Prayer As Communication

We can so often access a new understanding of our relationship with God by referencing what we know from our human relationships, at least when those relationships are at their very best. Prayer is the communication in a relationship. Let’s reflect on “Article 1: Expressions of Prayer”(read it online here) in the fourth section of the Catechism. In it, three forms of prayer are outlined: vocal, meditative, and contemplative. It occurred to me as I read this for the first time that these forms of prayer are mirrored in the ways my husband and I communicate with each other. I can use this very human experience to help me understand what God is wanting from me in our own times together in prayer. Communication weaves together lives, minds, and hearts, here on earth in our relationships with others; prayer does the same between us and our loving Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Vocal Prayer, A Lively Exchange

First of all, vocal prayer. It’s the easiest to understand, and by far the most common form of communication in a relationship. The Catechism says that vocal prayer is “external and thoroughly human” and is “internalized to the extent that we become aware of him ‘to whom we speak’” (CCC 2704) This distinction is an important one, between the friendly mindless banter we perform during tasks like cooking dinner (which is almost subconscious in a relationship as comfortable and long-term as my husband’s and mine), and real talking, where we actually stop whatever we’re busy doing and take time to ‘become aware’ of each other’s personhood and respond to it. The former is affectionate and born of friendly regard, whereas the second is loving, and builds deeper connection, even when it is about practicalities like what we’re going to do with our evening, asking for help with a chore, or inquiring whether the bills have been paid. This is a way of weaving our lives together. This kind of conversation, just like this kind of prayer, should be frequent, and can include others—family, friends—as well as just the two of us.

Meditative Prayer, A Meeting of Minds

Second, meditative prayer. I would compare this kind of prayer to the way my husband and I relive memories together, talk seriously about our dreams for the future, dig deep into relationship issues or personal struggles, or study spiritual things together. These are times of weaving our minds together. We learn so much about each other and ourselves during these times of quiet reflection and interaction. With this kind of prayer, we are learning about God as He reveals Himself to us, but because He already knows everything about us as we reveal ourselves to Him, He is teaching us about ourselves: Christ’s love “fully reveals man to himself” (Gaudium et spes 22). It is in these times that we “deepen our convictions of faith, prompt the conversion of the heart, and strengthen our will to follow Christ” (CCC 2708).            

Contemplative Prayer, A Communion of Hearts

Third, contemplative prayer. The Catechism quotes St. Teresa as saying that this form of prayer “means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us” (CCC 2709). This is the deepest and most intimate kind of communication, and between even the closest lovers is a relatively rare gift, because it requires both parties to be on the same wavelength at the same hallowed moment, intensely focused on solely each other to the exclusion of self-awareness. The focus on the other is so rapt that for that fleeting moment, nothing else exists, and words seem too small or seem to get in the way. Rather than attempting to communicate something verbal or intellectual, we are communing. “Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus” (CCC 2715), a focus on Christ so intense that it becomes a renunciation of self. This type of communication is a weaving together of hearts. Our heavenly Father’s gaze is always fixed raptly upon His beloved children. Contemplative prayer is “a gift, a grace; it can be accepted only in humility and poverty…[it] is a covenant relationship established by God within our hearts… a communion in which the Holy Trinity conforms man, the image of God, to his likeness” (CCC 2713). This kind of prayer is a foretaste of the Beatific Vision and is the type of union for which we long above all.

May the Lord grant each of us the grace to grow in our conversations with Him.

Ecce Homo: Learning to Behold Christ’s Wounded Body in Man

When we have met Jesus, and have been shaken to our core by His love and mercy, we cannot help but want to exclaim alongside the Samaritan woman: “Come and see!” (Jn. 4:29a). We want everyone to behold that precious Face which has gazed upon our lowliness with kindness—seen us in our wretchedness and known us fully, yet loved us—we want them to share in this “living water” which He offers freely to all. But so often, when we invite them to come with us to Mass to meet Jesus, they express reluctance because of what they have experienced of Christians. Echoing Gandhi, they often protest that, although this Jesus guy seems pretty great, it’s His followers they just can’t stand.

