What is Truth? Christ and Pilate (1890) by Nikolai Ge (1831-1894)¹, held in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia. M.N. Sokolov writes: “Notable among the works marking the opening of this new period is What is Truth? (1890; Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery), in which Christ is shown before Pilate who puts his ironic question to him, represents, in the words of Tolstoy, ‘an epoch in Christian painting’.”

Matthew 27 (NJB): ¹⁹ Now as he was seated in the chair of judgement, his wife sent him a message, ‘Have nothing to do with that upright man; I have been extremely upset today by a dream that I had about him.’²

Note

We have taken our cue from the Gospels given to be heard and contemplated in Catholic churches on each of the Sundays of Lent. We have progressed from Temptation (Matthew 4) to Transfiguration (Matthew 17) to Conversation (John 4), to Conflict (John 9), to Death (John 11), and finally to Love Unconditioned (St. Matthew’s Passion account).

Seeing the Painting

Notice how the painter has Pontius Pilate standing in the bright light, while Jesus, the Light of the World, is looking at Pilate from the shadows.

The stillness of Jesus – which is His “answer” to Pilate’s questions - is affecting Pilate. Pilate stands bathed in the light, as if he is being given a chance to follow the truth to the Truth who stands right there – “Who do you say that I am?”.

We want to say, “Pilate, you feel His effect in you, don’t you? You know already that something much greater than an interrogation is happening here. This Galilean stranger has brought you into the light. Don’t turn away; go into it. This man Jesus is not making this about him; it is only about you and the light in which He has placed you.”

Let us experience the profound stillness of Jesus, who is giving Pilate room to see the Choice being given him. Even here, the courtesy of Christ shines brightly. No victim here, but the Master at work.


Notice how this painting captures a moment early in the conversation. Everything about Pilate suggests that he feels himself completely in charge. The easy smile on his untroubled face; his right arm gesturing toward Jesus – notice that arm is bathed in light – but also that it is pressing into Jesus’ private space. Doesn’t that gesture remind you of the foolishness of kids who at the Zoo reach through the bars toward the lion who watches them with stillness and barely contained fierceness? “Be careful, Pilate. You have no idea with whom you are dealing. It is the Lord of the world.”


Notice how confident Pilate is (but so is Jesus). But as is the case with all who get self-satisfied, too sure of their stature and importance, Pilate has failed to notice how dark is the shadow that follows him, that is attached to him, which the Light exposes.⁷ (Jesus casts no shadow.)

Notice, finally, where Jesus is looking. Often people assume (and often because their religious leaders want them to assume this) that God is most interested in their sins – the shadow that we cast in the world.⁸ Jesus is paying no attention to that inky shadow behind Pilate; Jesus keeps his eyes on Pilate upon whom the light is shining.



Quotes

Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore, Chapter 13, “The Stone of Pain”, pp. 243-244 – And that was all there was left to do. Beyond that he could not see, the mist was all about him. He felt about in his pockets as he sat there, huddled with Ged¹⁰ in the fog, to see if he had anything useful. In his tunic pocket was a hard, sharp-edged thing. He drew it forth and looked at it, puzzled. It was a small stone, black, porous, hard. He almost tossed it away. Then he felt the edges of it in his hand, rough and searing, and felt the weight of it, and knew it for what it was: a bit of rock from the Mountains of Pain. It had caught in his pocket as he climbed or when he crawled to the edge of the pass with Ged. He held it in his hand, the unchanging thing, the stone of Pain. He closed his hand on it and held it. And he smiled then, a smile both somber and joyous, knowing, for the first time in his life, alone, unpraised, and at the end of the world, victory.

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)¹¹, “As I Walked Out One Evening” –


William Barry, SJ, “Discernment of Spirits as an Act of Faith” in An Ignatian Spirituality Reader – “The discernment of the spirits rests on the belief that the human heart is a battleground where God and the evil one struggle for mastery. Jesus of Nazareth himself believed this. In the desert he had been tempted by the evil one masquerading as an angel of light. If these were real temptations, then he, like us, had to discern the movements inspired by God from those inspired by the evil one. He, too, had to make an act of faith in who God really is, based on his experiences and his knowledge of the Scriptures of his people. Jesus came to recognize who the real enemy of God’s rule is. He cast out demons and equated his power over the demons as a sign of God’s coming to rule: ‘But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.’ The majority party of the Pharisees and most Jews of the time saw the real enemy of Israel, and therefore of God, as the pagans, and especially the Roman occupiers. Repeatedly Jesus warned his hearers that the real enemy was Satan.” (My emphases.)

Thoughts

I consider this encounter between Jesus and Pilate as possibly the most significant of the Passion account. Why? Because it is here that the Son of God comes before “the world” in its self-confidence and self-satisfaction, in its organizational prowess, in its self-congratulating clarity about who is “in” and who is “out” of order. There. See them? Pilate looking at Jesus; Jesus looking at Pilate.

I esteem highly how our painter, Nikolai Ge, has left out the crowd and the Praetorian Guards and everyone else. There is only these two men: two individuals who are also symbols of two worlds at work inside our world.¹³
 
Our painter cuts to the heart of it all. He paints a scene of dark shadows and strong light; a place of heavy stone suggestive of a tomb; a “tomb” of the world into which Jesus has come through the door from a world of brilliant light into the shadowed lands. He finds Pilate trapped inside … as will always be the case with the powerful of this world. There is a strong suggestion that this “tomb” of entrapment has become, because Christ has come there, a “gate of Heaven”.

See how our Lord strives to save Pilate, not Himself. Can you hear him? We must watch His lips - the voice a whisper, He says: “Unbind him, let him go free.”¹⁵



How ironic that Pilate was convinced that it was Jesus who was the prisoner in that place!

Prayer for the Sixth Week of Lent¹⁷

¹ M.N. Sokolov in Grove Art (Oxford) – “Ge [Gay], Nikolay (Nikolayevich) (b Voronezh, Feb 27, 1831; d Ivanovsky farm [now T. G. Shevchenko farm], Chernihiv region, Ukraine, June 13, 1894). … Russian painter. The son of a landowner and grandson of a French nobleman who emigrated during the French Revolution, he initially studied in the departments of mathematics of Kiev and St Petersburg universities (1847–50). In 1850 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, from which he graduated in 1857. … Ge gradually came to occupy a unique position in post-Romantic Russian art, anticipating the artistic quests of the 20th century in the passionate expressiveness of his work. In terms of iconography and ideas the determining influence on Ge from the 1880s onwards was the religious teaching of Lev Tolstoy, who became a close friend. Ge’s works moved towards a broad painterly style, pushing contrasts of colour and of light and shade to the limit. … Alongside his religious paintings, Ge produced remarkable portraits with a haunting inner spirituality.” My emphasis.

² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 27:19. “Dreams were commonly regarded as a means of divine guidance in the ancient world (see on 1:20). In Matthew the only other people said to be guided by dreams are the magi and Joseph (1:20; 2:12, 13, 19, 22). The intervention of Pilate’s wife serves only to deepen the guilt of the Jewish leaders: even a Gentile woman can see that Jesus is innocent. But of course she knew this only because God had told her, in the dream. It is God, rather than just Pilate’s wife, who thus testifies to Jesus’ righteousness, over against the accusations of the Jewish leaders.” [France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007, p. 1055.] My emphasis.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Is 9:1.

⁴ Father Simeon, O.C.S.O. (formerly Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis) obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Theology from Emory University. Formerly a Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of San Francisco, he is now a Trappist monk at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.

⁵ Leiva-Merikakis, Erasmo, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to St. Matthew (pp. 498-499). Kindle Edition.

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 9:36–37.

⁷ The basic disease is sloth. It is that strange laziness and passivity of our entire being which always pushes us “down” rather than “up”—which constantly convinces us that no [spiritual] change is possible and therefore desirable. It is in fact a deeply rooted cynicism which to every spiritual challenge responds, “What for?” and makes our life one tremendous spiritual waste. It is the root of all sin because it poisons the spiritual energy at its very source. The result of sloth is faint-heartedness. It is the state of despondency which all spiritual Fathers considered the greatest danger for the soul. [Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969, pp. 34–35.]

⁸ Nothing is more essentially boring to God than our sins, our habitual taste for unreality, our willingness to become silly. It is we human beings who care a great deal about our badness, and especially as we identify sins in others. God cares enormously about us, about the light in us, about the high purpose given us by God from the moment that we were “ensouled” in the womb – Romans 5: 5 because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us – our quickening.

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 12:18–21.

¹⁰ From https://earthsea.fandom.com/wiki/Ged - “Ged, also known by his use-name alias Sparrowhawk, is a wizard who was born at a village on Gont. His true name is Ged. He has a boat called Lookfar. Ged is described in The Farthest Shore as "a short, straight, vigorous figure.... His face was reddish-dark, hawk-nosed, and seamed on one cheek with old scars." He carries a yew-wood wizard's staff of exactly his own height. As a student and young wizard, he had an animal familiar, a small mammal called an otak, native to southern isles such as Roke.”

¹¹ See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-h-auden. “English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit.”

¹² I am grateful to Dr. Travis Pickell, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at George Fox University in Newberg, OR. He references this stanza in his signature file at the bottom of any email that he writes and sends.

¹³ The “other world” to which Christ refers in different ways may mean, but more rarely, the “place” to which Jesus Christ will go in His ascension. But what Christ most commonly means is a real world deeper-in than the fake world that we human beings construct for ourselves and in which we wish to become expert … and get well paid for it if we can. The fake world (which many call “this world”) is always about keeping us “thin”, making a deeper world seem bothersome and not worth the effort to explore, for dreamers, and perhaps for people who failed to get good at what is superficial and so are of little consequence. Isaiah 55 (NJB): ² Why spend money on what cannot nourish and your wages on what fails to satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and you will have good things to eat and rich food to enjoy. ³ Pay attention, come to me; listen, and you will live. (My emphasis.)

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Ge 28:15–17.

¹⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:44.

¹⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 17:26.

¹⁷ Omnípotens sempitérne Deus,
qui humáno géneri, ad imitándum humilitátis exémplum,
Salvatórem nostrum carnem súmere,
et crucem subíre fecísti,
concéde propítius,
ut et patiéntiæ ipsíus habére documenta
et resurrectiónis consórtia mereámur.
Qui tecum.

¹⁸ The Roman Missal: Renewed by Decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Promulgated by Authority of Pope Paul VI and Revised at the Direction of Pope John Paul II. Third Typical Edition, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011, p. 284.

The Raising of Lazarus (1890)¹ by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), held in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Painted in May 1880, while in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence [from 8 May 1889 to 16 May 1890]. “The attacks of mental illness, called epilepsy at that time, were to recur, and van Gogh allowed himself to be institutionalized in Saint-Rémy not far from Arles.” He would die by suicide, shooting himself in the chest on 27 July 1890. “Two days later he died calmly in the presence of Theo [his brother], who outlived him by only six months.”

John 11 (NJB): Then Jesus lifted up^j his eyes and said: Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer. ⁴² I myself knew that you hear me always, but I speak for the sake of all these who are standing around me, so that they may believe it was you who sent me. ⁴³ When he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’²

Note

We have taken our cue from the Gospels given to be heard and contemplated in Catholic churches on each of the Sundays of Lent. We have progressed from Temptation (Matthew 4) to Transfiguration (Matthew 17) to Conversation (John 4), to Conflict (John 9), and now to Death (John 11).

Seeing the Painting

First, it is unusual for us to find, as is the case here, a masterpiece (below) etched by a Master – Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) whom a later Master “made his own” by painting it. Here is Rembrandt’s contemplation of John 11:41-43 (below),³ from which we have Van Gogh’s painting (above).

The Raising of Lazarus (1869) by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)

Second, notice how van Gogh focuses his attention on the three siblings, leaving unseen the Lord who is summoning Lazarus from the realm of the dead (vv43-44). Why would the artist leave Jesus out? Well, one thing that anyone knows who has found his or her gift is that it is not about how or why or that he or she gives that gift. It is about what happens for others when one gives it, and the joy and wonder the giver experiences watching that happen. The giver feels embarrassed to be praised (though he or she would hope to be loved and not envied), which is what Jesus meant when He said,

Matthew 5 (NJB) - ¹⁶ In the same way your light must shine in people’s sight, so that, seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in heaven.⁴

There is little doubt that van Gogh understands the effect Jesus’ action is having on the three siblings of Bethany: Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. How would you describe the emotions that you see in each of the three? For example, is that not terror on the face and in the gestures of that one sister? For example, why are the sisters not looking at Jesus?

Third, notice also how in van Gogh’s painting, because he paints with vivid colors, we can see a red beard on Lazarus – van Gogh’s beard was red like that. The painter has identified with Lazarus, wanting to feel with his biblical brother what it felt like to be called by Christ who spoke into the dead place (sometimes people experience depression as a kind of living death, of being imprisoned in a gray space in-between): “Unbind him, and let him go free!” Remember that van Gogh, unreachable inside his tortured mind, painted this Gospel scene just two months before suicide.

Finally, think of just one of God’s masterpieces, human beings, about which Ephesians 2 writes: ¹⁰ We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for the good works which God has already designated to make up our way of life.⁵ Let us then consider how Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human, “made His own” that original work of art - what the Trinity made from the dust of the Earth and placed in Paradise. He was Himself a living, incarnate image and likeness of a human being, born of Mary – His “copy” (better than a painting) of the original. Jesus Christ is God’s way of being a human being, so that we could learn how to be human beings as God originally made us to be. Just because we were born human beings clearly does not mean that we are any good at it.

Quotes

St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Sermon 10 “On the Tears of Christ”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 3 – He [Jesus Christ] who speaks is not one whose thoughts it is easy to get possession of; that it is no light matter to put one’s self, even in part, into the position of His mind, and to state under what feelings and motives He said this or that; in a word, I wish to impress upon you, that our Saviour’s words are not of a nature to be heard once and no more, but that to understand them we must feed upon them, and live in them, as if by little and little growing into their meaning. It would be well if we understood the necessity of this more than we do.⁶

Pablo Neruda, “Morning” -

We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.

Thoughts

⁵ Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, ⁶ yet when he heard that he was ill he stayed where he was for two more days.⁷ – We know how completely improbable it is that Jesus, who loved Lazarus, would have waited - ³ The sisters sent this message to Jesus, ‘Lord, the man you love is ill.’⁸ He would have left immediately for Bethany (as we would have done). Of course He would have. But He did not. Why? St. Peter Chrysologus⁹, a Doctor of the Church, offered this observation:


But does not this seem cruel of Christ, using Lazarus, letting him rot, so that He could make a point? Jesus Christ was never cruel like this. Christ waited because His Father told Him to do so, assuring Him: “My dearly beloved Son, we’ve got Lazarus, and we want you to help us give to him a gift. Lazarus has always felt overshadowed by You and by his sisters. We intend to make him an intimate part of one of the greatest of all Signs to be given to human beings. Wait just two more days; then go to him.”

Jesus wept; ³⁶ and the Jews said, ‘See how much he loved him!’¹² – We might have noticed how some of the people drew a conclusion as to the nature of the tears that they saw in Jesus’ eyes. We need not conclude the same. Let us instead ask Jesus – “Lord, why are you crying?”. I have learned over the long years that I am a fool when I am convinced that I know why someone is crying. I must ask the person – “Can you help me understand what those tears mean?”¹³

I could imagine the sorrow that Jesus was feeling when He recognized the depth of hatred for Him that the in-group and in-power group of Jewish religious leaders cultivated – John 11: ⁵³ From that day onwards they were determined to kill him.¹⁴ It had to have been heart-breaking to Him, a long sorrow, to walk among those who, above all and quicker than anyone else (though perhaps not as quick as the demons), should have been able to recognize the Gift being given them by God. Instead, they chose to be offended by Him – it had to have been envy (the signature failing of Satan) and eventually to a murderous degree.


I could well understand why He would weep at the living death that envy causes. This was surely not the first time that Jesus thought or spoke or prayed: “Unbind them and let them go free!” Envious people lay waste to others. How often in history people have considered impressive such “power” (unable or unwilling to recognize its demonic source), praising a person who is “not afraid to be powerful”. We consider it useful to us, apparently, when such a person uses his or her power to go after “our betters”, whose “better” is an offense to us. And so, cities and nations are laid waste – the sign of Envy’s presence and its devastating power to unmake everything.

Jesus is not crying at the death of Lazarus (He already knows what His Father has asked Him to do, and to what astonishing effect). Rather, He is weeping at the presence of another Death, a living death, present in and emanating from those who take offense at Him. He knows how this kind of hard-heartedness will keep them from the abounding mercy of God.

 John 4 (NJB):
Envy is the inner force of the “deplorable word”¹⁸ so famously exercised by Jadis, the White Witch, in Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew.


Perhaps, if we think really hard about it, we would prefer and trust the following words more than “deplorable” words:



Prayer for the Fifth Week of Lent²⁰

By your help, we beseech you, Lord our God,
may we walk eagerly in that same charity
with which, out of love for the world,
your Son handed himself over to death.²¹
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.²²

¹ For closer study of this painting: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Raising_of_Lazarus_-_Vincent_Van_Gogh.jpg. But also, see: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0169V1962?utm_source=copilot.com. Evert van Uitert in Grove Art (Oxford): Vincent (Willem) van Gogh – “Dutch painter. His life and work are legendary in the history of late 19th- and 20th-century art. Van Gogh was active as an artist for ten years, but as a full-fledged painter only five years, during which time he produced some 1000 watercolors, drawings, and sketches and about 1250 paintings ranging from a dark, Realist style to an intense, colorful expressionistic one. … Albert Aurier in 1890 characterized him as ‘This robust and true artist, a thoroughbred with the brutal hands of a giant, the nerves of a hysterical woman, the soul of a mystic’ and said that ‘he will never be fully understood except by his brothers, the true artists…’.

² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:41–43.

³ See: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/391532.

⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 5:16.

⁵  The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Eph 2:10.

⁶  Newman, John Henry. Parochial and Plain Sermons. Rivingtons, 1868, p. 130.

⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:5–6.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:3.

⁹ St. Peter Chrysologus (c 380-450 CE) – The sermons for which Peter Chrysologus became famous are well known for the careful preparation of a well-prepared orator, their human sentiment and the divine fervor of a holy man. Through their examples, they also reflect the situation during that time at Ravenna, the imperial residence, an important port and agricultural center. [Studer, Basil. “Peter Chrysologus.” Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, edited by Angelo Di Berardino and James Hoover, translated by Joseph T. Papa et al., vol. 3, IVP Academic; InterVarsity Press, 2014, p. 159.]

¹⁰ Tartarus - Tartarus, in Greek mythology, lowest region of the underworld. The wicked (e.g., SISYPHUS, TANTALUS, and IXION) were sent to Tartarus as punishment for their sins. [Lagassé, Paul, Columbia University. The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., Columbia University Press; Sold and distributed by Gale Group, 2000.]

¹¹ Peter Chrysologus. Selected Sermons of Saint Peter Chrysologus. Edited by Thomas P. Halton, Translated by William B. Palardy, vol. 2, The Catholic University of America Press, 2004, pp. 250–51.

¹² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:35–36.

¹³ I have often been surprised by the answer. Sometimes I am surprised when a person replies, “I don’t know why I am crying.” (Maybe it is more important that a person cries, not why.) I have certainly learned that I must ask women what their tears mean, and I do not think that it is just because I am a man. The language of tears in women seems to me a different language than the language of tears in men. Not sure, but I think so. This tentative conviction is one of my “proofs” that gender does go as deep as the soul, i.e., that souls are not genderless – not neuter “stuff”. This makes sense to me when I recall that God made man and woman with two different acts of divine will – Genesis 2 (NJB): 22 Yahweh God fashioned the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man.

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 11:53.

¹⁵ Downey, Michael. The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, Electronic ed., Liturgical Press, 2000, pp. 249–50, at “Deadly Sins” by George P. Evans.

¹⁶ Lines taken from “The City in the Sea” by Edgar Allan Poe. See some remarks about it here: https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom1p050.htm. My emphasis.

¹⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 4:10.

¹⁸ Paul F. Ford: “DEPLORABLE WORD, THE - A magic word that has the power to destroy all but its speaker. It is a word that Jadis [the White Witch] has learned at great personal cost, and which the great kings of Charn have long known (MN 5). Jadis herself used it to defeat her sister, even though the innocent people of Charn were destroyed as a result. Near the end of MN (15), Aslan tells the children that the people of their world may soon discover a secret as terrible as the Deplorable Word, a broad hint that there are wicked people with the power to destroy all life on earth, most likely a reference to the then newly discovered atom bomb. [Ford, Paul F., Pocket Companion to Narnia: A Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis (Narnia® Book 62) (p. 105). Kindle Edition.] My emphases.

¹⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 10:10–11.

²⁰ Quǽsumus, Dómine Deus noster, ut in illa caritáte,
qua Fílius tuus díligens mundum morti se trádidit,
inveniámur ipsi, te opitulánte, alácriter ambulántes.
Per Dóminum.<sup>20

21</sup> A fascinating line. The more typical wording is that “Jesus was handed over into the power of men” – the passive voice of that verb. But here the prayer insists that Jesus handed himself over, which of course squares up well with a line a few verses before this famous story about Lazarus in John 10 – ¹⁸ No one takes it [my life] from me; I lay it down of my own free will, and as I have power to lay it down,  so I have power to take it up again; and this is the command I have received from my Father.<sup>21

22</sup> The Roman Missal: Renewed by Decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Promulgated by Authority of Pope Paul VI and Revised at the Direction of Pope John Paul II. Third Typical Edition, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011, p. 256.

Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind (John 9), a fresco in the west narthex of the Hagia Sophia Church in Trabzon, Turkey¹.

John 9 (NJB): ⁶ Having said this, he spat on the ground, made a paste with the spittle, put this over the eyes of the blind man, ⁷ and said to him, ‘Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam (the name means ‘one who has been sent’). So, he went off and washed and came back able to see.²

Laetare (“Rejoice!”) Sunday

We have taken our cue from the Gospels given to be heard and contemplated in Catholic churches on each of the Sundays of Lent. We have progressed from Temptation (Matthew 4) to Transfiguration (Matthew 17) to Conversation (John 4) and now to Conflict (John 9). And this particular Sunday is called Laetare Sunday:


Seeing the Painting

First, this fresco⁴ was painted sometime in the second half of the 13th century, which leaves us unsurprised at the water damage.
 
Why would we choose to contemplate this representation of that remarkable story in John 9? Because the 750 years of wear on that fresco makes us unable to see it (we see partially); we are blind. Isn’t it interesting that the very thing that we want to be able to see – Jesus touching the eyelids of the man born blind and the expression on the man’s face as this happened – has become hidden?

When we are unable to see something that we want to see, we pay far closer attention to it. We cease to use our eyes only and bring into play our powers of imagination and intellect as we work to “make sense” of what we can see and what we cannot yet make out. Seeing is never about merely the eyes.⁵

Consider, then, this spiritual principle: When we understand, and fully accept, that we are blind, we become more fully awake and focused. We cease gawking at the world, and we learn to work at seeing, the practice⁷ of attention, discovering that it is harder than we thought to win this habit.

We are blessed, not cursed, when we are shown and can accept how blind we are.



Second, did you notice that tiny wrist and hand reaching out toward Jesus, the owner of which is also obscured by water damage (bottom center of the fresco)? We suspect a cherub hidden there.

But what if the painter (placing himself into this scene as the blind man) was a dad of a newborn. Might he have painted that cherub there as an image of his own child? Perhaps he was a dad, who was keenly aware of his blindness (not of the eyes) and of his limitations (what dad does not feel that?) and of his need for Christ.


Perhaps as he painted on the ceiling of that church, high up there on the scaffolding in the west narthex, he prayed that his child would come to know Christ and to reach for Him (see the hand reaching?), imitating his dad who also is reaching toward Jesus.


A contemplative reading of a biblical text will cause such thoughts and associations and connections to enter our prayer. We should learn to let that happen, asking the Spirit to teach us through the sacred text.

Quotes

Pope Francis I (1936-2025; pope from 13 March 2013)¹² in his Interview by Fr. Anthony Spadaro, SJ (30 September 2013)¹³, published in America magazine (Jesuit) - “I see clearly,” the pope continues, “that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his or her wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. … And you have to start from the ground up.” [My emphasis.]

C.S. Lewis, “Preface” to St. Athanasius (296-373 CE)¹⁴ On the Incarnation – We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative¹⁵ is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.¹⁶ [My emphasis.]

Lauren Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit (published 1999) – “You don't throw a whole life away just because it's banged up a little bit.”¹⁷

Thoughts

First, Consider the significance of names. When you read this masterpiece of a story – John 9:1-40 – it is worth noticing where one’s attention lands in the story. I have noticed that often the name of a biblical story can pull my attention away from where my attention is fixed. (Think of that famous parable in Luke 15 when some renamed it “The Prodigal Father” rather than “The Prodigal Son”.)

