All that Belongs to Him

“The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.”  St. Mark 10:39

Jesus often spoke in phrases heavy with meaning.  He used images freighted with symbolic power, ambiguous turns of phrase that force the listener to slow down and consider.  Meditation--a word that comes from the Latin for what a cow does with her cud-- is not merely a pious practice.  We must often chew long on these phrases to draw out their full meaning. 

That can be difficult for us in a world where people try to conduct national policy debates in 280 characters or less.  By and large, we long for the single-page memo, the objective facts distilled out from the spin, the bullet points drained of their adjectives. Many of us seem to be drowning in a sea of words as it is. We don’t think we have time for beautiful rhetoric or the probing syllables of poetry. 

But we can miss a great deal if we rushly too quickly to the point, especially when the words spoken to us are about those things at the core of our existence. 

Ponder: "suffering with him"

“To be a fellow heir of Christ means to be glorified with him, but he will be glorified with him who by suffering for him suffers with him.”

Ambrose, Letter 35.4

Ponder: "the secret of thanksgiving"

“If the soul very early learnt to say, ‘thank God,’ its troubles would be almost at an end.  There is a homely principle, if a motor skids, turn it in that direction.  If when troubles come, we turn them into thanksgiving our soul returns to balance at once. There will be sweetness, strength, honey in the mouth of the lion. There is no greater secret than the secret of thanksgiving, even thanksgiving for everything except our failures.  Even then, we may thank God for the humiliation failures bring.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 56.

Ponder: "a good servant for the soul"

“The more we shun suffering, the more we come under its thrall, we become its slave.  To seek it, or at least to endure it, and to love it not for its own sake but for the sake of the good things that may be wrought through it, that is to become its master. Suffering that is such a bad master makes a good slave, a good servant for the soul in love with Jesus Crucified.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 73.

Ponder: "the world is being found out at last"

“Many are now [1932] suffering the loss of earthly goods.  What a most glorious occasion of thanksgiving! It is to me great anguish to see so many people suffering in that way. But there is also a deep sense of thanksgiving that the world is being found out at last. We are almost heartbroken to see the Prodigal Son herding with swine, but rejoicing that he knows swill is no food for man and swine no company for gentlemen. There is some chance of the poor prodigal thinking of his father’s home and turning back. To go back is often spiritual progress. It hardly seems right to sing ‘Te Deum,’ and yet deep down in our hearts there is gratitude to God that Mammon is at last revealing is essential cruelty and vulgarity, so that mankind in his utter destitution will see that the only thing sufficiently steadfast is Nazareth and the only God worth worshipping is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 57.

Ponder: "he that hath not suffered, what doth he know?"

“One of the early Fathers said, ‘He that hath not suffered, what doth he know?’   There is a lack even of knowledge in the one who has not dealt rightly with some kind of suffering.  Some people are never themselves till they have had great sorrow.  Sorrow must enter in.  It is not the final thing.  But something has happened to human beings, so that now it is an absolute necessity.  Some impurities have to be washed away by suffering.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 37-8.

Ponder: "outside God, there is no hope"

“Outside God there is no hope.  Remove God and you have not touched one of the sufferings of the world.  You have perhaps added one.  You have not touched one of the pains and pangs.  You have only removed the One who might help.  Their disease is untouched.  You have taken away the remedy.  Outside Christ, the problem of suffering is insoluble.  The dethrone God in a throe of anger and bewilderment is merely to hasten death by indeliberate suicide.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 17.

Ponder: "he meant to give copious redemption"

“[Thomas Aquinas] says that the very least one of these sufferings was of itself suffering enough to redeem the human race from all sin (that is woven into the Adoro Te).  But, says St. Thomas, it was fitting that He should have to endure all at once.  One suffering would have sufficed for our Redemption, but it would not suffice for the Love of the Redeemer.  He meant to give copious Redemption.  He willed that the beaker should brim over.  He gave a thousand Redemptions all in one.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 79.

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Devastating and Glorious

God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.  II Cor. 5:19

If you’ve ever read through one of the Gospels from beginning to end in a single setting, maybe what surprised you most was how long the passion story, the account of Jesus’ suffering and death is.  In what is probably the earliest Gospel, St. Mark, 45% of the text is of the last week of Jesus’ life.  Regular worshippers know to prepare themselves for Palm Sunday, because when we read the passion, it will take quite a long time.

The Gospels are unlike any other kind of literature that predates them in the way they focus in on this final (or properly almost final) part of the life of their subject.  We have some deathbed scenes for other important figures in the Bible, and the classical biographies usually include an account of the death. There is generally in ancient literature a sense that the death reveals the character, but the passions of the Gospel stories are really unprecedented.

Praying the Passion with St. Bridget: Weeping with the Pain of the World

“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.”  Isaiah 53:5

You may think it odd to begin a presentation about a famous set of prayers by a Swedish nun by spending time with a German painting.  But this painting was directly inspired by the devotional writings of Bridget of Sweden, especially her Revelations, a book of visions of the crucified Christ.  Bridget never saw this painting, as it was completed 130 years after her death.  But had she been able to paint, I believe she would have created something just like this.

This is the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthaeus Gruenewald in 1515 for the hospital chapel at Monastery of St. Anthony in a village near Colmar in Alsace, now a part of France.  One of the masters of the Mannerist style, this is Gruenewald’s greatest work.  A similar “Small Crucifixion” is in the National Gallery.

The monks who served at the monastery of St. Anthony were a community dedicated to treating those who suffered from the plague and ergotism.  There was no remedy, and the monks’ mission was to provide physical care and spiritual consolation.  The painting appropriately reveals Jesus who suffered as we suffer and who shows the extent of God’s love through offering Himself to destruction.  Jesus is present in our pains and reveals His mercy as we face the certain prospect of death.