They aren’t wrong to point it out: in any group of Christians, there will be plenty of self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness, gossip, cliquishness, lying, snobbery, cheating, and every other form of human sin. Further, burned into our minds by newspaper headlines are the grievous sins against innocents perpetrated by the very men who claim to act in persona Christi at our altars and in our confessionals. Those who do not reject God’s existence, and accept in some ways Christ and the Bible, often stop short of accepting His Church on account of the gross failure of Christians to act anything like the Jesus they claim to follow.

I am a recent convert from a non-denominational background; this past Easter is the sixth since I was welcomed into the Catholic Church with my husband and both of our young adult children. This past Good Friday, my heart was particularly heavy with thoughts of friends and loved ones, specifically those who have blamed of the sins of Christians for their alienation from corporate worship. As I entered the nave, I noticed that the near life-sized crucifix above the altar was draped, obscured from view. At once, an idea was impressed upon me so strongly that I scribbled it down as soon as I took my place in the pew: “When we object to Christians’ flaws and failings, we are rejecting His bloody, damaged, broken Body—His countenance is not one that would draw people to it.” Later, the lector read from Isaiah:

[T]here was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
            nor appearance that would attract us to him.

He was spurned and avoided by people,
            a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
            spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
            our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
            as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,
            crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
            by his stripes we were healed.

Isaiah 53:2b-5, NABRE

I gazed up at the drapery behind which I knew hung the pierced, bloody Christ, and looked out over the parishioners I have known for years, who, like me, are living examples of the weight of sin. Those who are wounded, and those who wound others on account of the wounds they have received, from damaged families or perverse culture or folly or sheer rebellion, all bowed their heads in unison. Every wound, a scar of sin: their own, or someone else’s. The staggering correlation between the two—the wounded, broken Body of Christ around me in the pews, obscured in the smiling faces of the worshipers, and the wounded, broken Body of Christ, obscured from my sight by mourning draperies—overwhelmed me.

In the churches where I grew up, I never saw a crucifix hung—only the naked Cross—but I was never specifically instructed against them. I assumed, when it even crossed my mind, that the corpus must just be out of fashion; something old-timey and European that didn’t match the slick modern décor. I didn’t know much about the second wave of iconoclasm which had struck such things from Protestant walls during the Reformation until more recently. I was never a Calvinist, and I’ve always been fond of crucifixes. But I’ve learned there is indeed a very specific wrath against the corpus; that afternoon, the reason why flooded in on me. Dr. Regis Martin, in his book Suffering of Love, quotes a poem by Hans Urs von Balthasar: “All suffering stares from that head. / Impossible to wrap it in a great and festive forgetting.” Though wrapped in fabric, I could still feel the weight of that suffering staring at me from the crucifix that dark Friday night.

When the Jews looked forward to the Messiah, they pictured the ruddy heir of David described in Solomon’s Song: virile, kingly, irresistible. According to Dr. John Bergsma, the prophecies in Isaiah were even believed by some to describe a second Messiah, a “suffering servant” who would come alongside the kingly Messiah—for how could they be one and the same man? The stately monarch, vital and magnetic, the lover wooing his bride Israel—and this poor fellow, the scapegoat whose “appearance was marred beyond that of a man” (Is. 52:14), someone from whom people would hide their faces: both are Christ.

When we are first drawn to Jesus, it is usually because of His goodness, His promises of healing, love, and peace. The Lover of our souls woos us, pursues us; His love letters are inscribed in every sunset and flower. He offers us meaning, purpose, and belonging; forgiveness, restoration, and hope. We feel the weight of our sin, and His knightly offer to bear it away for us and carry us off to His kingdom makes princesses out of paupers; we are flattered by His affection and devotion, humbled by our undeserving. It is not strange that we would flinch at reminders of His suffering, because after we have begun to return His love, we wince that it was our sin that put Him on that hideous Cross. But the discomfort goes so much deeper than that.

