Tag: Friendship

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St. Alphonsus Liguori: Living in Friendship with God-Pt. 2

In Part One, we saw how, though not without difficulty, St. Alphonsus left the potential power, wealth, and prestige that were before him, together with many “friendships” of utility behind, to pursue authentic and lasting friendship with God. We also discussed how, for Alphonsus, the first means of living in friendship with God is detachment. It is important to remember that detachment for Alphonsus does not consist in a flight from the world, but rather the right ordering of one’s loves in accordance with the twofold command of love. Living and growing in friendship with God thus becomes about learning how to live in a detached manner, and Alphonsus provides us with the means of doing so in his description of the second through fifth means of acquiring divine love.

The second means of acquiring the love of God in Alphonsus’ thought is meditation “on the Passion of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring it, 13). Alphonsus’ father Giuseppe himself had a deep devotion to the Passion of Christ, and so meditation on Christ’s saving work was something he cultivated within his children at a very early age (“Introduction,” 11-12). It is thus no surprise that the Passion of Christ was to be at the center of Alphonsus’ theological thought and pastoral work throughout his life. Pastorally, this is most clearly seen in that Alphonsus is the founder of the religious Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, more popularly known as the Redemptorists. The charism of the Redemptorists is labor among the poor, neglected, and spiritually abandoned, which as we saw in Part One, was a part of Alphonsus’ life from a young age as a member of the Congregazione dei Dottori. As such, by cultivating their charism, the Redemptorists become the presence of the Redeemer to those in need.

As a brief aside, this aspect of Alphonsus’ life and work very clearly highlights the importance of the life of prayer and lived spirituality in the Christian home. One never knows the impact of how we form our children will have in the life of the Church and on the world at large. What was simply part of Giuseppe’s own spirituality and which he instilled in his son Alphonsus, contributed not only to the holiness of his son, but all those who joined the congregation he established, which counts 17 members who have been beatified or canonized, and the countless individuals and communities which these religious have served throughout the history of their existence, now present in 82 different countries around the world (“Who are the Redemptorists”).

Aside from working to allow the life of the Redeemer to live in and through him and the lives of his confreres, Alphonsus dedicated one of his most well known works, The Passion and the Death of Jesus Christ, to meditation on the Passion of the Redeemer, and he recommends it as an aid for this practice to his readers (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 13). As a good student of St. Thomas Aquinas, Alphonsus had learned from the Angelic Doctor that “Whosoever wishes to live with perfection should do nothing other than to despise what Christ despises, and desire what Christ desires. Not a single example of virtue is lacking from the example of the Cross” (Conferences on the Apostles’ Creed, 6.2). Among the virtues named by Aquinas in the same work is that of detachment (Ibid., 6.2.5). Aquinas and Alphonsus are so insistent on the importance of detachment because it is this virtue that enables the human person to live out its nature properly. And, it is on the cross that Jesus most perfectly reveals that at its very core, human life has been created to be nothing else than a complete response of love to the Love which called it into existence (see, St. John Paul II, Redemptoris Hominis, 8 & 10). For Alphonsus, meditating on Christ’s Passion awakens this love which is so natural to the human creature yet which lies dormant inside the sin addled soul. Accordingly, echoing the above-mentioned sentiment that God’s demands of complete love seem extreme, Alphonsus asks,

who, upon seeing a crucified God dying for our love, could resist loving him? Those thorns cry out too loudly, those nails, that cross, those wounds, and that blood, all seeking to make us love him who has loved us so much. Our heart is too little with which to love this God who is so in love with us. To match the love of Jesus Christ would take another God to die for his love” (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 4.2).

Alphonsus is convinced that if the world does not love God, it is because the world has not spent enough time reflecting on the unspeakable love God has shown them in the cross of Christ (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 13).

It is here that the Eucharist finds its place in Alphonsus’ thought. Alphonsus refers to the Eucharist as the “sacrament of love” and the “pledge of love” (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 2.3). For Alphonsus, this is an appropriate name for this central sacrament of the Church’s life, because it most perfectly displays and makes present the love of the Divine Groom for His Bride the Church. Just as the true lover never ceases to demonstrate his love for the beloved, so too, Alphonsus writes that Christ

could not satisfy his love by giving himself entirely to the human race by his Incarnation and by his Passion, dying for all people. He sought to find a way to give himself entirely to each one of us in particular; and so he instituted the sacrament of the altar in order to unite himself fully with each one of us: ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them’ (Jn 6:56)” (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 2.8).

It is, of course, this sacrament which is also the source and summit of a life lived in friendship with God, for it unties us to the very life of God, giving us the strength to live a life wholly for God by inflaming “our souls with divine love” (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 2.13).

Only the soul so inflamed with divine love in the Eucharist is prepared to put the third means of acquiring divine love into practice: uniting oneself in everything to the divine will. Echoing St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Alphonsus writes that “the one who loves God perfectly can only will what God wills” (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 16). For Alphonsus, this means above all, in accepting whatever comes our way in life as taking place by the will of God, either because God directly wills it (active will) or permits it to happen (passive will) (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 16). Therefore, it is living by the firm conviction that “all things work together for good for those who love God” as St. Paul teaches (Rom. 8:28). Of course, the exemplar par excellence here, once again, is Christ, who on the night of His Passion prayed in the garden, “Father, not what I will, but what you will” (Luke 22:42). However, in the same manner, Alphonsus undoubtedly has the figure who is the subject of one of his other well-known works, Mary, the Mother of God. In Mary Alphonsus finds one who is a living fiat, as it were, demonstrated most especially at the Annunciation. In his Glories of Mary, Alphonsus writes that when the Angel Gabriel announced to her the intention of God for His Son to be incarnate in her, Mary, while acknowledging her nothingness in relation to the God Who IS, “yet all inflamed at the same time by the ardor of her desire to unite herself thus still more closely with God, and abandoning herself entirely to the Divine will, she replies, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’” (The Glories of Mary, Discourse IV). Alphonsus dedicated The Glories of Mary to his Redeemer, Jesus Christ, asking Him to “accept this little homage of the love I bear Thee and thy beloved Mother” (The Glories of Mary, “The Author’s Prayer”). In other words, this work itself was one of Alphonsus’ ways of echoing Mary’s fiat according to his own state of life.

Accordingly, what we see in this element of Alphonsus’ thought is central to his conception of what the human person has been created to be. In Part One we saw that detachment was central to living according to our nature as creatures created in the imago Dei, and above that it is Christ who reveals what living according to this nature entails most perfectly. Here, his theological anthropology gains a bit more specificity. The human creature, for Alphonsus, is meant to be a living fiat to God as exemplified by Jesus and Mary in the Passion and Annunciation, respectively. The five means of acquiring the love of God as articulated by Alphonsus has the formation of the individual into a living fiat as their aim.