Scholars give a name to a biblical story,¹⁸ doing so to be helpful, to remind the reader, “Oh, it is that story that I am about to read.” We come to appreciate the help of having those boldfaced titles inserted above each distinct piece of text.
 
However, such titles or names for a story can overly affect what one pays attention to in the story. For example, when this story is named “The Man Born Blind” it keeps one’s attention focused on this man, and on the circumstance of his sightless eyes, something for which he was not responsible. But does focusing on the fact that he was “born blind” really get to point of the story? Is it not a much richer reading of the story to pay attention to what happened in that man once his sight was restored? How might the story do its good work in us if it were named, “A Man who Learns the Price of Really Seeing”?

What do you think should be the name for this story?

Second, when the blind man meets Jesus for the first time, he knows Him only through His voice and the touch of His fingers on his eyelids. He has no idea what Jesus looks like, which is interesting. And so, when he returns from the pool of Siloam, his face bright with seeing eyes, would he not desire to find who it was who had accomplished something so life-changing for him and for his family? But, again, the man has no idea what Jesus looks like. (The theme of the Son of God hidden in plain sight is ubiquitous in the Gospels – “Who do you say that I am?”.)

Let us consider, then, how often we ignore someone, being not interested in what he or she has to say, because his or her looks put us off. Yet it would not be unlike God at all to give to that unlovely person the words we most need to hear. Isn’t it true that, if we were honest, we have made sure that Jesus in our imagination is just the right degree of handsome? We should consider why we do that.

Perhaps we could find Jesus much closer to us than we imagine possible if we shut our eyes and paid closer attention to what we hear people say. The blind man was saved because of what he heard, not by what he saw.

Third, and finally, in our current American moment, we feel often a considerable danger to friendship if we told someone that he or she is blind, preferring a deep-set bias to a more expansive truth. “Who are you to say this to me?!”, they would furiously riposte. Or in our story here:

We human beings were designed by God to be good at not knowing. God built us to learn from the experiences and insights of others, of all others²⁰ if we have the audacity²¹ to be that teachable.



Prayer for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday)²²

O God, who through your Word
reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way,
grant, we pray,
that with prompt devotion and eager faith
the Christian people may hasten
toward the solemn celebrations to come.²³

¹ The most famous Hagia Sophia church is in Istanbul.

² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 9:6–7.

W. West, Western

³ Louth, Andrew, editor. “Laetare Sunday.” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Fourth Edition, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 1090.

⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary at “fresco” – 2.a. – 1598 – A kind of painting executed in watercolor on a wall, ceiling, etc. of which the mortar or plaster is not quite dry, so that the colors sink in and become more durable. Originally in phrase “(to paint) in fresco”.

⁵ Did you notice how the religious “experts” in the Temple had perfectly good eyes. It was their stubborn refusal to let their intellects be “opened” (were self-blinded) by something genuinely new and astonishing and beautiful happening right in front of them. Their eyes worked just fine; their intellects were the problem – “darkened”. John 3:

⁶  “stupidly” – Recall that when a person is being “stupid”, it means that he or she has a mind but cares not to use it, to train it, to make demands on it. This is why people who are passionate about “issues”, and are proud that they are, often strike us as remarkably capable of avoiding the demands and discipline of intellect, the humility required to work something out and with the help of others.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to practice” – 2.a. - ?a1425 – intransitive. To exercise oneself in a skill or art in order to acquire or maintain proficiency, esp. in music. Frequently with on.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 9:40–41.

⁹ Dionysius (6) the Areopagite (c.500) Liturgical and mystical theologian. … The aim of all Dionysius’ works is the union of the whole created order with God, which union is the final stage of a threefold process of purification, illumination, and perfection or union: a triad which has been vastly influential in the Christian mystical tradition. The way to such union (ἓνωσις) with God, or deification (θέωσις) as Dionysius is fond of calling it, has several aspects. [Louth, Andrew. “Dionysius (6) the Areopagite.” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by Andrew Louth, Fourth Edition, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 556.]

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 9:35–37.

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 1:35–38.

¹² Wikipedia – Jorge Mario Bergoglio, later Pope Francis I (born 17 December 1936 in Argentina; died 21 April 2025 in Rome) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 13 March 2013 until his death in April 2025. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century Syrian pope Gregory III.

¹³ See: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2013/09/30/big-heart-open-god-interview-pope-francis/.

¹⁴ St. Athanasius of Alexandria (296-373 CE) – “Black Dwarf” was the tag his enemies gave him. And the short, dark-skinned Egyptian bishop had plenty of enemies. He was exiled five times by four Roman emperors, spending 17 of the 45 years he served as bishop of Alexandria in exile. Yet in the end, his theological enemies were “exiled” from the church’s teaching, and it is Athanasius’s writings that shaped the future of the church. (From 131 Christians Everyone Should Know.)

¹⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “palliative” – 1.a. - ?a1425 – That relieves the symptoms of a disease or condition without dealing with the underlying cause.

¹⁶ Lewis, C. S. “Preface: From the First Edition.” On the Incarnation: Translation, edited & translated by John Behr, vol. 44a, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011, p. 13.

¹⁷ I am grateful to my friend Fr. Gary Uhlenkott, SJ not only for this quote but how he read it to me, the feeling and deep understanding he expressed.

¹⁸ These names are not inspired Scripture; they were not given their names by God. And as you have seen, different biblical translations name the same story differently than others, but sometimes adopting the same name that others prefer.

¹⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 9:32–34.

²⁰ This idea lies at the heart of what “higher” education means. “Higher” was originally intended to mean “more broadly knowledgeable and capable”, making a person unafraid of remaining habitually teachable. I think it was and remains a significant loss when “higher” education came to mean hyper-specialized – knowing (thoroughly) more and more about less and less – and exposed to the apparently unavoidable temptation to arrogance. That is why “higher” education, and in significant degree as developed by the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries, was what liberal education meant; that is, a “freeing” education, an education that fully activates a person’s powers of soul, which makes him or her always capable of learning, teaching him or her to care for meaning and committed to the common good of all.

²¹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “audacity” – 1.a. – 1432 – Boldness, daring, intrepidity; confidence.
22 Deus, qui per Verbum tuum
humáni géneris reconciliatiónem mirabíliter operáris,
præsta, quǽsumus, ut pópulus christiánus
prompta devotióne et álacri fide
ad ventúra sollémnia váleat festináre.
Per Dóminum.<sup>22

23</sup> The Roman Missal: Renewed by Decree of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, Promulgated by Authority of Pope Paul VI and Revised at the Direction of Pope John Paul II. Third Typical Edition, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011, p. 246.

Christ and the Woman of Samaria (1619-20)¹ by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, aka “Guercino” (i.e., the “squinter”) (1591-1666)², held in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Seeing the Painting

We have taken our cue from the Gospel given to be heard and contemplated in Catholic churches on each of the Sundays of Lent. We have progressed from Temptation (Matthew 4) to Transfiguration (Matthew 17) and now to Conversation (John 4).

Did you notice how Guercino zooms in on the two people such that where this conversation is happening (at Jacob’s well) is not nearly as important as who is there and what is happening in their conversation? Nearly always this scene is called “the woman at the well” or some variant of that. Guercino calls his dramatic painting Christ and the Woman of Samaria, as if the space between them is the location that matters here.


Notice the intensity of the connection between the two. We might ask, at what point in the conversation has Guercino “stopped” the text, zooming in on it, so that we do not miss the moment that he considers the most important. At which verse has our artist stopped us? I think that it is here (you may decide differently):

The palpable⁵ connection we cannot miss. It is not a connection of words, as if the main point is that Jesus is talking and the other is listening and understanding what is being said to her. No. The connection here is about souls encountering each other, about insides touching, with the words playing their part, gestures playing their part, what each face is revealing essential. Have you noticed how friends, close friends at their “closest” moments, have moved beyond the words? They are mutually dwelling in their connection and words would be an irritating intrusion. Is it not obvious that Jesus and the woman are within each other, not touching (but close) but closer than touching?


Quotes

Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) - The triumph of sin, the main sign of its rule over the world, is division, opposition, separation, hatred. Therefore, the first break through this fortress of sin is forgiveness: the return to unity, solidarity, love. To forgive is to put between me and my “enemy” the radiant forgiveness of God Himself. To forgive is to reject the hopeless “dead-ends” of human relations and to refer them to Christ. Forgiveness is truly a “breakthrough” of the Kingdom into this sinful and fallen world.⁷

St. John Chrysostom (347-407 CE) – Moreover, the woman at once believed, and appeared wiser than Nicodemus; indeed, not only wiser, but even stronger. For, though he heard countless things of this kind, he neither summoned any other person to Christ, nor did he himself speak freely of Him; while she engaged in apostolic work, spreading the good news to all, and calling them to Jesus, drawing to Him a whole city from outside the faith.⁸

Bishop Erik Varden⁹ on “Caritas” (12 February 2026): “When we consider the world we live in now, and hear the political message spouted in various quarters, it is striking that the principle, ‘every stranger is an enemy’, has gained fresh currency. The infection is spreading. Many refuse to be vaccinated.”

Thoughts
 

John 4: ³⁹ Many Samaritans of that town believed in him on the strength of the woman’s words of testimony, ‘He told me everything I have done.’

Years ago, it became clear to me that inside of every grace that God gives to a person hides a mission.

What does this mean? Well, it means that God gives a person a grace¹¹ so that he or she may be grace-full toward certain other people, and sometimes toward a very particular other person.
 
A divine grace is only half-received when you or I receive it; it is even less than half understood.

To put this another way, I have learned that one of God’s favorite habits is to give a grace to a person who has not asked for it, so that he or she might notice someone (s) who has been asking for that grace. God loves it when we pay attention in this way. And noticing that we have what that person needs, we can, like God, give it freely to that person.

 
When we do freely pass on what we have received, we “complete” the grace, its essentially co-operative¹³ nature. We fully receive the grace that we were given (was entrusted to us) when, and because, that other person (s) has received it through us. Joy is kindled in both giver and receiver, such that a giver may honestly feel that he or she is the receiver. Divine grace is superabundant like this.

A “completed” grace is a relationship that happens between persons, because of the grace that is shared. We ask for things; God gives us each other. Jesus was perfectly clear about how this works:



Prayer for the Third Sunday of Lent

O God, author of every mercy and of all goodness,
who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving
have shown us a remedy for sin,
look graciously on this confession of our lowliness,
that we, who are bowed down by our conscience,
may always be lifted up by your mercy.¹⁵

¹ To study the painting: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/christ-and-the-woman-of-samaria-guercino-giovanni-francesco-barbieri/5gGmwtZxX7mavg.

² Grove Art Online (Oxford), Nicholas Turner on Guercino: Italian painter and draughtsman. He was one of the leading painters of the Bolognese school and one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of the Italian Baroque. His paintings show a command of subtle effects of light and dark, with the figures revealing a wide variety of gesture and facial expression, the result of the artist’s good grasp of human psychology.

³ O'Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (2008) from the Introduction. Kindle Edition. Wikipedia: John O'Donohue (1 January 1956 – 4 January 2008) was an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker, and as an author is best known for popularizing Celtic spirituality.

⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 4:25–26.

⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “palpable” – 1.a. – 1395 – That may be touched, felt, or handled; perceptible by the sense of touch; tangible.

⁶ Rumi: The Big Red Book – The Great Masterpiece Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship (2010), translated by Coleman Barks, page 505.

⁷ Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969, p. 28. And, Schmemann, Alexander (1921–83) Orthodox priest and theologian. Born in Estonia of Russian exiles, Schmemann studied at Russian and French schools in Paris, completing theological studies at the Institut St-Serge, and gaining a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He became a priest in 1946 and taught church history at the Institut St-Serge before moving to New York in 1951. He taught at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, serving as dean from 1962 until his death. He also taught and lectured at many non-Orthodox universities and seminaries.

⁸ John Chrysostom. Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1–47. Translated by Thomas Aquinas Goggin, vol. 33, The Catholic University of America Press, 1957, p. 314.

⁹ See his website: https://coramfratribus.com. Erik Varden, OCSO is a monk (Trappist) and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.

¹⁰ Wilken, Robert Louis, et al., editors. John: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators. Translated by Michael A. Thomas and Bryan A. Stewart, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018, p. 119.

¹¹ “a grace” – I do not like referring to divine grace in this way, as if it were some sort of “thing”, a kind of “object” that God possesses but who hands it over to me so that now I can possess it. I find it difficult to express what I mean. But what I am straining towards in the expression “a grace” is an experience a person has of having suddenly become capable where before he or she had been incapable. (What the tradition has called “helping grace” or “actual” versus “sanctifying” grace.)

¹² Dass, Ram and Gorman, Paul. How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service (pp. 23-24). Kindle Edition.

¹³ The Oxford English Dictionary at “cooperative” – 1. – 1603 – Of or relating to cooperation; having the quality or function of cooperating; that works together, or with another or others, towards the same end, purpose, or effect; collaborative. Also: that complies with an authority, order, request, etc., or is willing to be of assistance.

St. John Chrysostom (347-407 CE) - After he had spoken with them and calmed them sufficiently, he added, These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full (15:11). It is as if he said, “These things I have spoken to you so that you might not be separated from me or that you might not cut short your race. You were rejoicing in me greatly, but now a deep sadness has settled upon you. I will therefore remove this so that your joy may reach the finish line and that you might see that the events occurring now are not a cause for grief but for joy. I saw that you were offended, but I did not hold you in contempt … but in order that your joy may be full, these things I have spoken to you. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:11–12). Do you see that God’s love is intertwined with our own? That it is connected like a chain?¹³ [My italics.]

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 15:11–12.

¹⁵ Deus, ómnium misericordiárum et totíus bonitátis auctor,
qui peccatórum remédia in ieiúniis,
oratiónibus et eleemósynis demonstrásti,
hanc humilitátis nostræ confessiónem propítius intuére,
ut, qui inclinámur consciéntia nostra,
tua semper misericórdia sublevémur.
Per Dóminum.¹⁵

The Transfiguration of Christ (1487)¹ by Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516)² held in the Museo di Capodimante, Naples, Italy

Seeing the Painting

Matthew 17 (NJB): ² There in their presence he was transfigured: his face shone like the sun and his clothes became as dazzling as light.³

Notice how ordinary is the scene he paints. There is little suggestion of the intensities being expressed in the biblical text – “shone like the sun” and “dazzling as light”. The three disciples seem sleepy, or perhaps bored and distracted. They do not appear impressed.

I admit that I have long been puzzled by this biblical scene, because the visual magnificence described in the biblical account seems a “showing off” that Jesus without question would have found repugnant.

Second, the deliberately “unimpressive” way Bellini presents this scene (no flash; nothing to startle) suggests that our painter was paying attention not to the dazzling⁵ display but to something more compelling and powerful, wanting us to notice that instead. What if what he “remembered” about this scene was the profound stillness inside of which all this happened and, most of all, what he felt inside that stillness.
 
It is the “thickness” and resonant depth of that stillness that comes through to me, and what it enabled me to see and to hear. And then the sound of those unhurried voices quietly speaking – those of Jesus and Moses and Elijah.

Quotes

C.S. Lewis “The Weight of Glory”, a Sermon preached at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the High Street, Oxford on Monday, 8 June 1942, taken from the closing lines: “This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat [Latin: “truly he hides”]—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)⁶ – “In Memoriam” (the last stanzas) –



 
Thoughts

As I earlier suggested, I have wondered about what Jesus was showing those three disciples that night. I am convinced that we have missed something important. What is it?

The commentators ancient and contemporary conclude to the hidden divinity of the God-Man suddenly flashing forth in/through Him, which to this point had been unseen by the disciples. It was as if a great oaken door, behind which was a boundless Heaven boiling with life,⁹ swung open just enough to let through into a land of shadows a magnificent brightness.
 
It could be that it was His divine nature that He was revealing to them. But I don’t think so. It is just too unlike Jesus to allow such a display, a drawing attention to Himself. And then we have this text of obvious pertinence:




The key word is that He emptied Himself of that which could “flash out”, making an impressive display on the mountain, offering proof of how unlike He was to us who are not in the habit of being effulgent.


What, then, was Jesus showing them?

I have recently been learning from this text of John Chrysostom:

This text caused me to recall something that I learned some years ago when I was studying the Hymns on Paradise of St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373 CE)¹². Ephrem, unlike any other theologian I had ever read, contemplated what he had textually no means to see, but about which he asked God to teach him. What was the nature of the first human beings whom God made from the dust of the Earth, placing them in Paradise? What were we like there? Don’t we need to know this for us to understand the restoration being offered us by God in the holy redemption?


What God gave Ephrem to understand is that before the Fall, God had made us powerful and beautiful and formidable and alight with mirth, human beings who were far more than what we weakly imagine that we are or could possibly be. Think of the insight in Psalm 8:

What Jesus showed His three closest friends that night on the mountain was not the awe-inspiring greatness of His divine nature; it was instead a fully restored human nature that He showed them, restored to its paradisal¹⁴ glory - human beings fully alive – gloria Dei est vivens homo¹⁵. We were His work of Art there in Paradise, terrible¹⁶ beauties, “not tame, but good.”17 

If we were then as we regularly (always?) imagine ourselves to be now, then why would the Satan have bothered with us? Why would he have felt threatened by us? He would not have felt that. But Satan was threatened by the terrible beauty whom God made us to be in Paradise. And then an envy that he could not resist laid hold of him.


How could we not have been made terrifyingly powerful and beautiful and gentle and wise and filled with mirth and playful in highest degree? We were (and are) God’s work of Art, made not by word only but by His own hands working in the dust of the Earth, the very image and likeness of our Maker.¹⁹

Doesn’t it make much more sense that what Jesus showed us in the Transfiguration is what a fully human, fiercely and finally free, person is, the Form of human being that He came to restore, who was Himself that restored humanity?

For us to continue to say that Jesus “frees me from my sins” and then leave it at that - Christ was doing so much more than that! - is to indulge a vision of human beings that is insufficient, suffocatingly minimalist, a narrowing of what restoration in Christ offers us. Consider again:


The Transfiguration reveals not a divine being, but a human being [not an angel; not a god] fully alive, fully restored in Christ – whom God made and with whom it pleased Him to walk in the Garden in times past.

Prayer for the Second Sunday of Lent

O God, who have commanded us
to listen to your beloved Son,
be pleased, we pray,
to nourish us inwardly by Your word,
that, with spiritual sight made pure,
we may rejoice to behold your glory.²²

¹ To study the painting: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The-Transfiguration-1480-xx-Giovanni-Bellini.JPG.

² Grove Art Online (Oxford), Peter Humfrey on Giovanni Bellini – Italian painter and draughtsman, son of Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of Giovanni Bellini’s family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting (see fig.), by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practiced in 15th-century Venice. … The qualities of calm dignity and spiritual depth found in the best of Bellini’s small-scale devotional images also appear in the succession of church altarpieces that he produced throughout his career. … All are masterpieces, and they set the standards of quality and of innovative design against which all other Venetian altar paintings, and eventually altarpieces throughout Italy, came to be measured.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 17:2.

⁴ See the Apostolic Letter of Pope John Paul II on 16 October 2002. See https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/2002/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20021016_rosarium-virginis-mariae.html - “The Rosary of the Virgin Mary, which gradually took form in the second millennium under the guidance of the Spirit of God, is a prayer loved by countless Saints and encouraged by the Magisterium. Simple yet profound, it remains at the dawn of this third millennium a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness.”

⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to dazzle” – 3. – 1536 – transitive. To overpower, confuse, or dim (the vision), esp. with excess of brightness. (Also figurative)

⁶ Britannica – Alfred, Lord Tennyson (born August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England—died October 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey) was an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Among his famous works are “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” In Memoriam, and Idylls of the King.

⁷ I have placed this poem here in specific acknowledgement of a friend of mine who is in the grip of Pancreatic cancer, or more to the point, who is in the hands of God, those same hands that formed the first of us from the dust of the Earth and then breathed in life.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Eph 3:19–20.

⁹ “boiling with life” – This phrase I remember from reading Plotinus (3rd century). See his Ennead VI.12 where it reads in part: “Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it. The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give; you will always be able to move with it—better, to be in its entirety—and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before you.” [Plotinus. Plotinus: On the One and Good: Being the Treatises of the Sixth Ennead. Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page, vol. V, The Medici Society; Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1930, p. 137.]

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Php 2:6–7.

¹¹ John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis 1–17. Edited by Thomas P. Halton, Translated by Robert C. Hill, vol. 74, The Catholic University of America Press, 1986, p. 23.

¹² Ephrem of Nisibis (feast in the Syrian church 28 January or 1 February; in the Byzantine rite 28 January; in the Coptic rite 9 July; in the Latin church 9 July or 1 February, at present 18 June) is unquestionably the most important of the Syrian Fathers and the greatest poet of the patristic era. His original work is, with that of Aphraates, an irreplaceable link in the chain of the Eastern tradition. Witness to a Jewish Christianity that developed on the fringe of the Roman Empire, he placed the biblical-semitic tradition and its symbols in opposition to the influence of Greek philosophy. His poetic genius, often badly imitated by his Syrian successors, still animates the Eastern liturgies today, and is inherited by the Byzantine branch through the oblique line of Romanus Melodus’s kontakion. [Rilliet, Frédéric. “Ephrem the Syrian.” Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, edited by Angelo Di Berardino and James Hoover, translated by Joseph T. Papa et al., vol. 1, IVP Academic; InterVarsity Press, 2014, p. 810.]

¹³ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Ps 8:5–6.

¹⁴ Recall that “paradise” is not “Heaven”. The former is the original created place; it is not the uncreated Heaven. Or to use other language that might please the biblical scholar N.T. Wright to hear is that “paradise” is what in the power of the Holy Spirit we are meant to rebuild here, on Earth, in our beginning place.

¹⁵ This famous text, regularly mistranslated, from the writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 – c. 202 CE): “the glory of God is a living human being.” But “living” means something far richer and more textured than the opposite of being dead! Think of the line: “Do not weep now that you are to die. Rather, weep that you never really lived.” Or Jane Hirschfield (b. 1953): “I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so, I couldn’t just decide that I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.”

¹⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary at “terrible” – 1. - c1400 – Causing or fit to cause terror; inspiring great fear or dread. Also: awe-inspiring, awesome.

¹⁷ Recall Tolkien’s description of the Noldor: “The Noldor were accounted the greatest of the Elves and of all the peoples in Middle-earth in lore and crafts. In Valinor, their knowledge and skill became great, and they had always a strong desire for more knowledge and skill in art, surpassing even their teachers in many things. The Noldor had also a love for words, and were changeful in speech, endeavouring to find suitable names for all things. They were beloved of Aulë the Smith and were the first to discover and carve gems. Their chief dwelling-place was the city of Tirion upon Túna. Among the wisest of the Noldor was Rúmil, creator of the first writing system and author of many books of lore. Fëanor, son of Finwë and Míriel, was the greatest of their craftsmen, ‘mightiest in skill of word and of hand’ and creator of the Silmarils. Melkor harboured a hatred for the Elves, despising their joy and blaming them for his downfall, and he sought to deceive them by feigning friendship.” [Excerpt from the Tolkien Gateway website.]

¹⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Wis 2:24.

¹⁹ Recall that God created all things, but God made, by hand, human beings.

²⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Ge 1:26.

²¹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Eph 3:19–20.

²² Deus, qui nobis diléctum Fílium tuum audíre præcepísti,
       verbo tuo intérius nos páscere dignéris,
       ut, spiritáli purificáto intúitu,
       glóriæ tuæ lætémur aspéctu.
       Per Dóminum.
 

The Temptation of Christ (1600)¹ by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625)

Seeing the Painting


Some painters pack depictions of all three temptations into a single frame. Brueghel the Elder here focuses on only the third temptation. Why do you suppose? Did he guess that Satan judged that this temptation would be the one that would finally trip up Jesus? Perhaps Satan, getting distressed at his failure so far, brought into play what he considered the one thing that Jesus could not resist? What is it, do you think, that Satan, assessing Jesus with a conviction born of malice, considered Jesus’ greatest weakness, where He was most vulnerable to temptation? What exactly was this third temptation?


Pay particular attention to the comprehensive haziness Brueghel the Elder paints into the scene, giving the painting a dream-like look. Or has he not brilliantly figured out how to capture in paint a wile of Satan, who tempts us by making what should be perfectly clear to us appear unclear, vague, making us unable to perceive clearly what we are choosing? It is as if the artist is painting the very nature of all temptations of Satan - obfuscation?

Quotes

Romano Guardini (1885-1968) - Man has duped himself by his very cleverness; mistaking means for ends, he has degenerated from a master of the machine to a slave-mechanic. Such deterioration is an expression of the demonic, as is much else. Naturally, it is not easy to see clearly, to differentiate with nicety when our own eyes are blinded. Blurred vision, confused action, coldness of heart and falsely directed will—all are part of the same labyrinth. He who is caught in it sees only objects, facts, consequences, logic. He does not see the enemy. Jesus brought Satan to a standstill. He alone was able to stare him down. To the extent that we succeed in looking with Christ’s eyes, we too shall see him; to the extent that Christ’s heart and spirit become alive in us, we shall dominate him. The clever will of course smile at this. [Guardini, Romano. The Lord (p. 139). Kindle Edition. My emphases.]