It is not only our separated brethren who are uncomfortable with the corpus; the Jews could not abide the idea of God as a man at all, let alone one crucified. Pope St. John Paul II describes it thus:

“Is it any wonder that even those who believe in one God, of whom Abraham was a witness, find it difficult to have faith in a crucified God? They hold that God can only be powerful and grandiose, absolutely transcendent and beautiful in His power, holy and inaccessible to man. God can only be this! He cannot be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He cannot be Love that gives of Himself and that permits that He be seen, that He be heard, that He be imitated as a man, that He be bound, that He be beaten and crucified. This cannot be God!”

Crossing the Threshold of Hope

We anticipate a conquering king, not a miserable wretch, to lead us out of the darkness in which we cower. This Scandalum Crucis, he goes on to say, is a stumbling block until we recognize it for what it is. “God is not someone who remains only outside the world, content to be in Himself all-knowing and omnipotent. … His omnipotence was manifested in the omnipotence of humiliation on the Cross. … the crucified Christ is proof of God’s solidarity with man in his suffering. God places Himself on the side of man.”

In Christ, the Word of God, God reveals God to man, but God also reveals man to himself. And one of the truths Christ reveals is our alienation from God. Cardinal von Balthasar puts it this way:

“…the whole tragedy of the alienation that exists between God and us, the tragedy of sin and the sinner’s inability to return to God by his own power, is undergirded by the Father’s sending of his Son to be “with” us, even to the extent of being “with” us in our separation from God. Here the Apostle makes liberal use of the vital word with: we suffer with Christ, we are crucified with him, we die with him, to be raised with him and taken up into heaven with him. Thus Christian ethics means rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep, simply “being with” all those with whom God is. The fact that we did not want to be with the Son but crucified him is taken by our redeeming God and used in a deeper context, namely, that the Son took upon himself our refusal to be with him; he was “with” us in this very form.”

“Trinity”, You Crown the Year

No man has ever known the depths of alienation Jesus knew on the Cross, when He was separated from His Father, for no man has ever known the radical unity of the inner life of the Trinity. Balthasar, in Theology of History, asserts that “the alienation of Christ on the Cross is the supreme revelation of love, whereas the alienation of the sinful Christian is what first unveils the mystery of guilt; but it is also a unity, since it is in suffering that the Redeemer wraps the royal mantle of his love about his Body, his Bride, and draws her alienation into his own.” He identifies with His people; He is not separate from them; their suffering is His suffering so that His victory might be their victory.

There is nothing attractive about the disfigured body—stabbed, bruised, practically flayed—which hangs on that Cross. So also there is nothing attractive about a group of sin-stained people who form His visible Body here on earth. Backbiting and bitter Susan in the choir loft, hot-tempered James who browbeats his wife in the parking lot: neither are mere mortals, says C.S. Lewis, but are instead immortal creatures whose glory is “so heavy [a load] that only humility can carry it”. When the sun has darkened, the stars all burned themselves out, the planet spun itself into dust, Susan and James will still exist, whether winsome or wicked. “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” continues Lewis, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your sense. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.” Balthasar presses this even further, challenging that the further and more “other” a person is to us, the more we find Christ in them; it is the stranger that is our neighbor.

Over a lifetime of lay service to the church, I have witnessed the faith of too many believers shipwrecked on the rocks of suffering or scandal. Dr. Martin recounts the story from Elie Wiesel’s Night, where a young boy is hung as an example by the Nazis, and all are forced to watch as the “sad-eyed angel” suffers for thirty minutes until he finally expires. When “the grisly business is at last at an end … both God and the child at the end of the rope are dead. Indeed, their fates literally fit into the same noose.” And so God did die. Christ chose to descend into the deepest levels of human suffering and desolation, into God-forsakenness: He chooses “‘take upon himself’ the sin of the world… to remain in agony until the end of the world, in order that from the vantage of his own singular and unrepeatable anguish and abandonment—his willed descent into the wordless, lifeless dark of Sheol—every single experience of human extremity and loss might then derive its deepest, most ultimate and salvific meaning.”