In short, in everything we do from the most significant to the most menial tasks of our day, must be done so as to bring us into greater conformity with God by offering ourselves wholly to Him in imitation of His Son’s complete self-offering which embodies His “Yes!” to the will of the Father. This becomes clearest in Alphonsus’ thought in the fourth and fifth means of acquiring divine love. The first of these he calls “mental prayer” (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 19). The term is a bit misleading. What Alphonsus has in mind here is something like lectio divina, a meditation on the eternal truths at the center of the Christian faith, as communicated by Scripture and made manifest in the life of the Church and her saints. He writes that if we do not take time to meditate upon these truths, we will have great difficulty detaching ourselves from everything so as to “give all our love to God” (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 19). Meditation upon these eternal truths thus enables us to keep in mind the fabric of the universe and God’s ordering thereof, and our place and purpose therein in accordance with what has already been discussed.

For Alphonsus, however, living in friendship with God must never become an intellectual endeavor, it must be actively embodied. Thus, he insists that faith “makes us believe not just with the intellect but also with the will” (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 15.2), and cautions those who spend a great deal of time in study that study alone cannot make one holy (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 8.23). The best way for continually living out our friendship with God for Alphonsus is prayer, which he names as his final means for acquiring divine love. As he sees it, prayer is absolutely necessary for salvation. This is the case for two primary reasons. First, Alphonsus writes that “Without the aid of grace we can do nothing good; ‘without me you can do nothing’ (Jn 15:5)” (Prayer, the Great Means of Salvation, Ch. 1). We must pray unceasingly, as St. Paul teaches us (1 Thess 5:16-18), because prayer which is already God’s gift of grace to us, is the vehicle by which we obtain the grace to transform all that we say and do throughout the day into a spiritual sacrifice to God (A Way of Conversing with God Continually as a Friend, 29; cf. Rom. 12:1). Secondly, prayer makes it possible to stay in constant communication with God, and to share our day with Him.

His writings on prayer demonstrate that Alphonsus was a man whose mind was continually turned to God, and that it is by prayer that he lived in such a manner. How do we do the same? For Alphonsus it is really quite simple, it is only a matter of learning to see reality correctly. Once we do, everything we lay our eyes upon becomes a reminder to turn our thoughts to God in prayer. He writes this quite plainly, “try to turn your every sight and sound in to an opportunity of raising your mind to God or of glancing into eternity. For example, when you see running water, reflect that your life too runs on its course and that death draws near” (A Way of Conversing with God Continually as a Friend, 31). Again, describing God as the ultimate and relentless lover, Alphonsus tells us that when we look upon the beauty of creation we should think, “how many beautiful creatures God has created for me in this world that I might love him!” (Ibid., 32). When we see the rich and powerful, although we might be tempted to envy their place in the world, Alphonsus tells us that if they cling to their earthly status, we ought to see it as an occasion to imitate Christ and be moved by compassion for them. Alphonsus writes,

When you see the great ones of this world rejoicing in their wealth or rank, take pity on their folly and say: God is enough for me. ‘Some are strong in chariots; some in horses; but we are strong in the name of the Lord, our God’ (Ps 20:8). Let them glory in such emptiness. I wish to glory only in God’s grace and God’s love” (A Way of Continually Conversing with God as a Friend, 31).

The sound of birds singing should motivate us to give continual praise to the Creator and the sound of the rooster be a reminder that we too, like Peter, have fallen short of the love of God for which we were made (Ibid., 33). It is here, then, that we find one of the most beautiful aspects of Alphonsus’ thought. Remember that Peter’s threefold denial in the courtyard, in Christ’s hands became the means of Peter’s growing closer to Him after the Resurrection, where on the shore of Lake Tiberius, he professed a threefold love of Christ (John 21:15-19). So too, for Alphonsus, each and every time we fall in sin, we must “immediately raise [our] eyes to God, make an act of love, and, confessing [our] fault, [we] may rest assured of pardon” (A Way of Conversing Continually with God as a Friend, 22). Alphonsus adds, “Say to God: ‘Master, the one you love is ill’ (Jn 11:3). The heart which you love is sick, is covered in sores” (Ibid.). If, in the hands of the Almighty, even our sins become the means of our healing and growth in holiness, there is simply nothing that cannot become the occasion for a prayer in Alphonsus’ mind.

See what he’s getting at here. All things are an occasion for lifting our hearts to converse with God because we were made for friendship with God. Just as we want to share everything with our intimate friends, good or bad, the mundane no less than the extraordinary, so our every experience ought to bring us into the presence of God to tell Him about it. To be sure, in a world so filled with noise, pain, suffering, disappointment in ourselves and in others, to live in such a way is no small task. Yet, as we have seen, such intimate friendship with God is precisely what we have been created for. Thus, we must also pray for the grace of prayer, the grace to be able to turn all that we see and hear into an occasion for lifting our hearts to God. Accordingly, Alphonsus bids us to go to God in all occasions with the utmost confidence. Not only has God created us for such intimacy, but when sin instilled the idea within us that God would have nothing to do with us, God sent His Son into the world. “In order to increase our confidence, God emptied himself, became nothing (Phil 2:7), humble to such an extent as to become human in order to converse with us like a friend (Bar 3:38)” (A Way of Continually Conversing with God as a Friend, 2). In this, God has made his desire to be on the most intimate terms with us in all things apparent. Therefore, if even our sins ought not keep us from continually conversing with God as a friend, then we ought to be no less confident about sharing every other single aspect of our days with him, the good and the bad alike. “Discuss all your business with God, your plans, your troubles, your fears—anything at all that concerns you. And do so with confidence, with your heart open wide.”  (A Way of Continually Conversing with God as a Friend, 8). We perhaps won’t find it too difficult to bring our concerns, anxieties, and troubles to God. After all, even the Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic conception of God is inclined to do so as was mentioned in Part One. Alphonsus knows this, and thus recognizes the irony that, while we will share with God our troubles, we are far less likely to share with God our joys. Thus, he writes:

When you receive some happy news, don’t act like some negligent people who run to God in times of difficulty but forget and ignore him when things are going well. You should be faithful to God as you would be to a friend who loves you and rejoices in your good fortune. Go to God and share your happiness with him, give him praise and thanks, recognize everything as a gift from his hands” (A Way of Continually Conversing with God as a Friend, 19).

This is perhaps the best indication that we are growing in friendship with God. Is there anything real friends like to share more than one another’s successes, triumphs, and joys? It is also here that we see how, contrary to the utilitarian type of friendships discussed in Part One, friendship with God has no utility. Rather, friendship with God finds its purpose in itself, and as the very aim of life, it transforms and orders all things to itself. Therefore, if we are to live in friendship with God, we must come to Him with our joys no less than our sorrows, knowing that He is the only source of the former, and our only consolation in the latter. By doing this we train ourselves for the life of Heaven, because, as Alphonsus reminds us, the saints in heaven occupy themselves only with God,” and in this they experience perfect happiness (A Way of Conversing Continually with God as a Friend, 38). Consequently, he tells us that while we are in this world, that we must strive to cooperate with God’s grace to make Him our only happiness, the only object of our affections, the only end of our desires and actions, until “you arrive at that eternal kingdom where your love will be entirely perfected and completed, and your desires will be perfectly fulfilled and satisfied” (A Way of Conversing with God Continually as a Friend, 38).