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)³  – “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

Thoughts


We can be surprised when a person or persons perceive something, the same something that others perceive, yet arrive at such a different conclusion as to its nature and intent. Consider in the long course of human events, how regularly people have fallen for the seduction of human monsters, have freely turned over their freedom to them.


No one (if Aristotle was right about temptation) ever chooses a monster as monster; no one ever deliberately chooses to have him or her reign, so that savagery thrives or, as St. John Paul II articulated, so that a culture of death may establish itself as what “normal” now will be.

We must learn, in this Lenten season of repentance and with a relentless and honest self-assessment, that people (that means each of us) choose what they believe to be good (or at least better than what they have). How can we fault them for this? We should not. They do not see the Enemy (i.e., the enemy of our human nature) … as we, more than we like to admit, do not see him either, the Enemy whose superpower is to lie.

But we can fault them, and ourselves, for falling for temptations that make hazy what should be perfectly clear to us, and for the corruption of relationships that ensues, the destruction of trust. We rightly do not deny a person’s right to choose, but we do have the right to hold him or her accountable for what comes of his or her choice. The German nation must still look with horror at what they chose, or allowed, during that part of their 20th century history. “How did we not see what was happening? What were we thinking?! How did we come to praise what, in hindsight, was corruption, savagery, banality and a surpassing lethality?” How indeed.

What was the specific nature of the third temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4:8-10)? These are deep matters indeed, “for who can know the mind of God?”

But what if it were something like this?

When we are faced with the “success” of malign powers in our world – ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage’⁴ - we and groups of us may be tempted to meet those powers on their own terms; that is, to be more skillfully nasty than they, to be meaner, more devious, to be louder and more committed to divisiveness than they. In exactly the way that those powers have gained their “success”, we choose to act, adopting their malevolent habits, so that we too can become “successful” at bringing them down. Such a desperate foolishness.


Do you see the haziness in this way of thinking through to the decisions we make? It is the mark of the Tempter, the “enemy of our human nature”, actively tempting us.

Let us consider, as a sort of examination of our own consciousness, how clearly Jesus perceived that third temptation, refusing its seduction, and offering instead a Way so profoundly different, the only Way that can defeat what has been taking possession of our nation and overthrowing a common good.

Prayer for the First Sunday of Lent

Grant, almighty God,
through the yearly observance of holy Lent,
that we may grow in understanding
of the riches hidden in Christ
and by worthy conduct pursue their effects.⁷

¹ To study this painting, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Brueghel_d._Ä._-_Weite_Gebirgslandschaft_mit_der_Versuchung_Christi.jpg.

² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 4:8–10.

³ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography a “Dame Iris Murdoch” – “Iris Murdoch deserves chiefly to be remembered for her astonishing productivity and achievement. She played a major role in English life and letters for nearly half a century and became an icon to a generation; she won many honours and was appointed DBE in 1987.”

⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 4:9.

⁵ Foolishness is a failure of Judgment; stupidity is a failure of Intellect; being dumb is a failure to pay attention to what is right in front of us.

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 5:2–12.

⁷ The original Latin of this Collect Prayer from the First Sunday of Lent (Latin: “Quadragesima”):

Concéde nobis, omnípotens Deus,
ut, per ánnua quadragesimális exercítia sacraménti,
et ad intellegéndum Christi proficiámus arcánum,
et efféctus eius digna conversatióne sectémur.
Per Dóminum.⁷

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

Quotes before Ash Wednesday on 18 February 2026

St. John Chrysostom (347-407 CE), Homilies on Genesis - When the devil, as you remember, evil spirit and enemy of our nature as he is, saw the first human being living in the garden, how his life was carefree and how he lived on earth in bodily form yet like an angel, (23d) he wanted to trip him up and dislodge him with the hope of greater promises, and so he cheated him of the possession of what he had. This is the extent of the evil of not keeping within proper limits but aspiring to greater heights. A wise man has made this clear in the words, “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world.”⁷ Do you see, dearly beloved, how from the beginning it was from intemperance¹ that death had its entry? … Do you now recognize the harm caused by intemperance?²

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Book of Images – “The Man Watching” (in part): The image from Genesis 32:24-29, when Jacob wrestled throughout the night with an Angel.

A Story

I became 10-years old in June of 1964. As a result, I had the good fortune to grow up within the greatest generation of folk and rock singer-songwriters ever. What permanently impressed itself on me was the way that we politically powerless young people sang our protest of a growingly rogue government (in some of its departments, things about which General Eisenhower in his Inaugural Address in 1953 had warned us, and which those departments did not heed).

President Eisenhower, our 34th President from 1953-1961, began his speech this way:

We sang our protest, singing a whole catalog of memorable songs. Think Woody Gurthrie, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary (their remarkable ability to communicate famous songs), the Chad Mitchell Trio, Sam Cook, Joan Baez, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, and so many others. And, to give proper credit, all these singer-songwriters were indebted to the very greatest American songbook, which is constituted of Black spirituals, proceeding from a people whom it pleased us to enslave but who with consummate grandeur, and from places and circumstances of such intense sorrow at our hands, sang their protests.

The following Latin antiphon, and its different musical settings, I offer here, to America right now - its ultimate protest song.⁴

 Musical Settings of the Following Text

Taizé, Ubi Caritas (released 1996); John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers, Brother Sun, Sister Moon (released 1988); Voces8, Lux (released 2015), arranged by Ola Gjeilo; The Monks of Glenstal Abbey (Moroe, County Limerick, Ireland), Gregorian Chants (released 1997); Bob Hurd (director and arranger), Journeysongs Third Edition, Volume 26 (released 2012); Anna Lapwood (director and arranger) and the Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, Celestial Dawn (released 2022); Dan Forrest (director and arranger) and the Beckenhorst Singers, The Peace of Wild Things: Choral Music of Dan Forrest (released 2024).

A Text

“Ubi cáritas est vera, Deus ibi est”⁵ – is a Latin antiphon that was probably composed in the late 8th century, perhaps by the scholar and considerable poet, St. Paulinus (c. 730-802 CE), Bishop of Aquileia (a town near the northern end of the Adriatic Sea, between Italy and the Balkans).

A Close Reading of the Text

“Where true charity is, God is there” – In English, verbs have moods, giving a speaker or writer the ability to express not only an action but also his or her intentions or attitudes inside these actions – “The characteristic of a verb’s form that shows the speaker’s attitude and expresses whether the action is a fact [Indicative mood], a command [Imperative mood], a possibility [Subjunctive mood], or a wish [Conditional mood].”⁷

The repeated refrain in our Latin antiphon does not say that God better be present [Imperative], or that God “ought” or “might” or “could” be present [Subjunctive], or that God will, we hope, be present … if certain conditions are met [Conditional].

No.

The refreshing and beautifully clear point: Where true charity is, God is. When God speaks, God uses the Indicative mood⁸, and I think that God always and only uses that mood – the mood that expresses what is real (the truth of things) – “where true charity is” - and our commitment to it rather than to convenient lies: “Where true charity is, God is present, there.” I am captivated by the thought of what a person would sound like [notice Subjunctive mood], or be like, if he or she were to speak or write only about what was real, communicating only in the Indicative mood. We are reminded of that line in Matthew 5:

If, but more likely when, we ask “Where are you God?”, expressing this in a plaintive or complaining or worried way, God’s answer is: “Get to work [Imperative mood]¹⁰ loving someone (not manipulating him or her or meddling in his or her life)! Do the hard work of friendship.” Because where love is, God is. It is as simple and as profound as that.
 
We recall that beautiful statement of Fr. Joseph Whelan, SJ, but made famous the world over by Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ’s use of it (the anniversary of whose death was yesterday, on February 5th, in 1991):


The “practical” point indicated in that first line is that there is no other way to know God, to find God close, to understand what He is up to, except to be like God, to love others with the love that God has poured into us.


In other words, “Where true charity is / God is there.”

Rumi (1207-1273) – “Lift the discernment-sword that rules a thousand compassions.”¹³

“let us strive to keep our minds free of division; / may there be an end to malice, strife and quarrels” – To be discerning is a spiritual gift of great significance.¹⁴ In the most fundamental sense, we mean by a discerning people what Eisenhower prayed (above) that we American citizens would be: “Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby.” But at the heart of this gift of the Holy Spirit is an ability to distinguish most particularly what is of God (truth, beauty, unity) and what is of human beings alone.
 
St. Augustine composed his masterwork (413-427 CE), City of God, on the theme of discernment - a Christian’s power (through grace) to distinguish self-love and what comes of that (the city of human beings) from the love of God and what comes of that (the city of God).¹⁵

But what happens, repeatedly, is that this holy power to distinguish becomes, through temptation, a noxious habit (= a vice > vicious) of separating (“keep our minds free of division”, we pray), which will always end up in some form of “malice, strife, and sorrows.” We have no more eloquent example given us than that of Jesus in His ability to distinguish – God is God; humans are not God – yet fervently to fight for the connection between the two, to find and to establish forevermore the “right relationship” between the two.



Jesus’ great power of discernment was to distinguish for the sake of relating even very different things. And most severely for us, He commanded us to love our enemies (i.e., those whom it pleases us to imagine are certainly not like us!). We so easily distinguish us from them, but then, by the Holy Spirit given us, we refuse to separate ourselves from them. We look for a connection; something good, however small, through which to be at common cause. The Christian genius is being able to find that thing through which to make a connection with an enemy. Think of a young man in World War I, a German soldier on Christmas Eve, raising his voice in prayer to the silent night … and then all the combatants, inside the opposing trenches joining him in that fervent adoration: “Silent night / holy night / all is calm / all is bright.” Genius.

A Prayer

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 CE), Proslogion, 1 – I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that You have created Your image in me, so that I may remember You, think of You, love You. But this image is so effaced and worn away by vice, so darkened by the smoke of sin, that it cannot do what it was made to do unless You renew it and reform it. I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that ‘unless I believe, I shall not understand’ [Isa. 7: 9]. [emphasis added by me, St. Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics), “Proslogion” translated by M.J. Charlesworth (p. 87). Kindle Edition.]¹⁸

*7 Wis 2:24.

¹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “intemperance” – 2.a. – 1547 – Lack of moderation or restraint; excess in any kind of action; immoderation; spec. excessive indulgence of any passion or appetite.

² John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis 1–17. Edited by Thomas P. Halton, Translated by Robert C. Hill, vol. 74, The Catholic University of America Press, 1986, p. 24. My emphases added.

³ Wikipedia notes: Astronaut Neil Armstrong took a tape recording including the New World Symphony along with him during the Apollo 11 mission, the first Moon landing, in 1969.

⁴ So much greater and more to the point than our banal, and at points intensely irritating, national anthem. If we must choose, then give us “America, the Beautiful” please.

⁵ The most current Roman Catholic version of this Latin antiphon, after having researched the earliest manuscript versions of this text, prefers Ubi caritas est vera / Deus ibi est – “Where charity is true / God is there [in that place]”, while the Classical Music tradition has been widely committed to a text that reads Ubi caritas et amor / Deus ibi est – “Where charity and love are / Deus is there [in that place].”

⁶ For this current Latin text and English translation: https://gregorian-chant-hymns.com/hymns-2/ubi-caritas.html.

⁷ See Bryan Garner’s magisterial Garner’s Modern English Usage: The Authority on Grammar, Usage, and Style, 5th edition (Oxford: 2022).

⁸ The Oxford English Dictionary at “indicative” – 1.a. – 1530 – Grammar. That points out, states, or declares: applied to that mood of a verb of which the essential function is to state a relation of objective fact between the subject and predicate (as opposed to a relation merely conceived, thought of, or wished, by the speaker).

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Mt 5:37.

¹⁰ God would not use the Imperative, giving us a command as I have written it. Instead, what God did and does is to BE what He means by loving us, each, without condition. His eloquent demonstration is the “command” that God gives – “Love one another as [i.e., in the way that] I am loving you.”

¹¹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “practical” – I. Having to do with action. I.1.a. - ?a1425 – Of, relating to practice or action, as opposed to speculation or theory. Frequently designating that area of a particular subject or discipline in which ideas or theories are tested or applied in practice.

¹² The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Ro 5:3–5.

¹³ Barks, Coleman. Rumi: The Big Red Book: The Great Masterpiece Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship (p. 56). Kindle Edition.

¹⁴ David Lonsdale, SJ, “Discernment, The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (2005): “Human beings, faced with moral choices, find themselves subject, individually and corporately, to contradictory inner and external influences, some of which incline them to good, others to evil. Moreover, it is often difficult to distinguish, in practice, between good and evil pressures or ‘stirrings’ in a person, a group or a community, an institution, a nation state or globally.”

¹⁵ Civitate Dei, De (The City of God). Written at intermittent intervals between 413 and 427, the City of God is Augustine’s longest and most comprehensive work. It is also one of the foundational books of Patristic literature [i.e., from the 1st century to the 8th century]. Its unique achievement is to have clarified Christianity’s ambiguous relationship to the temporal order and to have established, in opposition to some of the most influential Christian writers of the Constantinian era, its radical transcendence vis-à-vis the Roman Empire and, indeed, all possible regimes or political dispensations. Implied in Augustine’s position on this issue is a rejection of the classical notion of the city or its equivalents as self-sufficient totalities capable of fulfilling all of one’s basic needs and aspirations. Without renouncing their citizenship in the temporal society to which they belong, Christians form part of a universal, albeit invisible, society in which alone salvation can be attained. [Fortin, Ernest L. “Civitate Dei, De.” Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999, p. 196.]

¹⁶ Fortin, Ernest L. “Civitate Dei, De.” Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999, p. 197.

¹⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 17:20–22.

¹⁸ Latin: Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo: quia "nisi credidero, non intelligam" [Is 7,9].

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

The Baptism of Christ (late 1440s) by Piero della Francesca (1415-1492)¹, at the center of an altarpiece in Sansepolcro Cathedral², the painting now held in the National Gallery, London

I have begun to write this on the feast of the Baptism of Jesus, which this year, on the Catholic liturgical calendar, landed on Sunday, January 11th.

Notice the powerful sense of peace that emanates from this painting. We grow in a conviction that the Holy Spirit has not given this divine gift – “a peace that the world cannot give” – only to those in this painted scene but also to us who are looking in. Such divine peace cannot be contained by a painting. Christ is looking at us, pleased to see us startled to be receiving the same gift that He was receiving at the River Jordan.

Notice also the orderliness of this painting, which is perhaps a compositional reason why we find such peace when beholding it. We recall St. Augustine’s remark that “Peace is the tranquility of order.”³ Such order is the painter’s way of understanding and expressing how our disordered affections are what John the Baptist came to challenge, and if he could, to re-order, “making straight” our crookedness of character. We recall here C.S. Lewis’ important word in his Space or Cosmic Trilogy books (published 1938-1945), in which he recognizes how sin leaves a person “bent” – notice over there to the right that bent man, getting himself ready for Baptism. Jesus entered a world of orderliness that John and his ministry had prepared, “a people set apart”, whom John had made capable of receiving their Savior.

We notice how both Jesus and John stand beautifully balanced, with John poised as if he were the principal dancer in the greatest Ballet.

A Quote - Leiva, Erasmo. Fire Of Mercy, Vol. 1 (Kindle Locations 1774-1778), Ignatius Press (April 1996) – “Repentance is grounded, not in a desire to abase myself, but in a clear understanding and a profound conviction of my great worth in the eyes of God.

A Story

The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome is the Cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome (who is also Pope of the universal Church), and it is dedicated to the memory of St. John the Baptist – “least of the new and greatest of the old”.

I love it that the first church, as an acknowledged public building in early 4th century Rome,⁴ was dedicated to the last prophet of the Old Testament, associated with the one who recognized when the Christ had come into their midst, and then who pointed at Him, helping others see Him, who had not noticed that He was right there, in their midst – “There, He is the Lamb of God, He whom we have sought through endless ages. Pay attention to Him!”


The Church’s highest capacity is not to be the location where God dwells but to be a community of people with a highly developed capacity to recognize quicker than anyone else when God has come into our midst and who help others to see God and to trust Him.

A Text

Malcolm Guite (born 1957)⁵ – “A Sonnet: St. John the Baptist: St. John’s Eve”⁶ -
 

A Close Reading of the Text

Midsummer night, and bonfires on the hill – Britannica notes that “Midsummer is celebrated in many countries but is synonymous with Scandinavia, where it is observed as a national holiday in Sweden and Finland. … In Scandinavia and elsewhere, many Midsummer celebrations are held over several days and often occur in tandem with St. John’s Eve (June 23rd) festivities, which usher in the feast day of St. John the Baptist (June 24th).” The rituals associated with this annual celebration magnified the natural good that people felt at the time of the year, when the weather was most conducive to living outside. People wanted to live out in the open and not just physically outside. Think here of Genesis 3:


It will always be the active effect in us of “the enemy of our human nature” (Satan) to convince us that we need to hide, to be afraid to live, if you will, “out in the open” - in honesty, openness, with a candor unsettling or even frightening to people who prefer to hide.⁹ Those “bonfires on the hill” were lit, a ritual of Midsummer, as lights kindled to drive away evil spirits, to free us from fear, from the need to hide. John the Baptist was both fire and light, but of less incandescent splendor than the One for whom John gave his life:


Until his sun illuminates my night – At first, this is an apparently ponderous expression, over-wrought. We know that the Sun never illuminates the night. But then we catch on. The poet elaborates through a different metaphor of how the One grows greater (the Sun) and he, John, grows less. The poet articulates how John is the Moon (and its phases), which has no light of its own, which shines with a borrowed light – the Sun – but which “announces” in the night that the Light exists and will indeed come again – “In a dark time / the eye begins to see” as the poet Theodore Roethke put it.

Unlatches the last doorway into faith – I do not know what this means. So, let’s see what we can figure out. “Unlock” suggests a reality into which we seek to enter but which door someone (Who?) has locked (Why?) And we know that we lack the key. We think of that traditional language that Christ and through His life and sacrifice “opened for us the gates of Heaven”. But “Heaven” seems something different than “the last doorway into faith”. And it feels awkward to imagine faith as a location, as if a room into which to go and to remain. But perhaps the most important part of this poetic line is a sound. We have heard that sound before. Recall a time when you felt trapped, blocked, or stuck … and you did not know what to do or how to get yourself out. It feels like a location. The sound of that locked door (either a physical or a psychological or a spiritual or theological door) being “unlatched” is a sound we love. “Someone has found me! He or she has come! He or she will know how to guide me out of here.” Can you hear that sound?

There have been a few truly great Teachers in my life whose words were filled with keys to locked doors that I never knew that I had.

A Prayer

Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, SJ¹¹ -
 

¹ Grove Art Online (Oxford) at Piero [Pietro de Benedetto di Pietro] della Francesca (c. 1415-1492), Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. … In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language.

² See: https://religiana.com/sansepolcro-cathedral.

³ “In its most general meaning peace (pax) is the absence of dissension and strife. As such it is realized most perfectly in a world of absolute unity, a world in which there is “One” and not “Many.” In the really existing world of multiplicity peace is found in the tranquility of order (tranquilitas ordinis), the arrangement of like and unlike things whereby each of them has its proper place (civ. Dei 19.13.1). Peace among human beings results from a “oneness of heart” (concordia) rooted in the love of friendship. Peace for a human being is perfect only when the person’s love is well ordered and possesses everything that it desires (en. Ps. 84.10; s. 357.2; mor. 1.3.4). [Burt, Donald X. “Peace.” Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999, p. 629.]

⁴ For nearly three hundred years the Church had been a church-in-hiding, one that could not be public because of the Roman state’s commitment to exterminate the Church. When the Church was officially “allowed” to exist publicly - Constantine I or Constantine the Great (kŏnʹstəntēn, –tīn), 288? – 337 CE, Roman emperor, b. Naissus (present-day Niš, Yugoslavia; the Edict of Milan of 313 CE - and then some forty years later, when Christianity became the preferred Religion of the Roman elite, there were many who felt that something essential, something centrally important about the Church was being eroded, even corrupted. Sociologists of Christianity have associated the rise of the monastic religious Orders, and the hermit traditions in the deserts, as being a deliberate reaction to the popularity and public esteem of Christianity – expressing in rigorous life the desire to maintain in the Church that clarity and conviction that those three hundred years of persecution had given the Church.

⁵ Wikipedia: “Ayodeji Malcolm Guite (b. 1957) is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest and academic. Born in Nigeria to British expatriate parents, Guite earned degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University.”

⁶ See: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/a-pair-of-sonnets-for-st-john-the-baptist-2/. This sonnet can be found in Guite’s collection, Sounding the Seasons: Poetry for the Christian Year (published November 2012).

⁷ Mark Carwright in World History Encyclopedia at “Orpheus” - Orpheus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology, most famous for his virtuoso ability in playing the lyre or kithara. His music could charm the wild animals of the forest, and even streams would pause and trees bend a little closer to hear his sublime singing. He was also a renowned poet, travelled with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and even descended into the Underworld of Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Ge 3:8–10.

⁹ Note: that first hiding of human beings is clearly associated with their moral failure, in that pre-historical Time before Morality (as a code) existed, when it was solely about one’s closest relationships and the trust in them. To use the biblical language, they hid because they had sinned. But very often people hide not because they have sinned, but because they have been hunted by malign human actors (political, social, ecclesial, familial), who fully intend to harm them. How often have those malign human actors then cloaked their maliciousness by blaming those whom they victimize or desire to victimize.

* 3:19; 8:12b; 12:46; Ws 7:26

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible. Doubleday, 1990, p. Jn 1:8–9.

¹¹ Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955) French theologian and scientist. Born near Clermont in central France, he entered the Society of Jesus novitiate at Aix-en-Provence in 1899 and was ordained priest in 1911. During his long training he studied theology but was also strongly attracted to the natural sciences, especially geology and paleontology. After service in the First World War, he was able to devote himself to his scientific studies. For many years he worked in China and gained a notable reputation as a paleontologist. His last years were spent in the USA. At the time of his death he had published only scientific papers, for he had not been able to obtain permission for the publication of his religious and theological works. These appeared from 1955 onward and at once made a powerful impression as a new synthesis of science and religion. [Endean, SJ, Philip. “Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre.” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by Andrew Louth, Fourth Edition, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 1893.]

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)¹, Mystic Nativity (1500)², housed in the National Gallery, London. Charles Dempsey in Grove Art Online: “The painting bears a Greek inscription identifying its subject as the Second Coming of Christ as foretold in the Revelation of St. John and announcing Christ’s coming in the year 1500 CE during the tribulations then afflicting the Italian peninsula. … The colors are those traditionally assigned to Charity (red), Faith (white), and Hope (green), and it had been Joachim³ who identified the three realms, or stages, of the world with an Old Testament age of Hope, a New Testament age of Faith, and a post-Apocalyptic age of Charity, or perfect Love, the future age initiated by the Second Coming of Christ. He named this as the age of the eternal Evangel (the book held by the central angel painted by Botticelli on the roof of the shed), when Hope and Faith would come together in perfect Charity, and he imagined that with the Second Coming of Christ and the expulsion of the devil from the world heaven would descend to earth and join with it, and men and angels would live together for a thousand years in a state of Christian love, until the end of the world in the day of the Last Judgment.”

So much to draw the eye in Botticelli’s painting, from the tiny in stature devils, looking like pestilential bedbugs out to wreck a good night’s sleep (see them, those pallid winged creatures along the bottom of the painting?) to that circle of angels, dancing angels, in the sky above the Stable – a perfect expression of “Joy of Heav’n to Earth come down”. But what most catches my eye is the upstretched arm of the child Jesus. We so often articulate the religious quest as learning how, consistently, to stretch out our arms toward God, which too often causes us to overlook that the Incarnation has nothing to do with our reaching toward God, but it has everything to do with a gesture of Love that “comes down”, that is all God’s initiative, God reaching towards us.

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

Some Musical Versions of the Following Text

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, The World of Favourite Hymns (released 1986); The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, Let Us All Press On: Hymns of Praise and Inspiration (released 2019); Conspirare, directed by Craig Hella Johnson, Close to You – Carillon Christmas 2019 (released 2021); Choir of Trinity College Melbourne, directed by Michael Leighton Jones, Abide With Me: A Treasury of Classic Hymns (released 2006).

Text

Charles Wesley (1707-1788)⁴, “Love divine, all loves excelling” (1747)

A Close Reading of the Text

Love – It is a bold start to have begun with this single English noun that names the very heart of the Triune God – “Pure, unbounded love thou art”. “Love” is the greatest of the Names of God and an important Trinitarian elucidation of that so famous, but very solitary Name – “I am” – revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:13-15) –


What the name “Love” adds to the “I am” is the relational identity of God as a community of three divine Persons. Love is not only the greatest of the Names, but it also expresses the very core God’s meaning, as Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c. 1416) eventually understood, and who so eloquently expressed it:


Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of Heav'n to Earth come down – In the first stanza, Wesley contemplates the stunning contrast, and the completely unexpected reality of the Incarnation!⁷, when “high” realities (exalted, divine) “fit” themselves into what is “low” (human, humble, of little consequence on its own). How can something so vast and real “fit” – “enter every trembling heart”? Why would God freely, deliberately choose to become “small”?
 