Each of us who chooses to follow Him must follow Him into this mission. If we remain in Him and He in us, we are plunged into it whether we know it or not. Every wound on each of us is a mark on the disfigured corpus, stretched in anguish on the rough-hewn wood. Sin made each stripe: on Him, and on us. It is terrible to behold. But there is hope: by His stripes, we are healed. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Pt 2:24, NRSVCE) For Wiesel, the darkness of Holy Saturday was never broken by the sunrise of Easter morning. The difference—the only difference—between the bleeding wounds of those inside the Church, and those outside it, is that whatsoever wounds are united to, or subsumed into, Christ’s wounds, become a source of healing rather than of more destruction. United to Christ’s wounds, our wounds are empowered to destroy death instead of life—and not only for us, but for the whole world. Louis Dupre who says that Christ is crucified “in me, not in Jerusalem. … [Grace] is as personal as my suffering. Indeed, it is my suffering. For in this world there can be no grace but through redemptive suffering, through Jesus’ death—in me.”

In The God Question and Modern Man, Balthasar’s essay on the “Sacrament of the Brother” describes how we must find Christ in our brother. At the final judgment, Christ is clear that when we serve “the least of these” we are serving Him. But we really do serve our brother as well: “For charity is not asked to discover Christ “behind” the brother, “representing” him in a kind of hide and seek game, still less to love Christ “in place of” the brother… It suffices for him to love the brother together with Christ; then he will love him with a love that ascends towards the Father, seeing, too, through the hidden and disfigured face of the brother the original of all this disfigurement—for love.” We mistakenly anticipate a victorious Church full of living saints whose feet barely touch the ground and for whom life is a pleasure-palace; we would rather see tangible evidence of the rewards for the hard work we see before us in the Christian life. We don’t want a suffering Church any more than the Jews wanted a suffering Messiah. If we are His Body, our wounds become His wounds, and His wounds become ours. When we refuse His wounded Body, we refuse Him.

Photo by Henrique Jacob on Unsplash

Do you read me?

tiny, amidst a sea of pavement

a honeybee, adrift

something she ate, something she gathered
(something they sprayed, something they scattered)

her limbs twitch yet she tries

to dance

complicated steps to show the secret way she found to

something

anything

and no one here to see but me and i
can make no sense of her intricate map but she spends

her last blurred strength to tell

someone

anyone

she can’t keep her footing but

keeps dancing
keeps collapsing
starts slowing
stops moving

she and her secret
her urgent, fatal secret

drift away

Surrender

The chapter “The Sacrament of the Brother” from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The God Question and Modern Man felt like a glass of cold water thrown in my face, shocking me out of the red haze of self-pity I’ve been weeping through all week. The reminder, in stereo, that love of neighbor is in fact a simple proof of love for God, was exactly the song the Holy Spirit needed to sing to me to get me back on my feet, shoulder this blessed Cross, and sing along in praise to God the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Where every attempt towards kindness is repudiated is precisely where God’s love is best demonstrated. Balthasar did not mince words any more than Jesus did about what my response must be, and how this love cannot be found only in my own heart, but must flow through me from God, and to God.

I think we know we’ve heard from the Lord when our conscience is pricked in such a way that we are left feeling inspired—how correction always comes inextricably tied to consolation—and while recognizing anew what my duty is, I was granted the comfort of knowing that my own insufficiency to the task is not a personal shortcoming, but rather the whole point of the thing. I cannot love enough—and it is not with my love that I should be loving anyhow. Rather than bewail my inability to stoke the fires of human affection in the face of pain and hurt, I am encouraged rather to bury myself deeper in the bottomless depths of His love, to love Him more and let His love work through—and perhaps most importantly, in—me.  As Balthasar put it, to find that I am “no match for it” but am instead to simply and humbly obey. The grace of hope chases despair and revivifies courage.