Your servant in Christ,

Tony

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FRESH Exemplars

St. Alphonsus Liguori: Living in Friendship with God-Pt. 1

Last year, hoping to fill in a gap in current research, a group of psychologists from Columbia University and Michigan State University, sought to investigate the “cultural moderators of the link between friendship and important outcomes” (Peiqi Lu, et. al., “Friendship Importance Around the World”). These researchers found that valuing friendships was correlated to personal health and well being, and higher levels of happiness especially in countries which tended to be more individualistic, such as the United States. One might think that the reason for this being the case is that friendship makes us less individualistic, however, that’s not how these researchers approached the topic. Instead, what they were really asking is, what is friendship good for? For these researches, the conclusion was that, while some friendships can be destructive due to negative influence, friendship is mostly good because it has a utility. Friendship is good because it is useful for the individual. Thus, the same study described how friendship provides a “sense of companionship,” “mitigate[s] feelings of loneliness,” and contributes “to our self-esteem and life satisfaction” (Ibid.). In sum, friendship is useful for many reasons and benefits the individual’s experience of life in many ways.

This is how many think and speak of God today. It is part and parcel of what Christian Smith refers to as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God is a friend who just wants us all to get along, for us to be happy, and doesn’t really put His two cents worth in to tell us what to do, but will intervene to help us when we face a problem (Christian Smith, “On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Factor Religious Faith”).

In contrast to this utilitarian understanding of friendship, C. S. Lewis writes that friendship is basically useless. “Friendship is unnecessary,” he writes, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself” (The Four Loves, 71). Lewis, however, is not discounting friendship, he is rather acknowledging its intrinsic goodness. For him, authentic friendships are not about what benefits can be derived therefrom; instead, following Aristotle, friendship is rather the result of pursuing something else. Accordingly, he writes “that is why those pathetic people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends” (The Four Loves, 66). This something else, for Lewis, is Truth (Ibid.). In fact, friendship is a tool of sorts for Lewis, but not for us. Rather, friendship is a manifestation of Divine Providence in our lives. He writes,

Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as revealing (The Four Loves, 89-90).

For Lewis, friendships draw us closer to God because authentic friendship exists among those who pursue God together. Accordingly, friendships give us a foretaste of eternal life. That is why Scripture speaks so sparingly of friendship with God. If it did so more often, we would be inclined to mistake friendship for the life of Heaven (The Four Loves, 88).

Lewis’ exploration of the love of Friendship (Greek philia) brings us to the doorstep of a central theme of the theology of St. Alphonsus Liguori. Of the approximately 110 works this Doctor of the Church has left us, one of the most celebrated is entitled “A Way of Conversing Continually with God as with a Friend.” As we will soon find out, while friendship with God certainly has the result of human flourishing, it is not because it contributes to a personal sense of self-satisfaction. Rather, this friendship, as Lewis describes, is really good for nothing. Friendship with God is about nothing else other than itself, and it is that Friendship for which we have been made and nothing less.

Alphonsus de Liguori was born in 1696 at his parents’ home “on the outskirts of Naples” (“Introduction,” Alphonsus de Liguori: Selected Writings, 12: The Classics of Western Spirituality Series). His father, Don Giuseppe Felix de Liguori was a commander in the Spanish navy, and his mother, Anna, was of the Cavalieri family, who could boast “a more authentic ancient lineage and nobility than the Liguoris” (Ibid., 11-12). Alphonsus was the eldest of eight children, and showed himself precocious in many areas as he entered school age. Don Giuseppe spared no expense on the young Alphonsus’ education. He hired tutors to educate Alphonsus in several languages, including Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, as well as in “history, mathematics, and the rudiments of Cartesian physics,” philosophy and psychology. In addition, “competent tutors” were hired “to instruct his eldest son and heir in drawing, painting, and architecture, in all of which disciplines he showed considerable talent. But it was in music that Alphonsus really excelled” (Ibid., 13). Alphonsus’ love for music never left him. One of his compositions, Duetto tra l’Anima e Gesù Cristo con violino, can be found in the British Museum, and it is said that even up to the age of eighty, he still liked to spend time at the keyboard (Ibid., 13-14).

By the time he was thirteen, Alphonsus had completed his humanities studies under the direction of his father and at the hands of various tutors, and was registered as a first-year law students at the University of Naples (Ibid., 14-15). In 1713, Alphonsus graduated as a Doctor of Laws, still not yet seventeen years of age (Ibid., 16-17). From there, Alphonsus joined a very powerful legal establishment, and was well on his way to becoming the powerful and prestigious figure his father had formed him to be. During this time, he travelled in the circles of high Neapolitan society, a frequent attendee of the opera and the theater, and an avid card player (Ibid., 16). However, during all this time, Alphonsus spent a considerable amount of time with the less fortunate of society as well. He was a member of Congregazione dei Dottori, which among other things was dedicated to the service of the poor, especially in the Oratorian Fathers hospital, which served as a refuge “for the needy and outcast.” He did this for eight years, and “it was here that he first experienced the real happiness to be found in God’s service and it was here that his desire to become a priest developed and came to a positive conclusion” (Ibid., 17). Standing in the way of his vocation, however, was his father, Giuseppe. When Alphonsus did summon the courage to tell his father that he would be entering the priesthood, it was an experience that he never forgot for the rest of his life. So devastated and angered was Don Giuseppe, that he refused to be present at his son’s ordination.

Having mingled with the elites of society, Alphonsus undoubtedly knew a thing or two about the friendship described by the psychologists above, a friendship aimed at getting ahead in life and bolstering one’s self-esteem. Unfortunately, it seems as though his father had just such an idea of friendship with his son in mind during the early part of Alphonsus’ life. Accordingly, Alphonsus learned through experience the price that friendship with God cost, everything. In order to live in friendship with God Alphonsus left all of his early success, and prospective wealth and notoriety behind. He reports that as he hesitated to tell his father of his vocation, and while continuing to serve the poor, he came to see the vanity of the world “with startling clarity.” Continually the words of Christ from Matthew echoed in his mind, “what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul” (Mt. 16:26 & “Introduction,” 19). The hardest decision Alphonsus ever made eventually became the simplest, he was willing to leave worldly friendships behind because he could not stand the possibility of losing friendship with God.

