Quinquagesima Sunday

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 / Luke 18:31-43

Can we love without knowledge? We surely think so. Love, after all, is an affair of the heart. It is as true of infants at the breast and toddlers at their mother's knee as it is of doctors, lawyers, and ministers of state. Love, surely, is what can bind even the simplest of us to the most profound. Even the saints attest as much. We marvel at the depths of love in the Curé of Ars, but not the clarity of his theological acumen. We are dazzled by the charity of Frances Xavier Cabrini, but do not seek her correspondence to puzzle our way through difficulties in Biblical exegesis. There is much to be gained from patterning ourselves on the love of children, but the thoughts of childhood are quite another matter: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away the things of a child. Love, it seems, can be without knowledge.

Can we know without love? Tragically, we think this, too, can be so. The long, sad, horrifying stories of techniques of terror used by regimes both liberal in constitution and tyrannical in vision, for both the politics of pragmatism and the zeal of ideology, can attest to the presence of knowledge without love. The technical marvel of the guillotine, after all, was a product of the march of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Even closer to home, on a less global and dramatic scale, we can walk by ravages of poverty and illness on our own street corners and, perhaps feeling a slight prick of our conscience, nonetheless walk on by, or seek material aid but utter not one word of genuine care. And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, yet do not have charity, I am nothing. Knowledge, then, looks as though it can live, even if only fatally, without love.

Yet, as clear as this picture is, it does not get the case quite right. Love, after all, only makes sense if it is of something true, something known to be true. What divides the holiness of the marriage bed from the shadowy longings of the brothel house is, after all, the truth of what is going on. The passionate unmarried couple might profess that what they do is out of love, but in this they err. Their actions are false, and so their feelings, however sincerely professed, cannot be real love. The child who mocks her peer for dressing poorly, the mother who withholds kindness from a child who will not do as she asks, the husband who seeks to help his wife fulfill her vocation with the back of his hand — we assert that these are not love precisely because they are not true. Without knowledge of who the other person is, who he is not only for me and my desires, but in and for himself, and in his call by God, there can be no love, only sentiment.

This is how the crowd near Jericho goes wrong. Not knowing Jesus rightly, they abuse the blind man. Knowing Jesus falsely, they imagine that Jesus is served by keeping those who suffer from him. In their eyes, his calling out for healing is an offense, and in this they are gravely, potentially fatally mistaken. It is only in knowing him better by his merciful healing that they are able to move from accusation to praise, from malice to love. It is in coming to a deeper knowing of who Jesus is that they can honor him rightly, and come to see the man who now can see not as a nuisance and an obstacle, but as the privileged sign of God's compassion for a world blinded by ignorance and sin. Only in knowledge, do they come to love.

If love only makes sense if it is true, if it is of something known and known rightly, then we must remind ourselves, too, that we do not know anything rightly apart from love. To see the world from the eyes of another means not only to have the same senses and images in our head as in theirs. It means to know the world as they know it, but that means to see in things the value which they hold for the other. It is not enough to know that our brother loves the novels of Jane Austen; to know Jane Austen as he does means to love her books as he loves them, and to love them for his sake. All the more is this true of God. We cannot actually know the things of God, we do not really have prophecy and knowledge, if we do not see things the way God sees them. Anything else, of course, is a failure to see. However, the only way to see things as God sees them is to see with the love that God has, to love them as God loves them, and to love them for God's sake.

This is why we now see only through a mirror in an obscure manner. It is not for lack of revelation. In Christ and the apostolic witness, we have the fulness of all we ever need to know of God. Still, we do not love as we ought, and apart from that love, we really know nothing at all.

Brothers and sisters, our observance of Lent will begin in a short span of days, a pilgrimage to lead us from Jericho to Jerusalem, where all things that have been written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. Where our love has grown cold, let us seek to know him better. Where our knowledge is dimmed, let us love all the more fervently. It is in knowing God better that we will be able to love, and in our loving that we will see him as he is. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I have been known. So there abide faith, hope and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.

