On Aspiring to be Pilgrims of Hope

Here is a talk I gave at the Leominster city-wide Catholic Mission last week on what it means to aspire to be people of hope.

The eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans has always meant a lot to me. I was first introduced to it by the lyrics of a song that was written by Father Enrico Garzilli. It was simply called Romans 8. Perhaps you have heard it:

For to those who love God, who are called in his plan 

Everything works out for good,

for God himself chose then to bear the likeness of His son 

That he might be the first of many, many brothers

This chapter goes on from there:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us…For creation was made subject to futility in hope that creation itself would be set free…and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I begin with Roman 8, because it sets the context of the hope to which Pope Francis has called us in the forthcoming Jubilee Year: to be pilgrims of hope.

The Holy Father first announced the Year of Jubilee in a document entitled Spes non confundit, or Hope Does Not Disappoint. In it, he reminds us that while we are already a pilgrim Church, walking during our whole life in a great pilgrimage of faith, we are called to become something more: we are called to become pilgrims of hope.

We live in a world desperately in need of hope. Just look at the desperate state of public discourse and the vicious way that people treat one another. How quickly people resort to cave man bullying tactics rather than reasoned discourse. And how compassion and patient understanding is in cut short supply.

Not to mention the Crosses which each one of us face in our daily lives.

A couple months ago, a dear priest friend told me that he had taken very sick very quickly at Mass when he suddenly felt very week and nauseous, to the point where he stumbled and almost knocked over the chalice on the altar. He stopped the Mass and someone did a Communion service while he took to his bed. Since then he has had a quadruple by-pass, and I am happy to report is doing well.

But he and I are both at the age where sudden illness can strike at any moment. Many of you know that disquieting fear, which hums in the background of your heart. You begin rehearsing the awful ways you have seen people get sick and die, accelerate your forays into forensic genealogy and desperately seek a diagnosis for each twinge from Dr. Google. Nor does it help that I am past the age where most people retire in order to have time for all those doctors. 

For even worse than the kidney stone is the fear of it, the identification of the cramp or the ache as the onset of some agonizing night in the emergency room, where you will be sentenced to lying on a gurney, counting the seconds between the stabbing pains.

Fear of physical suffering reminds us, as does Romans 8, that these bodies groan in anticipation of their redemption. I guess thats why the image of the woman “groaning in labor pains” works so well….groaning within our selves as we wait for God to bring us home.

But, as this Jubilee year reminds us, we have a choice to make as we lay there wondering how much longer the pain will last, or if, indeed, it will ever go away, we are reminded by Saint Paul, that…

we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.

That’s why at every Mass we insist that we are waiting in joyful hope, even if during the week we must add to the dermatologist and audiologist, a cardiologist or even an oncologist.

For our hope is in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, which has saved us, even from death. The Cross of learning that its malignant, that your old life is over, at least for a time, and that now you must enter this monastic enclosure called Cardiac Care.

Now the Cross, of course, demands detachment: a letting go of what has been.  Like all Crosses, it is mounted on a Good Friday as the sky goes black as all seem to have turned against you.  Like all Crosses, it faces a vast darkly empty tomb, across which they plan to roll a great big stone to seal you in.

And like all Crosses, there are two ways it can be approached: as a captive or as a free man.  As a captive, I go to the gallows bound and gagged, never gently into that good night, but fighting for my life.  Alternatively, I can choose to receive the cross with open arms in imitation of the one who taught me how to mount the tree and accept every cross as a participation in his.  The first is coerced.  The second is the act of a free man and a life with meaning.

Admittedly, its hard to be a free man and to accept the suffering as they drive the nails into your wrist.  Our every instinct is to struggle to get away.  Only faith opens our arms.  Only faith makes us free.

Saint Theresa of Calcutta, Doctor of fruitful suffering, once reflected: 

Today the passion of Christ is being relived in all the lives of those who suffer. To accept that suffering is a gift of God. Suffering is not a punishment. God does not punish. Suffering is a gift.  Though like all gifts, It depends on how we receive it. And that is why we need a pure heart- to see the hand of God, to feel the hand of God, to recognize the gift of God in our suffering. Suffering is not a punishment. Jesus does not punish. Suffering is a sign-a sign that we have come so close to Jesus on the cross, that He can kiss us, show that He is in love with us by giving us an opportunity to share in His passion. In our home for the dying it is so beautiful to see people who are joyful, people who are lovable, people who are at peace, in spite of terrible suffering. Suffering is not a punishment, not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world.

So let us live the faith we profess, that, delivered from fear, we might live as the children of God, waiting in joy for the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

THE FACE AND THE HEART OF JESUS

 Here is a talk I gave this morning to parish ministers from Saint Joseph Parish in Charlton nohow to be the face and the heart of Jesus to others.

When my grandmother was born at the end of the 19th century, there were two very popular devotions in the city of Worcester. They crossed, ethnic lines, and images of each were in almost every tenement. The first was the image of the Sacred Heart and the second the image of the Holy Face.

Indeed, my mother, of pure Irish stock, was nonetheless given a French first name, “Marguerite,” because of the widespread devotion to Sister Marguerite Bourgeois, whose visions of the Sacred Heart, where the impetus for the first of these new devotions. 

And then there was the devotion to the Holy Face, which started in Italy, growing up around the relic of Veronica‘s veil venerated in the third pier of Saint Peter‘s Basilica. Pius IX, besieged by Garibaldi‘s troops, had reproductions of the veil printed and sent to bishops and their flocks throughout the world so that they could intercede before the Holy Face for the preservation of the Holy See.

But beneath these exigencies, I suspect that the real reason for a popular embrace of devotions to the Sacred Heart and Holy Face of Jesus was the deep desire to know the Lord personally at a time when the industrialization of western economies was turning Mrs. McGillicuddy, the Lacemaker to that lady on the fourth loom who had a bad back and nonetheless sat on a hard wooden bench with shuttle and spindle for 56 hours a week.