As already mentioned, over the course of his life, Alphonsus wrote many works. Theologically, his best known work is his Moral Theology. He is known today as the patron saint of moral theologians due to his navigation of the tricky path between the school of Probabilism (which resulted in moral laxism) and the school of Probabliorism (which led to a moral rigorism) through the development of his own approach which came to be known as Moderate Probabilism or Equiprobabilism. The nuances of this debate and Alphonsus’ contribution to the development of moral theology with his own system are far beyond the scope of this discussion. Far more pertinent and of lasting influence in the life of the Church are his teaching on the day-to-day life of the Christian. Alphonsus knew that to be a saint meant to live in friendship with Christ. Near the end of His earthly journey, Christ had said to His Apostles, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). It is His making known everything to His disciples that makes friendship with God possible. Distinguishing the erotic love of Eros from the love of Friendship, Philia, C. S. Lewis wrote that “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities” (The Four Loves, 71). This is what Christ had done for the human family in the Incarnation. He had laid bare the Personality of God such that now it was possible for the human family to enter into authentic friendship with Him. And it was precisely the facilitation of this friendship that stood at the heart of all of Alphonsus’ pastoral ministry and writing.

So how do we live in friendship with God according to Alphonsus? His massive theological output precludes anything approaching a comprehensive overview here. However, we can begin to get at how Alphonsus believes that we can live in friendship with God by using one of his shorter works as a guide and framework. During his time as bishop of St. Agatha of the Goths (in the Italian region of Campania), in 1775, St. Alphonsus composed a short work titled Divine Love and The Means of Acquiring It. In it, Alphonsus structures his discussion on five “means of acquiring the love of God.”

The first of these is “to detach oneself from human attachments” (Divine Love and The Means of Acquiring It, 8). In this section, Alphonsus writes that “there is no place for the love of God in hearts that are full of earth; the more there is of earth the less there is of the reign of love of God” (Ibid., 8). It is important to understand that while Alphonsus does have something quite radical in mind in speaking of detachment, he is not advocating a kind of flight from the world, or fuga mundi, spirituality. Rather, in a manner that foreshadows the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the universal call to holiness (Lumen Gentium, 39-42), Alphonsus had learned from the writings of St. Francis de Sales that friendship with God was to be pursued by all Christians in accordance with their state of life. In his Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales compared Christians to a diverse garden of living plants, writing,

When he created things God commanded plants to bring for their fruits, each one according to its kind, and in like manner he commands Christians, the living plants of his Church, to bring forth the fruits of devotion, each according to his position and vocation…Not only is this true, but the practice of devotion must be adapted to the strength, activities, and duties of each particular person (Introduction to the Devout Life, 3).

St. Alphonsus echoes this plainly in The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, considered by some to be his “spiritual masterpiece” (“Introduction,” 39). There, he writes:

So it is a great mistake to say, ‘God doesn’t want everyone to be a saint.’ On the contrary, Saint Paul says, ‘For this is the will of God, your sanctification’ (1 Thes 4:3). God wants all of us to be saints, and each one according to his or her state in life: the religious as a religious, laypeople as laypeople, the priest as a priest, the married person as married, the merchant as merchant, the soldier as soldier, and so on, in every other state of life (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 8.10).

Thus, the Christian is to practice detachment as part of day-to-day life. What does this mean? Most basically, it means having rightly ordered loves, one must love God above all things and all things, including oneself and one’s neighbor, for and in God. Only by referring all love to God for St. Alphonsus does God remain the central focus in our lives. Again, in The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, Alphonsus writes that

those who truly love Jesus Christ lose all affection for worldly goods, and seek to strip themselves of everything, to be one with Jesus Christ alone. All their desires point to Jesus; they are always thinking of Jesus and sighing for him; and in every place, at every time, on every occasion, they seek only to please Jesus (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, 11.24).

To live detachment in this manner, for Alphonsus, is the way that our nature as creatures created in God’s image and likeness flourishes. Thus, in Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, he rhetorically asks if God is being excessive when He “requires us to love nothing but himself.” To this, Alphonsus responds quite simply that “God, who is infinitely good and deserves infinite love, can rightly demand that he should have all the love of souls whom he has created specifically for the purpose of loving him” (Divine Love and the Means of Acquiring It, 10).

The question, then, becomes how it is that we learn how to live daily in this detached manner. We find his answer in the second through fifth means of acquiring the love of God, which we will discuss in part two.

Your servant in Christ,

Tony

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FRESH Exemplars

St. Jerome: The Slow Work of Sanctity

Happy feast of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church!

Friends, what comes to mind when we think of the saints? For starters, perhaps paintings, images in stained glass windows, and statuary. If we take an interest at all in these heroes of the faith perhaps legendary stories that we like to recount given our own particular personalities and interests. The lover of the environment recounts the story of St. Francis preaching to the birds. The intellectual calls to mind St. Thomas Aquinas lost in thought at the king of France, St. Louis IX’s, dinner table, pounding his fist on the table and saying, “and that should settle the Manichees” (Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, 22). The action lover recounts St. Lawrence, roasting on the gridiron and saying to his executioners, “I’m well done on this side. Turn me over!”

All of these vignettes say something profound to us. They speak of virtue’s perfection, of singularly minded souls devoted to the love of Christ. However, if our memory of the saints is limited to the manner in which they are depicted in stained glass and those moments of their lives where their very best shines through, they will ultimately remain for us lifeless, unattainable paradigms who are almost not human, or at the very least, not as human as us. This leaves us with the sadly mistaken view that to live a saintly life devoted to Christ is unattainable for us “commoners” and provides us with the convenient excuse that excellence is for a few, and mediocrity for the many. The beautiful thing about the saint celebrated by the Church today is that if you know anything about him, the portrait you hold in your mind of him is not of someone whose feet barely touched the ground.     

St. Jerome was born into a Christian family in the city of Stridon, in the Roman province of Dalmatia in about 347 AD. “He was given a good education and was even sent to Rome to fine-tune his studies” (Pope Benedict XVI, Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine, 133). These studies, though unknown to him at the time, would eventually lead to pivotal work for the life of the Church. His extant corpus includes a collection of letters, and it is in these especially that we encounter the full humanity of the saint. In a way similar though not nearly as detailed as Augustine’s Confessions, Jerome writes of the indiscretions and missteps of his youth, indiscretions which would haunt him once his heart had been set on following Christ. In one letter, Jerome very candidly describes his early years as an ascetic in the desert:

How often, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome! I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness…Now, although in my fear of hell I had consigned myself to this prison, where I had no companions but scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself amid bevies of girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting; yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead (Letter 22.7).

Nevertheless, his prodigal youth did not prevent him from eventually making his way to the fount of life. Jerome was baptized around the year 366 and soon decided upon an ascetic life. After some time he set out “for the East and lived as a hermit in the Desert of Chalcis, south of Aleppo, devoted himself assiduously to study,” perfecting his knowledge of Greek and learned Hebrew (Ibid, cf. Jerome, Letter 125.12). As the above quote has demonstrated, deciding for a life lived for Christ does not entail instant perfection, far from it. In addition to his struggle to leave worldly pleasure behind, Jerome also struggled to remain single minded in his studies. He writes that as he made his way to the desert, he longed to read the works of Cicero again. As his body languished under the weight of asceticism, he experienced a vision where he was “dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge…Asked who and what I was I replied: I am a Christian. But He who presided said: You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’” (Letter 22.30; cf. Matt. 6:21).

