Communion & Liberation Advent Retreat talk (2007)
[The following is a talk that I gave to the Communion & Liberation community in Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 2007. I thought I would share it since I did not have to preach this weekend since the deacons were]
Advent is a time for preparation and waiting. It does not seem as if the modern world is very good at waiting. We seem to want fast food, overnight express delivery, on-demand TV and movies. Ours seems to be a culture of instant, or at least near instant, gratification. Jesus told His Church that we would be a sign of contradiction, and one of the ways that the Church holds up a big red flag to our culture that is just rushing along, is to have this season of Advent — a sacred time of waiting.
But waiting for what? Rather waiting for whom? Of course our wait is for the encounter with the Mystery. The one who speaks with authority. The one who fills all of our deepest desires. The one who reveals us to ourselves. We are waiting for the encounter with Christ.
One of our simple gestures, when we gather as a community of believers, is to pray the Angelus. Why this prayer, of all the many beautiful prayers in the Church’s treasury? I believe that Msgr. Giussani had an affinity for the the Angelus because it reminds us of the center of time and being — the Incarnation, when the eternal Logos in love of us became Flesh. While the Mystery had always made itself known to humanity, in the Incarnation the fullness of Divine love is manifested to humanity. Of course the Incarnation did not happen at Christmas. That first encounter of the Logos-made-Flesh was an intimate, personal encounter when the Blessed Virgin Mary said “Yes” to the invitation by God to participate in an absolutely unique way in His almighty will. For nine months this great event, this wonder of wonders, was experienced only by a few people — most intimately by Mary and Joseph, but recall that even John the Baptist leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when he encountered the Mystery in Mary’s womb.
Yet Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for Christmas, when the great Encounter manifests Himself for all the world to see — from the poor shepherds tending their sheep to the wealthy wise men from the East. While the waiting for the Messiah was over at the Incarnation, we who are often slow to realize the greatness of God, celebrate the end of the waiting at Christmas. Our Salvation has Come!
One of the ways that we can best celebrate Advent is to nurture this need for waiting within ourselves. We need to recognize our desire for Christ, our longing for Him, in order to recognize His Presence among us. Without anticipation, without waiting, we might miss Christ passing by. We might miss our opportunity to say, “Master, where do You live?” so that He can say, “Come and see.” Of course Christ never stops making Himself present to us, He continually invites us to encounter Him, yet we can repeatedly miss Him in our blindness, in our rushing about, in our not being willing to wait.
What can we do to be better wait-ers? First we can learn to better appreciate beauty. The theme for this year’s Exercises was “Christ in His Beauty Draws Me to Him.” That is a powerful statement, and one that we should not rush past too quickly. It seems to me that our culture has dimmed in its appreciation of beauty. After all, look at some of the things that pass for art today; a Crucifix in a jar of urine, a mosaic of the Madonna made out of elephant dung, music that seems to glorify using people, or just taking care of “my own.” We have been lead astray by the saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, which so many people seem to interpret as meaning that there is no universal standard of beauty. Yet we know that God IS Beauty! Please note well that I am not saying that God is beautiful, but that God in His Being is the Being of Beauty. I am not a great philosopher, in fact I nearly drove one of my philosophy professors mad, because I just kept telling him I just did not get it, so I am sure that this is not the most philosophically exact definition of beauty, but beauty is the correspondence between the artistic expression and the mind of God. It is a response to God’s love that tries as best as it is able to correspond to God’s love. It is this correspondence, or more properly put, relationship with God that was the theme of the first lesson of this year’s Exercises, and will be the theme of our Advent reflection as we prepare and wait — for Christ, in Christ, with Christ.
In reading a biography of St. John Vianney, I read about an episode in the saint’s life when someone, noticing that the Cure’ of Ars spent many hours of devout prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, asked him what he prayed before the Blessed Sacrament. St. John Vianney, simple, holy man that he was, replied, “He looks at me and I look at Him.” What an absolutely wonderful description of contemplation. First, Christ looks at me. Then I look at Him.
