Jesus Forsaken – 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.

Echoes of Jesus’ forsakenness in secular thought

1127 words, 6 min read

A central aspect of Christianity is Jesus’ suffering on the cross, to the point of calling out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) shortly before his death. This moment of utter abandonment shows God making himself one with each one of us even in our darkest, loneliest, most desperate moments – a realization that gives us a glimpse of the extent of his love. It also invites us to look for him and encounter him in the suffering of others and ourselves, in the hope of joining him in the resurrection that follows.

Since this belief is in God’s presence in suffering being universal, it raises the doubt of whether those who do not share that belief nonetheless experience what Christian’s would recognize as a relationship with the forsaken Jesus. In fact, my own experience has been very much one of a resoundingly positive answer to this question. As I read the writings of agnostic or atheist thinkers, or those who follow other religions or philosophies, I keep coming across passages in which echoes of Jesus’ cry of abandonment can be heard. By this I certainly don’t mean to ascribe beliefs to their authors that they do not hold, but simply to say that their accounts are like those I would give of my relationship with the forsaken Christ.

Instead of an annotated reading, I would just like to offer a selection of my favourite such “echoes” next.

Jorge Luis Borges, Paradise, XXXI: 108:

“We have lost those features, just as a magic number made up of ordinary figures can be lost; just as an image in a kaleidoscope is lost for ever. We may come across the features and not know them. The profile of a Jew on an underground train may be that of Christ; the hands that give us our change over a counter may echo those that some soldiers once nailed to the cross. Perhaps some feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died and was erased so that God could be everyone.”

Ted Hughes, letter to his 24 year old son:

“It’s something people don’t discuss, because [they] are aware of [it] only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, […] or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them.

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable […] eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances.

And when we meet people, this is what we usually meet [and we] end up making ‘no contact.’ But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.”

Slavoj Žižek, God in Pain:

“The crucial problem is how to think the link between the two “alienations” — the one of modern man from God (who is reduced to an unknowable In-itself, absent from the world subjected to mechanical laws), the other of God from himself (in Christ, in the incarnation) — they are the same, although not symmetrically, but as subject and object. In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I = I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to “humiliate” himself, to fall into his own creation, “objectivize” himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual, in all its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God. The distance of man from God is thus the distance of God from himself. […]

In Christianity, the gap that separates God from man is not effectively “sublated” in the figure of Christ as god-man, but only in the most tense moment of crucifixion when Christ himself despairs (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”): in this moment, the gap is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God the Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.”

Marina Abramović, Tate Talk (25:47 – 27:19):

“We are always afraid of pain, of dying, of suffering. They are the main concerns of human beings. Many artists deal with these themes in different ways. I was always interested in how the different ancient people work with ceremonies and with the ritualization of inflicting very large amounts of pain on their bodies, even to the stage of clinical death. And the reason for this is not any kind of masochistic reason. The reason is very simple: to confront yourself with the pain, to confront taking this kind of risk, in order to liberate yourself from fear, to jump to another state of consciousness by doing it. I could never do this with my own private life, but if I stage the situation where it is painful, in front of the audience, the stage situation is dangerous in front of the audience, I take the energy of the audience and I can use it to give me strength to go through that experience. So, I become like your mirror. If I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love:

“In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one. […]

In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering. You can no longer say, “That’s your problem.””

Tracey Emin, Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon 2009:

“To sleep

To sleep
not sleeping
To wake
not wanting
Night time comes
with feelings mixed
I want to drown myself
in my pillow
Force myself
through another world
I want to wake up
feeling love”

Žižek: what separates me from God, unites me to him

1389 words, 7 min read

Jesus’ cry of forsakenness on the cross is by some considered to be the pinnacle of his suffering and therefore of God’s self-emptying and self-giving love. It is a moment in Jesus’ life that has attracted many and that many have reflected on and meditated on. Among the latest of these is the atheist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who, in a book co-authored with the Lutheran theologian Boris Gunjević and entitled “God in Pain”, presents a particularly insightful analysis.

Žižek approaches Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross by first posing one of the most perennially challenging questions in Christianity, and in any religion that posits a loving God, which is that of evil and suffering:

“Every theologian sooner or later faces the problem of how to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of the Shoah or some similar excessive evil: How are we to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and good God with the terrifying suffering of millions of innocents, like the children killed in the gas chambers?”