In 382 he returned to Rome, where he met Pope Damasus who, familiar with Jerome’s growing reputation as a scholar, “encouraged him, for pastoral and cultural reasons, to embark on a new Latin translation of the biblical texts” (Pope Benedict XVI, Church Fathers, 134). Consulting the original Hebrew and Greek of the Old Testament in addition “to earlier Latin versions, Jerome was able, with the assistance later of other collaborators, to produce a better translation” which “constitutes the so-called ‘Vulgate’, the ‘official’ text of the Latin Church which, after the recent revision, continues to be the ‘official’ Latin text of the Church” (Ibid., 135).

Despite the papal commissioning of this endeavor and the reputation Jerome had gained as a scholar in the Christian world, his work at translation and commentary was not without criticism. As Jerome worked tirelessly to translate and understand the Scriptures, a theologian some seven years younger stepped onto the scene whose genius was destined to outshine Jerome, upon whom nature had bestowed a “well-known difficult” and “hot-tempered character” (Pope Benedict XVI, Church Fathers, 133). The younger theologian, though not as prone to annoyance and anger as his elder, could neither be said to suffer for a lack of self-confidence when it came to scholarship. For Augustine of Hippo, like Jerome, had made his way through the Roman educational system, and when called upon to serve as a priest likewise brought his education to bear upon the careful study of Sacred Scripture. The letter correspondence that has been preserved between the two are a glimpse into the life of two saints, who for all their devotion and love for Christ, still struggle with their respective imperfections. And it is this quality which makes these two figures simultaneously relatable and beautiful, for it is in their brokenness and their struggle to overcome that we see Christ at work in them.  

The two butted heads on various topics. For starters, Augustine, though adamant in his gratitude for the translation work Jerome was doing (see Augustine of Hippo, Letter 71.6), did not find it without its problems. Perhaps forewarned about Jerome’s irritable character, the otherwise eloquent Augustine awkwardly tries to combine critique and flattery in his early letters to Jerome. For example, he had heard about problems with Jerome’s translation of the prophet Jonah. He writes: “a certain bishop, one of our brethren, having introduced in the church over which he presides the reading of your version, came upon a word in the book of the prophet Jonah, of which you have given a very different rendering from that which had been of old familiar to the senses and memory of all the worshippers, and had been chanted for so many generations in the church” (Augustine, Letter 71.5). The mistranslation had caused an uproar in the Church, such that the bishop, Augustine writes Jerome, the renowned translator of Scripture, “was compelled to correct your version in that passage as if it had been falsely translated, as he desired not to be left without a congregation—a calamity which he narrowly escaped. From this we are also led to think that you may be occasionally mistaken” (Ibid.). Ultimately, Augustine’s advice to Jerome is to be more careful in his work of translation: “You would therefore confer upon us a much greater boon if you gave an exact Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint version” (Ibid., 71.6).

In addition, Augustine found occasion to critique Jerome’s interpretation of the passage in Galatians where Paul writes that he had called out Peter’s hypocrisy (Galatians 2:11-13). Jerome had written that Peter could in no way have been wrong, but was rather involved in some form of role-playing that would provide Paul with the opportunity to proclaim the truth of their being no need for Gentile converts to Christianity to keep all the tenets of the Mosaic Law as practiced by the Jews (e.g., circumcision and kosher dietary law) (Jerome, Letter 112.4).

In response to both criticisms (including others), Jerome, obviously annoyed as his younger contemporary, responded to Augustine beginning: “ I have received by Cyprian, deacon, three letters, or rather three little books, at the same time, from your Excellency, containing what you call sundry questions, but what I feel to be animadversions on opinions which I have published, to answer which, if I were disposed to do it, would require a pretty large volume” (Letter 112.1). After attempting to respond to Augustine’s criticisms, often cautioning the younger theologians not to be so confident in his critiques of others (see, e.g., Letter 112.4-5 & 19), Jerome concludes the letter, basically asking Augustine not to bother him and to let him work in peace: “In closing this letter, I beseech you to have some consideration for a soldier who is now old and has long retired from active service, and not to force him to take the field and again expose his life to the chances of war. Do you, who are young, and who have been appointed to the conspicuous seat of pontifical dignity, give yourself to teaching the people, and enrich Rome with new stores from fertile Africa. I am contented to make but little noise in an obscure corner of a monastery, with one to hear me or read to me” (Letter 112.22).

In the same year, (404 AD), Jerome had sent a letter to Augustine, expressing frustration that Augustine’s criticisms of Jerome’s work had been made public prior to Jerome receiving correspondence directly from Augustine (this was an unfortunate mistake of the times, being as it was without any official and secure postal system). To begin, Jerome admonishes Augustine to be open and honest with him, writing, “True friendship, can harbor no suspicion; a friend must speak to his friend as freely as to his second self” (Jerome, Letter 105.2). In addition, Jerome accuses Augustine of having done this in an effort to advance his own reputation by taking down a more senior scholar: “Some of my acquaintances…suggested to me that this had not been done by you in a guileless spirit, but through desire for praise and celebrity…intended to become famous at my expense; that many might know that you challenged me, and I feared to meet you; that you had written as a man of learning, and I had by silence confessed my ignorance, and had at last found one who knew how to stop my garrulous tongue” (Ibid.).

Why do I spend so much time recounting parts of this seemingly petty exchange between these two much revered saints, these two doctors of the Church? Precisely because sometimes it was just that. The exchange demonstrates that these two men were clearly not without their shortcomings however dedicated they were to Christ and His Church. Moreover, it demonstrates that growth in holy friendship is hard work that requires honesty, sometimes involves criticism of one another so that we might keep one another focused on the only thing that matters, Christ, and, perhaps above all, an authentic humility that truly desires the mutual pursuit of the Truth that is Christ. Accordingly, in a letter written a year later (405 AD), perhaps sensing any sort of potential friendship between the two to be in grave danger, Augustine writes to Jerome again: “again, I beseech you to correct boldly whatever you see needful to censure in my writings. For although, so far as the titles of honor which prevail in the Church are concerned, a bishop’s rank is above that of a presbyter, nevertheless in many things Augustine is in inferior to Jerome” (Augustine, Letter 82.33).