Notice how the mystery of the Incarnation is being expressed in the rhymes. We observe: “all loves excelling” (high) rhymes with “humble dwelling” (low); “come down” (low) rhymes with “crown” (high); “compassion” (high) rhymes with “salvation” (low); “thou art” (high) rhymes with “trembling heart” (low).

Sometimes we forget that during the first thousand years of the Church’s existence, it was the Incarnation (God choosing to become human) that occupied the attention of its profoundest theological thinkers, not the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus (except these understood as a further deepening of the mystery of the Incarnation). It was in the second thousand years that the Cross would come to captivate the attention of our greatest thinkers.

I myself have long wondered what great good might have come to our theological understanding, and spiritual practices, if we had considered the Paschal Mystery (the passion, death, and resurrection, and ascension of Christ) as the completion of the Incarnation rather than as we awkwardly, and too often, consider the Cross as having been caused (as in forced God to act) by “our faults, our faults, our most grievous faults.”⁸

Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit Into ev'ry troubled breast – I have noticed that sometimes when a person is suffering a calamity in his or her life – the haunting of memories; the startling jolt when experiencing cruelty; feeling overwhelmed by the human taste for horrors and our cunning ability to spawn them, etc. – he or she can have a hard time breathing, catching his or her breath. I see him or her laboring under a terrible compression of the chest, a psychological binding around his or her heart. “I can’t breathe!” It is in such a person, in such a state, that these words – “Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit” – is exactly what one needs.

Take away our love of sinning – Such an unsettling frankness by the poet. It is a perceptiveness about human beings that caused Jesus one night to speak of the same thing, when a learned man come to talk to him:


 
It is a useful and a mature insight to be given us by God, and usually through the words of a teacher whom we trust, that we really do not “hate” our sins but enjoy them, or as Wesley says with a particular sharpness, we love them.

I have rarely in my life met a person, in any context, who said outright, and with genuine embarrassment, that he or she sinned (in some way) because he or she liked doing so! It is most consistently in addiction recovery programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, that persons come to realize the grace in, and the necessity of, practicing an honesty so starkly direct and on target … and doing it with others similarly committed to such honesty. What would you or I feel if Jesus, looking directly at us with those beautiful eyes, said, “You are aware, aren’t you, that in this habit of yours you prefer darkness to the light?”

Suddenly return, and never, Never more thy temples leave – These lines reference the Christian understanding of the indwelling of God – the Holy Spirit – within each of us, as if in a holy Temple. As a Catholic boy I was taught that the Sacrament of Confirmation made each of us a “Temple of the Holy Spirit”. (We had no idea what this meant of course, because, I believe, young people already have a much more intimate awareness of the presence of God than the awkward theological language of “Temple” is expressing.) One of the most beautiful expressions of this “incarnation” of the Holy Spirit within each of us comes at the end of the most famous sermon that C.S. Lewis ever preached, delivered from the pulpit in St. Mary the Virgin on the High Street in Oxford, on 8 June 1942, on a Monday, eighty-three and a half years ago. It bore the title, “The Weight of Glory”¹⁰, and it concludes in this way:

An Advent Prayer

St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), Doctor of the Church –

¹ Grove Art Online (Oxford) at “Botticelli, Sandro” by Charles Dempsey - Botticelli (It.: “a small wine cask”), a nickname taken from that of his elder brother, was the son of a tanner. He may briefly have trained as a goldsmith but soon entered the studio in Florence of Fra Filippo Lippi, who taught him painting. He is mentioned as an independent master in 1470 (though he doubtless arrived at this status earlier). … Botticelli’s extraordinary mastery of drawing and elastic contour became progressively simplified and economized, occasionally producing even a crudeness of effect; his colors, notably his greens, yellows, and reds, became brighter and purer in hue; and the action of his profoundly felt dramas was staged in an abstract and otherworldly environment that is the imaginative counterpart to the simple backdrops designed for a mystery play. There is no artistic ornament conceived for its own sake, and all is calculated to enhance a single narrative and emotional effect.”

² To study this painting more closely: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mystic_Nativity,_Sandro_Botticelli.jpg.

³ Joachim of Fiore (jōʹəkĭm), c.1132–1202, Italian Cistercian monk. He was abbot of Corazzo, Italy, but withdrew into solitude. He left scriptural commentaries prophesying a new age. In his “Age of the Spirit” the hierarchy of the church would be unnecessary, and infidels would unite with Christians. Joachim’s works had a vogue in the 13th and the 14th cent.; many, especially the extremist Spiritual Franciscans, acclaimed him as a prophet. Dante places him in Paradise. [Paul Lagassé, Columbia University, in The Columbia Encyclopedia (New York; Detroit: Columbia University Press; Sold and distributed by Gale Group, 2000).]

⁴ From Hymnary.org taken from John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907) - Charles Wesley, M.A. was the great hymn-writer of the Wesley family, perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration, the great hymn-writer of all ages. Charles Wesley was the youngest son and 18th child of Samuel and Susanna Wesley, and was born at Epworth Rectory, Dec. 18, 1707. In 1716 he went to Westminster School, being provided with a home and board by his elder brother Samuel, then usher at the school, until 1721, when he was elected King's Scholar, and as such received his board and education free. In 1726 Charles Wesley was elected to a Westminster studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1729, and became a college tutor. In the early part of the same year his religious impressions were much deepened, and he became one of the first band of "Oxford Methodists." … As a hymn-writer Charles Wesley was unique. He is said to have written no less than 6500 hymns, and though, of course, in so vast a number some are of unequal merit, it is perfectly marvellous how many there are which rise to the highest degree of excellence. His feelings on every occasion of importance, whether private or public, found their best expression in a hymn.

⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ex 3:13–14.

⁶ Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: Showings, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 342–343.

⁷ Fr. Karl Rahner, SJ (1904-1984), one of the top five or three greatest Christian theologians of the 20th century, wrote that at the center of reality are three great Mysteries (not problems to be solved, but mysteries through which to walk, never coming to the full depth of them). The three Mysteries are the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Grace.

⁸ These words are taken from the Penitential Rite through which Catholic worshippers pass from arriving at Church for the Eucharistic Service to being ready to be still and to listen to the Word of God proclaimed from the pulpit.

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 3:19–20.

¹⁰ Lewis’ sermon is developing the biblical text, 2 Corinthians 4: ¹⁷ The temporary, light burden of our hardships is earning us forever an utterly incomparable, eternal weight of glory, ¹⁸ since what we aim for is not visible but invisible. Visible things are transitory, but invisible things eternal. [The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 2 Co 4:17–18.]

¹¹ “unless Thy Grace interfere” – Such a beautiful and unexpected way of speaking of divine Grace – as “interference”. The Oxford English Dictionary at “to interfere” – “2.a. – 1609 – intransitive. Hence, of things generally: To strike against each other; to come into physical collision; to collide or clash, so as to hamper or hinder each other; to get in each other's way, cross each other's path.” When we have gotten “stuck” spiritually or psychologically or even socially, the arrival of an “interfering grace” seems a great kindness indeed.

¹² Newman, John Henry. The Essential Cardinal Newman Collection: Prayers, Meditations, and Other Spiritual Writings (p. 34). Kindle Edition.

Michelangelo (1475-1564)¹, Moses (1513-1515), part of the tomb of Pope Julius II, in the Church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome.²

Because the biblical text, Psalm 90, that lies behind the text of Isaac Watts (below) is one attributed not to David but to Moses, the only one of the 150 Psalms that is attributed to Moses, we have chosen the most famous image of Moses – this sculpture that Michelangelo “found” inside a block of Carrara marble.³

Notice the two stone tablets (the Ten Commandments) tucked in on his right side. Michelangelo is showing us Moses when he has just returned from his second experience of being with God on Mount Sinai. This second time, God’s divine closeness to Moses caused Moses’ face to be alight with the divine Light! (The supposed “horns” on top of Moses’ head are the sculptor’s effort to express in marble two “radiant beams” of light.)


Those tablets are the second set. Moses had smashed the first set upon coming down from the mountain the first time, only to find his refractory, frustrating, foolish people worshipping a golden calf (see Exodus 32). He would pray, and God would invite Moses up onto the mountain a second time (Exodus 34). It is only when he comes down the mountain from this second visit with God that his face was so bright with divine Light that it scared everyone. Notice that Moses has those (unbroken) tablets tucked away, concerned about sharing something so precious with a people too easily making a mess of things.

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

Psalm 90:1-4 (NJB) -



Derek Kidner on Psalm 90 - Only Isaiah 40 can compare with this psalm for its presentation of God’s grandeur and eternity over against the frailty of man. But while Isaiah is comforting, the Psalm is chastened and sobering, even though the clouds disperse in the final prayer. A closer companion to the poem in some respects is Genesis 1–3, on which the psalmist evidently meditates … In an age which was readier than our own to reflect on mortality and judgment, this Psalm was an appointed reading (with 1 Cor. 15) at the burial of the dead: a rehearsal of the facts of death and life which, if it was harsh at such a moment, wounded in order to heal. In the paraphrase by Isaac Watts, ‘O God, our help in ages past’, it has established itself as a prayer supremely matched to times of crisis.⁶



Martin Neary & Martin Baker and the Westminster Abbey Choir, Favorite Hymns from Westminster Abbey (released 2010); Sir Stephen Cleobury & Richard Farnes and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge, The World of Favorite Hymns (released 1986); John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers, Sing, Ye Heavens: Hymns of All Time (released 2000).

Moses – Remember that Watts formed this hymn from Psalm 90. This suggests that we might fruitfully consider this hymn as if we were hearing Moses sing it, the words of which he might have taught some of his closest companions, when he was on Mount Nebo and so near his death.⁸

Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come – We first notice how the title of this famous hymn begins with “O God…” when in fact the opening line of the hymn reads “Our God…”. If we use the interjection “O”, then we express the otherness of God, who is a source of awe to us, and because of whom we cry out.


But the first line reads “Our God”, where what stands out is not the otherness of God – God as God – but the relationship with God that we cherish, something that Jesus Christ “won” for us through His life and death and resurrection and ascension. We have been granted direct access to the Father, so that we can say “our Father”. And lest we overlook the relationship (what our “redemption” means), Watts deploys four times the possessive pronoun “our” in the first four lines!

The way Watts structures the two opening lines places him, and us with him, at a center point of Time (in medias res: “in the middle of proceedings; into the midst of affairs”). From this point, the Present, we consider the reality of God in the Past even as we consider the Future with eyes opened by hope. We are like the Roman god of the gate/door that has two faces: one face looking inward (to the Past); one face looking outward (to the Future).¹⁰       

In other words, Watts argues a connection between a Past of “help” and a Future of “hope” only when we have recognized how God was at work in our Past –


If we consider the Past, even our very personal Past, as “everything that happened”, then we can get ambushed by lacerating memories, which can bind us as if by an evil enchantment,¹² holding our attention on the sorrows in our Past rather than on the Blessing – the “holy Mystery” - that was alive in our Past too: a Light that shone in the darkness, which that darkness could not overcome or comprehend.
  
Sufficient is your arm alone, And our defense is sure – The adjective “sufficient” is an interesting choice, because it can mean different things. Let’s take a look. The word “alone” in line three rhymes with “throne” in line one. This suggests that the “defense” that we expect from God “our help in ages past” is to be exercised from Heaven where His arm is, from the “throne” where the Son sits at the right hand of the Father. And so we look upwards as we pray. But God is no longer “close” in the way Jesus was when He walked among us, the God-man, when He directly commanded evil spirits to depart, when He compelled Death itself to obey His ”sufficient” command: “Unbind him and let him go free,” He spoke before the tomb of Lazarus. This suggests that the meaning of “sufficient” used in this stanza two is this one:

In other words, the “sufficient” means for our defense in this complicated world comes not from the “other” world, from the “throne” of God, but from within each of us into whom the Holy Spirit has been poured already:


In other words, “our defense is sure” because the power to defend ourselves is already given within us, but we must learn how to understand the nature of that power, and how to trust it, to rely on it. This is what St. Paul is trying to help us see here:

O God, who see how your people
faithfully await the feast of our Lord’s Nativity,
enable us, we pray,
to attain the joys of so great a salvation
and to celebrate them always
with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.¹⁶

¹ Grove Art (Oxford) “Michelangelo (Buonarroti)” by Anthony Hughes and Caroline Elam – “Italian sculptor, painter, draughtsman and architect. The elaborate exequies held in Florence after Michelangelo’s death celebrated him as the greatest practitioner of the three visual arts of sculpture, painting and architecture and as a respected poet. He is a central figure in the history of art: one of the chief creators of the Roman High Renaissance, and the supreme representative of the Florentine valuation of disegno (see Disegno e colore). As a poet and a student of anatomy, he is often cited as an example of the ‘universal genius’ supposedly typical of the period.”

² See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo's_Moses_(Rome).jpg.

³ Britannica: “The most well-known metamorphic rocks used in sculpture are the marbles, which are recrystallized limestones. Italian Carrara marble, the best known, was used by Roman and Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo, and is still widely used. The best-known varieties used by Greek sculptors, with whom marble was more popular than any other stone, are Pentelic—from which the Parthenon and its sculpture are made—and Parian.”

⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ex 34:29–30.

⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ps 90: title–6.

⁶ Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 16 of Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 359.

⁷ From Hymnary.org at “Isaac Watts” – “Isaac Watts was the son of a schoolmaster, and was born in Southampton, July 17, 1674. He is said to have shown remarkable precocity in childhood, beginning the study of Latin, in his fourth year, and writing respectable verses at the age of seven. At the age of sixteen, he went to London to study in the Academy of the Rev. Thomas Rowe, an Independent minister. In 1698, he became assistant minister of the Independent Church, Berry St., London. In 1702, he became pastor. In 1712, he accepted an invitation to visit Sir Thomas Abney, at his residence of Abney Park, and at Sir Thomas' pressing request, made it his home for the remainder of his life. It was a residence most favourable for his health, and for the prosecution of his literary labours. He did not retire from ministerial duties, but preached as often as his delicate health would permit.”

⁸ The death of Moses is narrated in Deuteronomy 34: 7 Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, his eye undimmed, his vigour unimpaired. 8 The Israelites wept for Moses on the Plains of Moab for thirty days. [The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Dt 34:7–8.]

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 17:7–8.

¹⁰ An AI summary: “Janus is the ancient Roman god of beginnings, transitions, doorways, and endings, famously depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions, symbolizing past and future, entry and exit. The month of January is named for him, and he presided over war and peace, with the Temple of Janus's gates open in war and closed in peace.”

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Je 29:11–14.

¹² The Oxford English Dictionary at “to enchant” – 2.a. - c1374–1678 - figurative. To influence irresistibly or powerfully, as if by a charm; to hold spellbound; in bad sense, to delude, befool. Obsolete.

¹³ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to prognosticate” – 1.b. - c1487 – transitive. Of a person: to know or tell of beforehand; to have previous knowledge of, to presage; to foretell, predict, prophesy, forecast.”

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ro 5:1–5.

¹⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 2 Co 12:7–10.

¹⁶ “Solemn … glad” - I am reminded of a remark by C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, chapter 17: “Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world, everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven. [Lewis, C. S., A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis (p. 11). Kindle Edition.

James Tissot (1836-1902), The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew (1886-1894)¹, referencing Mark 1:16-18, housed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Notice how the painter puts us in the same position as those two brothers, out in the shallow water looking back toward Jesus on the shore. Is Jesus, therefore, calling us too? Or, we wonder, had those two brothers been “calling” for God to show Himself to them for a long time, crying out to Him underneath the words of even the best prayers that they knew how to pray?

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

The Biblical Text Behind the Text (below)

John 14:5-6 (NJB):



William Barclay (1975) – Again and again Jesus had told his disciples where he was going, but somehow, they had never understood. “Yet a little while I am with you,” he said, “and then I go to him that sent me” (John 7:33). He had told them that he was going to the Father who had sent him, and with whom he was one, but they still did not understand what was going on. Even less did they understand the way by which Jesus was going, for that way was the Cross. At this moment the disciples were bewildered men. There was one among them who could never say that he understood what he did not understand, and that was Thomas. He was far too honest and far too much in earnest to be satisfied with any vague pious expressions. Thomas had to be sure. So, he expressed his doubts and his failure to understand, and the wonderful thing is that it was the question of a doubting man which provoked one of the greatest things Jesus ever said. No one need be ashamed of his doubts; for it is amazingly and blessedly true that he who seeks will in the end find. Jesus said to Thomas: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” That is a great saying to us, but it would be still greater to a Jew who heard it for the first time. In it Jesus took three of the great basic conceptions of Jewish religion and made the tremendous claim that in him all three found their full realization.⁴

Some Musical Versions of the Following Text

See: Northern Sinfonia with Director, Richard Hickox - Hickox Conducts Vaughan Wiliams (released 2000), “Five Mystical Songs: The Call”; Michael Leighton Jones and the Choir of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne (released 2008), Mystical Songs: Choral Music of Vaughan Williams, “Five Mystical Songs 4 – The Call”.

Text

“The Call” by George Herbert (1593-1633)⁵
In his collection called A Priest to the Temple; or the Country Parson (1652)

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
And such a Life, as killeth death.

[5] Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.
 
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
[10] Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joys in love.⁶

A Close Reading of the Text

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life – Each of the three stanzas begins with the same word – come - a verb in the Imperative mood (how we express a command).⁷ What is hidden is the complement that this intransitive verb requires. We must supply “Come to me”. In other words, “my Way, my Truth, my Life” are three of this poet’s favorite personal names for his Lord – the poem will include nine names, nine divine names for God.
 
But there is something more important happening here. These first three titles are ones that Jesus gave to Himself at the Last Supper (see John 14:5-6, citation given above). But Jesus did not say “I am your Way; I am your Truth and Life”. So, how has it happened that our poet has made those names his own – “my Way, my Truth, and my Life”? This subtle point about grammar captures something of great spiritual significance. The poet is no longer treating Jesus Christ as one object to know among many other objects (the mark of a young spirituality, one that needs to mature). He now knows Jesus Christ as subject; that is, he now knows Him from the inside, if you will, by thinking and acting like Him – the meaning of “the imitation of Christ”. This is what St. Paul means:


This likening of us to God is perhaps the greatest work of the Holy Spirit in a human being.⁹

But one other remark about that opening command, “Come.” We expected, given the title of this text, “The Call”, that it would be about God’s calling of the poet, God’s summoning of him, giving the poet his vocation, “Come, follow me.” Instead, his poem is an invocation. He is, if you will, giving God His vocation (!), calling on God to show His best self towards and with him, the poet.


He is summoning God to be present to him, deploying his nine favorite names of God, as if to make his prayer irresistible to God.

Concerning the structure of the poem - How orderly he is in this holy Summoning! Did you notice? Consider the first stanza:


The first line of each stanza gives God three names – in this case, Way, Truth, Life. Then each of the following lines of the stanza explains, in turn, a cherished aspect (“such a”) of each name. We are often surprised at something in each name that we had not considered.

For example, I would not have expected “Truth” to be that which “ends all strife”. Why? Because in this American moment lying is considered clever and necessary, proof of an “effective” use of (ungoverned) power – “It’s just how the world works”. We force “truth” to be what we say it is. In such a world as this, speaking the truth (what is real, whether it is convenient or not) enflames strife; it does not end strife.


Do you see? To read this poem, each line, can summon each of us to think about each of these nine divine names. And when we do, the poem opens its depths to us.

This orderly structure extends to the rhyming pattern, following the same pattern in all three stanzas. The last word of the first line rhymes with the last word of the third line; the last word of the second line with the last word of the fourth line. This rhyming relates the two words, deepening the meaning of each: “life” rhymed with “strife”; “breath” with “death”. We are brought deeper into our understanding by considering the relation of the two words.

Take time to “play” inside these stanzas and the individual lines. Experience how the poem gives so much more than we initially guessed it would.

An Advent Prayer

From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz (1325-1390) translated by Daniel Ladinsky –

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

 Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

¹ See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Calling_of_Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Andrew_(Vocation_de_Saint_Pierre_et_Saint_André)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg

² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ro 8:26–27.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 14:5–6.https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Calling_of_Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Andrew_(Vocation_de_Saint_Pierre_et_Saint_André)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg

⁴ William Barclay, ed., The Gospel of John, vol. 2 of The Daily Study Bible Series (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press, 1975), 156–157.

⁵ Peter McCullough, “Herbert, George,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Andrew Louth (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) 875. - Herbert, George (1593–1633) Poet and divine. Born at Montgomery, a younger brother of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where his classical scholarship and musical ability (he played the lute and viol and sang) secured him a fellowship in 1614. He became public orator of the university in 1620, and his success seemed to mark him out for the career of a courtier. The death of James I, however, and the influence of his friend, Ferrar [Nicholas Faerrar (1592-1637), founder of Little Gidding], led him to study divinity, and in 1626 he was presented to a prebend in Huntingdonshire. In 1630 he was ordained priest and persuaded by Laud to accept the rectory of Fugglestone with Bemerton, near Salisbury, where in piety and humble devotion to duty he spent his last years. … Herbert was a man of deep religious conviction and remarkable poetic gifts, masterly in handling both metre and metaphor. The ‘conceits’ in his verse are, with very few exceptions, still acceptable thanks to their genuine aptness and wit. The good sense of his didactic poems, and esp. the poignancy of the more personal lyrics, continue to ring true and have proved irresistible to many outside as well as within the Christian faith.

⁶ George Herbert, The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall Jr. and Richard J. Payne, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 281.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at the verb “come” – I.5. - intransitive. In imperative. - I.5.a. - Old English – With complement. Used both as an invitation to approach or join and as an invitation or encouragement to proceed with an action or activity performed alongside, or for the benefit of, the speaker.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 1 Co 2:16.

⁹ In the eastern half of the Christian Church – Greek or Orthodox Christianity, this likening is spoken of as deification – a centrally important theological idea for them. See Stephen Thomas at “Deification” in the Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity: “Deification” and sometimes “divinization” are English translations of expressions used by the church fathers to describe the manner in which God saves his elect by mercifully initiating them into his communion and his presence. The most-used Greek term, theōsis, acts as a master-concept in Greek theology, by which the truth of doctrinal statements is assessed. The fathers used theosis to bring out the high condition to which human beings are exalted by grace, even to the sharing of God’s life. Theosis means that, “In Christ,” we can live at the same level of existence as the divine Trinity, to some extent even in this life, and, without possibility of falling away in the next.”

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 14:16–17.

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mt 10:34.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), from his set of four paintings, The Four Freedoms (1943) – Freedom from Want. This set of four paintings was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address. The President spoke of the freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.¹

Did you notice how, except for those serving the meal, everyone is finding their delight not in looking at the food, but in looking at each other? Even that man, who is peeking out at us from the bottom right-hand corner, is looking at us. Do you see the humor in his eyes?

NOTE: For the best copy of this Meditation, with all formatting in place, click here for the PDF:

Biblical Text

Lamentations 3:21-24 (NJB)


Robert Davidson on Lamentations 3:21-24 - The end of the previous section leaves unanswered the question: If the Lord is responsible for the suffering and the tragedy being experienced, to whom does the poet turn for help? The answer, as in so many of the Psalms, is to no one other than the Lord, the same God who is the source of his trouble. Let us follow this answer through four stages in verses 21–39. (1) The answer begins in verses 21–24 by recalling what alone can be the foundation of hope, the true character of God as Israel had known Him in the past. All the great words of assurance come tumbling out: God’s “steadfast love” (hesed), that constancy which means that he could never walk out on his people (see comments on Jer. 2:2 in vol.1, pp. 24–25); his “mercies”, his warm compassion (raham, a Hebrew word that basically means the womb); and his “faithfulness”, that dependable support which will never let anyone down. The words recall the description of God given, according to Exodus 34:6, to Moses when he received the stone tablets with the commandments: “The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…”.³

Some Musical Versions of the Following Text

See: Fernando Ortega, The Shadow of Your Wings: Hymns and Sacred Songs (released 2006); Steven Curtis Chapman, Deeper Roots: Where the Bluegrass Grows (released 2019); Anthem Lights, Hymn-Capella (released 2020); Keith & Kristyn Getty, Getty Kids [four girls!] Hymnal – Hymns from Home (released 2021); Carrie Underwood, My Savior (released 2021).

Text

“Great is They Faithfulness, O God My Father”⁴
By Thomas O. Chisholm (1866-1960)⁵

 1. Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with thee.
Thou changest not, thy compassions, they fail not;
As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be.

Refrain:
Great is thy faithfulness,
Great is thy faithfulness,
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed thy hand hast provided;
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me.

2. Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love. [Refrain]

3. Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine and ten thousand beside. [Refrain]

A Close Reading of the Text

Great is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father – That this hymn begins with the adjective “great” asks us to consider in what sense it is great. We can dismiss that it means “great physical size” and overlook any chance that it means that God is pregnant, as in “great with child”, though the idea that God is pregnant with faithfulness has poetic power. But we feel ourselves closer to what Chisholm means with “of long duration; lasting, or having lasted, a long time.” Is there not something implied in the very idea of faithfulness that it has gone on for a long time? Thus, we consider ourselves blessed when we have at least a few “old” friends – their enduring, tested presence in our lives.

When he writes “O God, my Father”, we notice how Chisholm is joining two utterly different realities: the created world and God. He articulates that this joining is through a relationship of mutual affection; there is tenderness in it.

One reality is referenced in the exclamation “O God”, which emphasizes God’s supreme otherness (the Hebrew sense of the word “holy”): no one and no thing is remotely equal to God.


This exclamation expresses awe but also the fear (a “holy” fear, not a “servile”⁷ fear) that one feels in the presence of the Holy One.

The other reality is elegantly referenced in “my Father”. In this, we see proven the success of the mission of Jesus Christ, Who has made us able to say, and in truth, that the utterly transcendent God, the Pantókrator⁹, is Someone to whom we have been given access – “my Father” and “our Father / who art in Heaven”. The tradition speaks of how Christ came “to open for us the gates of Heaven”.


Morning by morning new mercies I see / All I have needed thy hand hast provided – We think of the Wilderness years, when God’s chosen people wandered and at considerable risk out in a harsh landscape that none of them knew, and where often they suffered thirst and hunger.

But God, each morning, gave them manna (from the Hebrew meaning, “What’s this?!”), which was not what they wanted but what they needed. (Such an important spiritual understanding of broad application, so important for each of us to grasp.)


Join with all nature in manifold witness / To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love – We Americans (hardly us alone) are now daily in danger of being whelmed by “the human stain”, by the (human) world that, as William Wordsworth (1770-1815) noted, with grief,


 And which the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ (1884-1889) describes in this way:  


 But what does “whelmed” mean?

What our poet enjoins us to do, writing in a day long before screens and their manifold artificial realities colonized our attention, is to go outside, to stare far less at screens and more at the natural world – to go outside and learn to pay attention to the “timely help” God gives us in Nature - “And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives a dearest freshness deep down things”!¹⁴ For in Nature we have a “manifold¹⁵ witness” to God’s “great faithfulness, mercy, and love.”
 

Consider what an AI offered me today, when I queried it about how much time each day that we Americans are gaping at screens, at images of images,¹⁶ rather than getting ourselves out among the trees and plants and other wild things of this Earth, learning to pay attention there.

 
An Advent Prayer
 
The opening stanza from the hymn Conditor Alme Siderum (“Gracious Maker of the Stars Above”) found in the Evening Prayer of the Liturgy of Hours, the Breviary, for the Season of Advent, Year A:

¹ See: https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms.

² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), La 3:21–24.

³ Robert Davidson, Jeremiah and Lamentations, vol. 2 of The Daily Study Bible Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1983), 193.

⁴ Kenneth W. Osbeck, Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1996), 348. “While many enduring hymns are born out of a particular dramatic experience, this was simply the result of the author’s “morning by morning” realization of God’s personal faithfulness in his daily life. Shortly before his death in 1960, Thomas Chisholm wrote: ‘My income has never been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years which has followed me on until now. But I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, which have filled me with astonished gratefulness.’”

⁵ From Hymnary.org – “Thomas O. Chisholm was born in Franklin, Kentucky in 1866. His boyhood was spent on a farm and in teaching district schools [beginning at age 16]. He spent five years as editor of the local paper at Franklin. He was converted to Christianity at the age of 26 and soon after was business manager and office editor of the Pentecostal Herald of Louisville, Ky. In 1903 he entered the ministry of the M. E. Church South. His aim in writing was to incorporate as much Scripture as possible and to avoid flippant or sentimental themes.”

The M.E. Church South – “The Methodist Episcopal Church, South (M.E. Church South; pro-slavery) was a Protestant denomination formed in 1845 after a split in the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of slavery. It became the dominant Methodist body in the American South until merging into the Methodist Church in 1939.” (Microsoft CoPilot)

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ho 11:9.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “servile” – 1.b. - a1425 – Of, belonging to or proper to a slave or slaves; characteristic of or associated with slavery or servitude. Earliest applied (in servile dread; later also servile fear) to fear of or respect for authority (esp. God) which is motivated by knowledge of the possibility of punishment for wrongdoing rather than by love or reverence.

⁸ Mitchell G. Reddish, “Holy One,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 258.

⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “Pantrokrator” - A ruler of all things; (Christian Church) (a title given to) God or Christ as the Almighty. Hence: an artistic representation of Christ as ruler of the universe, esp. as an image in Byzantine and Orthodox iconography.

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 17:7–9.

¹¹ New American Bible, Revised Edition. (Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Ex 16:15 & 21.

¹² See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us.

¹³ See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.

¹⁴ From the same poem by Hopkins, SJ.

¹⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “manifold” – 1.a. - Old English – Varied or diverse in appearance, form, or character; having various forms, features, component parts, relations, applications, etc.; performing several functions at once.

¹⁶ A reference to that particularly famous “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic dialogue, Book VII, 514a to 520a.

John Foley, SJ – “Come Weal, Come Woe” (1996)¹ – 

Come rain, come shine, come weal, come woe
Come shepherd's sign in friend or foe
Still yet it shines, this Light of Life
That now we find in weal or woe

A Story

In Rome, on the solemnity feast of All Saints, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed St. John Henry Newman² a Doctor of the Church. (Pope Francis had canonized Newman a saint in October 2019.)

The Latin noun doctor refers to one who is a teacher, an instructor. In current English, we acknowledge a person who has earned his or her doctorate, meaning, literally, a person capable of teaching one specific subject, or perhaps only a tiny part of that one subject.

But in the case of our greatest Teachers, we esteem not only his or her ability to teach us but also his or her ability to heal us as they teach us – that other meaning of “doctor”, as in a medical doctor.

For us to read St. John Henry Newman is, I suggest, to experience an exorcism³ of our ill-thought convictions; a setting free of our suffocated affections; a dramatic expansion of our conscience. To read a great Teacher such as this, or any of the thirty-eight Doctors of the Church,⁴ is to gain an insight into the power of Jesus’ own voice, both in His prayer and then what comes from that into His mighty word – the greatest of Teachers:

John 11 (NJB): 

⁴⁰ Jesus replied, ‘Have I not told you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?’* ⁴¹ So they took the stone away. Then Jesus lifted up his eyes and said:


⁴³ When he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’* ⁴⁴ The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with strips of material, and a cloth over his face. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, let him go free.’*⁵

O to be such a Teacher as this and to such effect!

A British journalist and novelist remarked this about what happened in Rome on 1 November 2025:


A Text

Newman was a brilliant Latinist too. As one of his regular “devotions”, he translated ancient Latin hymns or medieval chants into elegant¹¹ English verse. We will explore one of these, a 5th century hymn, sung in monastic choirs throughout Christendom in the season of Advent. Our close reading will be of Newman’s translation – his choice of words – not of the Latin original.

“En Clara Vox Redarguit” translated from the Latin¹² by St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890)¹³

Hark, a joyful voice is thrilling (Latin, redarguit),
And each dim and winding way
Of the ancient Temple filling;
Dreams, depart! for it is day.

Christ is coming! - from thy bed,
Earth-bound soul, awake and spring, -
With the sun new-risen to shed
Health on human suffering.

Lo! to grant a pardon free,
Comes a willing Lamb from Heaven;
Sad and tearful, hasten we,
One and all, to be forgiven.

Once again He comes in light,
Girding each with fear and woe:
Lord! be Thou our loving Might,
From our guilt and ghostly foe.

To the Father, and the Son,
And the Spirit, who in Heaven
Ever witness, Three and One,
Praise on earth be ever given.

A Close Reading

Hark, a joyful voice is thrilling –

We know that we are in eternity (i.e., outside Time) when this famous “voice in the wilderness” of John the Baptist, opening access in human hearts to the coming of Christ, is announcing, in the opening stanza, the Christ who has not yet been born!

And we see Newman’s devotional involvement in the words of this hymn when he translates the Latin verb rědarguo as “thrilling”, as in a voice that “thrills” us who hear it. What rědarguo means literally is “to refute, to contradict, to prove someone wrong.” How could Newman interpret the penetrating, perhaps sometimes frightening, contradicting frankness of John the Baptist’s words as thrilling? We might think, rather, that the Baptist’s words are unsettling or irritating or impolite. Why thrilling?


Because when we are addressed by such a voice, a voice bright with Holy Spirit, it “finds” us. But though this “finding” can startle us, even sting us, that voice comes into us and gives us, at the same time, the capacity to let it enter. The truth of the matter is that all of us want to be found, to be found out. But we need for the one who finds us to be one who loves us. And when we are “found”, it is thrilling. We exclaim, “Finally! I can come home.” This “thrill” is what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews is trying to get us to understand when he writes:

John the Baptist’s voice is penetrating, discerning, accurate, unambiguous, but also unmistakably joyful. Upon hearing that voice, we want to repent. I recall how St. Ignatius of Loyola describes a grace that he wants us to experience upon “being found out” by an “amazing grace”:


Notice that “exclamation of wonder and surging emotion”? This is what Newman means by “thrilling.” And this is also why one of the weeks of Advent typically concentrates on the work of John the Baptist.

And notice also how the rhyming of “thrilling” with “filling” instructs us that this thrilling voice fills, echoes throughout, the “ancient Temple”. What Newman means is that this compelling “voice” could exist only because of the ancient Religion, while at the same time it radically challenges Religion’s staleness, its rote-ness of rituals, its deflated fierceness, its dreary conventionalism, demanding that it become alive again, and joyfully.

Once again, He comes in light, Girding each with fear and woe –

Those adverbs “once again” now transport us from our anticipation of that first Christmas to the reality of the second Coming of Christ at the end of Time. It will be magnificent (as in “making greater” even the most glorious thing that we have ever witnessed in this world) – “He comes in light” –

Notice how the rhyming of “in light” and “loving Might” are paired, the one explaining the nature of the other. However, the result in us, at least at first, is that we feel bound in both “fear and woe.”


We are reminded of what Isaiah felt that day:




 

An Action

In his homily preached on 1 November 2025, Pope Leo XIV, he said (in part):


As we approach Advent, but first all of us passing through American Thanksgiving Week, commit to refusing to stoke fear and pessimism in conversations. Instead, be a “kindly light” that helps people see the Blessing more clearly than our contemporary preference for acknowledging the Curse.

¹ One of John Foley’s best: https://music.apple.com/us/album/come-weal-come-woe/466796634?i=466796661.

² A short but reliable biography of St. John Henry Newman: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-john-henry-newman/.

³ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to exorcise” – 2. – 1645 – To clear (a person or place) of evil spirits; to purify or set free from malignant influences.

⁴ For a complete list of all of them arranged chronologically: https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/doctors-of-the-catholic-church/

* 1:14n; 2:11f

* 17:1+ Mt 14:19par.

* 12:30; 1:1a

* 5:27–29; Is 49:9

* 19:40; 20:5–7

⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 11:40–44.

⁶ Simon Caldwell - Concerning this British journalist (The Daily Mail) and novelist, Joseph Pearce wrote in his review of Caldwell’s novel: Lady Mabel’s Gold: “Caldwell’s ability to suggest the presence of grace in disgraceful situations is a rare gift indeed. He takes us into the dark to lead us to the merest suggestion of the light. Rarely have I found myself so excited by the emergence of a new literary talent.”

⁷ Wikipedia notes: “The Catholic Herald is a London-based Roman Catholic monthly magazine, founded in 1888 and a sister organization to the non-profit Catholic Herald Institute, based in New York. After 126 years as a weekly newspaper, it became a magazine in 2014.”

⁸ See for a short biography of St. Bede the Venerable (672/3 – 735 CE): https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-bede-the-venerable/. For example, about Bede: “Bede the Venerable is one of the few saints honored as such even during his lifetime. His writings were filled with such faith and learning that even while he was still alive, a Church council ordered them to be read publicly in the churches.” He is the patron saint of Scholars.

⁹ St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4 – 1109 CE), considered the greatest mind (theological and philosophical) of western Christianity between St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) and St. Thomas Aquinas, OP (1225-1274 CE). He is the other English (though born in Italy) Doctor of the Church, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury in England (1093-1109 CE), but he was Italian by birth.

¹⁰ By the way, the United States of America, in its 249 years of existence, has not yet had a Doctor of the Church.

¹¹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “elegant” – 1. - c1475 – “Characterized by grace or simple beauty, combined with good taste; tastefully ornamental. Also: characterized by refined luxury.” But especially as characterizing Newman’s English style: 2.a. - c1475 – Of language, literature, or literary style: characterized by harmonious simplicity in the choice and arrangement of words; free from awkwardness, coarseness, or clumsiness; graceful, refined.

¹² Newman, John Henry. The Essential Cardinal Newman Collection: Prayers, Meditations, and Other Spiritual Writings (pp. 26-27). Kindle Edition. But also: https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/hark_a_joyful_voice_is_thrilling.htm.

¹³ Source: Rev. Matthew Britt, O.S.B., Hymns from the Breviary and Missal (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1922), Hymn 37, pp. 99-100.

* 1 P 1:23

* Is 49:2; Ep 6:17; Rv 1:16; Jn 12:48; Rm 1:9e; 1 Co 15:44w; Jb 34:21–22; Ps 33:13–15+ Ws 1:6

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Heb 4:12–13.

 * Is 65:17; Rm 8:19–23; 2 P 3:13 •Jb 7:12f

* 19:7–8; 7:15–17 •Ezk 37:27

* Is 7:14f •Is 25:8 •Is 35:10

¹⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Re 21:1–4.

* Ex 19:16g; ▶40:34–35 ▶1 K 8:10–12 ▶↗Jn 12:41 ▶↗Rv 15:8; Ex 33:20i

¹⁶ “seraph” – the plural is Seraphim. “The presumed derivation of the word from a Hebrew root meaning ‘to burn’ (see above) led to the view that the seraphim are specially distinguished by fervour of love (while the cherubim excel in knowledge), and to the symbolic use of red as the colour appropriate to the seraphim in artistic representations.” Of the traditional “nine ranks” of Angels, the Seraphim serve at the highest rank, the Angels closest to the Triune God.

 * Jr 1:9; Dn 10:16

¹⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Is 6:4–9.

A Story

We pray in the Lord’s Prayer that God not “put us to the test”. See Luke 11:

² He said to them, ‘When you pray, this is what to say:^a

And what we mean is that we know how we could be thrust into a circumstance that we know is beyond our capacity “to handle.” We, usually by others, are rendered helpless, “handed over into the power of men” as Jesus put it and who then experienced it. At such moments, the evil spirit (what St. Ignatius of Loyola, and with penetrating insight, called “the enemy of our human nature”) can tempt us let go our trust in God. “Do not put us to such a test, ever!” we beg. How many times in my priestly life have I walked with people through such a calamity crashing, unlooked for, into their lives.

In my life, I had such a moment. Dante himself expressed such a moment in his own life in this way (Inferno, Canto I), capturing feelings like my own:


And to my dismay, what came to me in that experience was a boyhood prayer that I had been taught, had been told to memorize – I must have been no more than four years old when I learned that prayer. It was that prayer that I prayed over and over and over during that time, even though I knew other prayers, good prayers, ones composed by the greatest Saints, and in the case of the Lord’s Prayer, by Jesus Himself! I leaned on a prayer that I had memorized when I was a boy, very possibly the first prayer that I had ever memorized, before I had learned by heart the “Hail, Mary” and the “Our Father” and the “Glory Be”. That prayer was:


The prayer that we closely read below, written by St. John Henry Newman, he composed during some weeks in his life when he found himself lost, in circumstances beyond his ability to “fix”. It is a prayer that a person might choose to memorize, saying/praying it often. It might be for you that necessary prayer, the one that you need, when the lights have gone out of your world.

A Text - From In Love with Love: 100 of the Greatest Mystical Poems, eds. Anne and Christopher Fremantle (1978), 124.

A Note about the author: ²
 
For Newman, the way to God was always through books. His autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua [published April 1864] – the “apology³ for his life”—is as much about what Newman read as what he did. He writes in intricate detail of the thinkers and ideas that fascinated and shaped him.

Newman was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825 and became a curate in Oxford, where he was also a fellow at Oriel College Oxford. His specialty was Patristics—the study of the Fathers of the early Church—and what he read slowly led him towards the Roman Catholic Church.

For Newman, becoming Catholic was not a quick or easy decision. He knew that if he became a Catholic, it would cost him friends as well as his livelihood, since he would not be able to function as a member of the Anglican clergy nor retain his Oxford fellowship. But for Newman, simply setting aside difficult questions was never an option. Newman wrote, “The one question was, what was I to do? I had to make up my mind for myself, and others could not help me. I determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason.” Newman wrote in a diary in 1829, “I am now in my rooms in Oriel College, slowly advancing and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me.”

A Close Reading

We keep a close eye on Exodus 13:17-22, in whose lines Newman finds the biblical framing best suited to what he has been feeling when he wrote this poem:


“Lead, Kindly Light” - The poem begins with this command, which Newman in his unbearable helplessness speaks to God. This seems impertinent⁷ – “Who are we to command God?” Yet, we think of the famous line from the Confessions of St. Augustine: “Give what you command, O Lord, and then command whatever you will.” It is right that we feel bold about “commanding” God to give to us what He has already demonstrated that He wants to give us. Such as other commands, “Forgive me!” or “Remember us!” or “Love us, or me!” We notice that Newman does not demand an explanation from God about the human complexities in which he finds himself trapped. How difficult it is for us to break the bad habit of complaining to God, saying “Why?”, which is always the wrong question. It is enough for him to ask God to lead him … wherever God wishes to take him. In the spirit of John 10, Newman recalls that in the biblical world, shepherds did not “drive” their flocks (e.g., the Australian and American tradition of “drovers”, those who drive herds from behind) but “called them” by name, “going before them”, that they hearing his voice could follow him. Thus, Newman commands “Lead!”, because his sheep may command him, their shepherd, to do what he already intends.

The adjective “kindly” has unlooked for textures of meaning. We find in the 15th century it qualifies something “that is naturally suited to or required by a person … something proper or fitting or appropriate for a person to have.” In this sense, Newman has understood that the divine Light (the Holy Spirit) is required that we might become persons at all; we are made/designed to receive the Light. This is what the great Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, SJ⁹ meant by “obediential potency”¹⁰ – a person defined as a creature made by God with an active capacity to listen closely to God and to respond. Newman is acknowledging that the divine Light is not like the lights at a Football stadium – very bright; diffused over a large area; indiscriminate. Rather, it is a highly personal gift of Light, perfectly fitted to each person, giving to each person a capacity to know and to love God and to be able to love others as God does. St. Paul is getting at this when he famously writes:


The noun “Light” is a famous way of referring to God, as if it were one of His personal names. What is striking about this Name is how it is the very expression of a Person Who is completely other-centered – the very heart of what it means to be LOVE. How? Because light does not see itself; it is that by which we are capable of seeing other things. This means that for us to love God will always mean, at least in great part, to love what the divine Light allows us to see, to notice what God reveals to us to see and to respond to it as something shown us by God.

“Keep Thou my feet” – Have you noticed that when it is very dark, and we need to move, on foot, through that darkness to some destination, we keep our head up and eyes bulging out, and our head moving to enable the different light-gathering capacities of our inner eye (the “rods and cones”) to pick up whatever light is available? But in order to do this, we cannot also be watching where our feet step. Thus, Newman asks God to guard him from tripping and falling, as he, Newman, keeps his head up and eyes straining to find any light, or some lighter texture of dark. The “Thou” used to be in English a more familiar way of addressing another person (now considered an archaic way of speaking). In that earlier stage of English, to use “Thou” when addressing a person revealed how the speaker felt himself or herself personally closer to the hearer. Notice the familiarity indicated by “thy” (i.e., your) in the Lord’s Prayer - “thy Kingdom come; thy will be done”.

“I loved to choose and see my path” – A wise Jesuit, who had spent most of his life spiritually directing people, remarked to me. “Rick, I now believe that it is only when a person has completely exhausted every spiritual technique, has expended himself or herself making every effort to get “right” his or her spiritual path, only then does there emerge the real possibility that he or she might surrender to God.” Newman, a man of such prodigious talents, took a long time to get there (as did C.S. Lewis) because, as he remarks: “I loved the garish¹² day, and, spite of fears, / Pride ruled my will.” Fr. Moreland, SJ then said, “Only when this surrender begins to happen does a person’s genuine spiritual path truly begin.” You hear Newman voicing his surrender throughout this poem, expressing his surrender to God in a single word, “Lead”, and then “one step enough for me.”¹³

“O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent” – When Dante began the first volume – Inferno - of his three great, interlinked master works – the Divine Comedy – he spoke of himself as lost in a dark wood, which he describes as filled with dangerous, wild creatures. For Dante, an urban dweller, the “primeval forest” was a place of frightening strangeness, a place to avoid, populated with wild animals with a taste for human flesh.


Newman here deploys images from the wild, untamed lands as his way of capturing how his lostness had really frightened him, causing him to feel, regularly, that even with all of his gifts, he knew that he was completely out of his league, beyond his ability to “fix” his spiritual life and path. And it is one thing to be lost in the wild lands in the daytime; it is quite another experience to be lost at night out there, as Newman describes himself to have been!

An Action

Memorize this poem. Having in one’s memory such an articulate and lovely spiritual expression of surrender to God can be solace as well as spiritual direction given us when I or you find ourselves lost. Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, wrote that this poem, put to music, was sung by women as they were marched to the Ravensbrück death camp, a concentration camp exclusively for women open from 1939 to 1945 in northern Germany. It was also sung by miners trapped underground in a mining disaster in 1909 in Durham, England. [These references from One Hundred Great Catholic Poems (2023)¹⁵].

And/or spend time praying the words as you listen to those who have “covered” this poem with music (and there are so many!). For example:

John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers, Lead, Kindly Light (2021)
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, “Lead, Kindly Light”, Then Sings My Soul (2006)
Audrey Assad, “Lead, Kindly Light”, Fortunate Fall (2013)
Sharon Hopkins, “Lead, Kindly Light”, Lead Kindly Light (2007)
Coventry Cathedral’s Saint Michael Singers, “Lead, Kindly Light”, The Hymn Makers Best Loved Hymns, volume 2 (2012)
Notre Dame University Folk Choir, directed by Steven C. Warner, “Lead, Kindly Light”, We Will Rest in Thee (2012)
   

* ‖Mt 6:9–13

¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 11:2–4. This comment: “Some take lead us not into temptation in the sense of NEB, ‘do not bring us to the test’. But this is to be preferred only if we take the whole prayer as eschatological. The word peirasmos is the normal word for ‘temptation’ (though it can mean ‘test’) and temptation is surely correct here. This does not imply that God does sometimes cause us to be tempted, and in fact James assures us that he never does (Jas 1:13). Rather Jesus is encouraging an attitude, the attitude that flees from temptation (cf. 1 Cor. 6:18; 10:14; 1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22).” [Leon Morris, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 3 of Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 213.]

² This useful account from the Catholic Cathedral of St. James of the Archdiocese of Seattle. For the full text: https://www.stjames-cathedral.org/PoemoftheWeek/newman-leadkindlylight.aspx. They have there a commendable tradition of presenting A Poem a Month.

³ “apology” – In current American English, we most always mean by this word something we say to someone whom we have hurt or harmed – “to offer an apology”, etc. But what the noun means, and has meant for far longer, is to give a reasoned account (literally, apo- “from”; -logia, “reason”), to explain why something is the way it is.

⁴ Catholic News Agency on 28 September 2025 – “Pope Leo XIV announced on Sunday that he will proclaim St. John Henry Newman a doctor of the Church on Nov. 1, the solemnity of All Saints. ‘I will confer the title of Doctor of the Church on St. John Henry Newman, who gave a decisive contribution to the renewal of theology and to understanding Christian doctrine in its development, in the context of the Jubilee of the World of Education,’ the pope said after celebrating Mass for the Jubilee of Catechists in St. Peter’s Square. With the proclamation, Newman will become the 38th doctor of the Church, joining a select group of saints recognized for their enduring contribution to Catholic theology and spirituality. He is especially noted for his insights on the development of doctrine and the role of conscience.”

⁵ For a haunting, sublime version of this poem set to music, find it by John Rutter and performed by The Cambridge Singers (12 November 2021), “Lead, Kindly Light” - https://music.apple.com/us/album/lead-kindly-light/1592745799?i=1592745800.