After dismissing two unsatisfactory answers (the first being an argument from mystery and the second from God self-imposing limitations that effectively lead to dualism), Žižek proceeds to present a, to his (and my) mind, credible response:

This brings us to the third position […]: that of a suffering God — not a triumphalist God who always wins in the end, although “his ways are mysterious” since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who — like the suffering Christ on the cross — is agonized, who assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with human misery. It was already Schelling who wrote: “God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. … Without the concept of a humanly suffering God … all of history remains incomprehensible.” Why? Because God’s suffering implies that he is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God’s suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of a real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s deep insight that, after the Shoah, “only a suffering God can help us now” — a proper supplement to Heidegger’s “Only a God can save us!” from his last interview. One should therefore take the statement that “the unspeakable suffering of the six million is also the voice of the suffering of God” quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any “normal” human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Jürgen Habermas: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost.”

Which is why secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like the Shoah or the gulag (amongst others) are experienced as insufficient: in order to reach the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is “out of joint”—when one confronts a phenomenon like the Shoah, the only appropriate reaction is to ask the perplexed question “Why did the heavens not darken?” (the title of Arno Mayor’s book). Therein resides the paradox of the theological significance of the Shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology that can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of the catastrophe — the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of God.

I believe that Žižek makes two key observations here: first, that God’s suffering is born of solidarity with human suffering, in other words, that it is the result of mercy, and, second, that it is God’s suffering that is a key to beginning to understand the suffering of others and suffering itself.

Furthermore, Žižek also sees Jesus’ abandonment on the cross as the key to man transcending his animal origins and as a bridge over the otherwise insurmountable abyss between God and man:

“The crucial problem is how to think the link between the two “alienations” — the one of modern man from God (who is reduced to an unknowable In-itself, absent from the world subjected to mechanical laws), the other of God from himself (in Christ, in the incarnation) — they are the same, although not symmetrically, but as subject and object. In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I = I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to “humiliate” himself, to fall into his own creation, “objectivize” himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual, in all its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God. The distance of man from God is thus the distance of God from himself.”

Žižek then argues that Jesus’ abandonment is the key to union with God since in that moment God makes what separates man from Him part of Himself. The gap that separated us from Him becomes part of Him and makes us immediately adjacent and no longer at a distance:

“In Christianity, the gap that separates God from man is not effectively “sublated” in the figure of Christ as god-man, but only in the most tense moment of crucifixion when Christ himself despairs (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”): in this moment, the gap is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God the Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.”

Finally, Žižek claims the forsaken Jesus for himself by conferring on him his own atheist identity and he does so also through the words of G. K. Chesterton:

“[I]n Christianity, when, dying on the cross, Christ utters his “Father, father, why did you forsake me?”—here, for a brief moment, God himself does not believe in himself—or, as G. K. Chesterton put it in emphatic terms: “When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 145.)”

Žižek’s “God in Pain” is a book that I wholeheartedly recommend to read in full, since it is a rich source of profound reflection on a variety of questions, from among which the above are the highlights of his insights into the forsaken Jesus. Personally, I find his perspective very enriching in that it provides a view from a vantage point that is close to the event of Jesus’ abandonment and that spells out aspects of what that experience might have been “from the inside.” Žižek’s insight that Jesus’ taking on what separates God from man is what builds a bridge is particularly striking and also an invitation to radical dialogue. By emptying myself to receive what separates me from you, we become one.

I can’t not mention another outstanding feature of “God in Pain”, which is the deeply beautiful re-telling and analysis of St. Mark’s Gospel that Gunjević presents in the book’s final chapter, entitled “Pray and Watch — The Messianic Subversion.” It alone is worth the price of admission.

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”.

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)

The salvific atheism of Christ

[Warning: Long read.]

The title of this post is a quote from a conversation between Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi and the journalist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari. There, Ravasi argued that Jesus’ cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) can be described as a “salvific atheism.” An atheism that is juxtaposed with the Resurrection, where Jesus remains the Son even when He doesn’t feel the Father and thereby “plants the seed of the infinite in mortality.” Many shy away from attributing atheism to Jesus in this moment, where He laments His being abandoned by God, with a lot of hand-waving and “as if”s or appeals to reason along the lines of “how could Jesus, who is God, have been abandoned by God?!” Such attempts at denying Jesus’ profound experience of the absence of God may have good motives, but they have always struck me as being misguided, since they obscure the extreme nature of this most important moment of Jesus’ life.

