Chiara Lubich – eyebeleave

Mary

3047 words, 15 min read

[The following is based on two talks given to groups of young adults in Barcelona and London in December ’17 and January ’18 respectively.]

Today I would like to share something with you about who Mary is for me and I will try to do that in three ways: say something about who she is, tell you about my relationship with her and reflect on what this relationship has taught me about what love is and who God is.

Who is Mary?

Instead of painting a comprehensive picture, I would like to focus on three moments in Mary’s life that I believe tell us a lot about who she is: the annunciation, the ~30 years she spent living with Jesus before his public ministry and her suffering at the foot of the cross. What I hope to do here is to highlight that Mary is more than an object of piety, that she is more than meekness and compliance and that she is an example for all Christians and people of good will, whether they be women or men.

But, let’s start at the beginning, which in terms of the Gospels is Luke’s account of the annunciation, where we are drawn into an event of courage, non-conformity and selflessness and where the very nature of the universe changes categorically. Mary, a young woman is presented with a startling request: to become the mother of God. She is unmarried and pregnancy would make her a social outcast, she would be rejected by her fiancee and would bring dishonour on her family, not to mention that she can’t even get her head around how this could possibly happen since she is a virgin. Yet, she takes a leap of faith and gives her consent. And everything changes. God, the uncreated, eternal, infinite, all powerful, while retaining all of these attributes, also becomes a clump of cells in Mary’s womb. Incarnate in the created, not only finite, but infinitesimal, not only weak but highly vulnerable. Mary’s self-giving, in spite of her doubts, reservations and incomprehension is immediately rewarded in a way that makes a hundredfold look positively mean.

In a recent homily on the feast of the Annunciation last year, Pope Francis drew parallels between Mary’s response to the Annunciation and our own reality today, when he said:

“Like in the past, God continues to look for allies, continues to look for men and women capable of believing, capable of remembering, of feeling part of his people so as to cooperate with the creativity of the Spirit. God continues to pass through our neighbourhoods and our streets, he goes everywhere in search of hearts capable of listening to his invitation and of making him become flesh here and now. Paraphrasing St. Ambrose […] we can say: God continues to look for hearts like that of Mary, willing to believe even under the most extraordinary conditions.”

 The second moment to reflect on is what the Gospels are silent about. The long years during which Mary, her husband Josep and their son Jesus lived together as a family. After the initial, extraordinary, cosmic drama of Jesus’ incarnation there followed decades of what I hesitate to call “ordinary” life. It couldn’t have been! Just imagine it – Mary, the mother of God, Joseph, a just man whom God chose to teach and raise his only son, and Jesus, God made man, all living in a small town in Palestine. Working, doing household chores, getting together with friends, being good, religiously-observant first-century Jews, being frustrated and angered by social and political issues, having to budget their resources with prudence, having worries and fears, hopes and dreams. Yet those who met them, who got to know them, must have felt that there was something special here. This family drew them in, they felt welcome there, they felt the warmth of how Joseph looked at Mary, how Mary took everyone as a member of her family from the first moment and how their son, Jesus flourished as a child, grew up to be a kind and friendly youth and developed into a wise, just and loving man.

This is a period in the life of Mary that Chiara Lubich also spoke about and where she saw the Holy Family as a real model for us to imitate:

“[It must have been a] family, whose members starting with a supernatural vision, seeing Jesus in others, end with the most down-to-earth and simple expressions typical of family life. A family whose members do not have a heart of stone but a heart of flesh, like Jesus, like Mary, like Joseph. Are there among you some who are suffering because of spiritual trials? They must be understood as much as and more than a mother would. Bring them the light with a word or by example. Do not let them feel the absence of the family warmth, on the contrary, let them feel it all the more. Are there among you some who are suffering physically? Let them be treated as favourites. It is necessary to suffer with them. Try to understand them right to the depth of their pain. Are there some who are dying? Imagine yourself in their place and do for them whatever you would have done for you up to the moment of your last breath. Is one of you rejoicing over some success or for any other reason? Rejoice with him or her so that the joy is not spoilt and the soul closed in on itself, but the happiness is shared by all. Is one of you going away? Do not let him or her leave without a heart filled with a single legacy: the sense of the family, so as to take it with them wherever they go. Never put any kind of activity, either spiritual or apostolic, before the spirit of the family.”

Finally, let us consider a third picture, which is that of Mary standing at the foot of the cross. There, above her hangs the mangled, broken, twisted and damaged body of her son, her own flesh and blood. She looks at him and sees the baby she gave birth to, the little boy who learned to walk, read, do geometry, the man who never stopped being her child and who brought heaven into the midst of the world, who announced the good news of God’s love for all, who cured the sick, who revived the dead and who was then betrayed and condemned to death by his peers. Such suffering may be unimaginable to us, but it is shared today by mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends of those killed in natural disasters, by illnesses, in wars and out of hatred. Yet, for Mary even this unbearable burden was only part of the story. She also saw her son cry out to his Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His physical and psychological torment culminated in a complete loss of that which made him who he is – his being one with the Father. Mary looked at her son lose his faith. She saw God without God. The God who changed the universe in her at the annunciation was now gone, leaving her son a mere husk of a man. What would I have done in her place? I, like the apostles, would have run and run far – seeing Jesus on the cross would have been unbearable beyond words. Yet, Mary stayed. She didn’t care about the cost to herself, what it would look like, what the consequences would be. She chose to be there with and for her son while utterly helpless in the face of his suffering. She had to stay, because it was in this moment that her son loved us most – giving everything, holding back nothing, showing us that he is there in all our suffering. And Mary’s response of silent unity with her son spoke volumes. It took courage, it ignored social disapproval and it was utterly self-less and self-giving.

Yet the question remains: why did they – Jesus in his forsakenness and Mary in her desolation – have to suffer so much? Here Chiara Lubich again proposes a key:

“How beautiful is Mary desolate in this turning of herself towards humanity to gather up the fruit of her son’s death – truly co-redeemer in this working together for the redemption of all. I see her with him running towards humanity which has become their god out of love for God! Both ready to leave everything for us. We too, like them, must leave God for human beings, must leave unity for the Jesus forsakens scattered throughout the world. Must make of unity our launch pad towards humanity. Must come, must live for sinners and not for the righteous – like him, like her.”

 What is my relationship with Mary like?

When I say that I have a close relationship with Mary, I don’t mean to suggest something esoteric, elitist or extraordinary (although the extraordinary is to be found everywhere!). What I mean is that she is someone whose presence I seek and find in my relationship with others. It is not dissimilar to me finding a shared friend in my relationship with another friend, or finding my parents in my relationship with my siblings, or my wife in my relationship with my sons. Analogously, I find Mary in all my relationships, since she is the one through whom Jesus, in whom all relationships subsist, came to us.

When I meet someone new, I see her since she is the mother of all and recognising her reminds me that this person who is new to me is at the same time my sibling, to be cared for, to be welcomed, to be treated with lightness and warmth. When I find myself mindlessly in the midst of a routine, I glimpse her and the routine recedes into the background of a conversation with her – after all, a routine shared is a routine halved :). When I am troubled, when it is unclear to me what I should do, when what happens doesn’t make sense, I find her beside me, consoling me and leading me to her son. When I see exclusion, discrimination, injustice, I recognise her among the excluded, calling me to herself, giving me courage to join her. And when I see suffering, I see her son and her by his side, with space for me to stand beside her. Useless, impotent, but present and ready to look for the little that I may be able to do.

Let me give you an example to illustrate what I am talking about here. During the last months there have been many challenging moments at work, where I saw that my colleagues were struggling with the pressures they were under. One Monday morning, when I arrived at work, I saw a young colleague looking physically unwell, as pale as a sheet, another colleague injecting panic into every conversation and a general sense of defeat and disillusionment among all who worked on a project that my brother Peter and I are leading. The previous week some technical challenges emerged and the general feeling was that they could end up making our project completely collapse, after ten years of hard work and before it brought anything to the company. This was unquestionably a moment of crisis and I knew that the expectation was for me to lead, to drive, to persuade and ultimately to win! I certainly wanted our project to succeed, no doubt, but the question that kept going around in my head was: “What would Mary do here?” I saw my colleagues like lost children at that moment, who first of all needed to be loved. And who better to learn from than their mother! Mary would surely comfort them, tell them they were special and give them a hug. I couldn’t do that literally, but I set out to go around, talking to them one by one and making sure they felt my closeness, that they felt understood and that they knew that we were in this difficult situation together. It was a day spent alongside Mary and therefore a day spent recognising Jesus in all.

What does Mary tell us about what love is and who God is?

Finally, we can also look at the above and ask what it tells us about what love is and who God is. Here there are two aspects that I would like to focus on, both of which are expressed with particular clarity in a mystical vision of Paradise that Chiara Lubich had in 1949. At that point she and her friends had spent five years of putting the Gospel into practice in their daily lives and when they went on holiday to the Dolomites, Chiara started receiving intellectual visions. Speaking about one of them some years later, she described Mary in the following way:

“On that day I understood Mary, perhaps through an intellectual vision, as I had never seen her before. And now twelve years have passed since that day, but I still have the clear impression of the unexpected “greatness” that this discovery of the Mother of God in the Bosom of the Father made on me.
As the blue of the sky contains sun and moon and stars, so Mary appeared to me, made by God so great as to contain God Himself in the Word.
I had never had such a notion of Mary, but there her divine greatness (divine by participation in the divinity of God) was impressed upon my soul in such a way that I do not know how to say it again.”

