Wonders Never Cease

The Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time was anything but ordinary at our chapel last Sunday morning. Mass was celebrated by our recently arrived parochial vicar, formerly pastor of a downtown parish and spiritual director of American seminarians in  Rome. His sermons are always interesting, doctrinal, edifying, and often quite amusing. This Sunday's was no exception, and even included an anecdote about the Lutheran exegete (and pupil of Bultmann) Ernst Käsemann, under whom our priest had studied. Good enough, but the best was yet to be.

The final "hymn" was "The City of God," which I dislike for both its sappy music and its even sappier theology. As I ground my teeth, I noticed that Father had remained at the entrance to the sanctuary, facing the congregation. What's going on? I wondered. Is he staying there so we won't leave before the song is over? Did he forgot to make an announcement?

When the hymn was over, Father interrupted the postlude to tell us that we were all Pelagians; "Let us build the city of God," the song had us exhorting one another; we'd do it all ourselves. After a brief explanation of Pelagianism and the observation that St. Augustine must be rolling over in his grave, Father took up his station at the chapel entrance, and we all filed out. I was flabbergasted—and overjoyed.

I hope Father continues to comment on the musical fare. If he needs some examples, I've got a little list . . . 

The Transitus

In all things

he wished to be conformed to Christ crucified,

who hung on the cross

poor, suffering and naked.

Therefore at the beginning of his conversion,

he stood naked before his bishop,

and at the end of his life,

naked he wished to go out of this world.

He enjoined the friars assisting him,

under obedience and charity,

that when they saw that he was dead,

they should allow

his body to lie naked on the ground

for the length of time

it takes to walk a leisurely mile.

O, he was truly the most Christian of men,

and strove to conform himself to Christ

and to imitate him perfectly—
while living to imitate Christ living,
and after death to imitate Christ dying,
and after death to imitate Christ after death—
and he merited to be honored
with the imprint of Christ's likeness!

—St. Bonaventure, The Life of St. Francis (Legenda maior)

translated by Ewert Cousins in Bonaventure, Paulist Press,
1979

October 1: St. Therese of the the Child Jesus and the Holy Face

I know, I know, I'm a day late. I should really head this post "Yesterday's Saint." Now, it's certainly true that I'm lazy, but I really, truly, tried to post this yesterday. The trouble is, though my  regard, and even devotion, to St. Thérèse has grown  over the years, it's been a struggle.

The "Little Flower"—even her nickname was off-putting. The talk of spiritual childhood, the simpering, too-perfect-for-words little girl in the Catholic Treasure Box stories I read to the kids, the saccharine holy cards and statues, all that devotional froufrou repelled me. Little did I know.

Two things changed that. The first was reading about the "trial of faith" that Thérèse underwent amid the protracted,  intense physical suffering of her last illness. She lost her certainty of the goodness of God, of the value of her religious vocation, of the reality of heaven; she was haunted by the thought that, awaiting her on the other side of death was, not the God whom she loved with all her being, but—nothing. In place of a veil, there was now a wall between Thérèse and the heaven she had longed for. As with another Thérèse, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she learned to persevere in the works of faith even when that faith seemed to have deserted her. There was nothing simpering or childish here.

The second happened in 1999, when the relics of St.Thérèse visited New York. I joined a group of pilgrims for an hour of prayer, late in the night, at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In the silence, I realized that Thérèse's "Little Way" was not childish at all. And it wasn't the froufrou that had made her, by orders of magnitude the most beloved saint of modern times. After walking down the aisle to kiss the small casket of relics in the cathedral crossing, I received a postcard-sized prayer card with a photograph of saint to take home with me. The face that looked out at me from that photo had nothing sentimental or sacherrine about it; there was nothing at all simpering about those eyes.

St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, help me never to confuse simplicity with naïveté and to persevere no matter how deep the darkness.