What does Christ see when He looks at me? He sees my need. He sees my longing for infinite happiness, my desire for infinite love. He looks at me with compassion. Over and over again in the Gospels we hear that Jesus looked at people with compassion. Whether it was the Rich Young Man who wanted to know what he needed to do to gain eternal life, or the woman caught in adultery, or the crowd that followed Him like sheep without a shepherd, or looking at Jerusalem soon to be destroyed, Jesus always looked with compassion. And He still looks at us with compassion. As you have probably heard, the word compassion means to “suffer with,” but I think we need to broaden that definition for when we use the word “passion” we often mean more than “to suffer”. We say that we love passionately. We might say we have a passion for football, or knitting, or hiking, or reading. Often when we use the word “passion” we mean something like, “to burn with desire,” so when we think of Jesus looking at us with compassion we need to see Him as burning with desire for us. Jesus loves us. That really is the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Jesus REALLY, REALLY loves us.
Now, if you are going to cry when I say that Jesus loves you, please let it be with joy. Once I was helping at another parish as their children made their first Reconciliation. Many children come feeling nervous and anxious, and this one child really looked scared and after they told me all their sins, I looked at them with as tender a look as I could, smiled and said, “Jesus loves you.” With that this child burst into tears. I have to wonder what people thought as they saw this child crying as they left the confessional. Maybe that is why they haven’t invited me back to help with first Reconciliation any more.
Seriously, when Jesus gazes on us, He burns with desire for us and with us. He knows what fulfills our deepest desires. He lays bare our need to be happy, our need to be loved, together with all the illusions we create around us that we think will make us happy. Our sins are one type of illusion, a false love, a false happiness that just leaves us empty. But there are also other illusions in our lives, which often are not sinful per say, but do not satisfy.
Almost 20 years ago I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. This was long before I was a priest. While there I had fallen in love with a woman. Her name is Juliann. I know that there was some real love there, because only people who love each other can hurt each other as much as Juliann and I hurt each other. Looking back in hindsight, we both were looking for the other to be the source of our happiness, and this just put too heavy a burden on the other. Of course we failed to fulfill each others’ deepest desires, after all we were both fallible and finite human beings. And when we failed, we got angry with each other. We broke up, and for a long time afterwards I was in a depression. I just wondered if anyone would ever really love me. I was just absolutely sure that if I just found “Miss Right” my life would be happy.
During this time, in addition to going to a counselor — hey, remember, I was studying to be a psychologist, I continued to go to my spiritual director, Fr. Bob, a Dominican priest. For a very long time I was “in the desert” as they say. While in my head I could accept the fact that there was a God, I just could not feel His love. He seemed distant and unconcerned about me. And I got really tired of hearing people say, “Oh, even Jesus spent 40 days in the desert.” One day Fr. Bob and I was talking about all the “sand” I was eating. I remember getting angry and saying, “Jesus was only in the desert for 40 days. I feel like I have been here for a year.” Fr. Bob asked me to think about why Jesus was in the desert. I said to be tempted, and he said, “Yeah, but think about when in His life He was in the desert.” I said, right before He started His public ministry. Fr. Bob said, “Yeah. Did you ever think that God might be calling you to that kind of public ministry?” I remember staring at him thinking he must be insane. I mean here I was having what I thought were some serious doubts about God, and he was asking me if I had ever thought about becoming a priest. He said that he noticed that I seemed to be more at ease, more at peace, when I was helping out there at the university Neumann Center.
I left that session of spiritual direction still thinking that Fr. Bob was nuts, but it broke something in me. It laid bare some of my illusions about what happiness was. I eventually came to realize that I had an encounter with Christ that afternoon. That Jesus had spoken to me through Fr. Bob. Jesus looked at me. Of course Jesus was always looking at me, but this time I started to look back. My needy heart, which was at first “needing” the wrong things, helped me to recognize the Presence of Jesus and my desire to be loved by Him and to love Him. Now, I have only been a priest 3.5 years, and this encounter was over 15 years ago, it has been a long journey. It has been a journey of passion — both the suffering kind and the joyful loving kind — but Christ’s compassion for me has kept me going.