Thursday in Sexagesima

2 Corinthians 11:19 - 12:9 / Luke 8:4-15

Brethren: You gladly put up with fools, because you are wise yourselves.

It is important to stand up for yourself. Everyone learns at some time in his life — in a spat with a sibling, with a bully on the playground, accused falsely before a teacher — that the world, even those close to us, will step over us and our best interests. Every parent, at some moment in her life, will come face to face with that moment, with the child who fearfully turns to his mother or father, the one who has always had his interests at heart and defended them with outstretched arm and bared teeth. She will come to that moment and know that this time, she cannot come to his aid. This time, if he is going to grow to maturity and strength, if he is to learn the crucial lessons of fortitude, this time he has to make it on his own.

Not always, of course. Yet, there remains this unhappy feature of the world outside Eden, on this side of the flaming swords spinning to and fro, that we will be opposed. We know this is the case even for the friends of the world, for those who are worldly wise. We know to expect it for those of us who live as spiritual guest workers with residency permits, which is to say, to be in the world and not of it.

Then again, we know that sometimes, we need to let someone come to our help. We find ourselves faced with what is, for us, an insuperable challenge — from the child reaching for the apple on the counter too high for her to reach, to the college student whose roommate did not come through with the check and has no way to pay the rent, to the father whose undocumented and illicit presence in the country may tear him away from the family he has taken such pains to raise. It is at these times that, much as we flatter ourselves with tales of self-sufficiency, much as we pride ourselves that we have not been a burden on those whom we love, we need to be brave enough to seek a strength not our own. This, too, is fortitude.

So, this week, we have as our perfect model of fortitude in Paul of Tarsus. On the one hand, we have Paul the fighter, Paul who congratulates the Corinthians in their forbearance, their putting up with the abuse of the arrogant, but nonetheless cannot contain himself from a little sparring on their behalf. This is a man who is not afraid to seem conceited. He knows his credentials, he knows how he has suffered for the Gospel, he knows that he speaks not third-hand, an authority derived by hopes and hearsay, but as one who was caught up into paradise and heard secret words that man may not repeat. If the Corinthians in their holy meekness will not rise against those who would do them ill, then Paul of Tarsus is happy to do so on their behalf, without fear or trembling.

On the other hand, we see the man who knows his limits. In Paul we encounter a man who is confident that, but for one unnamed impediment, a thorn for the flesh, he could do even greater things for his Lord Jesus Christ. So sure is he that this weakness is an obstacle to his mission, that he not once, not twice, but thrice besought the Lord that it might leave him. Paul, the great Apostle, the fighter with no fear of men, turned to the Lord in his weakness, to have his weakness confirmed. My grace, the Lord told him, is sufficient for you, for strength is made perfect in weakness.

This is why the Church, during this week, has placed daily on our lips a prayer to call for help, and not just any help, but the aid of St Paul: O God, who see that we do not trust in anything that we do of ourselves; mercifully grant that by the protection of the Doctor of the Gentiles we may be defended against all adversities. Christian bravery means standing up with a strength not our own, and for that reason a strength we can trust all the more. Like St Paul, we need to be afraid that our witness to Christ is less sure because we have not the power to sustain it of ourselves. Gladly therefore I will glory in my infirmities, that the strength of Christ may dwell in me.

Wednesday in Sexagesima

2 Corinthians 11:19 - 12:9 / Luke 8:4-15

And those by the wayside are they who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their heart, that they may not believe and be saved.

It is a dreadful thing to be a victim of robbery. If you have been fortunate never to have had someone with malice, someone who has been observing you unseen and unknown for days, even weeks, make his way into your home, with only your harm in his thought, then count yourself indeed fortunate. Even when what it taken is ultimately of little consequence, although perhaps of significant value, even should you be so free of attachment to things, baubles, devices, toys, that their absence would impact you only in the least way, there is a special horror, a dread of invasion after the fact, in knowing that the private, intimate spaces where you live out your life have been the unwilling host to an ill-minded villain. The chair where you take your morning coffee, the table over which you dine and entertain, the sofa where you curl up with a favorite book, the bed where you entrust yourself and your safety to almighty God as you sleep — all of these places you know and which connect to those perhaps trivial but no less personal moments of our day have been handled, used, made sport of. It is a dreadful thing to be a victim of robbery.