Augustine’s efforts here proved not to be in vain. Jerome obliged, and the two worked to build more solid footing for their friendship in Christ. How did they do this? Not by worrying about who was potentially making the other look bad, or who was showing themselves to be the holier or more learned. They did this by focusing on the one thing that mattered, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, especially as revealed in the words of Sacred Scripture. In a letter written some eleven years later from Jerome to Augustine (416 AD), it is clear that these earlier tensions have been overcome, and Jerome explains how: “in any discussion between us, the object aimed at by both of us is advancement in learning” (Jerome, Letter 134.1). Not only this, but the curmudgeonly Scripture scholar seems to have developed a decided liking and admiration of the younger Bishop over time: “Certainly, whatever can be said on the topics there discussed, and whatever can be drawn by commanding genius from the fountain of sacred Scripture regarding them, has been in these letters stated in your positions, and illustrated by your arguments” (Ibid.). What lies behind these words of praise is not only the epistolary discussions they had engaged in, but also the fact that as a true friend in the fight for Truth, Augustine had come to the defense of Jerome when he came under the attack of the Pelagians. Thus, Jerome writes: “Be it ours, therefore, rather to rid the Church of that most pernicious heresy which always feigns repentance, in order that it may have liberty to teach in our churches, and may not be expelled and extinguished, as it would be if it disclosed its real character in the light of day” (Ibid.).

A couple of years later (418 AD), Jerome now nearing the end of his life (d. 420 AD), wrote one final letter to Augustine, with by now a fully developed admiration for this once annoying young theologian who Jerome has seen grow into a mature bishop and a divine instrument to be reckoned with by all who would seek to undermined the Truth of the Christian Faith.

At all times I have esteemed your Blessedness with becoming reverence and honor, and have loved the Lord and Savior dwelling in you. But now we add, if possible, something to that which has already reached a climax, and we heap up what was already full, so that we do not suffer a single hour to pass without the mention of your name, because you have, with the ardor of unshaken faith, stood your ground against opposing storms… (Jerome, Letter 141).

Then, in his final words to Augustine, Jerome then pens some of the greatest praise perhaps ever to have been written, one Doctor of the Church to another:

Go on and prosper! You are renowned throughout the whole world; Catholics revere and look up to you as the restorer of the ancient faith, and — which is a token of yet more illustrious glory— all heretics abhor you. They persecute me also with equal hatred, seeking by imprecation to take away the life which they cannot reach with the sword. May the mercy of Christ the Lord preserve you in safety and mindful of me, my venerable lord and most blessed father (Ibid.).

What a change we see here! What growth in love! From, ‘leave me alone you young know-it-all,’ to be “mindful of me, my venerable lord and most blessed father.” “Father,” the older Jerome addresses the younger Augustine. Why? Not out of some feigned deference for title. Augustine had already taken that off the table as we saw above in a quote from an earlier letter. Out of love, precisely the love they shared for one another in Christ who they had come to know in the Scriptures. Thus, we saw Jerome write that he loves the ‘Savior dwelling within Augustine.’

So, where does all this leave us? What are the “practical takeaways” here, if you want? First, none of us this side of eternity are perfect. We are all, as theologian David Clairmont says, “works-in-progress” (David Clairmont, Moral Struggle and Religious Ethics: On the Person as Classic in Comparative Theological Contexts, 12). Not even those reverenced officially as saints by the Church. Growth in holiness is a lifetime’s worth of hard work. This reality should, if nothing else, instill a profound humility within us. Second, it cannot be done alone. We need good friends who are running in the direction of Christ to grow in holiness. Third, we do this by keeping one another accountable, by making sure that we all have our focus trained on Christ, and by meeting one another time and again through, with, and in the Word made present to us in Sacrament and Scripture through the life of the Church. It is imperative that as we strive for holiness that our measure for progress isn’t something we make up as we go, which is the fourth point. Rather, we must always look to the Church as Teacher and Mother to lead us on our journey. She contains within her the voices of thousands of saints who have made this journey before us to help us on our way. In today’s day and age, there is absolutely no excuse for making it up on our own. For instance, the links within this post will lead you to the letters quoted, and through them you can find other works written by Augustine and Jerome among other great minds in our Church’s history. Read them, read the Catechism, but above all, spend time with Christ daily in the Scriptures. 

Well, you may say, “these guys were professional theologians and Scripture scholars, I don’t have time to do all that studying, all that praying!” True, most of us will never have the luxury of spending hours in study, but time wasn’t exactly readily available to Augustine, who was a bishop who spent most of his days hearing disputes among his parishioners, and yet, for love of Christ was able to spend his nights writing 5 million words about our faith. Nor was time a luxury for Jerome, who ran two monasteries and still made the time to translate the Scriptures so that the masses might have access to this divine gift. None of us are too busy to spend some time with Christ in the Scriptures daily. If you need a place to start, a good practice is to simply read the daily Mass readings which can be found many places online. And, when you make the time to do it, as Jerome says, pray, read, and then pray again. “If you pray,” Jerome writes, “you speak with the Spouse; if you read, it is he who speaks to you” (Letter 22.25). The fact of the matter is we spend time with those we love, not just spilling our guts to them, but listening to them out of a desire for wanting to know the one whom we love more intimately. As Jerome famously said, “Ignorance of Scripture, is ignorance of Christ” (Commentary on Isaiah). We are hard pressed to claim that we love Him if we will not take even a few moments a day listening to Him so that we might know Him more intimately, and that in knowing Him more intimately, we might come to love Him more deeply.

Your servant in Christ,

Tony

Categories
FRESH Exemplars

Perpetua & Felicity: Striving for Eternal Happiness

The desire for happiness is a universal human experience. From of old philosophers have constructed their theories of what it means to live a good life based on this self-evident truth and have sought to articulate for the human family the path by which happiness could be attained. As the Christian tradition matured in the early centuries of its existence, it entered the fray of philosophical debate under the same assumption. In one of his early works, St. Augustine quips: “Certainly, we all wish to live happily. There is no human being who would not assent to this statement almost before it is uttered” (The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, 1.4). To this we could add that we do not want some fleeting form of happiness, rather we desire a happiness that is unending and that is out of the reach of fear from losing. In short, we don’t simply desire happiness, but eternal happiness. Such is the longing of the human heart.

In name the saints celebrated by the Church today, Perpetua and Felicity, remind us of this most basic desire and the account of their passion reminds us of the road we must travel to obtain it. In a series of sermons preached on these two great witnesses of the Christian faith, Augustine liked to play upon the meaning of their names, drawing a deep lesson from them: “Perpetua, of course, and Felicity are the names of the two of them, but the reward of them all. The only reason, I mean, why all the martyrs toiled bravely for a time by suffering and confessing the faith in the struggle, was in order to enjoy perpetual felicity” (s. 282.1). Perhaps we don’t normally equate the martyrs as being happy or being motivated by a desire for happiness, but this is precisely what Augustine is saying here. The martyrs, more than anyone else, were willing to struggle for eternal happiness to the point of shedding their blood to obtain it.