That Jesus underwent a trial of this magnitude, where his suffering drove him to a loss of feeling united with the Father – i.e., the very heart of the Trinity, is the most powerful indication of how far God is willing to go towards us, whose faith is limited at the best of times. He is showing us that He is our brother also in darkness and during experiences of the absence of God.

The importance of this nadir in Jesus’ life (and pinnacle of His self-noughting love) was profoundly understood also by Chiara Lubich, the founder of the Focolare Movement who is now on the path of being considered for sainthood, and by the agnostic Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman.

For Lubich, who with her first companions has spent years focused on putting the Gospel into practice, the realization of the importance of Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross came, when – in 1944 – her spiritual director asked her when Jesus suffered most and declared that he thought it was in his cry of forsakenness on the cross. Looking back to that moment some 56 years later, Lubich described it as follows:

“Right from the start we understood that fullness had another side to it, the tree had its roots. The Gospel covers you in love, but demands everything from you. “If the grain of wheat doesn’t fall to the earth and die – we read in the Gospel of John – it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). And the personification of this is Jesus Crucified, whose fruit was the redemption of humankind. […] Through a particular circumstance, we came to know that the greatest suffering of Jesus and, therefore, his greatest act of love, was when on the cross he experienced the abandonment by the Father: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” This touched us to the depths. And our young age, our enthusiasm, but especially the grace of God, urged us to choose only him in his abandonment, as the means to realize our ideal of love.”

Having identified Jesus’ forsakenness as the pinnacle of his love, Lubich and her companions sought to find, love and console Him in the sufferings of all around them and in themselves:

“From that moment on, we seemed to discover his countenance everywhere. He had experienced within himself people’s separation from God and from each other, and he had felt the Father far from him. We saw him not only in all our personal sufferings, which were never lacking, but in those of our neighbor, often alone, abandoned, forgotten, in the separation between generations, between rich and poor, within the very Church at times, and, later, between churches, then between religions and between persons of different convictions.

But these wounds didn’t frighten us. On the contrary, because of our love for him in his abandonment, they attracted us. He had shown us how to face them, how to live them, how to cooperate in overcoming them when, after the abandonment, he placed his spirit in his Father’s hands: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” giving to humankind the possibility of being restored to itself and to God, and he showed us the way. And so he manifested himself to be the key to unity, the remedy for every disunity. He was the one who recomposed unity between us each time it cracked. In him we recognized and loved the great and tragic divisions of humankind and of the Church. He became our only Spouse.”

During Lent that same year, Lubich meditated on Jesus’ forsakenness in this way:

“He who is life itself was giving himself completely. It was the culmination of his love, love’s most beautiful expression.

All the painful aspects of life conceal his face: They are nothing other than him.

Yes, because Jesus, crying out in his abandonment, is the image of those who are mute: He no longer knows how to speak.

He is the image of one who is blind – he cannot see; of one who is deaf – he cannot hear.

He is the weary person, moaning.

He is on the brink of desperation.

He is hungry … for union with God.

He is the image of one who has been deceived, betrayed; he seems a failure.

He is fearful, timid, disoriented.

Jesus forsaken is darkness, melancholy, contrast. He is the image of all that is strange, indefinable, that has something monstrous about it. Because he is God crying out for help!

He is the lonely person, the derelict. He seems useless, an outcast, in shock.

Consequently we can recognize him in every suffering brother or sister.”

Finally, Lubich, who has made love of Jesus forsaken her life, describes the following effects of identifying and loving Him in others: “after each encounter in which we have loved Jesus forsaken, we find God in a new way, more face-to-face, with greater openness and fuller unity. Light and joy return; and with the joy, that peace which is the fruit of the spirit.”

To get another, deeply insightful, perspective on this key moment in Jesus’ life, Bergman’s “Winter Light,” that premiered in 1962, has its characters speak about it twice. First, when the pastor of a town, plagued by doubt, breaks down in front of a parishioner who comes to him for help, saying, with obvious anguish and torment throughout:

“If there is no God, would it really make any difference? Life would become understandable. What a relief!

And thus death would be a snuffing out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness and fear … all these things would be straightforward and transparent.

Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanation.

There is no creator. No sustainer of life. No design.

My God…

Why have you forsaken me?

I’m free, free at last.”

Before giving thought to the above, let’s look at the second reference to Jesus’ forsakenness, which comes later, when the disabled sacristan (who didn’t hear the pastor’s lament) shares the following reflection with him:

“Wouldn’t you say the focus on [Christ’s] suffering is all wrong? This emphasis on physical pain. It couldn’t have been all that bad. It may sound presumptuous of me – but in my humble way, I’ve suffered as much physical pain as Jesus.

And his torments were rather brief. Lasting some four hours, I gather? I feel that he was tormented far worse on an other level.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. But just think of Gethsemane, Vicar. Christ’s disciples fell asleep. They hadn’t understood the meaning of the last supper, or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away. And Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They’d lived together day in and day out – but they never grasped what he meant.

They abandoned him, to the last man. And he was left alone. That must have been painful. Realizing that no one understands. To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on – that must be excruciatingly painful. But the worse was yet to come. When Jesus was nailed to the cross – and hung there in torment – he cried out: “God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he’d ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God’s silence.”

To my mind, the above are two great attempts at an identification with the forsaken, crucified Jesus. The first, the pastor’s, is an identification from within – a re-experiencing of Jesus’ forsakenness at first hand, that leads the protagonist to a wishing away of it all, to a denial of the problem’s reality and a subsequent, forced declaration of freedom (forced and strained because of how it is portrayed in the movie). The second is an identification from the position of compassion and intuition – the disabled sacristan takes his own physical and psychological sufferings as a basis for inferring the greater magnitude of the latter, and – by extrapolation – intuiting that Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross – the experience of “God’s silence” – must have been most severe.

In many ways it is the pastor’s experience that gives the greatest sense of what it may have been like for Jesus himself, by the anguish and despair that it presents. The sacristan’s monologue, in turn, is – to my mind – already a source of hope in that it demonstrates another’s capacity to intuit my despair and therefore be lead to compassion.

Cognition by mutual reflection

A paper I have been meaning to read since it was published in October is Dr. Callan Slipper’s “Towards a New Kind of Cognition,” in which he reviews a number of cognitive modes, characterizing not only an individual’s development, but also the evolution of the human species and of cultures and then introducing a new, social mode that has roots in the mystical experiences of Chiara Lubich.

As far as setting the scene and providing context, Slipper’s approach bears resemblance to Dr. Yuval Harari’s “A Brief History of Humanity,” both in that it goes back to the cognitive modes of hominids and that it considers both biological and cultural factors. Even Harari’s favorite device of “fiction” (quotes mine) is mirrored in Slipper’s references to myth as a cultural contributor to cognition.

Instead of attempting a summary of the already concentrated review of classical modes of cognition, where Slipper discusses Jean Piaget’s somatic, symbolic and theoretic modes of knowledge that can be observed in a child’s development and then proceeds to show how these are mirrored also in the evolution of the Hominidae family and the basis of rational enquiry into the present day, I’d instead recommend reading the excellent, full paper itself. Instead, what I’d like to do is focus on the new cognitive mode that Slipper’s paper culminates in.

To understand the novelty and otherness of the new cognitive mode, it is worth considering the following observations Slipper makes about the state at which the evolution of cognition has arrived in the present day, as an evolution of “mythic culture”:

Mythic culture employs symbolic representations in the context of narratives (mythos is Greek for story), and these give human subjects powerful instruments to interpret and interact with the environment. Mythic cognition is not static and it did progress, using its narrative and symbolic methodology, to be self-critical. […] The culture that emerged, which we are heir to today, can be called […] the culture of the logos. The logos is a form of knowing that attempts to achieve objectivity, that is, to see things without projections from the hopes, fears, fantasies, or preconditioning of the subject. It develops conceptual reasoning that produces theories, and so it corresponds to the acquisition of theoretical knowledge. But the logos-word can also be a word of command and so have ethical and existential implications. Furthermore, as the light of understanding it can also mean conscience or a profound spiritual intuition, which attempts to see things as they truly are. […] In Greece, for example, this was undertaken by theoretical discourse in the development of philosophy; the ethical-existential dimension was developed in the light of Transcendence by the Hebrew prophets; a transcendent spiritual intuition (bodhi) was at the root of the new conceptual thinking that arose with Buddhism.