One of the things that we need to do as we wait and prepare this Advent season is to recognize Christ gazing at us, and we must gaze back at Him. We need to allow Christ to lay bare our need to be happy, our desire for love, and our illusions.
Related to this gaze of Christ is the value of the human person. If we were of little value, why would Christ look at us with compassion? After all, God does not need us. God is complete in the Trinity. Yet for some reason He has not revealed to us, God chose to create the universe. I almost said, “the universe in general and each of us in particular,” but the truth is that in His perfect love God creates everything “in particular.” While we can talk, scientifically, of processes of cosmology and evolution, we should never fall for the illusion that God just started these processes and has just allowed them to run without giving things much of His attention since. That would be a deistic why of thinking: God the great clock-maker who now just lets the clock run on its own.
No, God loves us as an “I”. While He loves all of creation, He does so in a particular way, not a general way. That means that He loves each of us, not just in general, but in particular. As another priest once told me, “God knew every sin and mistake I was going to make in my life, and even though He could have made the universe any way He wanted, He did not want to make it without me.” Well, that goes for each of us.
Just as we should never look at cosmology and evolution as processes that God just started and has now step back from, we should not look at our lives in that way. There is a real tendency to try to explain away our behaviors as due to forces beyond our control. In the early 70’s the comedian Flip Wilson had the famous saying, “The devil made me do it.” Now we blame our DNA and/or our environment. We want to reduce everything that we do to mere reactions. As a psychologist I see this often, even within the Church. I work as a psychological expert for the diocesan marriage tribunal, and so often in annulment cases the argument is made that since depression or anxiety or substance abuse or you name the diagnosis from the DSM-IV runs in the family the person was incapable of entering into a valid marriage. I am not sure what the judges on the tribunal think of me, because I frequently say in my reports that people are not cogs in a machine. That God has given us this tremendous gift called free will. While not wanting to completely dismiss the influence of DNA and prior learning, we cannot throw out our freedom. We cannot be reduced to being just like the animals. We are made in the image and likeness of God. We are His children. He counts the hairs on our heads. God loves us!!! Christ desires to enter into an exclusive relationship with us. Jesus wants every individual to be happy. Our desires stem not from the senses, like the brute animals, but from that spiritual power we call the human will.
In the famous passage from St. Paul’s Second letter to the Corinthians, in which he talks about the thorn of the flesh that he begged the Lord to remove from him, he writes, “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me” (2 Cor. 12:9). Here is another example of how the Church stands in contradiction to the spirit of this world. Weakness, dependency are bad things according to our culture. We are told that we need to become autonomous and independent. That we are responsible for our own happiness, our own satisfaction. If this is true, why would we have any relationships at all?
St. Paul had the right idea when he “begged the Lord” three times, for to have an authentic relationship with Christ we must become beggars. We must recognize our utter dependence on God for EVERYTHING. I mean every beat of our heart, every breath we take is a gift from God. We need God. No amount of money or power or things or human relationships is going to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. Only Christ can make me truly happy.
Now, I am not saying that everyone needs to become celibate like me. Of course marriage is a blessing, a gift from God, yet I am sure that you married couples here can verify that if it all depended on the two of you, your marriage would be over. I know that if it was just up to me, J.C. Garrett, I could not forgive sins or make present the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. All vocations must be rooted in God. That’s just another way of saying, that we need to recognize and live in a unique relationship with Christ Jesus. We must allow the power of Christ to dwell in us. This is what Msgr. Giussani called “religiosity” and religiosity is what Jesus insists on as the only condition for being human. “Man has a choice: either to conceive of himself as free from the entire universe and dependent solely on God, or else as free from God, and therefore he becomes a slave to every circumstance” (L. Giussani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim [V. Hewitt, trans.]. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998, p. 86).