 God, who is Love, makes Mary, his creature, greater than himself to the point where she contains him. Yet, this extreme humility in turn adds to God’s greatness because it shows the measure of his love for Mary. The result is a virtuous cycle of love where my making myself small so that the other may flourish fulfils me too and makes me grow, which in turn adds to the greatness of the other person whom I love and so on. Asking here who is greater then becomes a misunderstanding, since the “greatness” that follows from love has no limit once the first step of making oneself “small” out of love is taken.

A second vision that Chiara Lubich received shows an image that sheds light on the relationships among the persons of the Trinity, Mary and all of humanity. Here I’d like to read you just one passage from it:

“The tree of humanity was […] created in the image of God.
When, in the fullness of time, it blossomed, unity was made between heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit espoused Mary.
Therefore, there is one flower: Mary. And there is one fruit: Jesus. And Mary, though alone, is nevertheless the synthesis of the entire creation in the culminating moment of its beauty when it presents itself as spouse to its Creator.
Jesus, instead, is creation and the uncreated made one: the Marriage consummated. And he contains Mary within himself just as the fruit contains the flower. Once the flower has served its purpose, it falls and the fruit matures. Even so, if there had never been a flower, then neither would the fruit have ripened.
Just as Mary is daughter of her Son, similarly, the flower is child of the fruit which is its child.”

To get a clearer reading of this mystical and poetic text, let’s listen to what reflections it inspired in Fr. Pasquale Foresi, one of Chiara Lubich’s closest collaborators, who in 2006 wrote the following:

“God is the Father who gives himself wholly in the Son, who in turn wholly gives himself back to Him. And their mutual love – the relationship that unites them among themselves – is the Holy Spirit. Being like God then means living this same Trinitarian dynamic with Him. […]
Also to us, then, created “in the likeness” of God, must be given the possibility of giving God to God, that is, of returning to him as creatures truly capable of being like him.
This possibility took shape fully on earth, at a given moment in history, in Mary.
She is the creature who was made capable of generating in the flesh the Word, the second Person of the Trinity.
We must understand this prerogative of Mary in all its extraordinary depth, which makes it unique among all creatures.
Mary, being Mother of Jesus, is the Mother of the only human-divine Person of the Word, to whom she gives human nature, which in him unites in most profound and most perfect union – “without division” and “without confusion”, as the Council of Chalcedon affirms – with the divine one.
Mary is therefore, in the true sense, Mother of God. God has been able to bring about so much in her because of her free consent to the divine plan prepared from all eternity: “May it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38).
At the same time, Mary, because conceived of by God as the one who in herself sums up the whole creation, has opened to creation itself the possibility of generating God.
This is how with her and in her the freedom of the human person reaches its truth and its fullness.”

What stands out to me here is the level of intimacy and unity between God and us, his creation, which has its pinnacle in Mary, the person whom God singled out in his relationship with humanity and who is at the same time one of us and one with God. Through God’s relationship with Mary we see the relationship we are all called to and in which we all already share through Mary. And again it also speaks about what love is, regardless of whether you believe in God or not. The relationship we are presented with between God and Mary is one where the lover surrenders to the beloved, risks their own plans by placing them at the mercy of the beloved, but ultimately arrives at a relationship of such unity with an other, who is so dramatically different from their self, that they both become each other’s source and fulfilment.

Fede: flinging open the doors of the Trinity

Fede

This morning, another of Chiara Lubich’s first followers has completed his earthly journey. Giorgio Marchetti, who received the name “Fede” (faith) from Chiara, was a focolarino, medical doctor, psychologist, moral theologian and priest, and I give thanks to God for the gift that he was for me personally. I first met Fede over twenty years ago, during a meeting in Rome of which I have three lasting memories. First, Fede’s deep, radiant and existential smile, which seemed more a smile of his every atom that just of his face. Second, his utter rootedness in the present moment, as a result of which he almost entirely ignored the carefully crafted schedule of the four day meeting to tell us what was at the forefront of his soul at the beginning of any given session during which he spoke. Third, the experience he shared of his call to follow Jesus. Fede, pretty much in the first sentence I heard him say, declared that he never felt called by Jesus. Instead, he met others who had so obviously been his followers that he felt like someone who goes up to Jesus and says to him: “Let me follow you.” All of this has had a powerful impact on me during a time when I was discerning my own vocation, and I would like to thank God for the gift of Fede on this, his dies natalis.

Others have known Fede far better than I and have been far closer to him, and I hope that they will share their rich experiences of who he was for them. As a way of thanking Fede myself, I have selected – and translated into English – a couple of my favorite passages from his writings, which I would like to share with you next.

First, there is a particularly lucid passage about how love and freedom mutually strengthen each other, from a talk entitled “The conquest of freedom”:

“In practice we see that a person grows humanly and spiritually and that they mature and become fulfilled not by looking at themselves in an effort of self-perfection, but by looking at others, and on the back of their giving themselves, they grow and fulfill themselves, almost without realizing it, not by looking at themselves in the mirror, but by looking at others.

This love makes freedom grow in us. Why? Because in every act of love we, giving ourselves, somehow “lose” ourselves, but by doing so we free ourselves from all the things of which we may be prisoners. But, by being love, we grow. And we grow with a full heart: pure and full, free and full. Therefore, as freedom lets us love, so love increases freedom.”

Second, a beautiful reflection on what makes love perfect:

“[Love] cannot be but reciprocal, for it is the love of the Trinity itself that Jesus made come down to Earth and in which he made us take part. Like this he, in fact, prayed to his Father: “May the love with which you loved me be in them and I in them.” (John 17;26) It is therefore the same love that connects us with God and with one another, to the point of making us “perfect in unity”, as John always says, that is, “one”, like Jesus and the Father are one. If we love one another reciprocally, “God remains in us.” (1 John 4:12) The more unity grows among us, the more unity grows with him, and vice versa; we are therefore not called to sanctify ourselves alone but together, and for each one of us to feel responsible for each other, each members of one another. If we love, Jesus is still with us, as he promised us: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20) God in us, God among us: this is enough for us, of course, to understand that love is the essence of Christian life.”

Third, advice on how to think of and deal with inevitable difficulties:

“Each one of us, in their own life, cannot help but experience sufferings, to meet, or rather to collide with difficulties. Even just being aware of this allows us to be prepared to face them. And it is important, in fact, to face them: that is, not to let them effectively take over; I’d say in other words, it should not be they who “live us” but we who “live them”, with full awareness and with all the freedom we are capable of. This applies to all the difficulties we encounter, physical, spiritual, social, environmental.

A difficulty that I would like to reflect on is “temptation”: by that I mean thoughts or circumstances or inner drives that tend to distract us from our life’s project that we are pursuing in an attempt to be consistent. Here in particular it is important and fundamental to be aware of them, that is, pulling them out of the subconscious, “not to sleep on them” but to look them in the face and reject them with utmost determination. This applies to everyone; but for us Christians, in particular, there are those temptations that can distance us from God and from the life that he proposes to us: the one that we most deeply desire.

And here, in addition to our determination, what is worth a lot, and takes first place, is trusting prayer. But we can say the same also with regard to all other types of difficulty. Some we can resolve. Others we will have to accept, but it is possible not to get crushed by them. Beyond interior attitude, it may be useful to share them with other people you trust. For us Christians, it is important to unite our sufferings with those of Jesus crucified and abandoned, and possibly share them with other people united by the “new commandment” of Jesus, who love one another with his love to the point of being able to count on him personally, as he promised: Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20)”

Fourth, on the importance of remaining in love:

“What God expects of us, more than the great acts of virtue or heroic deeds and even more than a scrupulous fidelity to his teachings, it is our love for him, overflowing to men. He is a Father who expects us to start and to continue with him, in a thousand ways, a personal dialogue that will last beyond death. Our love can be turned to God or to men and permeate our relationship with all creatures; but remaining in this divine-human reality of love always has the consequence of “remaining in God.”

And this is not just some nice expression, nor some keeping in touch with him, like with someone of whom you think and whom you love; instead, it is a communion that reaches the totality of our being. There are a thousand circumstances that can make us exit this reality. For example, when we approach someone full of good will and with all the love that we are capable of, it is always a tough injury if we receive hatred, dislike, or even indifference from them in return. Or, it can happen that what we do is misinterpreted; and misunderstandings arise. It is not easy then to remember that regardless of any possible explanation, that which has value, however, is to ”remain in love.” Many of us have known slanders, insults, teasing and cheating of every kind. Many know what wounded pride, humiliation, the desire to pay back in kind, or the blind rage of impotence mean, instead of remaining in the newness of the kingdom of Jesus. But who manages to “remain in love,” learns to forgive, to repay evil with good, to pray for those who persecute us, and to give double of what is asked of us, in short, to live all of the Gospel.”