“Astonishingly, the success of the Son’s saving mission is made to depend upon the consent of a single human being, in whose hands the fate of the universe will literally hang. And she remains free, utterly free, to refuse. This singular creature of God, this luminous reed of the Spirit, is at liberty to sing whatever song she pleases; she cannot be made to sing the canticle of the Lord, even if in magnifying Him, her spirit too will soar. And so all eternity trembles before the unforced fiat of the woman whose submission to grace may only be asked, never coerced–no, not even to secure our salvation. Of course, in saying yes to God, Mary finds true freedom; her dispossession of self becomes the source of an undreamed-of self-possession. As a result, her life assumes a purity of transparence so powerful that in the future, all grace courses through her. “Surrender to God,” writes Le Fort, “is the only absolute power that the creature possesses.”” -Dr. Regis Martin, What is the Church

So true of Mary, yes; and in that way, so true of the Bride, His Church, and thus (in a potential way) of each believer. Salvation comes to the world through and from Christ, through our “unforced fiat”. How alike are the postures of arms open for an embrace–releasing, yielding–and those of Christ’s outstretched arms in the Crucifixion. Release, embrace; receive, give; all exactly the same action along a spectrum of movement: love.

Balthasar entertains a certain tension between tradition and holiness, and how refreshing a perspective in a conundrum which so often pits tradition against innovation. Rather, the enthusiastic “all-in” fiery passion –so natural to youth–is juxtaposed against the wisdom, quietude, and reserve of time-honored tradition. They need each other–they are not opposed. It is breathing in, and breathing out.

Release, embrace; receive, give.

Love.

This surrender is literally the air I must breathe right now; acceptance of divine Providence is the only path to peace. “A purity of transparence so powerful that…all grace courses through her”: what freedom in that! I don’t have to be enough; I need only consent, give my “yes” and go on giving it, and through that transparency the grace of God can flow, bringing salvation to me, to those around me, to the whole world. “All eternity trembles” indeed at the thought of it. To be so exalted by humility; to be so enlarged by littleness. Praise be to the Lord; Holy Mary, pray for us!

Bread for the World

In Razing the Bastions, Hans urs von Balthasar uses the illustration of fruit to describe how the working of God in a soul is not primarily for the flourishing of that particular soul, but for feeding another. So too, the Church exists not for herself, or of herself, but for the Other, and through Another. Christ, our Head, is the Vine; we are the branches. Apart from Him, we can bear no fruit. But a vine does not produce fruit by some intense effort of will; it merely does what it was created to do: fruit is a natural by-product of its ongoing life. So too the fruit we bear as Christians is not solely of our human effort, but a natural result of our sustained communion with Christ, which is itself a God-given grace. Yet unlike a vine, we have free will, and can choose to remain or not to remain ‘in the vine’; therefore bearing fruit, in our case, must be a cooperation between grace and nature, between effort and yielding, between persistence and submission.

The Church must constantly return to her source, and remain in constant contact with Him, in order to bring life to the world. She is perpetually nourished by Him; consequently, through her, He nourishes the whole world. In his book What is the Church, Dr. Regis Martin reminds us that “…all salvation, all the happiness of heaven, comes by and through Him… we are not swashbuckling sources of anything save our own miserable sins.” Whatever good fruit we might bear comes through us; in submission and obedience we are privileged, with Mary, to become the conduits of grace as well as the recipients.

Our parochial vicar, Fr. Leonardo Pestaño, said in a homily that we should strive to live as Christ lived, as the Bread of Heaven, giving Himself to nourish the world. Our goal, he said, is to live in such a way that when we die, we have given ourselves away to feed others until there is nothing left of us to give: to be thus entirely consumed. But what is left of us when that is done will not be nothing; it will be rather the truest version of ourselves, ourselves fully unveiled and actualized.

“To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,” is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk, and many tears. … We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be.”

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

This bread then, we must “cast upon the waters” if it is to bring life to anyone. The Beatitudes illustrate this upside-down order of God’s Kingdom: strength in weakness, gain in giving, joy in suffering, kingship in servitude, life in death. If we want something, we must give it away to truly gain it. All human endeavor is a search for beatitude, blessedness, eudaimonia, but too often we reach for a lesser good and find our hands too full of it to accept the highest good. We must release this lesser good to have room in our hands for the perfect gift the Father wants to give us: Himself.