To some to make such a statement may sound flippant. To claim that happiness is the aim of life and that we should do everything we can to obtain it can sound shallow to our ears. This is because we have lost the understanding of what it really means to be happy. Lacking an understanding of what real happiness is, we have been convinced that happiness is either to be pursued in shallow ways or that because it is so often pursued in shallow ways it must be a shallow thing, a fleeting emotion. However, allowing this misunderstanding to go unchecked as Christians does a huge disservice not only to ourselves, but to the world at large. Why? There is a reason that the human heart desires happiness, or better, is hardwired in such a fashion. The reason is something that all of the classical philosophies understood, from Epicureanism to Stoicism to Platonism to Aristotelianism. The reason is this: for a creature to be happy means for it to have fulfilled its purpose. To be happy, in other words, was to have become what one was intended to be or reached the state one was meant for. This is why when Christianity enters the debate about what it means to live the good life it does not change the terms of the debate but rather broadens the framework.

The problem isn’t that people wish to be happy, it’s rather that we seek happiness in all the wrong places. Stop and think, if you were to name the ways people try and secure happiness for themselves, what would they be? The culprits are the same as they always have been: wealth, pleasure, honor and power. Now pause here. Many of us may think ‘well, thank goodness I don’t have those problems!’ How true is that? This is an important question to ask ourselves in more detail especially during this season of Lent as we strive to get back to the basics of Christian life and direct all our efforts towards following and imitating Jesus Christ. This is why it is so helpful to place before ourselves the examples of the saints during Lent, most especially the martyrs. They are the best reminders of what it really means to live the whole of one’s life for love of God in Christ Jesus for we who are constantly distracted by the passing goods the world offers us. When we look at ourselves in the mirror of the martyrs, how dedicated to God do we find ourselves to be?

The martyrs exemplify better than any others the Christian assertion that our only source of true happiness is found in eternal communion with God, which no mortal being can take from us except ourselves. This is above all why it is absolutely imperative that as Christians we affirm the universal desire for happiness, for that desire, regardless of who manifests it and in what way it is currently pursued, speaks however dimly of the human desire for God. Thus, it becomes all the more important that we as Christians learn how it is that we ought to pursue perpetual felicity, which is where the saints celebrated today come in. I want to suggest that there is a threefold lesson to be learned by examining The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity that can help us move forward on our journeys toward eternal happiness during this Lenten Season and beyond.

1) Water is thicker than blood. The allusion I am making here is to the waters of baptism. Stop and think for a moment, from where do I draw my identity. Some of us base our identities firmly upon the ties of blood, i.e. family. Others form their identity based upon their careers or a social group they are a member of. For many, it is a combination of all of these. Saints Perpetua and Felicity are excellent reminders that for Christians our identity is not something we inherit genetically or form through choice of profession or social group. Rather, our identity as Christians is gifted to us at baptism. It is by passing through the sacred waters of this sacrament that we are re-made into adoptive sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father by the power of the Holy Spirit (see Rom. 8:15-17; Gal. 3:26-27; Eph. 1:5-14), and it is this identity that we must cling to, strive to develop, and order the whole of our lives around including our careers and relationships.

Both Perpetua and Felicity are excellent examples of this. Throughout the course of her imprisonment and up to the hour of her martyrdom, Perpetua’s father tries no less than four times to convince her to do what is necessary to avoid her death by various means. In the first instance he simply tries to scare her through physical force (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 3), but in the latter three he tries to dissuade her by appealing to her love for her family, including her newborn son (Ibid., 5, 6 and 9). He implores her: “My daughter, have pity on my grey hair, have pity on your father…Think about your brothers, think about your mother and your mother’s sister, think about your son who will not be able to live without you. Give up your pride; do not destroy us all” (Ibid., 5). We see something similar in the case of Felicity, who had been imprisoned while still pregnant. We are told in the text that it was not permitted by Roman law for pregnant women to be punished in public (Ibid., 15). What is remarkable about Felicity is that rather than using her pregnancy to avoid the hour of martyrdom, we are told that “she was in agony, fearing her pregnancy would spare her” (Ibid.). Consequently, “two days before the games” she and those imprisoned with her “joined together in one united supplication, groaning, and poured forth their prayer to the Lord” (Ibid.). We are told that the Lord heard their prayer, for “immediately after their prayer her labor pains came upon her” (Ibid.). 

None of this suggests that family is not important for Christians, far from it. This is not an either/or situation. Rather, while a true good, biological family for the Christian is nevertheless made relative to being members of the family of God through baptism. In a very real way because as Christians we are bound to one another by the Holy Spirit, that tie is more powerful and everlasting than DNA could ever be. This is exemplified both in the way the martyrs refer to themselves and in the love demonstrated by these martyrs for one another. For instance, the first time we hear from Perpetua it is in response to her father’s first attempt “to change [her] mind and shake [her] resolve” with respect to her impending martyrdom. Perpetua’s response exemplifies a life totally identified with Christ. She says: “I am unable to call myself other than what I am, a Christian” (Ibid., 3). This manner of understanding oneself, in turn, naturally informs one’s loves. Thus, we are told that Felicity’s “fellow martyrs were deeply saddened that they might leave behind so good a friend, their companion, to travel alone on the road to their shared hope” (Ibid.). And while they were in the arena being attacked by the wild animals, we see that the martyrs cling closely to one another, not to evade the attack, but to support one another in facing it courageously. Thus, a struggling Felicity is aided by Perpetua and the catechumen Rusticus clings to Perpetua’s side (Ibid., 20). What we see here is the bond of true Christian love that is a continual source of support in the midst of the struggles we all face. What The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity is reminding us here is the absolute necessity of Christian friendship. Stop and think, do you have good Christian friends in your life? Are they friends who not only support you, but challenge you and spur you on in your life of faith? If not, this Lent is a good time to begin seeking out those friendships. 

2) Everything is Grace. The support of Christian friendship is one of myriad ways grace assists us in our earthly journey toward our heavenly homeland. St. Thomas Aquinas uses the term “gratuitous grace” to speak of the divine influence we experience through others. Distinguishing “gratuitous grace” from “sanctifying grace,” Aquinas explains that gratuitous grace is the grace “whereby one man co-operates with another in leading him to God…since it is bestowed on a man beyond the capability of nature, and beyond the merit of the person” (Summa Theologica, I.II q. 111.1). Within Aquinas’s system, the gift of “gratuitous grace” presupposes one be in a state of “sanctifying grace” (ST, I.II, q. 111.5, ad. 2). Therefore, for Christian friends to be able to lead one another to God, it is pertinent that they actively seek out and co-operate with “sanctifying grace” in their own lives. The idea here is analogous (vis a vis univocal) to the idea that you can’t give what you don’t have. What this means practically is that in order to be good Christian friends to one another we must avail ourselves of the sources of “sanctifying grace” and make use of those practices which incline us to the reception thereof.