And, finally, a reflection on the commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples:

“[What] resonates in our minds and hearts are the words said to his disciples: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” (John 13:34). He calls us therefore to participate in His own love towards men; This is His commandment, a New Commandment, the synthesis of all the moral teaching of Jesus. […]

In fact, Jesus says : “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (John 15:14) (and all his commandments are summed up in his commandment); and then he resumes: “I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:15) A friendship that is even mutual immanence: “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” (John 15:4) Next, he promises his disciples that if they will love Him, then the Father too will go and live in them; he promises the Holy Spirit; he promises that every prayer will be heard. More than a command, then, it is the revelation of Love, the door of the Trinity flung wide open. It is a love that, before being commanded, is given as a gift; and it is the same love that binds the Father to the Son: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” (John 15:9) And it is a love that contains all the loves of which Chiara spoke, referring to Jesus Forsaken: fatherly, motherly, brotherly, spousal.”

Reason in Faith: God’s exile of love in the world

Emmaus4

1592 words, 8 min read

The questions of how faith and reason relate to each other and to reality are of central importance in contemporary dialogue, and while I have previously focused on this topic with the desire to either make religious thought accessible to a non-religious reader or vice versa, I would here like to share a view “from inside”, a view that is deeply embedded in Christianity. I will do this by providing an English translation of a few passages from a book I have just read, in which the great Christian philosopher, Giuseppe Maria Zanghí, gives an account of his personal journey through philosophy. It is an account that is profoundly internal to its author, whose roots as a poet give the narrative both a mesmerizing beauty and, at times, call for his words to be be wrestled with repeatedly, putting us in the position of Jacob’s encounter with the angel (Genesis 32:22-33). Even if the result is defeat, and a hip injury, I believe that Zanghí’s words will leave us with an inner conviction that then allows for free, universal dialogue with all.

Zanghí, who in his youth met and then throughout his life followed Chiara Lubich, recounts this foundational piece of advice early on in the book:

“It was Chiara who […] made me pay attention to all expressions of human enquiry, because, she told me, each of them had been, is in love with the truth and in one way or another had, has touched it. In all there is a patrimony of suffering, invocation, anticipation, which must be respected with humble attention and strong participation. “You have to learn from everyone,” she said, “so that you may draw near to all with love.””

It is with this conviction, that behind all human enquiry there is a desire for truth and that all human enquiry also arrives at some truth, that its various forms can be approached with humility and be candidates for participation.

In this context, Zanghí understands our engaging with reality as:

“a unitary discourse set in a reality that is wholly given as God-Love’s word of love. An intuitive discourse, in which a face of reality, infinite in its original source that is the Word of God, opens itself up rationally and thereby offers itself to our weakness, to be reached in its entirety by the unity of knowledge that is wisdom.”

Since the above is a highly concentrated expression of what engaging with reality consists in, Zanghí proceeds to spell out what he means and anchors thought in Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross (pp. 26-27):

“The philosopher’s¹ approach to reality does not presuppose a previous mathematical approach (as Plato wanted): it captures, in one go, an aspect of reality in which reality speaks-gives itself all-in-a-piece. To the philosopher (like the mathematician, physicist, artist), in their “innocence”, reality gives herself wholly, without mediation through other kinds of knowledge, but she presents herself with a face that expresses all of her concealed in her entirety.

Every field of knowledge grasps all that is real, but reality is given to it in a way that hides while revealing.

And here the fulfillment of Jesus’ question – the commandment of mutual love (John 15:12-17) – opens itself to the thinker (and the artist). Because it is in the actuality of this that the one reality can be approached by a perichoresis of different kinds of knowledge, in a circular dance of knowledge, that is light and in tune with the profound harmony of God. Each kind of knowledge is custodian of its approach to reality; reality that unfolds fully in the mutual embrace of the different kinds of knowledge, an embrace in which individual thinkers will be lead to stripping themselves of their own approaches, making them gifts for the others. To receive as a gift the real in its entirety, that transcends individual kinds of knowledge.

Jesus forsaken is always the teacher: being and non-being. Knowing how to face the “emptiness” that follows the true gift, “losing” one’s own knowledge out of love in the attentive listening to the other, joined in their knowledge by my knowledge, mine and no longer mine, and waiting for their gift of a response in which I find again my knowledge made more complete by theirs. Without making their knowledge pass through the maze, the grating of my knowledge, that would result in me being joined by none other than myself.

In this communion one can, in some way, catch, in the faces of reality through which it is reached by our knowledge, the one face that it speaks and does not speak, to reveal itself to our reciprocal love. Catching the face of the triune God, of Trinitarian perichoresis, that speaks itself while hiding in realities and opens itself in their communion.”

What Zanghí presents here in highly dense and poetic language is an understanding of reality, knowledge and God that is unlocked by what Jesus revealed about the Trinity, and therefore love, in his abandonment on the cross. Since love is about loving in a way that requires a total self-giving, to the point of becoming empty, and about being loved, where my emptiness is filled by the other’s total gift, and since the God whose very life is such love is the source of reality, it too can only be grasped in that same dynamic of love, and knowledge too follows the logic of self-giving to an empty recipient. As a result, reality (spoken by God) makes itself known to our mutual self-giving. Knowledge is received when we empty ourselves and offer ourselves as gifts to each other. In such a world, dialogue is fundamental, since it is the space where knowledge is received as gift. It becomes the privileged locus of understanding and participating in reality and the lives of others, rather than being a mere PR exercise or an attempt at influencing others and changing their minds.

With the above world-view, let’s finally turn to Zanghí’s reflection on faith and reason (pp. 38-39):

“Faith and reason are not two ways of knowing. Faith without reason would remain blind, suspended in emptiness. Reason without faith would remain unfulfilled desire. They would remain one outside the other, one foreign to the other, ripping man apart.

And reason could never offer its light, out of love, to penetrating in faith the mystery of God and as far as possible to opening his riches to a creature, allowing itself to be lead to the pinnacle of its power, and immersing in those riches the created realities. Reason, without faith, would remain folded in mortifying impotence.

And faith could not let penetrate to the heart of man the light of God who is God in his loving self-offering to the efforts of the creature – efforts which, moreover, are provoked by that very light. The promise of knowing in the way in which it is known (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12) would remain unfulfilled, the order of created things would not be illuminated by the divine Order, by the Trinity, but would have to give itself a poor and unsatisfactory foundation and unfolding.

We must unite the divine that is offered in faith immersed as “form” in reason, and the human that is open in reason, pulled to himself by God, in faith for being filled with light. Without confusion and without separation.

For me it has been a beautiful experience to follow the rush of reason unfettered by cultural blocks, to the point of feeling it welcomed by God, who responds to it in faith, in a perichoresis, still on a journey, of the divine and the human.

Faith, due to one of its aspects, is, in some way, reason itself being led by God, in the ecstasy of cognitive love, outside itself, remaining itself but permeated by Christ.

Reason in faith is, in some way, the voice of God in its exile of love in the world.

Reason is the material offered to God who gives it human-divine form in faith.

Reason as the seal of divine love that participates in man, as a creature, his Logos.

Faith as the tenderness of God-Love for his creature, whom He does not want to burn with His divine power but lead, respecting it in its creaturely weakness, in a consuming embrace in which the creature, while entering the searing heart-mind of God, must remain herself.

Faith, in short, as a moment of mediation between that which I can here, as a man, know of God through the Revelation of God, and that which I will then know of God in God’s own way, no longer mediated through faith. Remaining man, like Jesus at the right hand of the Father is always the man of Nazareth.”

What strikes me as I re-read these passages for at least the tenth time is that clear both-and instead of an either-or that Zanghí establishes between faith and reason. On the one hand, the picture he presents can be seen as showing reason as supreme, since faith only plays a temporary role, as tender protection against the overwhelming power of God and therefore as a means for preserving our identity in the face of God. On the other hand, his words can also be heard as exalting faith above reason, since faith is reason transfigured, Christified, an expression of God’s love.

¹ I will render Zanghí’s “metafisico” as “philosopher” even though it might be more correct – but arguably more cumbersome – to say “metaphysician”.

A heart as great as the heart of God

Today is the feast of Mary’s assumption into heaven, a belief held by Christians since at least the second century and proclaimed as a dogma of the Catholic Church in 1950 by Pope Pius XII:

“we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

To get a better sense of what this teaching of the Church means and, even more importantly, what its implications are, I would like to share some passages from homilies given by the last three popes on this important marian feast that have given me most joy.

To begin with, St. John Paul II situates the feast of the Assumption not only as a guide for Catholics or Christians, but for all “people of good will” and links it to two themes so central to Pope Francis’ teaching: the poor and mercy:

“Taken up into heaven, Mary shows us the way to God, the way to heaven, the way to life. She shows it to her children baptized in Christ and to all people of good will. She opens this way especially to the little ones and to the poor, those who are dear to divine mercy. The Queen of the world reveals to individuals and to nations the power of the love of God whose plan upsets that of the proud, pulls down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away (cf. Lk 1:51-53).” (St. John Paul II, 15 August 1999)

Pope Benedict XVI then elaborates on what is meant by the destination of Mary’s assumption – Heaven – and how this teaching of the Church is central to two important aspects of its world view: that all of what is on earth is destined for salvation and that there is a profound continuity between the here and now and the eternal:

“All of us today are well aware that by the term “Heaven” we are not referring to somewhere in the universe, to a star or such like; no. We mean something far greater and far more difficult to define with our limited human conceptions. With this term “Heaven” we wish to say that God, the God who made himself close to us, does not abandon us in or after death but keeps a place for us and gives us eternity. We mean that in God there is room for us. To understand this reality a little better let us look at our own lives. We all experience that when people die they continue to exist, in a certain way, in the memory and heart of those who knew and loved them. We might say that a part of the person lives on in them but it resembles a “shadow” because this survival in the heart of their loved ones is destined to end. God, on the contrary, never passes away and we all exist by virtue of his love. We exist because he loves us, because he conceived of us and called us to life. We exist in God’s thoughts and in God’s love. We exist in the whole of our reality, not only in our “shadow”. Our serenity, our hope and our peace are based precisely on this: in God, in his thoughts and in his love, it is not merely a “shadow” of ourselves that survives but rather we are preserved and ushered into eternity with the whole of our being in him, in his creator love. It is his Love that triumphs over death and gives us eternity and it is this love that we call “Heaven”: God is so great that he also makes room for us. And Jesus the man, who at the same time is God, is the guarantee for us that the being-man and the being-God can exist and live, the one within the other, for eternity.