The scene therefore is a cognitive culture that aims at objectivity and an abstraction of the individual’s bias from the cognitive process. It is against this cognitive background that Chiara Lubich’s experience and thought are set. It has as its central themes a focus on two of Jesus’ utterances: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20) and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The first here makes the subject of cognition a community and the second is the key for that community to transcend itself, by imitating Jesus’ self-emptying (kenosis) at the moment of his greatest suffering. It is this mutual loosing oneself out of love for another that is Lubich’s central insight – the fruit first of years of putting the Gospel into practice and then of a mystical, intellectual vision that started in 1949.¹With the above, 10K mile view, let’s look at the consequences that Slipper spells out for cognition:

“The individual remains but it is now in a relationship of profound mutual involvement with other individuals, a form of recollection both within self and within the other person insofar as empathy, sensitivity, and attentive listening and communication (the apotheosis of the logos-word) will allow. […] In relation to the other person, everything can be reframed or rethought; even hard-won theories cannot be defended by the ego that generated them. Gesture, symbol, theory are all offered, not imposed, within the context of a deep meeting. In this way it is the very social nature of this process that offers the participants an intensified reflexivity, an extra possibility of using critical reasoning to challenge their presuppositions. Ideas are seen as instruments of a mutual reflection, engaged in together, so that out of the meeting of persons emerges a new act of cognition, one based on but not bound by any of the previous mental models. It thus has creative potential and is capable of thinking thoughts not had before in an act of cognition that is not closed and which, at least in principle, can be developed in further encounters.”

I have to say that I recognize the features of what Slipper speaks about here from personal experience. The attitude that “everything can be reframed or rethought,” that “gesture, symbol, theory are all offered, not imposed” and that “ideas are seen as instruments of a mutual reflection” is precisely what, I believe, allows for the “deep meeting” and “recollection both within self and within the other,” which has the potential for a “new act of cognition” to emerge. When all, who are engaged in jointly trying to understand something, bring this attitude of detachment (that mirrors Jesus’ self-emptying) to the table, the result is a transcendence of each individual (that mirrors Jesus’ promise of being present among his followers).

Slipper puts this very clearly and succinctly as follows:

Meeting together in a shared transcendent experience, the human subjects both feel themselves united with Jesus and find that they are seeing things (nature, humanity, indeed all creation), as it were, from Jesus.

To conclude, I would like to emphasize one aspect of the above, that to me personally is of great importance: this social, transcendent mode of cognition is open to all and is not contingent on Christian beliefs, even though I (like Dr. Slipper) experience, pose and believe it to be their consequence. And this is not some hypothetical speculation, but again an observation from my personal experience. I have experienced the above “deep meeting” with Christians, agnostics and atheists alike, since self-emptying, being open to the other and a going out of oneself to meet the other are all open to everyone. Whether the person I am thinking with believes this to be a participation in Jesus’ vision or not, is not a prerequisite to it. Wherever there is mutual love and detachment from one’s own ideas, it is possible for thought to become a social, self-transcendent experience and lead to insights, already interiorized by virtue of the process itself, that would otherwise be unlikely or impossible. In some sense it is a turning on its head of Jean-Paul Sartre’s being-for-others where the other objectifies me and, by taking something away from me, becomes my “hell.”

For the text of her notes on how that mystical experience started, see here and for a commentary here.

The diamond

Manfred

This morning, after nearly two years since the diagnosis of an incurable and aggressive brain tumor, my friend, Manfred, has died. While I cried after I received the news, I also felt a deep gratitude to God for the privilege of having one of his Son’s true followers among my friends. And I don’t mean to say that my relationship with Manfred has always been rosy – on the contrary, at times I felt like we had nothing in common and I thought that we weren’t even meant to be friends. If we had just met at some random event, we may well have said hello, but our conversation would not have lasted and we would have gone our separate ways.

Instead, Manfred was truly my friend. At difficult moments, he had words of encouragement for me, while at moments of indecision, a sentence from him could shake me from hesitation and set me on the right path – the path of loving my neighbors and through them God, instead of getting side-tracked into the trivial. I am also profoundly grateful that my ten-year-old son met Manfred earlier this year and was witness to Manfred’s choice of God in the midst of the final stages of his holy journey on this Earth.

