Bl. Giacinto Longhin on the Universal Call to Holiness

Today we have something of an embarrassment of riches in the Capuchin calendar, with two optional memorials of Capuchin blesseds. There's Blessed James of Ghazir (1875-1954), who was called 'the Lebanese St. Vincent de Paul', as well as Blessed Giacinto Longhin (1863-1936) who was bishop of Treviso, Italy.

Just for fun, I decided to translate Blessed Giacinto's reading for the Office of Readings today. (You see, here in the anglosphere, our superiors don't love us enough to provide officially updated Capuchin liturgical propers. It's one area, anyway, in which the Italians are ahead of us.)

Holiness in the Christian and religious life is an obligation. Our ignorance and acedia makes us believe that holiness isn’t possible for us, because we imagine ourselves in ecstasy, as if to be saints we need to have the gift of raptures or of visions or of prophecy or of miracles; we imagine ourselves on the cross, as if it were necessary to make great fasts or perform austerities and penances with the discipline unto blood, with hair shirts, and so on. It’s a trick.

Holiness consists in simpler things that are within everyone’s reach. It is not said to anyone: whip yourself, fast, go into ecstasy … no, this is asked of no one. It is said only that you love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and that you love your neighbor as yourself. It is in this that all the perfection and true holiness of the Christian life is found. 

Who in the world can say that they can’t love the Lord? To please him by doing his will shown to us in the commandments of the Decalogue, by the holy Church, and by our legitimate superiors? Who can say, I am not able to avoid deliberate venial sin and failures in charity, humility and obedience?

St. Thomas, to a sister who asked how she could become a saint, said: If you wish! Do you understand, my dear Maria? If you will to become a saint, it’s done. Grace will not be lacking for you and with grace we are all-powerful.

Gaudete et exsultate: Little Choices

This holiness to which the Lord calls you will grow through small gestures. Here is an example: a woman goes shopping, she meets a neighbor and they begin to speak, and the gossip starts. But she says in her heart: “No, I will not speak badly of anyone”. This is a step forward in holiness. Later, at home, one of her children wants to talk to her about his hopes and dreams, and even though she is tired, she sits down and listens with patience and love. That is another sacrifice that brings holiness. Later she experiences some anxiety, but recalling the love of the Virgin Mary, she takes her rosary and prays with faith. Yet another path of holiness. Later still, she goes out onto the street, encounters a poor person and stops to say a kind word to him. One more step. (16)

Just as theology is the queen of the sciences, which are only complete and reach their full flourishing under its light, so holiness is the first form of health within which all other well-being finds its rightful place and fullness.

And just as our bodily health is preserved and nourished by little, everyday choices, so it is with holiness. As Pope Francis points out, it is these small options for a turn to prayer, for charity, and especially for being willing to suffer for the good of another, that set us on the path towards being the saints God wills and delights for us to become.

Gaudete et exsultate: The Real History of the World

Pope Francis exhorts us, with the help of Edith Stein:

Let us be spurred on by the signs of holiness that the Lord shows us through the humblest members of that people which “shares also in Christ’s prophetic office, spreading abroad a living witness to him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity”. We should consider the fact that, as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross suggests, real history is made by so many of them. As she writes: “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. But for the most part, the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible. Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed” (8)

This reminded me of something from Thomas Merton:

I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don't believe that there are twenty such men alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart. (from "Detachment" in New Seeds of Contemplation)

One of the gifts of priesthood for me has been the opportunity to meet, usually in confession, some of these hidden saints. It is they, not the robbers writ large that one sees each day in the news, who are the protagonists of the true history of the world, which is the creation's pilgrimage toward full transfiguration in the Risen Christ.

Dust. Wind. Dude.

The other day I was sitting in church at the end of the day, when the afternoon sun comes in low through the windows on the St. Joseph side. One of the windows in front of me as open, and the sunlight was beaming through. In the sunbeam I could see particles of dust hanging in the air or moving about. This sight fascinated me when I was little, and I still enjoy it.

As I continued to consider the illuminated dust, I noticed how strong a metaphor it is for ourselves. We are hardly anything, unnecessary and entirely contingent. That we are anything worth noticing--indeed anything of beauty--it is only because at certain moments we catch the Light and become illuminated by Grace. We would be dirt on the floor, except that the quickening heat of the Light bears us up so that we might float on the currents of the Spirit, Who blows where He wills. To have this habitually is what holiness means.