This means that not only a part of each one of us will continue to exist, as it were pulled to safety, while other parts fall into ruin; on the contrary it means that God knows and loves the whole of the human being, what we are. And God welcomes into his eternity what is developing and becoming now, in our life made up of suffering and love, of hope, joy and sorrow. The whole of man, the whole of his life, is taken by God and, purified in him, receives eternity. Dear Friends! I think this is a truth that should fill us with deep joy. Christianity does not proclaim merely some salvation of the soul in a vague afterlife in which all that is precious and dear to us in this world would be eliminated, but promises eternal life, “the life of the world to come”. Nothing that is precious and dear to us will fall into ruin; rather, it will find fullness in God. Every hair of our head is counted, Jesus said one day (cf. Mt 10: 30). The definitive world will also be the fulfilment of this earth, as St Paul says: “Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8: 21). Then we understand that Christianity imparts a strong hope in a bright future and paves the way to the realization of this future. We are called, precisely as Christians, to build this new world, to work so that, one day, it may become the “world of God”, a world that will surpass all that we ourselves have been able to build. In Mary taken up into Heaven, who fully shares in the Resurrection of the Son, we contemplate the fulfilment of the human creature in accordance with “God’s world”. (Benedict XVI, 15 August 2010)

Benedict also traces the belief in Mary’s Assumption to her closeness with her Son and, like Francis does in Evangelii Gaudium (§269) with regard to the life and passion of Jesus, explains its deep continuity:

“[T]he Mother of God is so deeply integrated into Christ’s Mystery that at the end of her earthly life she already participates with her whole self in her Son’s Resurrection. She lives what we await at the end of time when the “last enemy” death will have been destroyed (cf. 1 Cor 15: 26); she already lives what we proclaim in the Creed: “We look for the Resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”. (Benedict XVI, 15 August 2010)

Two years later, during the last year of his pontificate, Benedict XVI focuses on what the specific implications of the Assumption are for our life as Christians, and he points to two complementary statements: in God there is room for man, and in man there is room for God:

“But now let us ask ourselves: how does the Assumption of Mary help our journey? The first answer is: in the Assumption we see that in God there is room for man, God himself is the house with many rooms of which Jesus speaks (cf. Jn 14:2); God is man’s home, in God there is God’s space. And Mary, by uniting herself, united to God, does not distance herself from us. She does not go to an unknown galaxy, but whoever approaches God comes closer, for God is close to us all; and Mary, united to God, shares in the presence of God, is so close to us, to each one of us.

There is a beautiful passage from St Gregory the Great on St Benedict that we can apply to Mary too. St Gregory the Great says that the heart of St Benedict expanded so much that all creation could enter it. This is even truer of Mary: Mary, totally united to God, has a heart so big that all creation can enter this heart, and the ex-votos in every part of the earth show it. Mary is close, she can hear us, she can help us, she is close to everyone of us. In God there is room for man and God is close, and Mary, united to God, is very close; she has a heart as great as the heart of God.

But there is also another aspect: in God not only is there room for man; in man there is room for God. This too we see in Mary, the Holy Ark who bears the presence of God. In us there is space for God and this presence of God in us, so important for bringing light to the world with all its sadness, with its problems. This presence is realized in the faith: in the faith we open the doors of our existence so that God may enter us, so that God can be the power that gives life and a path to our existence. In us there is room, let us open ourselves like Mary opened herself, saying: “Let your will be done, I am the servant of the Lord”. By opening ourselves to God, we lose nothing. On the contrary, our life becomes rich and great.” (Benedict XVI, 15 August 2012)

Finally, Pope Francis, in his first Assumption homily as pope, outlined the strong parallels between Jesus’ and Mary’s lives, as a result of Mary’s unity with her Son, making her not only our Mother, but also our “eldest sister”:

“The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, insists that being Christian means believing that Christ is truly risen from the dead. Our whole faith is based upon this fundamental truth which is not an idea but an event. Even the mystery of Mary’s Assumption body and soul is fully inscribed in the resurrection of Christ. The Mother’s humanity is “attracted” by the Son in his own passage from death to life. Once and for all, Jesus entered into eternal life with all the humanity he had drawn from Mary; and she, the Mother, who followed him faithfully throughout her life, followed him with her heart, and entered with him into eternal life which we also call heaven, paradise, the Father’s house.

Mary also experienced the martyrdom of the Cross: the martyrdom of her heart, the martyrdom of her soul. She lived her Son’s Passion to the depths of her soul. She was fully united to him in his death, and so she was given the gift of resurrection. Christ is the first fruits from the dead and Mary is the first of the redeemed, the first of “those who are in Christ”. She is our Mother, but we can also say that she is our representative, our sister, our eldest sister, she is the first of the redeemed, who has arrived in heaven.” (Francis, 15 August 2013)

Thinking about the words of these three popes, what stood out for me is the profound logic of Mary’s assumption into heaven – body and soul – and her closeness to all of humanity, and this – in turn – reminded me of a beautiful passage from the intellectual visions that the Servant of God Chiara Lubich had in 1949. There, she one day saw the following image:¹

“Looking at nature, it seems that Jesus has given his new commandment also to it.

I observed two plants and I thought about pollination. Before it happens, the plants grow upward, as if they loved God with their whole being. Then they unite, almost as if they loved one another as the Persons of the Trinity love one another. Out of two they make one single thing. They love to the point of abandonment, to the point of losing – so to speak – their personality like Jesus in His forsakenness.

Then, from the flower that emerges, the fruit is born and, therefore, life continues. It is like the eternal Life of God imprinted in nature.

The Old and New Testaments form a single tree. Its flowering came about in the fullness of time. And the only flower was Mary.

The fruit that followed it was Jesus.

Also the tree of humanity was created in God’s image.

In the fullness of time, at the point of blooming, unity came about between heaven and earth and the Holy Spirit married Mary.”

¹ Apologies for the limitations of the following translation from Italian, which is mine.

Our Sister, Mother Earth

Klimt

Pope Francis’ much anticipated encyclical on the environment, entitled “Praised Be” (“Laudato Si’”) after the opening line of St. Francis’ canticle, starts by personifying our planet, calling her our sister and mother, and lamenting the violence we have visited on her, with whom we are one, who lives in us and who sustains us:

““Laudato si’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.¹

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.”

Already the above, opening paragraphs of this encyclical are worth pausing over, and before even proceeding with reflecting on its remaining 183 pages, I would like to pick up on the idea that the earth ought to be thought of as another person, instead of “just” as some inanimate matter that is alien to the human race. In fact, Pope Francis decries such an attitude towards our planet later on in Laudato si’ by quoting Romano Guardini (§115):

“[T]he technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference.”

To get a sense of the origin and nature of St. Francis’ broad use of personification when addressing not only the Earth as sister and mother, but all of creation too, let us take a look at the circumstances of his writing the Canticle of Brother Sun that Pope Francis quotes. In a profound analysis of the Canticle, Ilia Delio, O.S.F. recounts the circumstances of its writing in the spring or summer of 1225 (some 6-10 months after St. Francis received the stigmata), quoting from the Legenda perugina:

“He could no longer see in the daytime the light of day, nor at night the light of the fire, but always remained in the house and in the little cell in darkness. Moreover, he had great pain in his eyes day and night so that at hight he could scarcely rest or sleep, which was very bad for him and greatly aggravated the sickness of his eyes and his other infirmities.”

St. Francis was at a low point in the midst of this suffering and he cried out to God for help: “Lord, come to my help and look on my infirmities so that I may bear them patiently.” He then heard a voice promising him eternal happiness in the kingdom of heaven, expressed via an image in which the earth transformed into gold (still in the Legenda perugina):

“Tell me brother: if anyone were to give you for your infirmities and tribulations such a great and precious treasure that, if the whole earth were pure gold, all stones were precious stones, and all water were balsam, yet you would consider all this as nothing, and these substances as earth, stones, and water in comparison with the great and precious treasure given to you, surely you would rejoice greatly?”

To this St. Francis replied:

“That would be a great treasure, Lord, and worth seeking, truly precious and greatly to be loved and desired.”

The voice then said to him:

“Therefore, brother, rejoice, and rather be glad in your infirmities and tribulations, since henceforth you are as secure as if you were already in my kingdom.”

The next morning, St. Francis awoke, wrote the Canticle of Brother Sun and sent his fellow friars out to sing it “as minstrels of the Lord.”