In the Mass, we bring our gifts to the altar to be offered to God. What are these gifts but an offering back of what has been given to us? The Lord gives us wild grapes and wheat; we cultivate and domesticate them to perfect their sweetness and delicacy. We plant, and the Lord gives us rain and sun to make them grow; we labor to tend and harvest them. We pluck them, crush and destroy them, and through an almost mystical process, a collaboration of natural processes—fermentation, fire—and the application of human labor, grain is elevated into bread, and grape into wine. These new, elevated forms—the product of our labors united with His gifts—we then present back to Him at the altar. There, the priest offers them to God, and they are elevated yet again; God gives them back to us, now as His very own Body and Blood. We consume them, and again, in a process both physical and mystical, we are now elevated by them; by eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He makes us part of His Body. The cycle continues: we then go out into the world, thus nourished, and feed others, that they too may join in the infinitely elevating dance of Gift and Giver.

When we look at the world, we must learn to see Christ “hidden in the stranger’s guise”; it is only when this is accomplished that the world will be able to see Christ when it looks at the Church. Anyone who is willing to concede that God could exist will naturally choke on the concept that God could become a man. The scandal of the Incarnation was a stumbling block for the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks. But “[i]f a purification and transformation of vision is necessary to look on Christ without being scandalized, how much more is it necessary when we are looking at the Church!” (from Henri de Lubac’s The Splendor of the Church) The idea that men could become God through Christ is an even greater scandal; but the idea that we must die in order to live might be the greatest scandal of all—contrary to our natural man, to every natural urge to self-preservation. But it is only through death to self that we can be reunited to God. The first Adam rejected God to grasp after his own idea of blessedness; the second Adam said to God, “Thy will be done.” Unless we likewise die with Him, we cannot be raised with Him. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (Jn. 12:24, KJV) 

When Jesus summed up all the Law and the Prophets as to ‘love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself,’ He was not giving two commands, but one with two faces which cannot be accomplished apart from each other. But to these He added a new commandment: love one another as He has loved us. Balthasar writes: “…God does not wish to become visible to us other than in the context of His creatures…” Jesus loved us by laying down His life for us; we love Him by laying down our life for others as He did for us. In so doing, we are laying down our lives for Him.

If we, as the Church, are to bring to bear in the world the eternal Word of God, we must remain in Him and bear good fruit. That fruit can be recognized as holiness. Balthasar underlines this: “[H]oliness is the best proof that the Church still has something to say to the present and the coming time, despite her age and her wisdom of old age.” All the Church’s traditions, teachings, doctrines, and dogmas will fall on deaf ears if they are not vivified by the electric zeal of a life lived on fire for love of God. Love is the wellspring we tap into through communion with Christ; it is the gift given and the Giver Himself. But the world has no fondness for believers “so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.” The world however, does sit up and take notice when Christians love the unlovable, those who cannot or will not reciprocate. The Church has always been distinguishable by her self-giving love for “the least of these”. Those outside may think it folly, a waste, a scandal; or they may think it supernatural; either way, they will notice. This “sign of contradiction” has always been the mark of Divine Love.

This mysterious interplay is how the Church can be called ever ancient yet ever new. But this dying and rebirth is not a cycle, like reincarnation. It is simultaneous: it is Incarnational. This continuous and simultaneous process of dying and growing maintains the Church’s relevance in a world that stays the same no matter how much it changes. Balthasar reminds us that “the truth of the Christian life is like manna: it is not possible to hoard it for it is fresh today and spoiled tomorrow.” When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God for daily bread. Just as we need bread each day to sustain our physical life, we need the Bread of Life daily to sustain our spiritual life. This bread must be baked fresh each day, but in order to remain bread, must always be baked according to the recipe. We cannot simply decide one day that we should like to bake our bread using only sand. So also the Church cannot change her message, for the truth she bears and safeguards is Christ’s message, the Word of God spoken since the beginning, and not her own truth. If bread does not nourish, it does not serve its purpose; if the Church does not feed souls, she cannot rightly be called the Church. As the Body of Christ, she and her Bridegroom are truly one flesh. He gives His flesh for the life of the world (Jn. 6:51), and in this way, it is also His Bride which He offers the world as the Bread of Life, united to His life, hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). Like the fruit of the vine, like the grains of wheat, in offering ourselves to Him, we are elevated, transubstantiated, and united with Him, to become bread for the world.

Footprints are not the point.

Think of footprints in sand.