As a priest I certainly feel close to Christ when I celebrate the Mass, hear confessions, and anoint the sick. Fr. Stephen Rossetti, in his book The Joy of Priesthood, calls this “reflected grace,” for while the person receiving absolution or anointing or the Eucharist is the principle recipient of the grace of the sacrament, the priest, as the instrument that God uses to bestow the sacramental graces, also receives grace. Maybe it is the grace of recognizing our dependence on God, because as I said before, I know that on my own I cannot forgive sins. To be an instrument is humbling, and it is in humility that we draw near to Christ. God does not want us groveling before Him. No, He wants us to embrace the our dignity of being children of God, to come to our loving Father with our needs in utter confidence that God will fulfill all our needs.
This dependency on God can be an extremely difficult lesson to learn, and it is one that we often need to learn over and over again.
A few months after I was ordained a priest I was diagnosed with cancer. I have to say, hearing that you have cancer can be one of the most frightening things you will ever hear. It really did not matter that the doctor told me that it was one of the most easily treated kinds of cancer. All I heard was, “I have cancer.” I had just turned 40 years old. The details of that night remain fresh in my memory. About 10 days prior the doctor had removed half of my thyroid, though he told me that the chances that it was cancer was very small. Mom and Dad, who had stayed with me a few days after the surgery, had gone home. The other priests in the rectory were all at a neighboring parish to assist at a Penance service. The doctor said a lot of other things, including that I would need more surgery followed by radiation, but mostly I just heard “you have cancer.” And I came home to a big, dark, empty rectory. I tried calling some friends, but no one was home. I was very scared and panicked, but then a calm came over me and I said quietly, “all for Jesus.” At first I did not know where that came from, but then I realized in my aloneness that I was not alone. Christ was there. He did not tell me that He would take the cancer away. He did not tell me that I wouldn’t die. He was just present with me, and I knew that He would always be present with me. The fear and anxiety did not magically go away, but they were transformed. I had a new appreciation for what Jesus means when He says, “See, I make all things new.”
When we are humble and embrace our dependence on God, Christ fills our lives in a superabundant way. God who is Love fills us with love. But if we are all filled with ourselves, striving to be so autonomous, we leave no room for Christ. He knocks at the door of our heart, but He will not kick it in. We must open the doors of our hearts, invite Him in, and He will sup with us.
Christ, who reveals us to ourselves, comes as a little baby, born in a manger. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Babe of Bethlehem, showing us that it is in dependency and weakness that the power of God dwells in us.
This religiosity, which Christ insists on, this unique relationship in which Christ looks with compassion on us as we depend on Him, is ever new. Christ is present to us through His Church, which is nothing but His Mystical Body enlivened by His life, by His Holy Spirit. As members of the Church we invite each other into this unique relationship with Christ that we have been discussing. Msgr. Giussani says that a friend is someone who opens up this religiosity in us. Fr. Bob, my old spiritual director, was a friend because in his challenge, he opened me up to the gaze of Christ. The reason we gather for School of Community is not simply to participate in some kind of Adult Faith Formation or study group. We are called to be friends to each other. We are called to help each other be open to the relationship that Christ desires to have with us. We help lay bare each others’ need for love, for happiness, and our illusions that keep us from Christ.
Our religiosity, our relationship with Christ that embraces our dependence on Him who looks on us with compassion, expresses itself in prayer. I am sure that most of us remember being taught, probably sometime in our childhood, that there are four kinds of prayer: Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication (ACTS). At times it seemed to me as if the prayer of supplication or intercession or asking was treated as the least good kind of prayer, because it could be seen as selfish. In reading the lessons of this year’s Exercises, and reflecting on them, I have come to realize how wrong that way of thinking is. While we certainly should be mindful of all of our brothers and sisters around us, and not be selfish, but all prayer really is asking. When we ask God our Loving Father for something — whether for ourselves, or our families and friends, or for the world — we are recognizing our dependence on Christ. We are inviting Him, who is constantly knocking at the doors of our hearts, to enter into relationship with us. It is always an asking to be aware of the Divine Presence. We should always pray, that is ask, in the words of that Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