What seems particularly significant to me here is that the Canticle was not the result of some euphoric lyricising, but instead the response to having received consolation from God in response to St. Francis placing his trust in Him in the midst of suffering and distress.

Beyond the circumstances of its writing, it is important to note what St. Francis’ disciple, St. Bonaventure though of the motives behind Francis’ personification of the created. The following are passages Delio quotes from Bonaventure’s Legenda maior:

“When he considered the primordial source of all things, he was filled with even more abundant piety, calling creatures, no matter how small, by the name of brother or sister, because he knew they had the same source as himself.

[…]

With a feeling of unprecedented devotion he savored in each and every creature – as in so many rivulets – that Goodness which is their fountain source … and like the prophet David sweetly exhorted them to praise the Lord.”

St. Francis called the Earth sister and mother because both she and he share the one origin: God. Since we and all of creation share the one Father, we are all siblings – not only among members of the human race, but also in relation to all of creation, from the simplest forms of inanimate matter to lifeforms most similar to us: a worldview also highly consistent with that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Pope Francis also refers to in Laudato Si’ (§83).

St. Francis tracing brotherhood and sisterhood with the Earth and with all of creation to a shared source in God is also very closely related to the intellectual visions of the Servant of God, Chiara Lubich, who in 1949 experienced insights into the life of the Trinity. There, Lubich saw the following image of how all creation proceeds from God:

“When God created, He created all things from nothing because He created them from Himself: from nothing signifies that they did not pre-exist because He alone pre-existed (but this way of speaking is inexact as in God there is no before and after). He drew them out from Himself because in creating them He died (of love), He died in love, He loved and therefore He created.

As the Word, who is the Idea of the Father, is God, analogously the ideas of things, that “ab aeterno” are in the word, are not abstract, but they are real: word within the Word.

The Father projects them — as with divergent rays — “outside Himself,” that is, in a different and new, created dimension, in which he gives to them “the Order that is Life and Love and Truth.” Therefore, in them there is the stamp of the Uncreated, of the Trinity.”

All of creation is a projection of the Word (words within the Word) “outside” of the Father, where these words (ideas) are the models, laws or forms of things, as Dr. Callan Slipper explains in an analysis of Lubich’s visions of creation. While all of creation is viewed in the above terms, consonant with St. Francis, Lubich also sees differences between the relationship that humans have with the Word (Jesus) and the relationship that the rest of creation has:

“At the end of time (and already now for God) the model of each pine tree, that is beneath each pine tree, will come into light and both the particular and the universal will be seen contemporaneously. Now the head is on High, and together with the other models, in the Word of God. […]

The plants that we see now, for instance the pine trees, are “members” of the model pine tree [that is, various forms of the model pine tree, Lubich explains] that is in the Word and thus destined to be Word. Here too is the mystery of the Mystical Body in nature. […]

Human beings, instead, because they are immortal, will return into the Word: son in the Son, but they will also be distinct from the Son as another son of God. Having however in themselves the whole of the Word they too will be a mirror of the Universe that is in the Word. […]

[I]n each human being [Jesus] sees the Human Being, that is Himself, the model of humanity, likewise He already sees beneath other creatures (as the pine tree for example) the Idea, the Word, that is then part (= the whole) of Himself. The human being (made in the image of God) is the whole of Himself; the plant is part of Himself (but = to Himself and it says: humanity—its God—is greater than me).”

While every created entity has its source in God, human beings each are both particular instances of a word-idea and the whole of the Word (Jesus); the rest of creation too has its source in the Word, but in a way that only partly expresses Him. Instead of suggesting superiority, the relationships between God (Word), human beings (particular instances of the whole Word) and the rest of creation (particular instances of the partial Word), place human beings in a position of containing the rest of creation (being “mirrors of the Universe”) by being instances of the Word that is their source and destination. This particular nature of humanity is also addressed in Laudato si’, where Pope Francis highlights both the need for treating all living beings responsibly and the greater dignity of the human person that is particularly, and most perversely, violated by other humans:

“At times we see an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person; more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure. Certainly, we should be concerned lest other living beings be treated irresponsibly. But we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others.” (§90)

I believe that the personification of creation that St. Francis used as a means for acknowledging that all of creation has the same Father as each one of us, that Chiara Lubich’s vision of the life of the Trinity clarified with even greater nuance, and that Pope Francis placed at the basis of his call for a new culture of relating to each other and to nature is a perspective that immediately brings with it a deep sense of clarity. Thinking of nature as a sibling rather than as the “mere given” that Pope Francis criticized is a great token for investing it with a whole architecture of care and affection that other mental models would struggle to bring about. And it is a perspective that was easily accessible even to my 7 and 12 year old sons, who understood what it meant as soon as I told them about it and who immediately saw that it makes sense.

¹ Just because of its beauty, here is the original in St. Francis’ own, Umbrian words: «Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra matre Terra, la quale ne sustenta et governa, et produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba.»

Chiaretto: truth, freedom, unity

Chiara e Don Foresi

This morning, Don Pasquale Foresi, one of Chiara Lubich’s first companions and a co-founder of the Work of Mary, has completed his earthly journey. Don Foresi, known to his friends as Chiaretto, was a man who has given his life to God unreservedly and I am sure that there will be much written about him in the years to come. Instead of attempting to share an outline of his life here, I will focus on his thought, which shone with brilliance and where he displayed not only a love of the truth, but also great care for and familiarity with the world and the Church. Chiaretto was an extraordinary theologian and philosopher, but before all else, he was a follower of Jesus worthy of the apostles.

Chiaretto’s thoughts on prayer are something I shared here already, but since they are such a great example of his characteristic focus on the essential, let’s re-read them again:

Prayer does not consist in dedicating time during the day to meditation, or to reading some passages from Scripture or from the writings of the saints, or in thinking of God or our ourselves with the aim of some internal reform. This isn’t prayer in its essence.

Reciting the rosary or morning or evening prayers is just the same. One can do these things all day without ever having prayed even for a minute.

Prayer, to be truly such, requires above all a relationship with Jesus: to go with the spirit beyond our human condition, our worries, our prayers – no matter how nice and necessary they may be, and establishing this intimate, personal relationship with him.

In an early article in Nuova Umanità from 1979, Chiaretto embarks on an profound analysis of the first three chapters of Genesis, with the aim of examining the way woman is presented there and arriving at a conclusion of fundamental equality between her and man. Just to get a sense of his clarity of thought, take a look at the following excerpt:

“Verse 23 [of Genesis 2], which says that: “the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of man this one has been taken.”” is a hymn of joy of the man who has found his partner. He discovers the same flesh, the same bones. In Hebrew “flesh” had a far vaster meaning than in our languages, because there was no word for “body”. Von Rad sees in this verse the key to explaining the creation account of Eve; this is in fact about understanding one fact: the primordial attraction between the sexes – whence comes a love as strong as death?

It seems to me that the Yahwist writer certainly explains the origin of the sexes, but his story is far more extensive and elevated than that. It is not just about a differentiation internal to the first couple, but it is the story of how all of humanity is meant to be that is being presented to us.

The deep love, (made tangible by the account of the birth of woman from a rib) between the first man and the first woman, foreshadows the love between all beings that are to be born; hatred ought not to exist, because it is against one’s own flesh; that which later will be said spiritually, “then” was true also physically.”

Many years later, in a seminal paper from 2001 entitled “Doing philosophy,” Chiaretto presents a startling picture of what is at stake when true philosophy is sought:

“[P]hilosophy implies a risk: the risk of one’s own peace of mind. Doing philosophy, in the sense I intend, is to say: I prefer to take risks, not be calm; I want to know, I want clear things up, I want to go further beyond. And this is a terrifying step, because no one helps us, because the answers that all give us the feel prefabricated, something that is meaningless because we must look for the real answer within ourselves. Only in these moments do we know what the real problem is, we feel it, even if we can not express it yet, to clarify it, to say it. It is the choice of a non-peace in the face of the appearance of peace offered by the world around us. It is a choice that involves changing all relationships with others. Because of this I would say that one aspect of this tragic situation is that almost no one will understand us. The surprise implies a break with the world around us: that surprise which is the wonder of being in the world without being in the world. One is cut off from everyone else, one is alone, naked. You say one thing and the others will understand another; they say one thing and you maybe understand the contrary. Basically, you do not receive any solution from the others, and even though you know that you have to find the solution with others, one feels alone, not in the sense of not having company but in the sense of a radical, metaphysical impossibility of “feeling oneself with someone.” It is as if one lived in another world. It’s like entering a cave, with the risk of never coming out of it again. But none of this is of interest in those moments: “what will be will be,” I can not have peace until I accept to face myself, to face the problem of my existence and of my knowing myself. We realize that we are at sea, in an abyss, in a dark universe. We have only just started to walk and we can not turn back. There is nothing left but to press ahead. This is the drama of doing authentic philosophy.”

In a follow-up paper Chiaretto then argues for knowledge being intrinsically social, even though the journey towards it starts in that dark universe of the self that artists like Antony Gormley have explored with such beauty:

“Knowledge is always born in dialogue. All knowledge is a talking with others while addressing myself. Or, more precisely, it is a dialogue with myself which others are present intrinsically and profoundly. They will perhaps be present in a confused, imperfect way, but they are there. I never know solipsistically, even when when I know “by myself.”