* 40:36+ Dt 1:33; Ne 9:19; Ps 78:14; 105:39; Ws 10:17–18; 18:3; Is 4:5; Jn 8:12; 10:4

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ex 13:21–22.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “impertinent” – 4.a. - Characterized by presumptuous speech or behaviour, or by intrusion or interference in that which is not one's concern; insolent; rude, disrespectful.

⁸ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 10:14.

⁹ Lonergan, Bernard (1904–84) Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, born Buckingham, Quebec, and ordained to the priesthood in 1936. He obtained the doctorate at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. [Richard Bernier, “Lonergan, Bernard,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th ed. Andrew Louth (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) 1157.]

¹⁰ ChatGPT concerning “obediential potency” in Lonergan: “Basic idea: a built‑in, ordered capacity or finality in human nature that is properly obedient to and directed toward a supernatural end; human powers are naturally disposed to receive and cooperate with supernatural grace (an intrinsic “vertical” orientation).” I think, but I am not sure, that this is what St. Thomas Aquinas, OP refers to as “sanctifying grace.” I will have to ask my longtime friend Professor Michael Stebbins about this.

* 3:23h

 * 2 Co 12:9–10; Jm 1:2–4; 1 P 4:13–14; Rv 1:9 •1 Co 13:13e •8:4–16; Ga 4:4–6; 3:26m

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ro 5:3–5.

¹² The Oxford English Dictionary at the adjective “garish” – 1. – 1545 – Of dress, ornament, ceremonial, etc.: Obtrusively or vulgarly bright in colour, showy, gaudy.

¹³ How often it has been the case in my experience of spiritually directing people that a person comes seeking from me a new technique, which if he or she were to practice it, they imagine that it would make their spiritual life better, giving them the means to “feel good” about their spiritual progress. People often seek a “sure thing” rather committing themselves to learn, patiently and humbly, the unique ways that God is already present within them, richly alive in them. It takes training (not techniques) for a person to learn how to pay attention, to learn how to “read” his or her inner experiences (one’s thoughts and affects, one’s longings), discovering how the Spirit communicates “with sighs too deep for words.”

¹⁴ Clive James (1939-2019): Born in Australia, Clive James lives in Cambridge, England. He is the author of Unreliable Memoirs; a volume of selected poems, Opal Sunset; and the best-selling Cultural Amnesia. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

¹⁵ This book was a gift to me from Tracy Thorne, L.Ac., MAOM, MTS, a distinguished practitioner of Oriental Medicine in Portland, OR.

 

The Tower of Babel (1563)¹ by Pieter Bruegel I, the Elder (1526/30-1569)² held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Let us look at the painting.

First, the painting is a curiosity. What do we mean by this English word whose roots are in the Latin adjective cūriōsus (from the Latin noun cūra -ae, feminine noun meaning a person of “care, solicitude, carefulness, taking pains”). One meaning of “curious” in English we could use to describe our painter


Just click on the Wikimedia link given in footnote #1, which then allows you to zoom in on the painting, allowing you to study closely what Pieter Bruegel has packed into it. So many “curiosities” - his unusual and minute attentiveness to so many details – animals, men and women, machines, clothing (even the tiniest people are clothed in specific styles and colors), tools, carts, tackle, boats and ships, winches, ladders, scaffolding, architecture, fortified towns, and techniques of stonework and construction. Take the time to take a look and see how this artist has “taken pains, is careful, is studious, and attentive.” One could get lost in the details and for a time enjoy it - “Oh, look at that! I had not noticed that.”

Second, one begins to wonder whether the adjective obscene might be appropriate to describe this massive human construction, which rises over the created world, looming (and leaning) as something bloated, engorged, a kind of swollen blister made of stone – notice the painter’s use of red suggesting that the building suffers a noxious⁴ infection.


What is the cause of this inflammation? We have our clue in how this tower of Babel reduces the relative size of the humans, who are giving their lives and efforts to build it, to that of ants. The proportion is completely out of proportion: buildings to humans, and humans to this work of their hands, and from a biblical perspective, a building out of all proportion to the natural world, which is God’s good work. And in this way, another meaning of “obscene” comes into play: “ill-omened, inauspicious.” 
And notice how the nattily dressed pezzi grossi (“big pieces”, a way Italians have of referring to the economically and therefore socially privileged minority) gathered in the foreground of the painting are outsized in relation to all the other humans in the painting. These (self-) important people likely live in the fortified castle that we see tucked over there to the right, the next largest building in the painting, pleasantly situated along the shore where cooling breezes blow. But not even that is enough for them. And so, they require next door a monstrosity of a tower to be built.

Enough is never enough - perhaps this best describes the infection of which the tower is the indication.

Third, there is no way that a tower so aggressively ugly could be built unless there was one language being deployed, which everyone understood, and through the use of which they were compelled to build it. That language is the language of power, the one language, I believe, to which this biblical text from Genesis 11 is referring:

Think of how a nation – take your pick - filled with people who speak different languages can be forced to comply, to obey, by a few who deploy an open, naked power, or who may prefer the use of a more hidden, devious power. Everyone recognizes when that language is in play, unmistakable and in unholy company with its master Fear.

Strangely, the truth of this kind of power – this “one language” - is that its taproot draws up from below the dark poison of fear, which is its Master. At the core of such power is cowardice,⁷ which is why it is also vicious.

This explains why God became so alert to what He saw happening in Babylon, not liking it at all. God could care less about towers and what they were for. But God most certainly cared about the abuse of power and the use of fear to intimidate a free people into subservience to a few. God’s action in Genesis 11 was not a punishment; it was the effective undermining of the “one language” of power and of those few whose interests it served. God did not punish at Babel; God gave people back their own voices (languages) and then commanded them to leave Babylon and to begin to learn how to fight for their own voices, becoming responsible for their own growth, earning the right to speak by engaging the world and building it, and to quit wasting their lives helping others build ugliness.

10. ABOUT USELESS GOSSIPING

1. Keep clear, as best you may, from the babel of human voices; it is wonderful what distraction is to be found in the discussion of worldly affairs, even when the motive for it is perfectly innocent. Frivolity is infectious and makes easy prisoners of us. I wish I had kept silence, this many a time, instead of enjoying the society of my fellow men!

What is it that makes us so fond of talking, of gossiping with our friends? We hardly ever come away from it without a guilty conscience. What makes talkers of us, is that we find relaxation, on both sides, in the mere bandying of words; we want an escape from the tedious whirligig of our thoughts. We like giving expression to what is in our minds, especially about the good things we enjoy, or would like to enjoy, and the difficulties we find in our way.

2. And the pity of it is that usually it does no good at all; we may get comfort from finding an outlet like that, but it interferes, more than a little, with that inward comfort which is the gift of God.

We need more watchfulness, more prayer; our time mustn’t be frittered away in doing nothing. When you have leave and leisure for talking, let your talk be such as makes for spiritual profit. Victims as we are of bad habit, unambitious as we are about our souls’ progress, we speak so unguardedly! And yet there is talk which can be a great spiritual help to us—I mean, the earnest exchange of ideas about spiritual things; especially when two souls, well matched in temper and disposition, find themselves drawn together in God.⁸

Point One

Our author writes: “Keep clear, as best you may, from the babel of human voices.”

I have been around newborns and little children recently, which always causes me to feel that I need to be especially attentive to what these little ones “fresh from God” (the lovely expression of a dear friend of mine) are expressing with their pre-linguistic selves. They are the purest place that I know for exploring the birth of language. I ask myself, “What is language, and what is it for?” I wonder how with our power of language as grown-ups, we so often cannot establish a depth of relationship with each other the way that pre-linguistic little ones can with us. How do they do this?

The author of the Imitation is addressing language in this chapter, instructing about its proper use and its misuse. “What is it that makes us so fond of talking, of gossiping with our friends?” He recognizes how we can drown ourselves in chatter – “the babel of human voices”. We can take the extraordinary power of language - so capable of expressing our inner lives outwardly – and reduce it to noise - “Frivolity is infectious and makes easy prisoners of us.” We babble at each other, a persistent drone, a “wall of sound” that we deploy to protect us from SILENCE, which we Americans fear almost as much as Death.



Hell, I fear, is filled with “idle chatter”, or as the original Latin title of this chapter has it – De superfluitate verborum; i.e., “On a superfluity of words”:


It is for this reason that I am convinced that the most striking thing about Hell is how noisy it is, where no one ever shuts up – “the mere bandying of words”, where silence never is – “people talking without speaking; people hearing without listening; people writing songs that voices never shared” as Paul Simon put it. Hell is where no one knows what language is for; they just have it. And, by contrast, I am convinced that Heaven is the home of Silence, where every word counts (and therefore one needs so few of them), and where language has measure and proportion and elegance – “In the beginning was the Word: The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Point Two

Our author writes: “What distraction is to be found in the discussion of worldly affairs, even when the motive for it is perfectly innocent.”

Innocence is a tricky concept, and especially when “innocence” gets mixed up with “purity”.

On the one hand, these two ideas do belong together when we are referring to a very young human being. Because little ones are so ignorant of, still so untouched by, the world and its distortions, their innocence is “guileless, devoid of cunning, unsuspecting, and naïve” We adults can look on the innocence of a little one and be touched by it, amazed and moved by it. But we also know that the world will come for them, and they will be hurt by it. We pray that they will become wiser and stronger in the fray. But at this time in their young lives, their innocence is, if we may put it this way, clueless, and their purity is not something chosen, fought for, but something given them because of the protected environment in which they live.

On the other hand, these two ideas also belong together when we are referring to a genuinely holy person, one who is long in the experience of the spiritual path. We refer to a person who is mature and tested and able to accept the challenge of depth in his or her life. This is what Jesus was driving at when he said in Matthew 10:

In this case, innocence does not mean “clueless”, because a true grownup is far from being clueless. He or she is all too aware of the world’s distortions, even when “innocently” seeking to stay up to date with the daily news – “the discussion of worldly affairs” and liking to chit-chat with others about our worries and fears and concerns and convictions. What “innocence” in this case means is what happens to a person who seeks to imitate Christ. His or her innocence is his or her likeness to Christ, a person who effectively and consistently “does as Jesus would do” in this or that circumstance.

And in this case, the “purity” of such mature and tested people has nothing to do with them “staying clean” or “unstained” by their engagement with the world. All we need do to understand purity is to contemplate Christ in His passion and brutal murder. In order to save us, the Christ “got dirty”, went in and moved close up to even the most “impure” places and people, so that He might bring divine love there. In this sense, “purity” means something much closer to what Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) meant when he wrote: “Purity of heart means to will one thing.” And it is also what St. Paul perceived so well about the Way of Jesus Christ, describing for us what God means by a person who has become “pure”, through long effort and a large measure of divine grace:


Point Three

Our author writes: “When you have leave and leisure for talking, let your talk be such as makes for spiritual profit.”

The goal we seek in our imitation of Christ is not about us always talking spiritually to people. This is artless and quickly becomes tiresome to those having to listen to us. No, what Jesus knew was that his Father was at work within anyone he met in his earthly ministry.

There is little doubt that Jesus was a master of what we call “small talk” (this is nothing like “idle talk” or frivolous chit-chat) – an artful use of language to make open the possibility of a real connection between persons. We see Jesus, over and over again, engaging people who had no idea who he was, or who had assumed that he would have little interest in knowing them. Jesus had to have been good at using language artfully, and with humor, causing people to trust Him and to open their faces to Him:

Psalm 34 (NJB):
So, what could be the meaning of “let your talk be such as makes for spiritual profit.” It means primarily a way of paying attention to people, a way to listening to them with a deliberate and heartfelt desire to find the Holy Spirit at work in them.

We go to meet them there, where God and that soul meet. To imitate Christ in the proper use of language means far less about communicating spiritual words or knowledge; it is far more about sharing with a person a mutual experience, a “spiritual” experience, of God at work within us both.

¹ To zoom in on this painting see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_d._Ä.,_,_Kunsthistorisches_Museum_Wien,_Gemäldegalerie_-_Turmbau_zu_Babel_-_GG_1026_-_Kunsthistorisches_Museum.jpg.

² Grove Art Online (Oxford) at Bruegel, Pieter I - the Elder (born, 1525/30; died, Brussels, 1569) by Wied & Porras - Pieter Bruegel was a painter and draftsman operating in the Netherlands and is one of the foundational figures for the Northern Renaissance. Although heir to the early Netherlandish painters, particularly Hieronymous Bosch, Bruegel brought a new humanizing spirit and breadth of vision to the traditional subjects he depicted while creating many new ones. His style and subject matter were adopted but rarely surpassed by the many artists of the later 16th century and the 17th who were influenced by his work, especially the landscape and genre artists of the northern provinces of the Netherlands. … The Tower of Babel (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), the undated variant of which (Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans–van Beuningen) is usually thought to have been painted c. 1567–1568. … Bruegel’s eerie architectural Utopia is modeled on the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, which he must have studied while in Italy. He conceived the vision of a Roman monstrosity, the fearful scale of which far exceeded all architectural megalomanias of the past. The Tower of Babylon, described in the Bible and by Josephus Flavius, symbolizes the fact that all the works of mankind are doomed to imperfection. According to Demus, the tower could not be completed because the hubristic design of its builders had reached the limits of possibility. Bruegel’s intent is to make evident this frustration: the scene typifies “a glaring want of coordination,” “a muddled conception doomed from the outset,” “an absurd state of helplessness before the grandiose mockery of a nightmarish bankruptcy of reason.”

* Is 14:12seq.; Jr 51:53; Jn 10:16; 11:52 •Col 3:11

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ge 11:7–9.

⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary at “noxious” – 1. - a1500 – Harmful, poisonous, injurious; unwholesome.

⁵ For the whole poem go to: https://poets.org/poem/city-sea.

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ge 11:5–6.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “coward” – 1. - ?a1289 – A reproachful designation for one who displays ignoble fear or want of courage in the face of danger, pain, or difficulty; an ignobly faint-hearted or pusillanimous person.

⁸ Kempis, Thomas à. The Imitation of Christ: Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley (pp. 34-35). Kindle Edition.

⁹ Barks, Coleman. A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (p. 219). Kindle Edition.

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mt 10:16.

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Php 2:1–5.

¹² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 5:17.

¹³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ps 34:5.

The Parable of the Rich Fool (1627, regarding Luke 12:13-21)¹ by Rembrandt (1606-1669)² held in the Gemäldegalerie [i.e., the “Painting Museum"] in Berlin, Germany.

Let us look at the painting.

First, we notice the painter’s use of the chiaroscuro style/technique.


I playfully imagine that Rembrandt, when facing an empty off-white canvas, decided to paint the entire surface black. “Why would he wreck his canvas in that way?” But then we see him picking up that special brush, the one kept apart in a beautifully crafted wooden box, the one that allows him to paint not with paints but with light itself. With that brush in his hand, a special gift from the Divine realm, we watch Rembrandt, stroke by deft stroke, begin to release from the darkness all that is hidden in it.

When the darkness is comprehensive, we not only cannot see what is hidden, but we do not even know that something is there!


Christ is our light, who sent to us the Holy Spirit, the real Artist of the bunch. She offers us Her gifts (inspiration; the gift of languages; brushes; musical instruments; the genius⁶ to compose poems and essays and novels, symphonies, paintings, buildings, etc.) so that we too might bring to light that which is hidden, as God began to do in that first moment of Creation:


Second, we wonder whether that man wanted to be seen – whom the parable in Luke 12 has called “a rich fool” (because that is what Jesus called him). Did Rembrandt ask his permission? But how could Rembrandt have asked that, when he did not know that this man was there in the dark, surrounded by his wealth, until the light allowed Rembrandt to see him? Why should we be concerned whether Rembrandt has asked? Because that man, for all his prosperity, is revealed by that special brush to be painfully vulnerable, worried, unsure of himself … and all alone.

Look at that face! It is not a cruel face. But there is sadness and anxiety in it, and it shows the pinched ravages of Avarice.⁸


If all of those who had envied him for his apparently unceasing prosperity could see him as the light reveals him to be, then they might be grateful for his example, showing them another truth. Such prosperity is not what they had assumed it was: a stay against fear, against insecurity, against sadness, a sure way to secure the unwavering praise of others.

That remarkable face, and because of Rembrandt’s compassionate heart, teaches all of us exactly what Jesus meant by His warning expressed in Luke 12:16-21. But we do well prayerfully to ask God to let us hear how He said the following line, with what intonation and with what kind of emotion:


We assume an angry edge in God’s voice – “Fool!” And when we do assume this, we make a mistake, proving that we are thralls¹⁰ to Envy, unable to see what God sees, and how God sees this man, and to what end, and with holy patience and compassion.


There is not a shred of envy in Rembrandt as he wields his brush. Just look at the depth of feeling Rembrandt finds in the unveiled face of that man, all his self-conceit effaced.¹²

Rembrandt paints the moment when the divine light has shown him who he has become, what he has loved more than was healthy for him. He is trapped. (Do you see how he is trying to hoard¹³ the light, so that we cannot see it, keeping it all for himself?)
 
Rembrandt allows us to approach the man, as he tries to accept the unsettling truth of who he has become. We say, “We are here with you; we know. Do not fear this truth, because it is the holy Light that reveals it to you.”

As my greatest spiritual teacher in this life, Fr. Gordon Moreland, SJ, once told me (but which remark took me years to understand), “Rick, we all want to be found out, though we also fear it. But the One who finds us is the One who loves us.”

7. ABOUT FALSE CONFIDENCE, AND HOW TO GET RID OF SELF-CONCEIT (De vana spe et elatione fugienda)

1. It is nonsense¹⁵ to depend for your happiness on your fellow men, or on created things. What does it matter if you have to be the servant of others, and pass for a poor man in the world’s eyes? It is nothing to be ashamed of, if you do it for the love of Jesus Christ. Why all this self-importance? Leave everything to God, and he will make the most of your good intentions. Put no confidence in the knowledge you have acquired, or in the skill of any human counsellor; rely on God’s grace—he brings aid to the humble, and only humiliation to the self-confident.

2. Do not boast of riches, if you happen to possess them, nor about the important friends you have; boast rather of God’s friendship—he can give us all we want, and longs to give us something more, himself. Do not give yourself airs if you have physical strength or beauty; it only takes a spell of illness to waste the one or mar the other. Do not be self-satisfied about your own skill or cleverness; God is hard to satisfy, and it is from him they come, all these gifts of nature.

3. He reads our thoughts, and he will only think the worse of you, if you think yourself better than other people. Even your good actions must not be a source of pride to you; his judgements are not the same as man’s judgements, and what commends you to your fellows is not, often enough, the sort of thing which commends you to him. If you have any good qualities to shew for yourself, credit your neighbour with better qualities still; that is the way to keep humble. No harm, if you think of all the world as your betters; what does do a great deal of harm is to compare yourself favourably to a single living soul. To be humble is to enjoy undisturbed peace of mind, while the proud heart is swept by gusts of envy and resentment.¹⁶

Point One

Our author writes: “Rely on God’s grace—he brings aid to the humble, and only humiliation to the self-confident.”

God has no interest, at all, in humiliating us. It is the evil spirit (“the enemy of our human nature” as St. Ignatius of Loyola calls Satan) who humiliates us, the most powerful form of which is shame.¹⁷

So, what could our author mean by “God’s grace brings … humiliation”? What he means is that God will expose our false self, if we let Him do it, revealing it for the cheat that it is, for the self-deception that it is. Rembrandt hopes that the man in the painting will let God do this. “Please, let God do this for you.”

It is the false self that feels humiliation at being found out, not the true self. It is the true self that in the dying of a false self knows that help has come to it and, upon experiencing this divine help, it cries out in such words as these, such words of which spiritual literature is filled:

Point Two

Our author writes: “Boast rather of God’s friendship.”

The “higher up” one ascends the social ladder, the more difficult it is for a person of stature to allow friendship with him or her, persons before whom he or she can be vulnerable.  He or she thinks that this is a problem with other people. And the friends they allow are drawn from an increasingly smaller group of those whom he or she considers of equal “station” or “class” or “net worth” (such an astonishing and revealing expression).

What our author teaches, and this is meant for every one of us, is that when our primary friendship is with God (whose very existence is a relationship of love among the divine Persons – the source of all true friendship) the range and type of friendships we establish dramatically expands. The “higher up” one ascends into familiarity with God, the more people of all kinds and classes and capabilities feel our loving friendship toward them, with them, and in whose company he or she receives so much that is valuable to learn.

Now that is something worth “boasting” about, as often St. Paul did: closeness with God that makes our capacity for love more universal, not exclusive (the meaning of the Greek adjective “catholic”¹⁸), and a unifying and generous force in the world.
 
We Americans used to take seriously how we were: e pluribus unum; that is, “from the many, one.” Such an ideal, and any chance that it has to become a defining principle of a people, comes only by the grace of God, because only God knows how to be good at the world. Let’s admit it: we are not good at the world ... but in grace we can be.

Point Three

Our author writes: “And what commends you to your fellows is not, often enough, the sort of thing which commends you to Him [to God].”

This comment again concerns the false self, its self-conceit, and how we manufacture the false self (and very often without noticing that we are doing it) to be a self that is pleasing to the world, and especially to the “important” people whose praise we seek. We might be consoled when contemplating the words of the beautiful hymn, “Be Thou My Vision” (written in Gaelic by Eleanor H. Hull, 1860-1935), one of whose stanzas reads:

 

¹ To zoom in on the file see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_The_Parable_of_the_Rich_Fool.jpg.

² Grove Art Online (Oxford) at “Rembrandt” - Another painting dated 1626, the Musical Company (since 1976 in Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.; Br. 632), is a mysterious scene previously thought to represent a musical party in Rembrandt’s house; it is more probably an allegory, though it has not been satisfactorily explained. The variegated colour scheme is still in Lastman’s style, while the still-life of books in the foreground must have been inspired by the vanitas pieces that were so much in vogue in Leiden in the 1620s. A striking feature is the concentrated fall of light, which became characteristic of Rembrandt’s work from then onwards. In his Leiden years he also painted a number of historical genre pieces or allegories. The Moneychanger (Berlin, Gemäldegal.; Br. 420) represents the Parable of the Rich Man (Luke 12:21), while the Sleeping Old Man (1629; Turin, Gal. Sabauda; Br. 428) is probably an allegorical depiction of Sloth. The Painter in his Studio (Boston, Mus. F.A.; Br. 419; see fig. below) symbolizes the working of the mind (ingenium) before the artist executes his work: true art was considered to be the result of ingenium, doctrina (the rules of art) and exercitatio (correct execution).

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 12:20–21.

⁴  The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ge 3:9–10.

⁵ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 1:9–10.

⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary at “genius” – I. - A supernatural being, and related senses – 1. I.1.a. - a1387 – With reference to classical pagan belief: the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at birth to govern his or her fortunes and determine personal character, and finally to conduct him or her out of the world. Also: a guardian spirit similarly associated with a place, institution, thing, etc.

⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ge 1:1–5.

⁸ “avarice” – One of the “deadly” or “capital” sins. “The theme of the deadly sins is featured prominently among a few of the most widely read writers of the Christian spiritual tradition. For example, Walter Hilton (d. 1396), in The Scale of Perfection, stresses love as the way of conquering strong enemies of humanity, the deadly sins. In directives to devout Christians faced with their own distorted self-love, Hilton analyzes each capital sin and describes the seven through various metaphors: streams running from the river of self-love, parts of the body of the devilish beast, separate evil animals. [Michael Downey, in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 249.]

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 12:20.

¹⁰ “thralls” – The Oxford English Dictionary at “thrall” – I.1.b. - Old English – figurative. One who is in bondage to some power or influence; a slave (to something).

¹¹ Michael Downey, in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 249–250.

¹² “effaced” – The Oxford English Dictionary at “efface” – 1.a. – 1611 – To rub out, obliterate (writing, painted or sculptured figures, a mark or stain) from the surface of anything, so as to leave no distinct traces.

¹³ The Oxford English Dictionary at the verb “hoard” - 1.a. - Old English – transitive. To amass and put away (anything valuable) for preservation, security, or future use; to treasure up: esp. money or wealth.

¹⁴ For the whole poem, see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii.

¹⁵ “nonsense” – The Oxford English Dictionary at “nonsense” – I.1.b. – 1678 – Foolish or extravagant conduct; silliness, misbehaviour.

¹⁶ Kempis, Thomas à. The Imitation of Christ: Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley (pp. 31-32). Kindle Edition.

¹⁷ “shame” – Shaming is never directed at an ignoble, unworthy, sinful action. No. Shaming is directed at a person’s existence; it strikes at a person, at his or her right to exist at all. Shame is the at the very center of what Satan is and does.

¹⁸ “catholic” - καθολικός, A. general, universal. … c. as extending throughout the world, teaching the fullness of Christian doctrine, disciplining all classes of mankind, curing all kinds of sin and possessing every virtue [G. W. H. Lampe, ed., “Καθολικός,” in A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1961), 690.]

¹⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 1 Co 13:4–8.

Christ in a Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633)¹ by Rembrandt (1606-1669)², held in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Let us look at the painting.