'Dust to dust,' as someone will pray of us one day as our bodies are committed to the earth, but in this time in between, we have a glimpse of the world to come as particles of dust made beautiful, shiny, buoyant, and warm in the Light.

The Holiness of Ordinary People

I guess I've been kind of down on stuff lately; I can see it in all of the ponderous posts and mystifying of my frustrations in my writing. It's true that the parish priest trade--the life in which I now find myself--can be tiring and difficult. The hours are terrible, someone is always mad at you and calling you a rotten priest, wedding paperwork is tedious, sacrilegious "eulogies" at funerals poison your heart with boredom. You have to get up early and work in the evening. Nothing ever seems finished and there are always more fires to put out and another wedding or funeral coming in.

So it all begs the question: why do it? What keeps a person going? Well, the first answer is certainly a desire to love God and to serve him as best you can, responding to the vocation which is a such a gift and so wound up with God's merciful Providence in your own life. But day to day, on the natural level, what keeps me going and what helps me stay positive is the simple holiness of ordinary people.

It's the devotion of secret saints. People of all ages who would wouldn't think of going through a day without Holy Communion, or a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, or the afternoon rosary. Thank you. I see you in church and you are my teachers. It's you in the confessional who are working your particular ascesis much harder than I'm working mine. Thank you for your encouragement and good example.

It's the beautiful practices of charity. People who save box tops and can wrappers in order that money be donated to some worthy cause. People who make secret donations to the parish food pantry. Folks who visit and check on their elderly neighbors.

It's the tremendous sacrifices of ordinary Christians. Adult children who give up opportunities, up to and including families of their own, to take care of sick or aged parents and siblings. Poor folks who pay the church's heat bill by the crumpled bills they stuff into the votive light boxes. It's the parents who work so hard because of the opportunities they want their kids to have. May my celibacy never make me ignorant of your sacrifice.

So as blue as I can get sometimes, and as heavy are my own temptations to arrogant criticism, I am humbled and grateful for the chance to work as a servant of the saints.

Fulfilling the Law

Jesus' words in today's gospel have always fascinated me:

Jesus said to his disciples:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.

Matthew 5: 17-18

But what does this mean for us, the latest in a long line of gentile converts to Christianity, grafted onto the faith of Abraham by our baptism? Surely we have not followed the Law that God gave to his people through Moses! So what does it mean when Jesus says that he has not abolished, but fulfilled the Law, and that none of it will pass away?

There are lots of angles on this, but here's the one that works for me: the Law was a gift to the people, that they might imitate the holiness of God. "Be holy as I am holy." Now everyone who has tried to live a holy life knows the experience of mixed results. Our attachments, sins, and unconscious motivations often make a mockery of our desire for holiness and devotion, and we find ourselves in the discouragement of desiring God but being stymied by our own inability to seek Him devoutly.

The gift of the Incarnation is a remedy for this sorry condition. Jesus, in his divine humanity, mirrors the holiness of God from within our human condition, and offers the perfect sacrifice of obedience to the Father, thereby justifying our humanity before God. Thus the holiness we could not attain on our own has been accomplished on our behalf by one like us in all things but sin.

At this point we must be careful not to make the protestant error which sometimes seems to say that we remain in our miserable state of utter failure even though we are justified before God in Christ. Not necessarily! We in the apostolic churches--and in some ways the Orthodox even more than us Catholics--have what one of my teachers called a "maximalist anthropology." We believe that the human person can be redeemed and lifted up to sanctity in Christ. This is because Jesus has allowed the blessing and grace of his perfect sacrifice and holiness to pass over into us through the Resurrection. This is exactly what we mean by the coming of the Holy Spirit as the animator of the Church, and by the Eucharist as the living memorial of the Passion. Jesus has handed over the fruits of his own perfect sacrifice into our hands, that we too might fulfill the Law through him, and become holy as God alone is holy.

Secret Holiness

Today is the feast of Capuchin brother St. Conrad of Parzham, who spent his religious life as porter of our friary in Altötting, receiving folks who came to the door.