What happens then when I give some of my knowledge to others? The words that I formulate to express and transmit that being that I perceived, are not only mine, but come simultaneously from me and from others: this means that when I offer what I have known, those who are listening to me are already inserted in the expressions that become formulated from before.

In telling others those words-knowledge of mine, they are completely, even if unknowingly, inserted in what I am saying, precisely because they have contributed to my knowing, they have given it to me and constructed it for me at least to some extent. Those insights are already the result of some communion with them.”

And finally, let me share with you Chiaretto’s synthesis of how Mary completes God making us in His own image, which is highly consonant also with how Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the Trinity in his “Introduction to Christianity”:

“God is the Father who gives himself wholly in the Son, who in turn wholly re-gives himself to Him. And their reciprocal love for each other – the relationship that unites them among themselves – is the Holy Spirit.

Being like God means therefore to live with Him in this same Trinitarian dynamic.

We, like all creatures, are called to being by God, just like the Son by the Father, and, precisely because we are his creatures, we tend to return to him in a relationship of love. Yet, this re-giving of oneself, even when total, of the creature to God, does not yet fully expresses its capacity to be like Him. Such a way of being does not in fact reach a “re-giving” of God to God, as it is in the Trinity. There, the Father is Father because he begets the Son. In other words, being Father is determined by the relation of sonship, that is, the Son being makes the Father be the Father.

To us too, then, created “in the likeness” of God, must be given the opportunity to give God to God, that is, to return to Him as creatures truly able to be his likes.

This possibility has taken on complete form on earth, at a given moment in history, in Mary.”

There would be so much more to talk about in terms of Chiaretto’s thought, but I believe that the above give a sense of his genius, even in the crude translations provided here.

Dearest Chiaretto, thank you!

The human and the divine

Patterns of light

Sir Terry Pratchett, who died yesterday and whose books have given me a great deal of joy over the last 20 years, expressed my gut reaction to crowds very well when he said that: “[t]he intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.”¹ While I don’t have a phobia of crowds, I’d always prefer a walk in a forest over “relaxing” on a packed beach, a stroll around good architecture to queueing at some movie-themed attraction, or a chat with friends in a quiet pub over a party in a sports bar.

These preferences (and prejudices) of mine were again reinforced when I recently spent a weekend at a holiday camp. There was a lot to like about it, no doubt – spending time with my family, a change of environment, clean air, eating out … But it also came with an ample and ready supply of that “creature known as a crowd.” The place was packed to bursting point! My aversion to such an environment was particularly heightened when, at one point, my spouse and younger son left me in a large “leisure pool” and set off to go down some slides.

As I stayed behind in the pool I felt like a sardine who had to be oiled to be squeezed into a tight tin. And I didn’t feel any bonhomie towards my fellow sardines either, I can tell you that for nothing.

Floating there, my mind started wandering and I went back to Cardinal Ravasi’s beautiful piece of thinking on secularity and secularism, and landed on his declaration that Christianity “doesn’t call us to detach ourselves from reality towards mythical or mystical heavens.” The truth of his statement struck me and reminded me of the importance of living neither in the good memories of the past nor in the promises of a potential future, but right here, in the present. As I looked around, it was still the same “creature known as a crowd” that surrounded me, but its individual members now presented an invitation and challenge to me. Can I see them as my brothers and sisters, as the presence of God, or do I let myself be enslaved by my prejudices?

I felt like I was on holy ground (like Pope Francis said to confessors yesterday: “We are ministers of mercy thanks to God’s mercy, and we must never lose this view to the supernatural that makes us truly humble, welcoming and merciful towards every brother and sister who wishes to confess. … Every faithful penitent who approaches the confessional is ‘sacred ground’.”). Ashamed of my self-centeredness, but encouraged by the open arms extended to me in the present moment.

At that point, my mind turned to that extraordinary meditation by Chiara Lubich, the seventh anniversary of whose death it is tomorrow, which she entitled “The great attraction of modern times” and where she wrote:

This is the great attraction of modern times:
to penetrate to the highest contemplation
while mingling with everyone,
one person alongside others.
I would say even more:
to lose oneself in the crowd
in order to fill it with the divine,
like a piece of bread
dipped in wine.
I would say even more:
made sharers in God’s plans for humanity,
to embroider patterns of light on the crowd,
and at the same time to share with our neighbor
shame, hunger, troubles, brief joys.
Because the attraction
of our times, as of all times,
is the highest conceivable expression
of the human and the divine,
Jesus and Mary:
the Word of God, a carpenter’s son;
the Seat of Wisdom, a mother at home.

Thinking about Lubich’s and Ravasi’s words made me realize: Yes, we are not called to a detachment from reality in favor of some heavens in an ephemeral beyond, but to a discovery of those mystical heavens in the reality around us. To a discovery by participation and a facilitation of others’ participation in it with us.

¹ Not wanting to nitpick, but I’d adjust Sir Terry’s words along the following lines, to impose a mathematically more severe expression of prejudice against crowds: “The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is one over the square root of the number of people in it.”

Peppuccio: being by not being

Peppuccio

Today, at the age of 85, the man who has helped me most with understanding God has gone to be with Him. Giuseppe Maria Zanghí, known simply as Peppuccio to all who met him (the Italian diminutive for Joseph that in English would be rendered as Joey), was a follower and close collaborator of Chiara Lubich, whose process of beatification is completing its diocesan phase and transferring to the Vatican on Tuesday.

Peppuccio’s philosophical genius will, I am certain, provide the basis for a deeper understanding of God for many generations to come. His insights into the fundamental interconnectedness of being and not being as the key to love and to an intuition of the value of suffering are akin to Einstein’s theory of relativity in that they turn all that came before on its head, while, at the same time, being a superset of it. Having had the privilege to listen to him speak and to get to know him personally a little has been a great gift for me and I will never forget meeting him again last May, after not seeing him for many years. By that time he had become a frail, old man, whose former steel had given way to the warmth of a kindly grandfather. I will never forget his recognizing me and caressing my face like my own grandfather used to.

Dearest Peppuccio, I will miss you very much! Thank you for all you have taught me!

Instead of telling you more about his extraordinary life, I prefer to translate for you an excerpt from a paper he wrote in 1979, entitled “Identity and dialogue,” so that you may get a flavor of his extraordinary thought directly.

In this paper Peppuccio considers the challenges and seeming opposition of the concepts of individual identity on the one hand and of dialogue on the other. Let’s join Peppuccio’s train of thought at the point where he presents how God loves us without possessing us, after having presented profound analyses of both identity and dialogue in isolation:

“I can be myself in Him (being an intimate participant of Trinitarian life in the Word), while being really distinct from Him (by virtue of being a creature different from Him). It is His love that wants me, and the love of God does not withdraw into itself, canceling diversity with the other by totally reverting it to Himself, but “makes” the other and guards them in diversity from Himself, not wanting to possess (like He doesn’t possess Himself) in total reabsorption.

And also those who are other than me, the other, or other subjects, are really different from me, because they are “guarded” in the diversity of God, and yet we are one because we are all seized by the same movement of God’s love.”

Peppuccio here roots our diversity-preserving union with God and our own relationships with others in His own inner life, where God’s relationship of love to all is the basis of our own diversity-preserving union with them. He then spells out the consequences of a departure from this many-but-one life:

“If I remove myself from the ecstasy of love, the ecstasy of being, my identity will experience an infinite regress, and I loose myself in the abyss of a nothing that, not being the “nothing” of the Love that wants me ecstatically, is a nothing that is not real, it is nothing-nothing … And community with others will be a collision and a negation and a distancing to infinity. The peace that is Love is replaced by the war that is hatred.”

Note that ecstasy in the above is best read in the Ancient Greek philosophical sense of ἔκστασις (ekstasis), “to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere,” since it refers to the self-giving, self-othering nature of love. Removing oneself from the ecstasy of love means retreating into oneself, while God’s love for me being ecstatic underlines His going out of Himself for my sake.

Peppuccio then proceeds to sketch out the Christian approach to relating to others, as a departure from the self-constrained, static nothingness resulting from a withdrawal from ecstatic relationships:

“The Christian revelation has ripped through this way of thinking and of being socially structured from the inside. But we are still far, it seems to me, from having understood this clearly and from having draw practical conclusions from it. It is true, in modern thought duality has been made more dynamic with dialectic. But the logic of confrontation and struggle has not been overcome. Because the relationship between the two “opposing” extremes (I and the other, I and God) is still thought of as ending in one of the two (and, therefore, in the strongest!); while, if Christian faith is true, the relationship does not end in either of the mediated extremes, but in a third that saves them precisely in their diversity. The relationship between two, if it wants to be thought and lived in the logic of God, must be torn from pure (and abstract) symmetry and discovered, as it were, in the asymmetry of a third that “transforms” the opposition into agreement, the conflict into peace.”

What is apparent from the above is God’s intrinsic role also in human relationships as the asymmetry that allows for unity in diversity, which very much also prefigures Pope Francis’ insistence in Evangelii Gaudium (§236) that the Church, and society too, ought to be modeled on the polyhedron (where diverse parts preserve their distinctiveness while converging to form one whole) rather than the sphere (where there is total uniformity).

Peppuccio finally leads the above considerations towards reciprocity and freedom in a masterful synthesis:

“In the relationship with God, this means living the relationship with Him, diversity, within Him, in Tri-unity.