Now, when our home has been the victim of burglary, we can at least know that what is ultimately of importance has not, indeed cannot be taken away. Standing in the pale of God's love just is not the sort of thing a robber can pilfer. So, all the more alarming is the warning of our Lord that the devil can take away the word from our hearts, and in so doing steal from us both our belief and our salvation. Surely faith, as a gift of God himself, and our salvation, which is in the end God's work in us, are immune from that kind of violence. Surely our hearts, where the Holy Trinity has made a home and come to dwell, can never, so long as we remain bound to God in love, is a place of safety, far removed from the dreadful intrusions of a burglar, be he a fallen angel or not.

Yet, we deceive ourselves if we imagine that the only enemies to our life in faith and our salvation are the ones which arise solely within our own hearts. Jesus warns us in the parable that, while there are certainly deadly tendencies internal to us which can choke the life of the Word, there are likewise external ones which can, in their own way, just as easily snatch it away.

On the one hand, there are those thoughts and ideas, suggested to us from without, whether by the wickedness of dark and twisted spirits or the carelessness of an incautious acquaintance, which it is better not to think. Some ideas, after all, are dangerous to think. It may be important, after all to know of the pathology of sociopathy, and it might even be important for some people, such as the police or forensic psychiatrists, to be able, after a fashion, to think as a sociopath would. However, to form one's mind to see the world with the eyes of a heartless murderer, to conform one's loves and delights to be as his, is quite possibly to deform one's own soul irrevocably. Indeed, this danger is as true of lesser, but in the long run no less poisonous, twistings of the mind and heart. To allow these in is as good as to let their author, the Prince of Lies, take away the good planted in us.

On the other hand, there is a kind of self-censoring, a worry about the forces external to us, that can also hand over to our assailant what we think we are protecting. Prudence in proclaiming the faith is indeed important, but there is a seductive offer, a siren's song which would call us to hold our tongue, to keep private our life in Christ, to learn to engage the world by living and seeming as one of the world. We ought not, the song tells us, to offend where offense may be taken. We should see where words like ours have been used not to heal but abuse, and so keep silent. Yet, as surely as those who opened their ears to the Siren of old found their ships dashed against the rocks and their lives forfeit, so also with the life of faith. To allow the worries of offense and past malfeasance to stop up our living in public witness to the Lord is in the end to hand away what we were given to nurture. It is to give to the devil without contest what he was threatening to take by force.

Can the Evil One take as his own the Lord's irrevocable gifts? By no means. But if we invite a known rascal into our home, or leave our house open and unguarded to avoid crossing his path, can we honestly be surprised to find that what we thought we valued had been taken away? If we had acted to carelessly or timidly about the seed of faith, did we actually want it in the first place?

Blessed Reginald of Orléans, Confessor, Order of Preachers

Ecclesiasticus 31:8-11 / Luke 12:35-40

... he could have sinned but did not, could have done evil but would not, so that his possessions are secure in the Lord, and the assembly of the Saints shall recount his alms.

Reginald of Orléans was, by any ordinary estimation, doing very well for himself when he took the habit of the Order of Preachers. A young canon lawyer of great fame, Reginald enjoyed that prosperity that comes from a highly esteemed employment well lived. Indeed, there was nothing suspicious, nothing inappropriate, nothing demeaning of his life in Christ in the life he led before he was struck so terribly ill, and in that illness encouraged without by St Dominic himself, and within by the Blessed Mother, to take up the habit of the Order. It was perhaps in light of these circumstances that Matthew, his brother in religion, a man who had known him during his days of prosperity in the world, asked Reginald whether he ever regretted putting on the habit. To this, Reginald replied: I very much doubt if there is any merit in it for me, because I have always found so much pleasure in the Order.