The Capuchin reform of the Franciscan Order, though not even five hundred years old, has produced a lot of saints, including many martyrs and even a doctor of the Church. A significant number of our saints have had this ministry of porter, or brother in charge of the door, or questor, a brother who would go out to beg.

Did these ministries make these brothers holier than the others? I doubt it. I think that many got to be saints because their holiness was available to the public; it was on display, as it were. The ministries of porter and questor put certain friars in regular contact with a lot of different people who noticed their holiness and kept its memory alive after their bodily deaths. Others who were equally saintly did not come to be canonized because their holiness was more secret.

The same point goes across religious orders. Why are their so many more canonized Franciscans than there are canonized Trappists or Carthusians? Because Franciscans are more holy? No way. It's just that their holiness gets to be more public, and those with heroic virtue are more likely to end up with a public cultus that leads to veneration, beatification, or canonization. I have no doubt that, proportionally speaking, there are just as many Trappists and Carthusians in heaven as there are Franciscans, but since their saintliness is more secret, it doesn't arrive at public veneration here in the Church Militant as we make our pilgrimage through this life.

In fact, I think that most of the holiness present in the individual members of the Church is secret. This is one of the things I've learned from the ministry of the confessional. There are saints out there, folks who have arrived at a level of response to grace and ascetical struggle against their sins that I can only speak to based on things that I've read in books. Where they are is far beyond what I can speak to from my own experience of the spiritual journey.

The really amazing thing is that often God seems to hide sanctity from the saints themselves. They don't know that they are so holy. This is partly because the closer we come to God, so much more do our faults seem glaring and our sins seem tragic in the intensity of God's goodness. That's why the saints are always so conscious of themselves as sinners. But I also think that it is the mercy of God that keeps people ignorant of their own sanctity. It saves them from temptations to vanity and ambition and frees them from an awkward self-consciouness that accompanies those who get caught in the trap of desiring holiness as a kind of commodity, rather than simply desiring God.

Nature

In today's gospel, Jesus sleeps in the boat while a storm threatens to sink it. His disciples wake him and ask whether he cares about the danger to their lives. He rebukes the storm and then his disciples for their lack of faith.

Often we experience nature as an adversary. Though our technology helps us exploit nature, often to our great benefit, creation always comes back to remind us of our powerlessness before storms and other natural disasters. We pay for our exploitation of nature by inventing new curses for ourselves: global warming, new and dangerous diseases, existential alienation from our own creaturehood.

That nature should be our adversary is part of the mystery of original sin. By the curse of Genesis 3 we have to fight against the rest of creation for our survival. One aspect of the redeemed world inaugurated in the life of Jesus Christ is the restoration of our relationship to the rest of creation.

The desert mothers and fathers used to believe that one sign of a saint would be his ability to live in harmony with all manner of dangerous animals, with nothing to fear from them. Original harmony and innocence came before original sin, and this is the proper state of thing restored in the saints.

Being a Beginner

I didn't feel like praying this morning. It's the sort of moment that teaches me that I'm still a beginner in the spiritual life. And the best we can do with such moments is to find the grace of humility in them.

If I only pray because I feel like it, it's not much different spiritually than if I got a 12-pack of PBR and watched TV all day because I felt like it. In fact, it's safer to do the latter; then one is free of the possibility of the Pharasaic delusion of holiness.

We must be mindful of our motivation at all times. I may pray because I like the idea of myself as a religious or holy and dutiful person. Or maybe my motivation is fear. In all of these we can use our so-called spirituality to bend us back upon ourselves, rather than turning us to face God and our sisters and brothers. And thus, by being "prayerful," if we're not careful, we can foil the whole purpose of the spiritual life. The devil is perfectly happy to have us pray and be religious as long as he can use these things for his own ends.

The only proper and genuine motivation for prayer is a loving response to the love of God. Nevertheless, our motivation will never be pure, and this too can teach us humility. This is one way we can take Jesus' parable of the weeds and the wheat. (Matthew 13: 24-30)

Today is also the feast of St. Ignatius of Laconi, an 18th century Capuchin lay friar. He was famous for his humility, and there are plenty of odd miracles associated with his life. The Australian Capuchins have a nice page on him. Check it out here.