In the relationship with others, it means “allowing” for God to be among the many, as the “third asymmetrical,” so to speak. This Presence among the many makes diversity true, uniting it without annulling it. This applies to my relationship with myself. It applies to my relationship with the other and with others. Diversity is experienced as love, identity is experienced as love: diversity is experienced as identity, and vice versa. I am me in the infinite, and absolute, gift of myself: in the diversity of me with myself, experienced not as laceration but as ecstatic love. The other, whoever they are, is my giving myself made person, real because giving myself is real. And reciprocally. Without reciprocity what I say here is suffered as an impossibility that must become, but still is not, possible. History, after all, is the path towards a realization of the necessity of this reciprocity so that everyone may be themselves!

From this dialectical perspective “as three,” identity and dialogue are the same thing: they are the love by which I am myself insofar as I am not myself. They are the sign of that freedom-love which is, if I may say so, the secret of being.”

Reciprocal ecstasy, a mutual being outside oneself, for the other, as a gift for each other, bring identity and dialogue together in love, and, if I too may say so with Peppuccio, are the secret of being.

Thank you, Peppuccio, for your wisdom and love!

Chiara Lubich’s Universe

In anticipation of Pope Francis’ upcoming encyclical on ecology, I have been reading up on various Christian perspectives on the universe, since it is the context to which Francis’ thought will be applied. Speaking about ecology – the “interrelationship of organisms and their environments” – presupposes at least an implicit concept of what those environments and organisms are, and what I will attempt over a series of blog posts will be to sketch out how various Christian thinkers, and the official teaching of the Catholic Church, conceive of it.

Instead of following a chronological or hierarchical order, I will first look at the view that is closest to my own heart – the mystical experience of Chiara Lubich. In 1949, after several years of living to put the Gospel into practice during World War II and its aftermath, Lubich and her companions went to spend a summer in the Dolomites. There, Lubich experienced a series of intellectual visions during which she saw the Trinity reveal Itself to her and provide her with insights that she then proceeded to share with her companions and gradually with all she came in contact with. Here I don’t mean to dwell on the nature of these experiences, but instead pick out a couple of passages from them that show how creation (i.e., the Universe) was experienced by her in the context of the Trinity.

In fact, the first passage relates to the days before the first mystical experience took place, where Lubich recounts her sensation of God’s presence permeating nature (speaking in 1961):

“I remember that during those days, nature seemed to me to be enveloped totally by the sun; it already was physically, but it seemed to me that an even stronger sun enveloped it, saturated it, so that the whole of nature appeared to me as being “in love.” I saw things, rivers, plants, meadows, grass as linked to one another by a bond of love in which each one had a meaning of love with regard to the others.”

On another occasion, she speaks about the same experience as follows:

“I felt that I could perceive, perhaps because of a special grace from God, the presence of God beneath things. Therefore, if the pine trees were gilded by the sun, if the brooks flowed into the glimmering falls, if the daisies, other flowers and the sky were all decked in summer array, stronger than all this was the vision of a sun beneath all creation. In a certain sense, I saw, I believe, God who supports, who upholds things. … The vision of God beneath things, which gave unity to creation, was stronger than the things themselves; the unity of the whole was stronger than the distinction among them.”

What emerges clearly from this event is an intuition of God’s sustaining presence in nature, of His being a unifying and all-pervasive presence and of nature being ordered according to the internal life of the Trinity, which is that of being a self-noughting, self-othering gift – i.e., love. While one way of thinking about the above is a spiritual one, the same experience can also be read from a conceptually paradigmatic perspective that suggests a relational, dynamically-interconnected nature of the universe. And while this is not science, and does not pretend to be science, it is a perspective on the same universe that science is working to understand.

Later, in the midst of a sequence of mystical visions, Lubich experiences creation (the universe) as seen from the perspective of paradise:

“When God created, He created all things from nothing because He created them from Himself: from nothing signifies that they did not pre-exist because He alone pre-existed (but this way of speaking is inexact as in God there is no before and after). He drew them out from Himself because in creating them He died (of love), He died in love, He loved and therefore He created.

As the Word, who is the Idea of the Father, is God, analogously the ideas of things, that “ab aeterno” are in the word, are not abstract, but they are real: word within the Word.

The Father projects them — as with divergent rays — “outside Himself,” that is, in a different and new, created dimension, in which he gives to them “the Order that is Life and Love and Truth.” Therefore, in them there is the stamp of the Uncreated, of the Trinity.”

The pre-mystical intuition of God being beneath all things is brought into focus and spelled out with greater specificity by making three points here: First, that the nothing that is the Universe’s origin is a nothing that results from God’s self-emptying (dying), motivated by love (a total giving of self (God), to the point of becoming nothing, out of love for an other (the Universe)). Second, that the “ideas of things” have a reality in themselves, instead of being mere abstractions. Third, that the way that God relates to the Universe is akin to the relationship between the sun and its rays (the rays being projected outwards, while remaining all sun) and that these “rays” (the Universe) are ordered (have “laws”, regularity – cf. earlier blog post on Genesis 1).

Dr. Callan Slipper, a theologian and close collaborator of Lubich, expands on the above passage as follows:

“Created things in themselves are not and remain nothing, but they have being insofar as it is given to them by participation. This means that creation, even though it is created and distinct from God and always dependent upon God, is, in its being, God. It is an externalized “God,” a “God” transferred outside Godself, a “God” that has become other. Certainly things are always nothing in themselves, but insofar as they are, they are constantly created by God. Their being is “God,” a “God,” so to speak, who is created and so having all the characteristics proper to creatures (finitude, temporality, incapacity, ignorance, and the possibility of suffering).”

What emerges is a picture where the Universe is anything but a remnant of a long forgotten game of snooker where God may have made the first shot and then withdrawn to the point of appearing dead. It is instead an image where God is the singer and the universe his song (cf. Zephaniah 3:17) – nothing in and of itself, yet made real and beautiful by the actions of its performer. On another occasion, Lubich speaks more specifically about how the universe relates to God-Trinity:

“In fact, in Creation all is Trinity: Trinity the things in themselves, because their Being is Love, is Father; the Law in them is Light, is Son, Word; the Life in them is Love, is Holy Spirit. The All given by participation to the Nothing.”

The point here is that the dependence on God is not just some wishy-washy generalisation, but that the Universe is seen as specifically intertwined with the Persons of the Trinity in ways that simultaneously reflect the specificity of each Person (Being, Law, Life) and their being one (Love). Slipper puts this particularly forcefully: “the “vestigia trinitatis” — the “traces of the Trinity” — that can be seen impressed upon things are neither arbitrary nor metaphorical, but are the presence of God” (emphasis mine).

Later, Lubich offers another powerful insight about how creation (the Universe) relates to God:

“When I see a lake of water projected by the sun upon the walls and see the play of the water upon the walls shudder according to the quivering of the real water, I think of creation.

The Father is the real sun. The Word is the real water. The lake reflected is the created. The created is nothingness clothed in the Word: it is the Word reflected. Of “being” in the created therefore there is only God. Except that, while the lake on the walls is false, in creation the Word is present and alive: “I am . . . the Life.”

In the created there is unity between God and nothingness. In the Uncreated between God and God.”

While this is fundamentally analogous to the image of the sun and its rays, the image of the reflection of a lake adds nuance by investing the created (the Universe) with reality. Not a reality independent of God (as has already been established), but a reality of finite, temporal, variety nonetheless. In fact, Lubich returns to this point when recounting a vision of the Eschaton – the end of time:

“I think, for example, of a bird. In paradise there will be the Idea of the bird and there will be all the various ideas. It is likely that there will be therefore also this bird ‘clarified.’ […] And they [i.e., all created things] are Trinity among themselves, since the one is Son and Father of the other, and they all come together, loving one another in the One from whence they came.”

Slipper again explains the above with great clarity, by emphasising that “In bringing about this return to the model, each thing will not be lost in a unity without qualifications, a kind of totalizing void, but, returning to the model Idea, the various ideas come back together in all their variety.”

Finally, and bringing this thread to its point of contact with the question of ecology, Lubich also speaks about the consequences of the above relationship between God and the Universe:

“[T]he fact that God was beneath things meant that they weren’t as we see them; they were all linked to one another by love; all, so to speak, in love with one another. So if the brook flowed into the lake it was out of love. If the pine tree stood high next to another pine tree, it was out of love. […]

I have been created as a gift for the person next to me, and the person next to me has been created by God as a gift for me. … On earth all stands in a relationship of love with all: each thing with each thing. We have to be Love, however, to discover the golden thread among all things that exist.”

Love of and care for the entire Universe are, in Lubich’s vision, a direct consequence of all creation being Trinity by participation, of all relating to all as the Persons of the Trinity relate to each other. I am ontologically bound not only to my neighbours, but the Universe in its totality, all of us jointly having resulted from God’s total gift of self. Such an understanding of creation takes John Donne’s famous “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” and projects it out beyond humanity to the entire Universe.

Just to avoid a potential misunderstanding, it is worth addressing the question of what the nature of the above insights is and how they relate to other forms of rational enquiry, such as philosophy and science. Here, the thoughts of another of Lubich’s collaborators – the nuclear engineer, philosopher and theologian, Prof. Sergio Rondinara – provide a framework by arguing for a unity of knowledge applied to a single reality, albeit approached by different means:

“[Philosophy, science and theology] are forms of autonomous and legitimate interpretation because of the different methods each employs. They are also formally distinct based on the different purposes each has assigned to the same act of cognition. [… They] are not comparable one with the other, since what is affirmed by one cannot be said by the other. For this reason they are mutually complementary, and […] can best express their approach to truth and their truthful contents in a dialogical context.