Ponder: "in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ"

“This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the centre of the Church’s pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them.   Our commitment does not consist exclusively in activities or programmes of promotion and assistance; what the Holy Spirit mobilizes is not an unruly activism, but above all an attentiveness which considers the other “in a certain sense as one with ourselves”. This loving attentiveness is the beginning of a true concern for their person which inspires me effectively to seek their good. This entails appreciating the poor in their goodness, in their experience of life, in their culture, and in their ways of living the faith. True love is always contemplative, and permits us to serve the other not out of necessity or vanity, but rather because he or she is beautiful above and beyond mere appearances: “The love by which we find the other pleasing leads us to offer him something freely”.  The poor person, when loved, “is esteemed as of great value”,  and this is what makes the authentic option for the poor differ from any other ideology, from any attempt to exploit the poor for one’s own personal or political interest."

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 197-198.

Ponder: "the last treasure of those who have nothing left"

“When I traveled to countries that were going through violent, profound crises, sufferings and tragic miseries, such as Syria, Libya, Haiti, the Philippines after the devastating typhoon, I observed that silent prayer is the last treasure of those who have nothing left. Silence is the last trench where no one can enter, the one room in which to remain at peace, the place where suffering for a moment lays down its weapons. In suffering, let us hide ourselves in the fortress of prayer.   Then the power of the jailers is no longer important; criminals can destroy everything furiously, but it is impossible for them to break in and enter into the silence, the heart, the conscience of a human being who prays and nestles in God. The beating of a silent heart, hope, faith and trust in God remain unsinkable. Outside, the world may become a field of ruins, but inside our soul, in the deepest silence, God keeps watch.”

Robert Cardinal Sarah, “CardinalRobert Sarah on the ‘Strength of Silence’ and the Dictatorship of Noise.” The Catholic World Report. 3 Oct 2016.

Ponder: "Thou didst stumble to a throne"

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. 

“Jesus of the Scars” by Edward Shillito, qtd. in Liz Hoare, “A Reflection on Philippians 2:1-18.”

Ponder: "only Christ suffers in his face"

"[Separation between face and body] is a main point in one of European culture's principal iconographic traditions, the depiction of Christian martyrdom, with its astounding schism between what is inscribed on the face and what is happening to the body.  Those innumerable images of Saint Sebastian, Saint Agatha, Saint Lawrence (but not of Christ himself), with the face demonstrating its effortless superiority to the atrocious things that are being inflicted down there.  Below, the ruins of the body.Above, a person incarnated in the face, who looks away, usually up, not registering pain or fear; already elsewhere.  Only Christ, both Son of Man and Son of God, suffers in his face, has his Passion."

Susan Sontag, qtd, in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (2015), 81.

Ponder: "those old songs don't sugarcoat anything"

"But Ralph always reserved time in each show for a few of the older songs that he would sing himself.  Those were the moments that audience members were most likely to remember afteward.  They were a reminder of a time and place where death and backbreaking work were not hidden out of sight, but were a constant presence.
"I don't put nothing on the song," Ralph told me. "I just sing it the way I feel it.  I just open my mouth and however it sounds, that's the way it comes out.  I try to do it the best I can, but I just try to feel it...Those old songs don't sugarcoat anything.  You don't hear that kind of singing much anymore, but when I was growing up, it was mostly what I heard.  That sound's not spread out everywhere; it's just here in these mountains."

Geoffrey Himes, "If Mount Rushmore Were in Appalachia, This Face Would Be On It."  The Washington Post 25 Jun. 2016, C2.

Ponder: "by his patience, laid low the cruel one"

"Thus blessed Job, when stricken with the loss of his substance and with the death of his children, forasmuch as he turned the force of his anguish into praise of his Creator, exclaiming The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away; as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done; blessed be the Name of the Lord: by his humility, struck down the enemy in his pride, and by his patience, laid low the cruel one.  Let us never imagine that our combatant received wounds and yet inflicted none.  For whatever words of patience he gave forth to the praise of God, when he was stricken, he as it were hurled so many darts into the breast of his adversary, and inflicted much sorer wounds than he underwent, for by his affliction he lost the things of earth, but by bearing his affliction with humility, he multiplied his heavenly blessings."
Gregory the Great, Morals in Job, II.21

Emmanuel: God with us.

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the Nations and their Saviour, come to save us, O Lord our God.

O Emmanuel—it is a resonant name, “God and man hyphenated,” one author calls it.[1]  It means, “God is with us,” and the One whose coming we expect, Jesus the Messiah, His name, Saint Matthew tells us, is Emmanuel.[2]  You know this name perhaps, from the prophecy in Isaiah chapter 7, which we have just heard.  But you probably know it best of all from the great Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”  It is a translation of a medieval Latin hymn, which is in turn a versification of a series of beautiful antiphons.  These are one sentence anthems designed to be sung before and after Mary’s Song, the Magnificat at Evening Prayer during the last eight days before Christmas.  In that series of antiphons, and in the original Latin hymn, O Emmanuel is the last one, the antiphon for the Eve of Christmas Eve.  But when the great John Mason Neale was translating the hymn, he put it first instead, and so we know the whole hymn by that immortal plea, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”

It was a wise choice, I think, for it is the finest of the antiphons, and in a way it is the summary of all of them.  The antiphons and the verses of the hymn chart a series of images, drawn deep from the well of Old Testament prophecy, mostly from Isaiah, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament.  O Wisdom, O Lord of Might, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Dayspring, O Desire of Nations: but together, in their prayers for wisdom, for protection, for fulfillment and deliverance and peace—all of them can be summarized, O Emmanuel, O God be with us.