You might picture a lone set of evenly-spaced footprints, marking out a clear trail into the distance. If you’ve got a vivid imagination (or a fondness for landscape photography), your mental image might include a fiery sunset or moody grey clouds. The types of weather and color and plant life might reflect your temperament, tastes, and personality.

What that mental image probably doesn’t reflect is reality.

How many times have you been to the beach and created the only set of human footprints? Unless you are a very early riser, or have access to some private beachfront property, probably not as often as you might have liked.

Even if you are alone, and only notice your own footprints, they are almost certainly not the only ones there.

In reality, that wave-smoothed sand is marred. The tracks of many, many other creatures — barefoot, clawed, pawed, and shod — crisscross the beach in a heedless chaotic jumble. Sometimes the prints are tiny and you really have to stoop and squint to see them: songbirds, rodents, crabs, beetles. Others are hard to miss: the sand is pitted and churned up by dogs and other heavier creatures like you and me.

There are also some spots with so many tracks that none are individually distinguishable. The tangle around the drinking fountains, the public restrooms, and along the thresholds between concrete and sand show us the waypoints where nearly everyone, regardless of species or footwear or destination, has passed or will pass.

Yeah, okay, great. So what does all this have to do with art? Sure, beaches are a pretty typical place for people to want to hang out, lots of animals there too, blah blah blah. But I’m talking about footprints — the tracks we leave behind.

Every creator faces a blank page, and in our mind, it can become that imaginary expanse of untrodden sand. In the name of self-expression, we might take a stick and boldly scrawl our name or sentiments in large letters: “I WAS HERE”, “JOHN ❤ ALICE”, a snatch of lyric, a bawdy joke. Others might create elaborate designs: fantastical mazes or sandcastles or rocketships. Some of us might prefer to leave only a humble trail of footprints, for others to see and know that this way has been traveled before. Autobiography, biography, fiction, non-fiction, diaries, visual arts; we leave our marks in different ways.

But, for many of us, that expanse of imaginary sand can feel forbidding.

Sometimes our perfectionism keeps us from taking a single step. Better to enjoy that lovely sunset from the margins than risk marring the landscape with my mess. People will see and know. People might be upset. I will ruin this. I’m not good enough.

But, like our mental image of that empty beach with one lonely set of footprints, the solitude is imaginary. Abstaining from our own brisk walk along that shore will not prevent the sand from getting churned up. Staying on the sidelines will not somehow preserve the way for other, more worthy walkers. That blank page in front of us has been visited many times, by many people. Anything that you can say will be understood by someone; there is no place to which you can journey where no one can follow you. There are places, fulcrums, in human experience where everyone’s paths intersect, needs we all share — you are not alone.

This leads me to a second fear: insignificance. The cacophony of other footprints (voices and blogs and opinions and critics) can be overwhelming.My contribution will only get lost in the muddle. Be original or shut up. No one can hear me; no one is listening; no one cares; this has all been said before, done before, made before.

To that fear, all I can say is this:

The footprints we leave are not the point of walking.

What brought you to this beach in the first place? Is that ocean less beautiful because other eyes have beheld it? Is this fresh air less vivifying because other lungs have drawn from it? Is that threshold less significant because others have had to cross it?

It’s so easy to get sidelined by the footprints.

Did you only come here to leave your mark?

But you are a writer, an artist, a creator. So footprints are, of course, a large part of the walk for you. You can’t see a sunset without wanting to pay homage in adjectives, or photographs, or shades of carmine and vermilion pigment. Because you are an artist, art is the side effect of your experiences, the natural result, the footprints you leave in the sand. But you didn’t come here to create footprints. You came here to walk, to run, to dance, to explore.

There is nothing wrong with leaving footprints. But they should be the result — and not the focus — of our journey.

We get so focused on the end goal — making sure each footstep is perfectly aligned with the last, cutting through some “original” unmarred bit of shoreline. But people don’t come to this beach to see your footprints in the sand, anymore than you came here to make them. Just like you, they come to see the sky, the sea, the waves — that fraction of a heartbeat where the slanting sunlight turns a cresting wave into stained glass.