It was the great era of the depersonalization of the individual and each and every Catholic longed to be seen and loved as a person, and to see the face and feel the personal love of the Lord, who was at the center of their life.

From the beginning of time, of course, we have all longed to see the Lord. Perhaps more than anything else perhaps more than any desire that stirred the human heart: to see the Lord and to know his love is at the heart of this journey which we call religion.

One of the major themes of the Bible is a desire to se the face of God. Indeed, the Hebrew word pānîm, which means “face”, is used over a hundred times in the Old Testament to speak of looking for the face of God. 

Why did they keep looking for God’s face?  Because only a person has a face, a living being, one who is loving and capable of being loved. And the desire to see God’s face is the desire to gaze on him with love, and to be looked upon by one who loves me. God, then, is not an abstraction or a divine mechanic who has withdrawn into the heavens and coldly looks down on us from above. No, God is love, and by dwelling in the light of his face….face-to-face with God, who enter into the deepest loving relationship of our little lives.

God then, listens to us, speaks to us, sees us and makes promises to us.  He loves and he teaches us the meaning of life and of love. The history of our relationship with God, then, is the history of our gazing at his face and his face looking back on us in love.

The Book of Numbers has that wonderful old patriarchal blessing, which we still use as a blessing on New Year’s Day:

“May the Lord Bless you and keep you. 

May the Lord make his face shine on you, 

and be gracious to you. 

May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace.

Indeed, it is only by looking into God’s eyes that we can see ourselves for who we are and who were meant to be. As our beloved Pope emeritus once said, “The splendor of the divine face is the source of life, it is what makes it possible to see reality; the light of his face is guidance for life.”

Moses understood that well. Which is why we read in the Book of Exodus that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). But even this face to face friendship was but a show of what there was to come.  For in Jesus, we see the face of God made flesh. 

In Jesus, God’s face can be seen. The great English mystic, Caryll Houselander once described what the Blessed Virgin Mary must have felt like when she looked into the face of the child in her arms and saw in it the face of God.

Maybe that’s why artists down through the centuries have worked to hard to depict the face of Jesus, for in that face we see God, “the mediator and the sum total of Revelation” 

As he said to Philip, ‘whoever sees him, sees the Father’ Indeed, “in him we see and encounter the Father; in him we can call upon God with the name of “Abba, Father”; in him we are given salvation.”

But there is something more to seeing God’s face in the face of Jesus, for he tells us that he is also present in the poor, the weak and the suffering.

Caryll Houselander, once again, once wrote: “I see the face of God in everyone I pass. Sometimes it’s hard but I try.”  She once described sitting on a train and looking at everyone around her. Then, all of a sudden it occurred to her:

“Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them — but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too…all those people who had lived in the past and all those yet to come.”

So, the face of Christ is not just a two dimensional icon to be gazed upon up near the altar, bur the face of the tired cashier, in which see the suffering Christ, tired and worn out from all the sufferings he endured.  It is the face of the garbage collector, tired and hot and thirsty on the Cross. It is the face of the homeless man, Christ in the desert with nothing to eat or drink and nowhere to lay His head.

That's why we meditate on the face of the suffering Christ.

It is the face once transfigured in glory, 

and now crowned with a web of thorns.

It is the face weeping before the tomb of his friend Lazarus,

the face which wept over Jerusalem,

and covered with the sweat of blood on the Mount of Olives.

It is the face covered with a veil of shame 

and profaned by the soldiers,

now bowed upon the Cross for our salvation.

It is the face washed and anointed by the holy women

and resplendent with glory on the day of the Resurrection.

It is the face of Jesus, hidden in the Eucharist

and worthy of all devotion.

It is the face which we will see on the day:

the face of the merciful and just judge,

terror of sinners and hope of the just.

It is the face for whom we long,

in whom we hope,

the face of love,

who will come to save us.

—

As Parish ministers, as evangelists and as disciples of the risen, Lord, we are called to be the face of Jesus to the world. For it is not our brilliant words or our strategic plans which will convert the world to Christ. Strategic plans and brilliant words are political instruments and we are most assuredly not politicians.

Rather, we must respond to the deepest longings of the human heart, which is to see God. 

Now, admittedly, the best parts of ourselves is but a blurred reflection of the light of Christ’s face. It becomes less blurred, and in shaper focus when we love like him and we forgive like him, when our love is characterized by patient endurance, and by the willingness to lay down our lives for others. 

When the lady calls for a mass card on a Tuesday morning at the same time you’re trying to get the bulletin out, she is not looking to speak to the most efficient parish administrator in the Diocese of Worcester. She is, whether she knows it or not, longing to see the face of Christ. 

When the couple come in to have their newborn baby baptized, (even when the hardest part of it for them was figuring out where the church was located), they are not just looking for a way to satisfy their parents, but, whether they know it or not, they are looking for the face of Christ. 

And when that young person, overwhelmed by all of what it means to be sixteen, comes to play basketball in the gym, he is looking, whether he knows it or not for the face of Christ.

And when that old man walks away with two canned goods and a bag of rice, he is not just looking for a way to stretch a too small social security check, but whether he knows it or not, he is looking for the face of Christ.

And so your work, no matter what it says on the job description, is to be the face of Christ and to love with his Sacred Heart. That is the ministry of which we are each ever unworthy, but to which we are constantly called.

For the spirit will transform the face of the Earth, not by our most efficient or well laid plans, which often go awry, but by our willingness to decrease, so that Christ might increase and the people of Charlton might meet him in the breaking of the bread and in compassion of the face and the heart of Christ, in each one of you each day. 

Thank you.