This […] aims to prevent the isolation of single fields of knowledge. Through appropriate philosophical mediation an indirect interaction among different fields of knowledge can be realized. It is a context in which proper interdisciplinary dialogue presumes that the quest for truth demands openness and acceptance of the position of others, requires each party to know and accept the differences and the specific contributions of the other, seeks what is common, and recognizes the interdependence of the parties. For [Lubich], dialogue between the natural sciences, philosophy, and the knowledge of the faith — that is, theology — is a way toward knowledge of the only reality and the only truth that can help the consciousness reach a unity of knowledge.”

Where nothing articulate can be said

The idea of God crying out in forsakenness, nailed to a cross like a criminal, is both deeply disturbing (hence the frequent denial of its “reality”) and a window onto Jesus’ new commandment: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” (John 13:34). It is an event that has not only occupied theologians and mystics, but has also attracted non-believers and has been written about on this blog several times. Today, I’d like to look at how Hans Urs von Balthasar, St. John Paul II, Gianfranco Ravasi and Chiara Lubich understood it and what consequences they drew from it.

Von Balthasar, like Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (“Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is nothing else than the culmination of the way he lived his entire life.” §269), argues for a deep continuity between Jesus’ life and teaching and his abandonment on the cross:

“The inarticulate cry of the cross of Jesus is no denial of his articulate proclamation to his disciples and to the people… instead it is the final end of all those articulations… which he utters with the greatest force where nothing articulate can be said any longer.” (The Whole in the Fragment)

To von Balthasar, Jesus’ forsakenness is not failure, but culmination, and this perspective can also be seen in St. John Paul II’s thought where he presents it as necessary for God’s “full solidarity” with humanity:

“[O]n Jesus’ lips the “why” addressed to God was also [… an expression of] pained bewilderment at that suffering which had no merely human explanation, but which was a mystery of which the Father alone possessed the key. Therefore, […] the question contained a theological significance in regard to the sacrifice whereby Christ, in full solidarity with sinful humanity, had to experience in himself abandonment by God.”

During that same General Audience in 1988, John Paul II also presents a synthesis of positions that argue for and against the “reality” of Jesus’ abandonment on the cross:

“If Jesus felt abandoned by the Father, he knew however that that was not really so. He himself said, “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30). Speaking of his future passion he said, “I am not alone, for the Father is with me” (Jn 16:32). Jesus had the clear vision of God and the certainty of his union with the Father dominant in his mind. But in the sphere bordering on the senses, and therefore more subject to the impressions, emotions and influences of the internal and external experiences of pain, Jesus’ human soul was reduced to a wasteland. He no longer felt the presence of the Father, but he underwent the tragic experience of the most complete desolation.

Here one can sketch a summary of Jesus’ psychological situation in relationship to God. The external events seemed to manifest the absence of the Father who permitted the crucifixion of his Son, though having at his disposal “legions of angels” (cf. Mt 26:53), without intervening to prevent his condemnation to death and execution. In Gethsemane Simon Peter had drawn a sword in Jesus’ defense, but was immediately blocked by Jesus himself (cf. Jn 18:10 f.). In the praetorium Pilate had repeatedly tried wily maneuvers to save him (cf. Jn 18:31, 38 f.; 19:4-6, 12-15); but the Father was silent. That silence of God weighed on the dying Jesus as the heaviest pain of all […].

In the sphere of feelings and affection this sense of the absence and abandonment by God was the most acute pain for the soul of Jesus who drew his strength and joy from union with the Father. This pain rendered all the other sufferings more intense. That lack of interior consolation was Jesus’ greatest agony.”

While the above may at first look like a variant of the naive arguments for the unreality of Jesus’ abandonment by the Father, which revolve around the claim that Jesus knew he wasn’t “really” abandoned, John Paul II’s position is more nuanced. He both affirms Jesus’ knowledge of the Father’s presence and the fullness of Jesus experiencing the Father’s absence. Unlike the naive positions that present knowledge as a mitigating factor, John Paul II does not hesitate to describe Jesus’ soul as a “wasteland” and his experience as being one of “most complete desolation.” It is essentially a third-person, “objective” view that recognizes the continuing presence of the Father while Jesus fully experiences his absence on the cross. In many ways this is akin to a Christian, who sees their atheist friends’ sincerity, recognizing that their friends live in the absence of an experience of God, while they themselves see both their own and their friends’ lives unfolding in His presence. This is not to deny the “reality” of the atheist experience (qua experience) while at the same time situating it within one’s own understanding of reality. I believe such a parallel also underlines John Paul II’s claim that Jesus’ abandonment on the cross was necessary for the sake of “full solidarity” with all of humanity – both with those who believe in God and who do not.

John Paul II’s analysis does seem to me to be the key also to understanding why many theologians wrestle with with the contradiction of Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross. Even Cardinal Ravasi, who in one context affirms the reality of Jesus’ forsakenness (even calling it “salvific atheism”), in another context speaks both about His being our “brother also in the tragedy of the absence of God” and at the same time about it not being possible to “classify that cry as a sign of despair and almost of disbelief.”

Beyond considerations about the reality of Jesus’ forsakenness and its central role in God’s closeness to humanity, what is its practical impact though? What difference does it mean to me, as a Christian, that Jesus experienced such complete desolation? Here the insights of the Servant of God Chiara Lubich are key, since she recognized in Jesus’ forsakenness the key to uniting herself both to God and to every neighbor she encountered, to the point of declaring Jesus Forsaken to be her spouse.

In a talk from 1971,¹ Lubich shares her insight into Jesus’ forsakenness being the pinnacle of his self-giving:

“He had given everything.

First, a life lived beside Mary in hardship and obedience.

Then, three years of mission, revealing the Truth, giving witness to the Father, promising the Holy Spirit, and working all kinds of miracles of love.

Finally, three hours on the cross, from which he gave forgiveness to his executioners, opened paradise to the thief, gave his mother to us, and ultimately gave his body and blood, after having given them mystically in the Eucharist.

He had nothing left but his divinity.

His union with the Father, that sweet and ineffable union with the One who had made him so powerful on earth as the Son of God and so regal on the cross, that feeling of God’s presence had to disappear into the depths of his soul and no longer make itself felt, separating him somehow from the One with whom he had said to be one: “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30). In him love was annihilated, the light extinguished, wisdom silenced.”

Left in a state of complete self-noughting, “where nothing articulate can be said,” what choice did he have left?

“To formulate a question was the only way Jesus could then possibly express himself; that loud cry is the Word which is no longer word, which therefore, cannot be understood and explained as word. It is the indescribable reality which is so beyond what words that are uttered in the created world can express. It is the sub-word; that which is chosen by the Powers of Heaven to bear the Eternal ultra- word.”

What was the point of such complete annihilation though? Here Lubich presents a deeply logical argument:

“So he made himself nothing to make us share in the All; a worm² of the earth, to make us children of God.

We were cut off from the Father. It was necessary that the Son, in whom all of us were represented, should experience separation from the Father. He had to experience being forsaken by God so that we might never be forsaken again.

He had taught that no one has greater love than one who lays down his life for his friends. He who was Life laid down his whole self. This was the culminating point, love’s most beautiful expression. He loved in God’s way! With a love as big as God!”

Most importantly though, Jesus Forsaken was not of academic interest to Lubich, who – with her companions and a growing number of sympathizers and followers – sought to put the Gospel into practice in everything she did, but a person with whom she developed a close relationship:

“He drew us to himself; we discovered him everywhere: in every physical moral or spiritual pain. They were shadows of his great suffering. […] Then we saw him in every neighbor who was suffering. […] Every personal suffering also appeared to us as a countenance of Jesus forsaken to be loved and wanted in order to be with him and like him, so that through the death of ourselves […], he might give life to us and to many others.”

In fact, Lubich understood that such a relationship with Jesus Forsaken, a becoming another Jesus Forsaken, is the way to profound relationships of unity:

“In his testament Jesus had said: “With me in them and you in me, may they be so perfected in unity” (Jn 17:23). If Jesus was in me, if Jesus was in the other, and if Jesus was in all, at that moment we were perfected in unity. […] Jesus forsaken is the model for those who must build unity with others. I cannot enter into another spirit if I am rich of my own. To love others I must constantly make myself so poor in spirit that I possess nothing but love. Love is empty of itself. Jesus forsaken is the perfect model of one who is poor in spirit. He is so poor that he has not even God, so to speak. He does not feel God’s presence.”

And finally, picking up on a theme so close to Pope Francis’ heart, Lubich points to the simultaneous closeness to humanity and God that Jesus’ forsakenness brings about, where He becomes the void that bridges the finite with the infinite:

“In his forsakenness Jesus seems to be nothing but a man, and so never had he been as close to us human beings as in that moment and never, therefore, had he loved so much. At the same time, never had he been so close to the Father; it is out of love for him that he dies in that way.”

¹ Which was also my source for the quotes from von Balthasar’s “The Whole in the Fragment” above.
² “But I am a worm, not a man, scorned by men, despised by the people.” (Psalms 22:7)