This painting is not about ideas; it is about affects (emotions, feelings) and what they drive the twelve Apostles to do or fail to do.

Rembrandt leaves no doubt that the violence of the storm is considerable, and that no one in that boat should be capable of staying calm, capable of holding the intensity of his reactions in check. Then we zoom in, looking more carefully at each of the thirteen men in the boat. Much more is going on here.

The two in the front of the boat, even though they are not equal to the power of the storm, remain focused, continuing to work for the safety of the boat and of its passengers. We feel admiration for them. Their ability to “stay calm” is directly proportional to their caring more about offering their skill and even their lives because the situation demands it. This is important. They do not overcome their fear by trying to make themselves not fear; they master themselves by caring more about being equal to the moment and not failing to show up.

The two facing each other at the mainmast are all about self-preservation. One with his back to the waves, hiding from what scares him, clings to the mast; the other one not only has tied himself by the waist to the mast with a heavy rope but he also has thrown a heavy cloth around the mast so that both of his desperate hands can cling to it. Fear has overmastered these two; they are incapable of helping anyone, of noticing any need beyond themselves. Here we have a luminous example of the connection between a paralyzing fear ruling a person and his or her lack of love.

The one with the knife in his belt, his right hand holding a fixed line (a stay), appears to be praying, looking up into the light that has broken through the threatening sky and has splashed over the front of the boat. One who so earnestly prays when the circumstances are desperate is doing something important. There is interior strength in that man. He is not working the sails or the oars; he is instead addressing the Lord of the storm and sea, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.



Then there are the four Apostles who have given up completely. One faces forward, frozen in resignation at his imminent death; there is another one standing behind him – the only one who is looking at us, as if we might be of help to him; then there is the one cowering at the gunnel on other side of the boat, trying to stay as far away from the storm as possible; and we notice that one is vomiting over the side of the boat. These four do nothing; help no one; they wish for a tamer world, for a less inconvenient reality.

Then we watch those two who are beseeching Jesus – “Save us, Lord! We are lost.” What strikes us is that they seem to be especially interested in the theological reasons why Jesus should be better in this circumstance than He is, needing to articulate those reasons to Jesus, who watches them with a bemused face. Listening to such theologians, Jesus might have wished that He had stayed asleep.

Finally, there is that Apostle at the rudder. He, like those two up front, meets the moment with resolve and courage, keeping the boat directly into the hammering waves. His strength and unwavering commitment to do his job goes unnoticed, except by Rembrandt who makes sure that we notice him.

What Rembrandt has painted is a biblical moment awash with and nearly capsized by the intensity and magnitude of the feelings of the Apostles … and how those feelings cause each of them to respond. Notice that Rembrandt wants us to pay attention to this, which is why he did not paint what we might be especially interested in seeing: the moment when Jesus stood up and stilled the storm. No, he keeps us focused on the Apostles in the time before He stood up and acted.

6. ABOUT IMMODERATE PASSIONS
 
1. Once a man sets his heart on anything immoderately, he loses his peace of mind—the proud man, the avaricious man, how little peace they enjoy! It is the detached, the humble, that live wholly at rest. Strange, how easily a man can be attracted and overcome by some slight, some trumpery affection, if he is not yet utterly dead to self! He has no spiritual fibre; nature (you may say) is still strong in him; he has a bias towards the things of sense. And how should he detach himself altogether from worldly desires? Does he leave them ungratified? It is a constant source of irritation to him. Does anybody thwart them? He is ready to fly into a rage.

2. On the other hand, if he gives way to them and gets what he wants, all at once he is struck down by remorse of conscience; that is all that comes of yielding to passion—he is no nearer the peace of mind he aimed at. No, the heart can only find rest by resisting its passions, not by humouring them; heart’s rest is for the fervent, the devout, not for the carnally minded, for those who give themselves over to the love of outward things.

Point One

Our author writes: “Once a person sets his or her heart on anything immoderately, he loses his peace of mind.”

To “set one’s heart on” is a poetic way of speaking about strong (i.e., a set) desire. But it is also a biblically insightful way of speaking when we recall how “the heart” was understood to be the organ of decision-making – a process involving both thinking and feeling.

We live in an American moment when too many of us have succumbed to the (demonic) temptation to allow our powers of soul to be outsourced! They are our greatest human powers. They are of memory/imagination; of intellect/understanding/reason; of will/affect. Such powers need to be trained, laid hold of, never surrendered to anyone for any reason.

Instead of training our power of memory to become stronger, more capacious,⁷ we don’t bother, letting a search engine remember things for us. Instead of training our reason to be disciplined and of greater nimbleness and penetration, we are allowing AI – artificial intelligence⁸ - to do our thinking for us.


But here is the deal. The more we outsource our central human/soul powers, the more vague we become as persons, or we might say, the more artificial, and dull. And the vaguer we become, the more immoderate we inevitably will be, and the louder.

Why? As a “solution” to our vagueness and boredom, we will seek intensity of feelings, needing constantly to nourish that intensity in order to feel that we are alive at all. Our author calls this state “losing one’s peace of mind.” Or, as we might dryly offer, “we have lost our mind” or are “out of our mind.”

Point Two

Our author writes: “No, the heart can only find rest by resisting its passions, not by humoring them.”


It is worth thinking here about the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17). Have you noticed that the first eight commandments prohibit actions but that the ninth and tenth commandments¹⁰ prohibit a specific kind of desire?


A traditional way of translating the kind of desires/passions that are prohibited is by the English verb “to covet”, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines this way: 3.a. - a1300 – “To desire culpably; to long for (what belongs to another). (The ordinary sense.)”

These covetous desires, which our author says must be resisted, given no quarter, earnestly erased in us, are ones that take us out of bounds and in ways that are particularly destructive to human relationships.

When we let such covetous desires take hold of us, we are culpable; that is, we are at fault, because we freely indulged those desires. To indulge such desires, either in one’s imagination or in actions, turns us, to use poetic language, into animals (which, frankly, is a deeply insulting thing to associate with animals). Perhaps better to say that those last two commandments of the Decalogue were given us by God to keep us from becoming vampires, as defined in this way:


In short, as our author warns, “it is best not to humor these desires.”

Point Three

Our author writes: “On the other hand, if he or she gives way to them and gets what he or she wants, all at once he or she is struck down by remorse of conscience; that is all that comes of yielding to passion—he or she is no nearer the peace of mind he or she aimed at.”

You might exercise your memory and recall something that you really wanted. Can you recall an example?

I remember my 10-year-old self who had set my heart on a Crosman, pump-action, BB gun.¹² I knew that my parents were cautious about something that could “put my eye out”, and so likely they preferred me to moderate that strong desire. But to my surprise, and genuine delight, they worked with Santa that year to have one waiting for me under the tree.
 
But then this. For the first time in my life in specific relation to gifts given, I felt “let down”. How could this be?! I noticed that my strong desire (covetousness) for that BB gun had caused a greater vividness inside of me, and an intensity of feeling, that was greater than what I felt after I had received that beautiful, thoughtful gift from my parents. I was confused by this.
 
Why was the feeling of having the gift less, less splendid and vivid, than was the feeling of wanting it, really wanting that BB gun?

Inchoately,¹³ I was beginning to recognize the significance of covetous desires, which cause a person to feel empty inside at the reception of a beautiful gift and to feel insincere in his or her response to the giver. I felt wrongness in me. “Thou shalt not covet, says the Lord.”

Our author writes: “Once a person sets his or her heart on anything immoderately, he or she loses his or her peace of mind—the proud person, the avaricious person, how little peace they enjoy!”

 

 
¹ To study and to zoom in on this painting: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Rembrandt_Christ_in_the_Storm_on_the_Lake_of_GalileeFXD.jpg.

² Grove Art Online (Oxford) at “Rembrandt (Harmensz.) van Rijn (Leiden, 15 July 1606; Amsterdam, 4 October 1669) - Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher. From 1632 onwards he signed his works with only the forename Rembrandt; in documents, however, he continued to sign Rembrandt van Rijn (occasionally van Rhyn), initially with the addition of the patronymic ‘Harmensz.’. This was no doubt in imitation of the great Italians such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, on whom he modelled himself, sometimes literally. He certainly equaled them in fame, and not only in his own country. His name still symbolizes a whole period of art history rightfully known as ‘Holland’s Golden Age’. … Rembrandt was not only a gifted painter but also an inspired graphic artist: he has probably never been surpassed as an etcher, and he often seems inimitable as a draughtsman. His subjects reflect his manifold talent and interests. … The 1630s are regarded as Rembrandt’s most ‘Baroque’ period, with particular reference to his history paintings. Exceptional in both format and subject is the Christ in a Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633; Isabella Stewart Gardner Mus., Boston, stolen 1990; Br. 547). Rembrandt never painted the marine views that were so popular in the northern Netherlands, and it was presumably the customer who requested this unusual subject and also dictated its enormous size. Houbraken praised the work for its convincing representation of the frightened apostles.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mt 8:23–27.

⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 1 Jn 4:18–19.

⁵ See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44403/the-wreck-of-the-deutschland.

⁶ Andreas Schuele, “Heart,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006–2009) 764.

⁷ “capacious” – The Oxford English Dictionary - 2. – 1656 – Able to hold much; roomy, spacious, wide.

⁸ “artificial intelligence” – Have you ever stopped to consider how odd this expression is, and how revealing? The Oxford English Dictionary at “artificial” - I.1.a. - c1425 – Of a thing: made or constructed by human skill, esp. in imitation of, or as a substitute for, something which is made or occurs naturally; man-made.

*1 See Pss 47:2(48:1); 95(96):4; 144(145):3.

*2 See Ps 146(147):5.

*3 See 2 Cor 4:10.

*4 See 1 Pt 5:5.

⁹ Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Part I, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, Second Edition., vol. 1 of The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), 39.

¹⁰ “Commandments 9 and 10” – Roman Catholics have maintained that these are two commandments; others understand these two commandments as one commandment but with two parts.

¹¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ex 20:17.

¹² They still exist! See: https://www.crosman.com

¹³ “inchoately” – The Oxford English Dictionary at the adjective “inchoate”: a. – 1534 – Just begun, incipient; in an initial or early stage; hence elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature.

St. Jerome and the Two Angels (early 17th century)¹ by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi [del Crescenzi] (Viterbo, 1590 - Rome, 1625).²

Let us look at the painting.

Because we see St. Jerome,³ that remarkable, complicated man, working in his study at the center of this painting, we might conclude that he is the subject⁴ of this painting. “Oh yes, that painting is about St. Jerome, one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church.”⁵

But here is the problem with this conviction. A genuinely holy person would never say that his or her life and work, or any painting with him or her prominently featured in it, was about him or her. It could not be so; it must not be.

The holier a person is the more he or she knows, and therefore insists, “I am nothing. But the God I love, and the works of my life, are about God, the Trinity of Persons. Please don’t break my heart by praising me; but join me in praising God through Whom I have had my life. But it would mean a lot to me if you were to love me and to know that God sent me.” In many places in the Gospels, we notice how clearly Jesus, “the holy One of God”, understood this about Himself, as for example:

 John 14 (NJB):
Therefore, St. Jerome would be relieved, and grateful, if you insisted that this painting is about other things than him. Could it be about the (divine) light that streams in from the left, illuminating his mind (notice how brightly his head/his intellect is shining), and which allows us to see this scene at all? Or could it be about those two Angels who have come to read along with him the Scriptures? (For heaven’s sake you couldn’t say the painting is about him when two beautiful Angels are right there!)

Notice how his Bible is open over there to his left, which stands under (i.e., “to understand”) the greatest Sign of his Lord, the Crucifix – the whole Scripture to be interpreted through the reality of that severe⁷ Beauty. Notice also how the Angels have laid open their Bible to the same pages, giving learned suggestions to St. Jerome as he works trying to decide how best to interpret a particular biblical passage.

5. ABOUT READING OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
 
1. It is for truth, not for literary excellence, that we go to Holy Scripture; every passage of it ought to be read in the light of that inspiration which produced it, with an eye to our souls’ profit, not to cleverness of argument. A simple book of devotion ought to be as welcome to you as any profound and learned treatise; what does it matter whether the man who wrote it was a man of great literary accomplishments? Do not be put off by his want of reputation; here is truth unadorned, to attract the reader. Your business is with what the man said, not with the man who said it.

2. Mankind is always changing; God’s truth stands for ever. And he has many ways of speaking to us, regardless of the human instruments he uses. Often enough, our reading of Holy Scripture is distracted by mere curiosity; we want to seize upon a point and argue about it, when we ought to be quietly passing on. You will get most out of it if you read it with humility, and simplicity, and faith, not concerned to make a name for yourself as a scholar. By all means ask questions but listen to what holy writers have to tell you; do not find fault with the hard sayings of antiquity—their authors had good reason for writing as they did.

Point One

Our author writes: “It is for truth, not for literary excellence, that we go to Holy Scripture; every passage of it ought to be read in the light of that inspiration which produced it, with an eye to our souls’ profit, not to cleverness of argument.”

Something that really bothered the younger St. Jerome about the Scriptures (and possibly the young, pre-Christian St. Augustine also), is that they were filled with examples of bad prose and poetry, of irritating repetitions, of inelegant writing, and regularly marked by unsophisticated thinking. For a man as learned and demanding as St. Jerome was, such sloppiness bothered him.


But then he had that “vision” or luminous moment in his life when Christ spoke directly to him, chidingly,⁸ that he had better get clear in himself whether he loved Cicero (the supreme literary stylist; philosopher; statesman of the Roman Republic) more than God. “It is for truth, not for literary excellence, that we go to Holy Scripture.”

Few people I know could be irritated with the Scriptures in the way that Jerome could, who have Jerome’s prodigious learning and commitment to excellence in study and thought and to a boldness of life in Christ, letting go of everything that would get in the way of that.

But I have met, often, Christians who at some level in their awareness feel irritated by, unsatisfied with, the way that the Bible or Theology is being taught to them. They notice a “thinness” of meaning given them; a kind of bored repeating of convictions by the teacher (sort of like watching a “fake” flame wiggle in the electric fireplace); a speaking about the Bible and of God in ways that seem suspiciously supportive of the world’s unredeemed way of thinking about things.

At some level, the Scriptures and the truth of God is no longer dangerous … as we intuit it should be.

Fr. Metz has provocatively said: “The shortest definition of Religion: interruption.” He also wrote: “The lightning bolt of danger lights up the whole biblical landscape, especially the New Testament scene.”¹¹

Point Two

Our author writes: “And God has many ways of speaking to us, regardless of the human instruments he uses.”

There is no question among Christians of any stripe that we consider the Scriptures a privileged source of revelation by God in history, about God in history and beyond history. But “God has many ways of speaking to us” –


A Christian, above all others, should know that “God has many ways of speaking to us”, and that it is not only in the Bible. We must be seekers of all the ways that God speaks into our history – including in our neighbor … and in our enemy - both in the past and in our present, so that, frankly, we can read and understand our Scriptures more sufficiently. The Bible is replete¹³ with “many ways” that God chose to speak to our Ancestors. We need to notice that. And then there are the writings of the saints, of the mystics, of the theologians, of the philosophers, of the scientists, of the poets and novelists, of the artists – they all are replete in this way … but we have to learn how to recognize God there. Jesus meant this when he said:

Point Three

Our author writes: “By all means ask questions but listen to what holy writers have to tell you; do not find fault with the hard sayings of antiquity—their authors had good reason for writing as they did.”

A key development in the maturing of our intellect happens when we begin to have the strength to endure not knowing, not (yet) understanding, but by this growing strength in us refusing to give up on trying to understand.

When I taught high school students, this was something that I needed them to recognize as important – the significance of the known unknown! That is, we know that what we seek still eludes us … but we know that it is there. This insight lies at the heart of the transition from Arithmetic to Algebra,¹⁵ when one has learned to name what he or she does not yet know – “Let X be…” – so that he or she may aim at X and then recognize that he or she knows it when he or she does!

It is no disrespect to question (faithfully, never unfaithfully) the Scriptures or Theology!¹⁶ What is disrespectful is not to question, not to make demands on ourselves to grow in our faithful understanding of God’s presence to us in the words and deeds of human beings of the great Traditions and currently, and in the Divine presence giving itself in the revelatory splendor of the natural world.

¹ To study or zoom-in on the painting: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St.-Jerome-In-His-Study.jpg

² Grove Art Online (Oxford): Cavarozzi [del Crescenzi], Bartolomeo - Italian painter, active also in Spain. … A more significant influence was that of the art of Caravaggio. Between 1610 and 1617 both Cavarozzi and Giovanni Battista Crescenzi became interested in this, and between 1615 and 1617, while still in Rome, Cavarozzi may have become acquainted with the Genoese painter Domenico Fiasella, who was also moving towards a Caravaggesque style. In any case, Cavarozzi was certainly a convert to Caravaggism by the time he left for Madrid in 1617, accompanying Giovanni Battista in the retinue of Cardinal Antonio Zapata Cisneros. … But the first true expression of Caravaggism in the work of Cavarozzi may have been in the St Jerome and Two Angels (Florence, Gal. Palatina). Raking light from the left illuminates the figures and picks out of the darkness the naturalistically rendered objects, among them a skull resting on tattered parchment pages and a book opened to an etching by Dürer. The attention to these details hints at a northern or Spanish link. Although influenced by Caravaggism, Cavarozzi retained aspects of his own style. He adopted the tenebrism of Caravaggio and peopled his canvases with substantial, naturalistic figures, but avoided the active drama present in the works of many of the Caravaggisti. Rather, his subjects appear to be graceful, high-born creatures imbued with gentle, restrained and even pensive natures. … Cavarozzi found few followers for his lyrical, intimate brand of Caravaggism. His importance for art history lies in his role as a conveyor of Italian Caravaggism to Spain, where the style influenced artists such as Murillo and Zurbarán.

³ The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th edition - St. Jerome (345-420 CE), biblical scholar and ascetic. Jerome studied at Rome, where he was baptized, and then travelled in Gaul before devoting himself to an ascetic life with friends at Aquileia. About 374 CE, he set out for Palestine. He delayed in Antioch, where he heard the lectures of Apollinarius of Laodicea until self-accused in a dream of preferring pagan literature to religious (Ciceronianus es, non Christianus – “You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian”). He then settled as a hermit at Chalcis in the Syrian desert for four or five years, and while there learnt Hebrew. … After [Pope] Damasus’ death he visited Antioch, Egypt, and Palestine, and in 386 CE finally settled at Bethlehem, where he ruled a newly founded men's monastery and devoted the rest of his life to study. Jerome's writings issued from a scholarship unsurpassed in the early Church. His greatest achievement was his translation of most of the Bible into Latin from the original tongues, to which he had been originally prompted by [Pope] Damasus (see the Vulgate translation). He also wrote many biblical commentaries, in which he brought a wide range of linguistic and topographical material to bear on the interpretation of the sacred text.

⁴ The Oxford English Dictionary at “subject” – III.12.a. - That which forms or is chosen as the matter of thought, consideration, or inquiry; a topic, theme. III.12.a.i. – 1563.

⁵ “Doctor of the Church” – Britannica: In Roman Catholicism, any of the 37 saints whose doctrinal writings have special authority. The writings and teachings of the various doctors of the church are of particular importance to Roman Catholic theology, and their works are considered to be both true and timeless. Although the title is not used in the same way in Eastern Orthodoxy, the Orthodox church esteems the 17 doctors of the church who died before the East-West Schism of 1045 CE, and Saints John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazianzus are especially honored as the Three Holy Hierarchs.

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 14:10–11.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary at “severe” – “not leaning to tenderness or laxity; unsparing.”

⁸ The Oxford English Dictionary “to chide” – 1.c. – 1393 – To scold by way of rebuke or reproof; in later usage, often merely, to utter rebuke.

⁹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), 2 Ti 4:3–4.

¹⁰ See: https://johannbaptistmetz.com. Born in Germany in the 1920s, Johann Baptist Metz is among the most influential Catholic theologians of our time. As Professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Münster until 1993 he introduced a brand of theology that speaks to the threatened future of humankind with a biblically sharpened view of the world.

¹¹ In a memorial published (3 December 2019, America magazine) by an American scholar of the theology of Johann Baptist Metz, Matthew Ashley, wrote: “If Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against the dangers of cheap grace, perhaps Metz will be remembered for his prophetic warnings against cheap hope: the thin hopes of a consumer culture that, Metz complained, has even abandoned its secular heritage from the Enlightenment of hoping for freedom, equality and fraternity for all humankind.”

¹² This document is of the most important statements ever written on how Christians can sufficiently understand divine revelation. For the whole text: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html.

¹³ “replete” – The Oxford English Dictionary at “replete” – 1.a. - c1384 – Abundantly supplied or provided with something (material or immaterial).

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 10:14–16.
 
¹⁵ I dread making any such assertion, because I know how significantly undeveloped I have always been at Mathematics!

¹⁶ The justifiably esteemed ALPHA endeavor, born among some gifted teachers at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, boasts about how completely it encourages ALPHA searchers not to ask the questions that they are supposed to ask but to ask the questions that they actually have, the answers to which they really need to discover.

The Young John the Baptist Goes into the Wilderness (1454) by Giovanni di Paolo (born c. 1399; died 1482)¹ kept in The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London.

John 1 (NJB): ²² So they said to him, ‘Who are you? We must take back an answer to those who sent us. What have you to say about yourself?’ ²³ So he said, ‘I am, as Isaiah prophesied:


Let us look at the painting.

First, I know of no other painter who has contemplated this moment in John’s young life: the moment when John left home. Our painter is able to give us the impression that John was still quite young, perhaps even a teenager. In light of our chapter 4 of the Imitation of Christ, John’s disappearance into the wilderness (did he know that he would never return home?) might seem to us, and certainly to his parents (!), an incautious action. John seems to lack “patient care”, possibly unwilling “to weigh up the pros and cons of the business as God’s sees it.” And the boy goes all alone!

Melvana Jelaluddin Rumi³ (1207-1273; translated by Coleman Barks):



Second, we notice the over-built castle from which John emerges. This detail is not meant to spark a question: “Did John’s family actually live in a place like that?” Rather, we are meant to feel that John is leaving a predictably safe and well-defended place, exchanging that for a location – the harsh and trackless Wilderness – that is a least safe and predictable place. And the young John goes wearing only his unkempt curls and a beardless face that never looks back.

Third, we wonder why his parents are not there at the door to see John off. Think for how long that they both had had to wait to get pregnant (like Abraham and Sarah)!⁵ And now this impetuous boy had decided to leave his parents while still so young and never to return to them. Do we not see them at the door, because they were hurt and had refused to offer a blessing to their son, or is it that they had been so old when he was born that they were already dead? Anyway, we wonder whether the parents sought and obtained trustworthy counsel about how to understand their remarkable, and only, child, as our author considers it prudent to do:

Fourth, there are not two boys in this painting but only one. It is the painter’s way of marking the passage of time: whatever time elapsed from the moment when John stepped through the open gate (still close enough to turn back) to when he was completely gobbled up by the severe Wilderness (he is almost there) – notice the knife-like edges on those mountains: they look so austere and threatening. I am not sure, but it appears to me that the fancy boots that he is wearing when he leaves his home have left his legs and feet by the time he has come fully into the Wilderness. We also recognize that his little bag of food that was dangling at the end of his stick when he set out is empty – so quickly! – before he gets very deep into the Wilderness.


Sometimes not being cautious in our undertakings when it comes to what God asks of us to do is what is necessary.

4. ON CAUTION IN OUR UNDERTAKINGS

1. We do wrong to be influenced by every rumour we hear, every suggestion that comes to us; patient care is needed if we are to weigh up the pro’s and con’s of the business as God sees it. Unfortunately—such is our frailty—people are often ready to believe the worst, instead of the best, about others, and to hand the story on. A fully formed Christian does not believe everything he hears; he realizes how weak human nature is, how bent on mischief, how untrustworthy in its statements.

2. Here is a very wise rule: never act in a hurry and always be ready to alter your preconceived ideas. And here is another principle that goes with it; don’t be too ready to accept the first story that is told you, or hand on to others the rumours you hear, and the secrets entrusted to you. Find out some wise counsellor to advise you, a man of enlightened conscience, and be prepared to go by his better judgement, instead of trusting your own calculations. Believe me, a holy life gives a man the wisdom that reflects God’s will, and a wide range of experience. The humbler he is, the more submissive in God’s service, the more wise and calm will be his judgements on every question.

Point One

I chose to consider St. John the Baptist (our painting above) as a way into chapter four of the Imitation. The author of the Imitation knows from experience how perilous it is to be a human being among other human beings and so did John the Baptist. We are a messy lot who often “prefer darkness”, which we choose, as Aristotle would insist about the choices humans make, because we think that we can lay hold of something good for ourselves, or at least something that gains us an advantage over others – leverage.


And when we so choose, our “bent” personality influences others, forcing them into adaptive distortions in their own personalities to protect themselves, to deal with the damage that our decision has caused.


