, marital faithfulness, and to the rules of our voluntary organizations. In such cases the difference between freedom and bondage is our capacity to maintain interior freedom while our actions are constrained by the rules and promises we’ve made.
Social courtesies are a small training ground for this capacity, but in our day they are often dismissed as old-fashioned, lost for lack of common usage, or resented as empty formalities. Take, for example, the obligation placed upon you to respond to an invitation. Granted, you did not ask for the invitation, yet it does (or it used to) impose upon you a duty to say yes, or no. Sadly, many recipients today simply dismiss this opportunity to re-weave the social fabric and another opportunity is lost. When non-response becomes the norm, then bondage becomes the norm as our response-ability atrophies.
A gift invites the response of gratitude. Sure, you could write that blasted thank-you note just because you have to, or you could write it in true freedom, realizing it is an ennobling responsibility. It’s not that the giver only gave in order to force you to write that note! A person who always just assumes the giver knows he’s grateful, but never expresses it is missing opportunities to enlarge his sphere of response-ability. No one can make you go to Mass, return phone calls, keep appointments, accept invitations, offer help, contribute, participate, or vote. But if you do what you should, you’ll grow in freedom.
RCYF! Respond – Create Your Freedom!
Placenta, Placenta, Placenta!
I mention the placenta so often, I had to post this image!
Here, also, are links to every one of my posts that mentions placenta!
In case you didn’t get it, this photo is of…drumroll, please…a placenta!
High-Tech Placenta
How does a TV fall short as a placenta?
The true, maternal placenta is a two-way structure, with real persons on each side. On the other side of a child’s TV, there is no one who yearns toward him in love, desires his growth into a higher reality, and prays for his welfare. In fact, on the other side of the TV there is someone who yearns only for him to be influenced to stay put for commercials, desires him to remain fully absorbed in its embrace and to forget any higher reality. “The set can’t respond to his needs, can’t help buffer him from sensory overload, can’t protect him from toxic material…” (SAW, pg. 24)
See all my Responses to the Questions in the Souls at Work Study Guide: Study with Charlotte
That We May Be One
This hymn was written to be sung to the tune “O Waly Waly” (“How Blessed is This Place”). It proceeds from Jesus’ prayer for the unity of His people, to the Crucifixion by which His Church was born, to the post-Resurrection period in which He was made known to His disciples by signs, wonders, risen saints, open wounds and in the breaking of bread. The heart wrenching yearning of His prayer for the Church is linked to the on-going suffering His Body experiences as a result of our disunities. The sacrifice of the Cross is linked to the healing of this Body through the Love among us by which Christ expects to be lifted up for the healing of the world.
I am grateful for the teachings of Chiara Lubich, foundress of the profoundly effective ecumenical movement Focolare, for the concept that it is only through identification with the Crucifixion – the abandonment of Self in love – that we may effect the restoration of the unity within human relationships and within the Church for which Christ died. [Read more…]
Zombies & Vampires
I state it publicly here, so that I’ll be able to prove my son Joshua and I thought it up if someone else writes a book about it: We think the zombies and vampires in movies express fears that are prevalent in the cultural sub-conscious: ‘fear of the unwashed masses,’ and ‘fear of the elite’.
Doesn’t it make sense that the general (i.e. non-Catholic) public would have inarticulate fears, as ever was, of all things remotely Catholic? And what’s more ‘Catholic’ than poor, breeding, unstoppable masses of superstitious people who threaten the Hygenic, Good People? Or, what’s more ‘Catholic’ than vaguely European (i.e. sexy) eternal, blood-swilling, castle-dwelling guys in black with aristocratic pretensions and the desire to get everyone into their power?
Just sayin’…. 🙂
Play By the Rules!
Managers of several Catholic Linked In groups have started discussion threads with instructions to “explain what you do in exactly seven words”. I’m game!
- Poetess, weaving experience into wombs of words.
- Begging for help naming millions of babies!
- I create low-budget Catholic cultural initiatives.
This is fun, so why am I irritated?? [Read more…]
Heavenly Storytelling
Everybody has hopes about what heaven will be like. Sometimes they wonder, though, what there will be to do. Not to be disrespectful of the sufficiency of seeing Christ fact to face, it hardly seems fulfilling to spend eternity in a blissful, floaty, staring contest. Given that everything that needed doing is done, and Heaven needs none of my puttering, my hospitality, or my activism, um…eternity is a long while to twiddle your thumbs! [Read more…]
Looking for Intellectuals
I noticed an ad for a conference. The theme: Where are the New Intellectuals? I mentioned it to my priest and he sent back an article from the 1950s asking the same question – bemoaning, in fact, the death of Catholic intellectuals. Not that I qualify as a New Intellectual, but, having, at least, an intellect, I thought I’d chew on this.
My response? Pish-tosh!
There certainly are Contemporary Intellectuals, and I think I know why you aren’t finding them. They are sitting around in Real Lives, not in universities that have the funds to send them to conferences like these. Lots of them are home educators – moms and dads who are discovering the holes in their educations and patching them up as fast as they can. Sometimes they’re just a few steps ahead of the Next Intellectuals they are raising.
Include, in the ranks of these auto-didacts, everyone who is actively reading and discussing books like G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, A.E. Sertillange’s The Intellectual Life (a blueprint for New Intellectuals, by the way), Fr. Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs, or Stratford Caldecott’s The Radiance of Beauty. Catholic magazines (and their readers) like First Things, St. Austin Review, Second Spring and Gilbert are full of NIs. In fact, if Joseph Pearce, Dale Ahlquist, Stratford Caldecott, Anthony Esolen, and Gregg Wolfe aren’t on your short list of NIs, you’re looking in the wrong place (still in academia, are we?).
No wonder you’re spending big bucks to investigate the crisis of the disappearing Catholic intellectual. I’d love to have been at this conference to hear the answers they came up with. I’m genuinely interested in learning what was said, who said it, and what they all thought we should do next. Meanwhile, here’s my advice to those who are searching for New Intellectuals:
- Look for people with a genuine interest in a wide variety of topics. The ability to be interested, to place myself into the essence of things, is root and fruit of an expanding intellect.
- Look for people who ask questions, especially questions that provoke you. The intellect must be able to focus on both ‘objects’ of study and on ‘positive absences’ (things noticeable for not being there).
- Look for people who enjoy and make time for conversation and who are capable of being influenced by those conversations. (Hint: a book can be read as a conversation with the author – notice whether you tend to ‘talk back’ as you read.)
- Look for people who respond to what they learn – write about it, talk about it, change behaviors, improve practices, dive in to learn more, create derivative works. The intellect must be a two-way street, or it’ll become a dead end.
I’m not exactly sure why you, or anyone, is hunting up NIs, but I hope these tips help you find a few. Meanwhile, if you’re wishing (for whatever reasons) there were more of ‘em, perhaps that’s your call to become one, or raise one, or both.
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