Every moment is significant if you are looking for a sign. The very fact that so many paths cross at any certain point is what makes that point worth our attention. First loves. Heartbreak. Fear of the unknown. The pain of loss. The fears of parenthood. The struggle to survive. The need to know and to be known.

In 1911, writer O. Henry penned a short story called “Makes the Whole World Kin,” about a burglar who ends up having a friendly chat with his intended victim about the rheumatism from which they both suffer. Instead of carrying out the burglary, the young thief ends up inviting the older man out for drinks, to which he agrees — and the thief picks up the tab. Our shared experience, in this case pain, links us at a deeper level than anything else can.

This is why art, born of the need to communicate our deepest experiences with each other, knits the whole world into a family. More than the excellence of our brushstroke or our skill with a turn of phrase, our experiences are what draw us together.

Years ago, I read an excellent novel: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor. Something is “remarkable” simply because people remark about it. Things don’t go unnoticed because they are commonplace — rather they become commonplace because they go unnoticed. The best art happens when artists notice, and share with us what they notice, and in so doing, teach us to notice on our own. The commonplace becomes remarkable when we remark on it. This “knack” of noticing comes easily to some; we might call those people artists. The truth is, every one of us is capable of learning this knack.

By reaffirming the significance, the remarkability, of our common experiences, we help to ennoble ourselves and others. By recognizing our similarities, we reinforce our humanity. It’s hard to burgle someone who knows exactly how much this blasted thunderstorm is making your arthritic shoulder ache — whose shoulder is really aching too — who offers you some tips on how to ease the pain.

You’re an artist, a writer, a poet, a creator, an engineer, a maker: a human being. It is your job to see things, go places, create, explore, notice — and if you are doing your job, you will leave footprints behind as you go. Make life remarkable by taking the time to ponder and remark about life. Make the world kin, by being kindred to it. Art will follow naturally. Your heart and soul will be changed by your journey, even if there is no one else on that beach to see your footprints. The art is in the doing. The footprints are not the point.

(Originally published on medium.com)

Theotokos

“Mary is the prime ‘God-Bearer,’ bearing for us in time the One who was begotten in eternity, and every Christian after her seeks to become in some small way a God-bearer, one whose ‘yes’ to God means that Christ is made alive and fruitful in the world through our flesh and our daily lives, is born and given to another.”  ~Malcolm Guite

The icon featured above is available from Damascene Gallery in a variety of sizes and formats.

Quartet for the End of Time

“Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). … after he managed to obtain some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard (Carl-Albert Brüll, 1902-1989), Messiaen wrote … [The] quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on 15 January 1941.

The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. Messiaen later recalled: “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.” Brüll provided paper and isolation for composing, and he also helped acquire … instruments. By forging papers with a stamp made from a potato, Brüll even helped the performers to be liberated shortly after the performance….

Messiaen wrote in the Preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7, KJV): “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire … and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth …. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ….”

–excerpted from Wikipedia entry, “Quatuor pour la fin du temps”

[Carnivorous] Social [Media] Butterflies

Fragile

is a word we use
for gossamer or butterflies.
But not for her.

Thin-skinned
doesn’t say enough;
she’s an overripe tomato
fermenting in the August sun.
Just a careless poke or jostle
and she’ll split right open
spilling slippery seeds
bright red and warm,
her final burst as silent
as her long decay.

The butterflies, at least,
benefit from her
degeneration.
They slake their thirst
at the puddle
of things she left
too long
unsaid.

Footprints in the Snow

This story was inspired by a Russian folk tale called “Baboushka and the Three Kings,” in which the Wise Men invite an old widow to join them as they search for the Christ-child on a frosty winter night. Although the poor woman extends to them what meager hospitality she can offer, she tells them she is too busy, too tired, too old to join them, and they leave without her. To her dismay, she cannot think about anything else after they leave, and she sets out on her own to find Him. Legend holds that she wanders the world still, sad and hopeful, peeking into every child’s bedroom, looking for the Christ, so she too may offer Him her gift. Children look forward to finding a little toy from Baboushka on their pillows each Christmas morning.

Continue reading “Footprints in the Snow”