This is a dynamic which we should put into practice with greater focus and intentionality during this Season of Lent. The sources of sanctifying grace are, of course, the sacraments. On the other hand, there are many things which the Church holds within the treasury of the deposit of faith which prepare and incline us toward the reception of sanctifying grace in the sacraments, such as sacramentals, blessings and an infinite variety of devotionals and prayers. Even in the midst of their captivity, the martyrs prove to be excellent exemplars of this dynamic. For instance, they are baptized in prison (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 3), and over the course of their time there we see them praying together (Ibid., 18), praying for others not with them (Ibid., 7), and even find Perpetua singing a hymn of praise to God as she is lead to her martyrdom (Ibid., 18). So focused was their devotion to God and so great was their intimacy with Him amidst their captivity that Perpetua likens the prison itself to a palace, “so that I wanted to be there rather than anywhere else” (Ibid., 3). These practices, moreover, demonstrate the directionality mentioned above of carrying out these practices in preparation for the reception of sanctifying grace in the sacraments. The sacrament of baptism has already been mentioned, but the martyrs’ longing for the Eucharist is clearly on display. So ardently did the martyrs desire unity with Christ that their visions are overtly Eucharistic. In one vision Perpetua receives cheese from the Good Shepherd and when she awakens from the vision tells us that she was “still eating some unknown sweet” (Ibid., 4), a clear allusion to the celebration of the heavenly Eucharistic banquet drawing on the Old Testament’s description of the Promised Land as a land flowing with milk and honey combined with the description of the honey-like sweetness of manna given to the Israelites in the desert (see Deut 31:20 & Ex 16:31). Thus, while the martyrs would not taste the sacramental banquet of the Eucharist this side of eternity, their hunger for Christ was so great that their imaginations had become thoroughly Eucharistic (see also The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 12). This Lent let us take our lead from these great exemplars of our faith and dedicate ourselves to a life organized around the sacraments and those practices which lead us to them, especially prayer.

3) We are happy in hope. In describing the actions of the martyrs above, it is clear that they were compelled inwardly by the virtue of hope accompanied, of course, by faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13). They looked forward to the fulfillment of Christ’s promises to them on the other side of their martyrial passions. However, these are not the only virtues we see at work in them. We should expect nothing less. Not only has the Tradition consistently upheld the doctrine of the unity of the virtues (Augustine of Hippo, The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, 1.25 & Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 65.1), but especially evident in the Patristic sources is the idea that virtue is no mere human thing, but rather a manifestation of human participation in the divine life: “whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is himself absolute virtue” (Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, P.7; cf. Augustine of Hippo, The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, 1.22-23). Accordingly, we should expect to see a full array of virtues exemplified by the martyrs, and we do. Here I want to name just four that are especially pertinent for the Season of Lent and beyond. First, we see the work of prudence in them, especially in ordering their lives totally toward God and fitting all other aspects of life, including relationships, around this primary focus. Second, we see the virtue of religion, which seeks to do justice in our relationship with God, manifested in them by their prayers, their baptisms, and their Eucharistic imaginations. Third, we see the virtue of courage or fortitude on full display, the martyrs not blinking in the face of threats by family, the authorities, or by the wild animals they are thrown to (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 6 & 19-21). Finally, most closely aligned with the theological virtue of hope, we see the gift of the virtue of perseverance exemplified by the martyrs, enabling them to confess the name of Christ in the face of death and to face their brutal passions with self-sacrificing love.

With God’s grace hopefully we have chosen a practice to pursue with great attention and ardor during this Season of Lent, whether it be “giving up” or “adding” something, maybe both. Hopefully whatever you have chosen to take on in addition to the regular days of fasting and abstinence the Church calls us all to, it is something difficult, something that stretches the limits of your capacity to carry out, be it a demand on your time or the virtue you currently possess. If not, today is as good a day as any to commit yourself to finding something that fits the bill for the remainder of Lent and sticking to it. Whatever that practice may be, it should be something that makes it clear to us that it cannot be accomplished without the help of grace. In this way we imitate the virtues of the martyrs, for undertaking such a task requires prudence and courage in initial choosing and living out so as to fend off temptation. It also requires the virtue of religion, for it will demand the imploring of grace as we test the limits of our capacities. Finally, it will demand that we persevere to the end, and if we fall down, rely on those around us and the grace of the Holy Spirit to pick us back up and push forward to the end. This training ground of Lent is ultimately meant to form our minds and wills in such a way that the whole of our life is impelled by the virtue of hope as we pass through this life, this valley of tears, stretching forward to the eternal loving embrace of our God. The very process should not be a source of sadness, but joy. Here and now we are truly happy in hope, for as we cooperate with grace and grow in divine virtue, we come to enjoy a foretaste of that heavenly kingdom, where there will be nothing but that which our heart desires more than anything else, perpetual felicity.

Your servant in Christ,

Tony

Categories
FRESH Exemplars

FRESH Exemplar: St. John Paul II: Fear Not!

October 22

Happy Memorial of St. John Paul II!

Fear not! So goes one of the most often repeated commands of the Bible, a message St. John Paul II made central to his pontificate. It is a message we need to hear constantly, perhaps most especially today when we are faced with medical, social and political turmoil on a vast scale. Be not afraid! Scripturally, the central reason for this is twofold: Christ’s promise to be with us always (Mt 28:20) through the gift of his Holy Spirit (Jn 14:16); secondly, and consequently, the Holy Spirit’s indwelling gifts us with the very love of God itself, and it is this “perfect love” which the First Letter of John tells us “casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18).

The saint celebrated by the Church today made this message central to his pontificate. At the inaugural Mass of his pontificate in 1978, St. John Paul II proclaimed: “Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the Pope and all those who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind. Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows ‘what is in man’. He alone knows it.” Notice the outward thrust of these few lines, the late pontiff asking us not only to wait without fear, but to go forth courageously in proclaiming the Gospel of Christ’s saving love, allowing him to transform every last facet of our existence. Having celebrated this Mass on “World Mission Day,” fearlessness in proclaiming the Gospel was embodied by St. John Paul II throughout the course of his pontificate, and his memory calls us to do the same today.

But notice, please, that there is no sense that we are to go at this alone, rather we do so communally, in friendship, as the family of Christ, seeking to make that family ever larger by calling others to join in the saving love of Christ. This bond of friendship which we share is affected by the same Spirit of Love that casts out fear. And, it is the very same Spirit whose dwelling within us implants within us the theological virtue of hope. As Christians we may not be optimistic about worldly events, but we are full of hope, filled with hope in the promises of Christ that speak of his desire to share the embrace of Triune love with us beginning now, and for eternity. It is this hope in Christ that John Paul II expresses in his letter to his friend, the great theologian Henri de Lubac, reassuring him that we are not in this alone but in friendship, a friendship animated by hope, a hope that assures us that in Christ, we are, and will forever be, happy.

St. John Paul II, pray for us that we too might embody the joy of the Gospel, so that in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the human family together, might set out anew on the royal way that leads to the eternal embrace of the Father. 

Your servant in Christ,

Tony