Our author in chapter four warns us about the effects “bent” people will have on us, who traffic in rumors, who gossip about the defects of others, who genuinely enjoy knowing the worst about someone, who disclose as an act of power secrets entrusted to them to keep, who have lost their ability, or desire, to recognize how deceitful they have become.

In St. John’s case, he gets up and leaves the company of human beings, and it appears, for years. But he goes not in order to reject people (his later ministry among the thousands who came looking for him proves this) but so that he might learn to listen to God, to be able to distinguish God’s voice from all the voices competing, too loudly and often with such vulgarity, for his attention.


It is telling that when the cowardly King Herod ordered that John be killed, it was his head – the clarity of John’s mind; its luminosity – that the King attacked, wanting to obliterate its light.

What would it mean to learn to be influenced, centrally and foundationally, by God alone? Chapter four begins to articulate how to identify competing influences of the world and its ways and the necessity to learn how to name and then to reject them. The whole of the Imitation is about learning how to be influenced by God alone.

Point Two

Our author addresses how we must grow in our ability to make our openness to experiences more discriminating. In particular, he means what we allow ourselves to look at; what we allow ourselves to hear. An old expression from books on the cultivation of religious maturity insists on a practice of “modesty⁸ of the eyes and custody⁹ of the senses”. One author puts it this way:


It is foolishness to let flood into our awareness everything that is out there – that would be indiscriminate; it can also harm us at the very least by fragmenting our concentration, overwhelming our capacity to deal with so much clamoring for our attention, finally exhausting us. Thus, the significance of cultivating a habit of modesty of the eyes and custody of the senses.


Consider why it is that we install on our computer virus/malware software. Its programming, constantly (even daily) being updated against new threats, can discriminate what is allowed to enter our computers and what is not. This is not censorship (!); this is an intelligent capacity to select from all that is out there what we let gain access to our attention, and therefore to enter our imagination and mind.

My favorite example of this refinement of our attention is a mother and her baby. By what extraordinary power and discrimination can a mother, while conversationally engaged with guests in the house for dinner, pick out from all the noise the tiny voice of her baby in his or her room upstairs, down the hallway, and behind a closed nursery door? She has become capable of filtering out (i.e., discriminating) all that gets in the way of keeping her ears attuned to the sound of her baby upstairs. It is not censorship that she is practicing in relation to all that she is seeing and hearing around her; it is a trained and refined attention to what matters most, to what gives her life and purpose.

We wonder how helped each of us would be if we developed such a degree of discrimination through a practice of modesty of the eyes and custody of our senses, allowing into our awareness only those things that give us life, letting in only those experiences that give our mind the chance to think about what is true and good and beautiful.

Point Three

Our author writes: “Find out some wise counsellor to advise you, a person of enlightened conscience, and be prepared to go by his or her better judgement, instead of trusting your own calculations.”

A question worth asking ourselves is “How is it that you or I conclude that this or that person is wise”? We need to know this so that we can find, and know that we have found, a wise counselor, not a person merely clever or with a title and a credential (gaining a title or credential never, ever, makes a person “wise”).


The one thing that for certain our author knows is that among all those born of women, Jesus Christ has been the wisest. Sure, He was smart as a whip (his quickness and deftness of humor!); but it is His wisdom that we long for. Best to get to know Him … by learning to imitate Him.

¹ Grove Art Online (Oxford) at “Giovanni di Paolo (di Grazia)”, article by Giovanna Damiani - Italian painter and illuminator. With Sassetta and Domenico di Bartolo, he was one of the greatest Sienese painters of the 15th century. He created a lyrical figural style capable of conveying both exaltation and pathos. … Castiglione, a Milanese professor of law at Pavia, was from 1400 to 1404 a member of the supervising board of works of Milan Cathedral. He and his wife lived in Siena c. 1415–19, and it is possible that they introduced Giovanni to Lombard book illumination. Throughout his career Giovanni executed book illuminations as well as panel paintings. … He had an intense, fertile imagination and a highly individual way of using line—nervous and impetuous—which boldly distorted and abstracted natural forms. … In the 1450s Giovanni’s style seems to show a stronger influence of Sassetta, with more clearly defined volumes and spatial relations. These features are already evident in the architectural backgrounds of his most ambitious narrative cycle, the scenes from the Life of St John the Baptist. The 12 panels, of which 11 survive (Chicago, IL, A. Inst.; Münster, Westfäl. Landesmus.; New York, Met.; Avignon, Mus. Pet. Pal.; Pasadena, CA, Norton Simon Mus.) were originally arranged in four vertical rows, perhaps as part of a cabinet (custodia) housing a sacred object or reliquary.

² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 1:22–23.

³ See: https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/R/RumiMevlanaJ/

⁴ Brian C. Jones, “Wilderness,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006–2009) 849.

⁵ The Lukan narrator initially describes her [Elizabeth] as righteous before God and blameless in following God’s commandments, but she is childless and beyond child-bearing years (1:6–7). Elizabeth’s story parallels the stories of childless women in the OT who, after disappointment, become the mothers of outstanding figures in biblical history. Elizabeth’s story especially resembles Sarah’s (see Gen 17:15–22; 18:9–15; 21:1–7) because they are both advanced in years and in both cases, there is a divine announcement of the birth before the child is conceived. [Robert C. Tannehill, “Elizabeth,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006–2009) 247.]

⁶ I am deeply grateful to Sister Wendy. It was she who taught me how to see, not just to look at paintings but to engage them with a complete and honed alertness. Britannica: “Sister Wendy Beckett (born February 25, 1930, Johannesburg, South Africa—died December 26, 2018, East Harling, England) was a South African-born British nun who appeared on a series of popular television shows and wrote a number of books as an art critic. Nicknamed the “Art Nun,” she offered eloquent and down-to-earth commentary that made art accessible to everyone. … The piece caught the eye of a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) producer, and in 1992 Sister Wendy’s Odyssey made its debut. The series followed a simple format: Sister Wendy stood next to an artwork and gave her reaction to the piece. With humour and a gift for storytelling, she brought life and drama to the work. The series was a hit, and Sister Wendy, a habit-wearing consecrated virgin with a speech impediment, became the unlikeliest of stars.”

⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 3:19.

⁸ “modesty” – How quickly Americans want to confine this word to being something about our bodies and our sexuality. The word has a much broader and more significant reach. The Oxford English Dictionary at “modesty” – I. - Modest quality or character - I.1. - 1531–1839 - † Moderation, temperateness, self-control; freedom from excess or exaggeration; clemency, mildness of rule or government. Obsolete.

⁹ “custody” - The Oxford English Dictionary at “custody”- 2. - c1450 – The charge or care of something or someone; protection, defence; guardianship.

¹⁰ See: https://spiritualdirection.com/2015/10/12/what-is-custody-of-the-senses.

¹¹ Jesus never asks us to do what He himself has not already done, consistently done.

¹² The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 15:14–15.

Nicodemus Visiting Jesus at Night (1899, John 3:1-21) by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)^1, found at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.²

 
We know from the biblical text that this Pharisee (a layperson) was also a member of the Sanhedrin.⁴ Clearly, at least by public consensus, Nicodemus was a man of deep learning and religious gravitas.⁵ The painter accepts as obvious that it takes a long time to become learned, so he had to paint Nicodemus as an old man. Learning is a work, the fruit of a long, consistent application of attention by a person, but wisdom is not a work, something that a person can make happen. And the proof of this is that it can come to those very young.⁶ Wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit, appearing when a person trusts God, letting God have him or her. Age has little to do with it. Our author writes:

Notice the hunched back of Nicodemus, a consequence of his long years of leaning over biblical scrolls, studying them, searching the Scriptures and the meaning of the Jewish laws and the commentaries on them. Yet for all his learning, Nicodemus cannot figure out why Jesus, who was so much younger than he, was convincingly wiser than he was. He should have been the one teaching Jesus and not the other way around.


Second, notice how Jesus’ chest is lit up (the heart-light burns within Him)⁸, which light splashes up onto His thoughtful face. But why He is lit up is worth pondering. For all the grief that Jesus had had to endure from the learned men of Judaism, from his elders, even from his own family,⁹ I am wondering whether it might have meant a great deal to Jesus finally to be respected, to be engaged as an equal by an approved expert, who finally, and without testing Jesus, humbly asked: “How can this be?” Nicodemus genuinely wanted to understand. Perfect; finally. Perhaps his lit-up chest reveals how much this conversation meant to Jesus.

3. HOW TRUTH IS TO BE LEARNT

1. Oh, to be one of those to whom truth communicates itself directly—not by means of symbols and words, whose meaning changes with time, but in its very nature! Our own estimate, our own way of looking at things, is always putting us in the wrong, by taking the short view. And here are we, splitting hairs about all sorts of mysterious problems which do not concern us—we shall not be blamed, at our judgement, for having failed to solve them. Strange creatures that we are, we forget the questions which really matter to us, matter vitally, and concentrate, of set purpose, on what is mere curiosity and waste of time. So clear-sighted we are, and so blind!

2. Why should we be concerned to divide up things into “classes” and “families”? We get away from all this tangle of guesswork, when once the Eternal Word speaks to us. From him alone all creation takes its origin, and therefore all creation has but one voice for us; he, who is its origin, is also its interpreter. Without him, nobody can understand it or form a true judgement about it. Until all things become One for you, traced to One source and seen in One act of vision, you cannot find anchorage for the heart, or rest calmly in God. O God, you are the truth; unite me to yourself by an act of unfailing love! I am so tired of reading about this and that, being lectured to about this and that, when all that I want, all that I long for, is to be found in you. If only they would hold their tongues, these learned folk! If only the whole of creation would be silent in your presence, and you, you alone, speak to me!

3. Once a man is integrated, once his inner life becomes simplified, all of a piece, he begins to attain a richer and deeper knowledge—quite effortlessly, because the intellectual light he receives comes from above. Freedom of heart is his, and simplicity of intention, and fixity of resolve, and he finds that he is no longer distracted by a variety of occupations; he acts, now, only for God’s glory, and does his best to get rid of all self-seeking. There is no worse enemy to your freedom and your peace of mind than the undisciplined affections of your own heart. Really good and holy people plan out beforehand in their minds how they are to behave in given circumstances; the course of their lives does not sweep them away into following their lower instincts, they shape it for themselves, according to the dictates of right reason. To be sure, the conquest of self demands the hardest struggle of all; but this has got to be our real business in life, the conquest of self—no day passed without beating our own record, without gaining fresh ground.

4. We find no absolute perfection in this world; always there is a background of imperfection behind our achievement; and so it is that our guesses at the truth can never be more than light obscured by shadow. The humble man’s knowledge of himself is a surer way to God than any deep researches into truth. No reason why we should quarrel with learning, or with any straightforward pursuit of knowledge; it is all good as far as it goes, and part of God’s plan. But always what we should prize most is a clear conscience, and holiness of life. How is it that there are so many people who put knowledge first, instead of conduct? It means that they are constantly at fault and achieve little—sometimes next to nothing. If only these people would take as much trouble to weed out their imperfections, and to cultivate good qualities, as they take over the learned theses they propound, we should hear less about sins and scandals, less about lax behaviour in religious houses. After all, when the day of judgement comes, we shall be examined about what we have done, not about what we have read; whether we have lived conscientiously, not whether we have turned fine phrases. Where are they now, Doctor This and Professor That, whom you used to hear so much about when they were alive, and at the height of their reputation? They have handed over their chairs to other men, who probably never waste a thought on them; while they lived, they counted for something, now they are never mentioned.

5. So soon it passes, our earthly renown. Well for them, if they had practised what they taught; then indeed they would have studied to good purpose. How often the worldly pursuit of useless knowledge brings men to ruin, by distracting their attention from God’s service! They must play the great man, they will not be content with a humble part, and it only leads to frustration. True greatness can only be reckoned in terms of charity; the really great man is one who doesn’t think much of himself and doesn’t think much of rank or precedence either. The only clear-sighted man is one who treats all earthly achievements as dirt, because he wants to win Christ; the only educated man is one who has learned to abandon his own will and do God’s will instead.

Point One
 
What could our author mean when he writes of his desire that each of us “be one of those to whom truth communicates itself directly—not by means of symbols and words”? But is it not only through language (images and symbols and words and grammar and syntax) that we are able to think our way to the truth of things?

What kind of school would it be that had classrooms in which teachers never communicated “by means of symbols and words”?! Honestly, I am now enchanted by the thought of classrooms loud with silence, in which there were no words spoken or written, no gestures made. Utter stillness … letting the “truth communicate itself directly” to each person, and through each to the others. What would we know after a day of classes like that?

The Trinity, by deliberate choice and with stunning self-effacement, communicated itself directly to us by becoming one of us, appearing in our human nature for the sake of establishing friendship with us.


God did not send a book of crucial ideas such that we might study hard and learn how to get the right answers all the time. God, instead, chose to build friendship with us – to “communicate directly” through God’s own divine and human natures: “Oh, to be one of those to whom truth communicates itself directly” – so that we might communicate ourselves directly to each other: “Love one another as [i.e., in the way that] I have loved you.”

Point Two

What our author understood and which he was certain that many among the learned had forgotten or had never been taught in the first place is that there are different kinds of truth (which is not the same thing as different truths – the toxic conviction of Relativists¹¹). Our author is emphasizing in this chapter the first and foundational kind of truth, which is living in a relationship of a particular kind, to which the Gospel of John refers constantly using the verb “to abide”.

How can one understand this? Consider how it is when a personal relationship of yours has gone bad, one up close and central in your life (i.e., you could not know the meaning of your life without him or her in it). When you both are out of sorts, even suffering a serious rift (and you hope only a temporary one), have you noticed how this rupture directly affects your ability to think clearly about anything?

This is not about one’s brain going wrong; it is about how one’s lack of love directly conditions his or her mind’s ability to think and to judge and to decide correctly. (Lack of love and its ill effects on our ability to reason is the oldest form of “brain fog.”) As a result, you each regularly misinterpret what the other says; you both cease to listen to and hear each other; and, more interestingly, you each begin to feel that the world has gone bad, has nothing faithful or true in it … which of course is patently¹² false. Love is the light of the mind.
 
This is what our author in chapter three wants us to understand: our capacity to know the truth about anything is deeply conditioned by how our personal relationship with God and with our closest friends is being experienced by us.¹³


Our author is particularly nettled,¹⁵ as Jesus was too, by the religiously learned, when they had replaced a deep, searching personal relationship with God for prodigious knowledge about God. Think of how a spouse may know everything about his or her spouse but has lost a feel for, a practice of, a real relationship with the other. Our author insists:

Point Three

The crisis of Truth in this American moment has little to do with our intellects; rather it has everything to do with our loss of commitment to friendships, built in the way the Son of God became human to show us how to do … thus, the imitation of Christ.

Those with no capacity for friendship will be compelled by so lethal a self-harm to make up truth, the truth they want, because they are unable to know what is true, have lost their ability, or will, to tell the truth. They splutter and gibber¹⁶ words “that seem to work.” The biblical Psalmist often references persons like this.



Genuine friendship comes first; access to truth (the proper functioning of the intellect and will) comes second. This is what is meant that love is the most practical thing:

Have you ever seriously considered how your capacity for friendship, genuine, well-built friendship, directly conditions the degree of your intellectual brilliance and dependable judgment?

¹ Grove Art Online (Oxford), article by Ilene Susan Fort: Tanner, Henry Ossawa (21 June 1859 – Paris, 25 May 1937) - American painter. He was one of the foremost African American artists, achieving an international reputation in the early years of the 20th century for his religious paintings. The son of an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop, he studied art with Thomas Eakins from 1880 to 1882 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He then worked in Philadelphia and Atlanta, GA, where he ran a photography studio and taught at Clark College. He also exhibited in New York and Philadelphia and attracted several patrons who sponsored him to study abroad. … To assure the accuracy of his biblical scenes, Tanner travelled to Palestine in 1897 and 1898, studying the terrain, people, costumes, and customs.

² To be able to zoom in on the painting: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicodemus_Visiting_Jesus,_by_Henry_Ossawa_Tanner_adjusted3.jpg

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 3:11–12.

⁴ Sanhedrin - The Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, as it appears in the gospels, Josephus, and rabbinic literature, has been understood alternately as the high priests’ political council, the highest legislative body in Jewish Palestine, the supreme judicial court, the grand jury for important cases, the council of the Pharisaic school, and the final court of appeals in deciding halakic questions. [Anthony J. Saldarini, “Sanhedrin,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 975.]

⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “gravity” – I.3. – 1509 – Weighty dignity; reverend seriousness; serious or solemn conduct or demeanour befitting a ceremony, an office, etc.; staidness. In later use with wider application: seriousness or sobriety (of conduct, bearing, speech, temperament, etc.); opposed to levity and gaiety.

⁶ One of The Night School guests of the Faber Institute was a little girl named Anna, whose story is recounted by her friend Fynn in Mister God, This is Anna (1974). The story covers her short life from when she met Fynn at 4-years old, a street urchin to when she died at 7-years old. Her wisdom was incandescent. Then there are the countless thousands over the course of human history who were vastly wise, who never had a single day of formal education.

⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 3:1–2.

⁸ “heart-light” – Recall an experience of joy. Do you notice how it fills one’s chest with warmth?

⁹ See Mark 3: 21 When his relations heard of this, they set out to take charge of him; they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ [The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mk 3:21.]

¹⁰ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 14:6–7. Notice that He does not say, “I know the Way; I know the Truth and Life”.

¹¹ The Oxford English Dictionary at “relativism” – Originally and chiefly Philosophy. 1. 1865 – Any theory or doctrine asserting that knowledge, truth, morality, etc., are relative to situations, rather than being absolute. See cultural, ethical, historical relativism.

¹² The Oxford English Dictionary at “patent” – More generally: open, widespread, unobstructed. 1. II.4.a. - a1398 – Of a fact, quality, phenomenon, etc.: clear, evident, obvious.

¹³ “is being experienced by us” – God never gets out of sorts with us or fails to communicate openly and honestly with us. It is we humans who fall out of sorts with each other, which will always result in us falling out of sorts with God.

¹⁴ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn 3:9–10.

 ¹⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to nettle” – 2.a. - c1450 – transitive. To irritate, vex, provoke, annoy. Frequently in pass with at, by, with, etc. Also, occasionally intransitive.

¹⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary at “to gibber” – 1604 - intransitive. To speak rapidly and inarticulately; to chatter, talk nonsense. Said also of an ape.

¹⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ps 2:1–3.

¹⁸ An exhortation written by Fr. Joseph Whelan, SJ, but made famous by Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, Superior General of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits).

Dirck van Delen (1604/5-1671) – “Church Interior with the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican of Luke 18:9-14 (1653)”, in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.¹

A couple things to notice in the painting. (1) Did you notice the shadows? See the one attached to the Pharisee and the one attached to the Publican/Tax Collector. So subtle! The shadows show us that the Pharisee has turned himself away from the light; the Publican faces the light. Eloquent; elegant. (2) It is essential for the self-impressed, because of their hollowness, successfully to secure and to maintain the (undivided) attention (the envy; the adulation, the fear, etc.) of others. We get the strong impression that the two other men (the one over there advancing from the right; the other peeking out from behind the pillar, over there in the background) are looking at the Pharisee, not at the Publican. The Pharisee pretends not to notice.

CHAPTER 2 - ON TAKING A LOW VIEW OF ONESELF

1. As for knowledge, it comes natural to all of us to want it; but what can knowledge do for us, without the fear of God? Give me a plain, unpretentious farmhand, content to serve God; there is more to be made of him than of some conceited University professor who forgets that he has a soul to save, because he is so busy watching the stars. To know yourself—that means feeling your own worthlessness, losing all taste for human praise. If my knowledge embraced the whole of creation, what good would it do me in God’s sight? It is by my actions that he will judge me.

2. Why not take a rest from this exaggerated craving for mere knowledge which only has the effect of distracting and deluding us? People are so fond of passing for learned men, and being congratulated on their wisdom—yes, but what a lot of knowledge there is that contributes nothing to our souls’ welfare! And there can be no wisdom in spending yourself on pursuits which are not going to promote your chances of salvation. All the talk in the world won’t satisfy the soul’s needs; nothing but holiness of life will set your mind at rest, nothing but a good conscience will help you to face God unashamed.

3. The wider, the more exact your learning, the more severe will be your judgement, if it has not taught you to live holily. No art, no science should make a man proud of possessing it; such gifts are a terrifying responsibility. Meanwhile, however well satisfied you are with your own skill or intelligence, never forget how much there is that remains unknown to you. Let us have no airs of learning; own up to your ignorance; what is the use of crowing over some rival, when you can point to any number of Doctors and Masters who can beat you at your own game? If you want to learn an art worth knowing, you must set out to be unknown, and to count for nothing.

4. There is no lesson so profound or so useful as this lesson of self-knowledge and of self-contempt. Claim nothing for yourself, think of others kindly and with admiration; that is the height of wisdom, and its masterpiece. Never think yourself better than the next man, however glaring his faults, however grievous his offences; you are in good dispositions now, but how long will they last? Tell yourself, “We are frail, all of us, but none so frail as I”.

Point One

Someone mentioned to me recently that he finds that my essays are “loaded”, that they contain so much that it takes work to “understand everything”. (I do listen closely to and consider what I hear from my readers.) Perhaps I could make two points that I think may illuminate my method and assist my readers. These points will also assist a reader in learning how to read The Imitation of Christ.

First, I want my readers to have to work to understand. It is only when one must reach for understanding, to think and then to think again, that the Holy Spirit has a real chance to give him or her greater understanding. Only when one is pushed beyond his or her grasp does he or she become teachable. And we each must learn, and constantly re-learn, to accept with humility how small is our understanding. Second, I do not expect my readers to understand every point that I make. No. But if even a single point lays hold of my reader and begins its good work inside him or her, and he or she lets it work, then he or she has successfully read the essay.

Consider this analogy. If you walk into a great Catholic cathedral, then you quickly notice how crammed that space is with, well, with so much! There is the architecture itself, the paintings, the statues, the stained-glass windows, the shifting nature of the light, the Stations of the Cross, the carvings, the patterns on the floor, all the furniture and other objects placed up in the sanctuary, and especially the Crucifix. So much; too much! But the point is not for you coming into that space to “figure it all out”. No, you soon pay attention to one thing and focus on it. God meets you there.

St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, in the Second Annotation writes (in part): “For, a person … finds something that makes the meaning a little clearer or brings it a little more home to him or her, whether this comes through his or her own reasoning, or because his or her intellect is enlightened by the divine Power. … It is not knowing much [i.e. a lot of things or grasping every point in a text] but catching on to one thing and relishing it interiorly; this is what contents and satisfies the soul.”

Point Two

When the Gospels reference “the Pharisees”, it is referencing a distinct religious association of men (laypersons; not Priests) operating in the Judaism of Jesus’ time. But the Pharisees are merely one historical example of a kind of person who has appeared always and everywhere in human history. We call it pharisaism,⁵ which could more fairly be referenced as persons who have become distorted, or “bent” (a favorite expression of C.S. Lewis), by Vainglory, a particularly popular form of the capital sin of Pride. A vainglorious person becomes especially difficult to endure when he or she models a religious form of this blight.
 
The author of The Imitation of Christ in this chapter is getting at this, exposing this competitiveness in us to appear smarter, better, more esteemed, more noticed, better looking, more worthy to be praised than others. The key words here are “more … than”. A person caught in a “more than … less than” world of his or her making will be pharisaical. Our author writes:

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity writes:


Point Three

Our author writes: “If you want to learn an art worth knowing, you must set out to be unknown, and to count for nothing.”⁷ In our psychologized American culture, we so often talk about a person’s need for “self-esteem” (as if it were a “right” owed us by others) and talk about our kids as “special”. We are furious when we feel that we or they are being ignored or slighted. But we rarely address the far more powerful and penetrating significance of humility. To us Americans it seems just plain wrong to “think of ourselves as low” or to “count ourselves as nothing”. After all, we Americans are notoriously convinced that we are exceptional .⁸ Our author insists: “There is no lesson so profound or so useful as this lesson of self-knowledge and of self-contempt.”
 

I recall what C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, in chapter 8, which he titles: “The Great Sin”.
The goal is not to speak of ourselves derogatorily¹⁰ (self-contemptuously) or to pretend to be humble (the famous example of Uriah Heep of David Copperfield [1850] by Charles Dickens), because both are sins against the truth of one’s life. One is still in the trap of a “more than … less than” world.
 
No. What an imitation of Jesus will get us, through the influence of the Holy Spirit, is a greater and more comprehensive attention to others, to the otherness of others. We will be freed from seeing people competitively (i.e., as a threat) and begin to perceive them contemplatively, loving their otherness, admiring what is best in them.

One of the most famous and incisive remarks ever made about humility came from C.S. Lewis. I think it likely that he formulated it from having read The Imitation of Christ “, about which book he wrote that he had read it “pretty nearly every day.” He wrote: “Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself; it means thinking of yourself less.”