There is a kind of moral rigorism which, while surely absent from our Brother Reginald, often makes his words its own. Pleasure, it seems to say, is a sure sign of wickedness. Where there is enjoyment, there must be a demon crouching in wait in the reeds, under every sweet smelling petal a deadly thorn, behind every moment of playfulness a well-oiled slope sure to send us plummetting to the depths of indulgence. Virtue, on this view, is hard work, and where there is no toil, no sweat, no grief of loss, then surely there can be no merit. Unlike the happy man of Ecclesiasticus, the man who seeks pleasure will have been tested by gold and come off, not safe, but seriously imperilled.

Yet, there is clearly something wrong here. Is the symphony spun from the deepest threads of a muscian's heart less worthy because in composing he finds life most delightful? Should we rather applaud the tortured composer who would rather do anything than harmonize another line, but in grim necessity sets his mind to the task? Is a mother's care for her child less lovely because she finds them delightful? Would we rather have it that she should prefer not to be a mother and love them regardless? Is this what we mean by virtue and merit? Do we imagine, after all, that the Virgin's happy acceptance, her glad Fiat, less worthy of praise, less meritorious, because it filled her with a joy beyond all telling?

Pleasure is, after all, the proper flowering of something rightly done. If we find ourselves distracted by pleasures from doing what we know must be done, surely this is no fault of pleasure itself. The delights of reading a richly textured novel, the pleasures of spending time in the company of a friend who cannot just now return our kindnesses, the thrill of sitting quietly in a dimly lit chapel, even with no petition to make and no message to hear, but to be at prayer with the One who loved us deeped than we will ever know from the gently hardness and pitiless mercy of the Cross — these are, to be sure, acquired tastes, and ones that do not come so readily as sweet chocolate on the tongue or a nice, hot shower. However, it is no good to hope that we will never find such things pleasurable. To be the sort of person who takes no pleasure in the things of God is no longer to be a friend of God. It is, for the sake of a mistaken sense of moral rightness, to have cast oneself willingly outside the sweet, savory feast where God would have us sup.

Is there merit in enjoying the things of God? This we know for sure. There is no merit is becoming so flinty and hard that the Gospel brings no delight. God redeemed us that we might have life. Do we imagine that, for those whom he has loved, he has intended that life to be dreaded or endured? Dare we hope that, like Blessed Reginald, even in the hardest tasks placed before us, we will find such pleasure in it, we will wonder if there was any merit in it at all?

Monday in Sexagesima

2 Corinthians 11:19 - 12:9 / Luke 8:4-15

And other seed fell upon good ground, and sprang up and yielded fruit a hundredfold.

The evangelical reformer John Wesley, although a married man, surprisingly believed that the gift of celibacy was offered to all Christians. On his view, the voice of the Scriptures was clear; all things being equal, the life of celibacy was a better way to pursue the things of the Lord than the married life, which even at its best left the heart divided. Yet, he could not imagine that God might not grant the same gifts to all. The notion that God might love some with gifts of a more excellent sort, which might be more likely to yield the hundredfold praised by our Lord in his parable, was intolerable. So, on his view, whoever found himself unable to maintain celibacy in charity must have, at some earlier point, rejected the grace which would have made it possible.

While Wesley's views here may seem a tad unusual to Catholic ears, to ears more attuned to a rich plurality of graces, his notion is not too far from how many of us experience our own lives with the Lord Jesus. Looking at the example of the apostles, the martyrs, the doctors of the Church, the virgins and confessors, we wonder why our own lives have not produced the heroic fruits that theirs did. We imagine that, somewhere, some time, we must have refused an offered grace, a gift which would have made us as patient as Anthony of Egypt, as passionate as Catherine of Siena, as gentle as Francis de Sales. In other words, we imagine that the generating force, the source of fruitfulness that is God's Word, must of its own nature always produce the same yield. Any variety, any disparity, must be the fault, not of the seed, but a defect in the soil.

Now, defects, to be sure, there are, and we cannot always absolve ourselves for the paltry, shriveled crop harvested from the bitter earth of our hearts. Yet, as any vintner will tell you, the quality of a crop is not merely the result of getting out of the way of the seed. It is not as though the seed ought always to produce fruit of the same flavor, if only the earth had not obscured its true taste. Rather, there is the terroir, that special character of the soil, of the precise proportions of sunlight and shade, of the microclimate of rain and dew, of the other plants in the region, of the centuries of growth — all of these, rather than impeding, make for a beautiful variety from the very same plant. This is, after all, why the French know their wines not by varietal, but by vineyard. It is the terroir, and not simply the grape, that marks the yield.

So, too, in our lives of faith, there is a spiritual terroir, a "ghostly earthiness" if you will, that yields a bountiful richness from the same holy Writ. From the same call to leave all things and follow Christ, we have the lives of hermits, of monks, of friars, and of active apostolates. From the same counsel to love of neighbor we have both Martin of Tours' heroic refusal of the sword and Louis of France's equally heroic death bearing the same. Where Elizabeth of Hungary set aside affairs of state for the sake of the Kingdom, Karl of Austria bravely led his people through a war he wanted desperately to end, and refused to set aside his imperial and royal claims to serve his people, even if he was forced to set aside the exercise of those sacred duties. For each of them, it was their heart's terroir, that combination of gifts and trials, within and without, all guided by the loving hand of Providence, which made all the difference.

Sexagesima Sunday

2 Corinthians 11:19 - 12:9 / Luke 8:4-15

And that which fell among the thorns, these are they who have heard, and as they go their way are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not ripen.

There is an episode of the 1980s television revival of The Twilight Zone ("The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon") which presents to us a man clearly free from the riches and pleasures of life. This otherwise harmless old man spends his entire day digging through the local garbage to seek not discarded things of value, but rubbish — a paper clip, a doll's head, a wire hanger. Nothing in his life seems to contribute at all to his personal comfort. He does not pursue any sort of worldly distraction. He neither chases after money nor indulges in money once gained.

Yet, Mr. Witherspoon is something of a public nuisance. While never overtly hostile or dangerous, this odd, old man has no time for pleasantries. He is cut off from any meaningful relations with his neighbors. He only has time for his unceasing and driving need for worthless, but always quite particular, articles of trash.

Why he does this, we later discover, is because he hears voices which instructed him to build a machine, a machine made from the cast-off trinkets in the garbage dump, to keep the world in balance and to ward off global disasters. Apply a doll's head just so, and an earthquake in Santa Barbara is averted. Knock something else out of place, and a tidal wave will wash away an island nation. And so, Mr. Witherspoon has no time for ordinary human interaction; the fate of the world is quite literally in his hands (and in his apartment). While free from the riches and pleasures of life, Mr. Witherspoon, kind as he may be, seems altogether choked by the cares of the world.

We who hold to the faith delivered once for all to the saints can easily fall into the trap of Mr. Witherspoon. Like this batty old man, we too know that there is important work that needs to be done. Scoured of impurities by the waters of Baptism and forged into a firm but supple instrument by the fire of the Holy Spirit, we respond, as we grow more fully into conformity with Christ by that same Spirit, to the slightest touch and prompting of God. We grow to see, as he sees, the cares and needs of the world. We come to love, as he loves, all those whom the heaviness of a world which longs to be set free threatens to crush and bury. So long as we keep this in mind, the riches and pleasures of life can be seen quite easily as goods, but distracting ones, and readily abandoned as inconsequential to our own happiness and our neighbor's flourishing.

Yet, with all of this insight, we can be drawn just as easily away from God's Word by these legitimate concerns as we can by the beautiful trinkets and baubles by which God has decorated it. Staring ever too closely at the darkness of the world's woes, our eyes can grow accustomed to the dim, and we might not feel any comfort with our fellows in the clear light of day. Indeed, such detachment from ordinary human interaction — a cup of tea on a quiet afternoon, a good book and a cold and rainy day, a walk with a friend through the park to see the setting of the sun, gazing at the stars with a child first awakening to the wonder of it all — not only dehumanizes us, it can be all the harder to resist precisely because we convince ourselves that it is a response to the hard demands of the Gospel.

But, resist it we must!

God indeed has assigned us a task, and there is plenty of work to be done. Make no mistake, this is no counsel to sloth. Even so, we are not made nor have we been redeemed for a life of drudgery, to lose what is enobling of human life in a grim determination to save the world, which, after all, God has already done in Christ. We ought rather to heed the words of Adam to Eve in the work of the great Puritan poet John Milton:

Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd
Labour, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight
He made us, and delight to Reason join'd. (Paradise Lost 9.235-243)

Brothers and sisters, the cares of the world are many, and will be there when you return. Are you ready to let God keep the world for a space, and enjoy a bit of leisure, the holy leisure in which God's Word will hold fast, and bear fruit in patience?

Blessed Jordan of Saxony, Confessor, Order of Preachers

Ecclesiasticus 31:8-11 / Luke 12:35-40

It can be a tiring and wearisome thing to be always on watch. There is a reason, after all, that armed guards of palaces and city halls, museums and supermarkets, maintain something of a grim air of resignation. Apart from warning off a potential evildoer, those on watch just cannot afford to be affable. Keeping an eye out for what is coming, for any sign however small that something deserves our attention, seems to us generally incompatible with mirth. For us, to be enjoying ourselves generally means also not having to keep watch, not needing to mind our P's and Q's.

This is why, at first glance, one might see why enemies of the faith have accused Christianity as being the foe of joy. After all, Jesus himself describes, or rather commands, Christian discipleship to resemble and unending watch: Let your loins be girt about and your lamps burning in your hands and you yourselves like men waiting for their master's return from the wedding. Indeed, it is a watch we are advised may take longer than we think, and for that very reason, we can never allow our attentiveness to slacken. The bridegroom may well come not right away, but perhaps even in the second watch, or possibly even the third watch of the night, when we wonder whether the sun will dawn on a new day without his return, and without a moment's rest on our part.

How very different, then, such watchfulness appears in those whom God loves, how very far from grim resignation and anxious fatigue. In this, we have no better witness than Blessed Jordan of Saxony, successor to St Dominic as Master of the Order of Preachers, and one of the most tireless promoters of the Order's membership and mission in its earliest days. It is true, of course, that Jordan kept special vigils of prayer over and above his obligations to the Divine Office. Indeed, he is said to have prayed on his knees, upright with his hands clasped, for over two hours (the time it would take to walk eight miles, it was said), once after Compline and again after Matins, crying bitter tears all the while.

Yet, it was this same man blessed by God who was noted, not for a maudlin temperament, but for his gentleness and joy. It is said that, while on his many travels, when not in holy conversation with his fellow friars, Jordan would walk ahead of them a stone's throw, singing all the while one of his favorite tunes, the Salve Regina or the Jesu nostra redemptio. So filled with joy was he in these tuneful meditations, that he would wander off, and his brothers would have to go searching to find where he had finally gone. Needless to say, Jordan and his fellow travellers would not infrequently get lost, but rather than lose his patience, or seek to blame another, Jordan is reported to have said, especially to those who were upset or worried by the delay: Never mind, brothers, it is all part of the way to heaven.

What Jordan reminds us is that watchfulness for God is not just like the watchfulness of a security guard minding the door to a bank vault. Ours is not the task of keeping someone out, but of being ready to let someone in. To do that, we need not so much to have the house put in order and put on hold, as one might worry over what to do with the entrée when the guest of honor is late for a dinner party. Rather, our task is to become the kind of people who will find the coming of the bridegroom a reason for unmitigated joy. To be watchful for God, in other words, means to be just the sort of person who weeps over his own sins and the sins of the world, who weeps with gladsome anticipation for the return of our beloved bridegroom Jesus Christ, and who sings with happy distraction along the way.

It is in our tears, song, and words of gentleness to our brothers and sisters that Christ will find the most welcome home, will find just the place he would desire to recline at table.