As a focolarino, Manfred has said his “yes” to God and devoted his life to making Jesus’ last testament – that we all may be one – a reality among those around him. His love was practical, selfless and direct, throughout a life during which he was at one moment present at the birth of new realities within the Church, at others putting the Gospel into practice while living – literally! – within shooting-distance of the Berlin wall, at others making his Christian faith inform his senior positions of responsibility within the prison service and at yet others being a bridge through which countless young people encountered Jesus.

During his illness, he continued being deeply generous, also with sharing his inner life. A whole community of his friends from various backgrounds and contexts hung onto his every word on Facebook and on his blog, where he shared his moments of joy and suffering and where he freely offered the spiritual gifts that crystalized through his love for Jesus, suffering and abandoned on the cross.

Since I hope he would have liked it, I have picked out some of my favorite passages from his writings during these last two years and would like to share them with you next. They are in reverse chronological order and start from among the last posts he put up before his condition deteriorated to the point where writing was no longer an option.

9 August 2013: “Today I have the impression that time for me have my sight is deteriorating out as it takes longer to get to normal! I can read, but my peripheral vision is sort of rainbow haze! As if I was tripping! Perhaps I’m! At first it was an hour, then three, then five, and finally today is the first whole day. But there I discovered many signs! I am less distracted when someone talks to me! I discover the beauty of listening. Another diamond I still read and type! Today is also the first day of physical pain, in joints, muscles, on the skin, but hey, patience is the watch word! The gift is to slow down!”

13 July 2013: “Today I have rediscovered the immense value of living the present moment. I went with a friend to my GP to plan some practical steps in case of my rapid decline. He gave me a “just in case” prescription of various medicines. When we left the surgery I couldn’t face losing my life! But then I realised why: because I don’t trust in God’s love AND because I wasn’t living in the present moment, loving the person next to me. Often, in the past I said to God: here is my life, it’s yours, but soon I found out it is not just a formula! He takes me seriously! But he never leaves me alone and gives me all the help I need. It is like Mary under the cross who offered her son, who died! And besides God never says “no”. He says “no” to our desires because they are in many ways focussed on loving ourselves [rather] than the other. I discovered that it is ok to complain to God.”

6 July 2013: “In these past two or three days some important things that happened to me, showing me how the Holy Spirit puts the spanner in the works of my daily routine! I was so tired that I could not sleep during the night, which meant that I could not meditate or pray. Now I have to get used to living in a wheelchair, that I can not climb stairs. Therefore I changed my room. I felt that I did not live well! My “routine” has changed!”

22nd June 2013: “Do not allow myself to fall into activism and the illusion that I must “do” things and for them to take your place!”

21 June 2013: “In the last few days I realized that my trust in the Father is rather lacking! For a loving father who wants my good, I ask for one thing or the other as if God was not aware of my needs! Yet Jesus tells us that the Father knows what I need before I ask, because He is love! Then I realized that I see God in human dimensions, that is, I have my lists of wants and needs and I asked many people to pray for the same thing, as if we should “persuade” God to “change” idea! That to me does not sound [like] true prayer! True prayer is union with God, who knows everything, and because He is love, does not need to pay attention to my needs! It is I who constantly needs [to] entrust confidently my life to Him, knowing that all is his love.”

20 June 2013: “The nature of the tumour is such that it does adapt very well to the latest medication. I wonder whether it would adapt to a miracle! I understood that I only have the present moment! I need to discover the love of God in that moment as if the was my last! I understood that I only have the present moment! I need to discover the diamonds in that moment as if [it] was my last!”

17 June 2013: “My life is no longer mine, it has never been mine!”

31 May 2013: “Today’s reflection by the Pope made me look again at welcoming my suffering as a gift of God’s love! Everything points to me being outside myself, in the way that love is! Love is totally giving, not thinking of itself, being nothing! That’s the root of joy!”

8 May 2013: “How many tribulations, little niggles, discomforts do we come across during our day! Today I don’t want to have [anything] standing between my neighbour and me! All is love of the Father for us!”

30 April 2013: “It is sometimes difficult knowing how to wait! We have all our unique gifts and we rush to show them, thinking they are ours! Once I realise yet again that they are God’s love for our neighbour, they will shine in the right moment, not before and not after! For that I need patience!”

29 April 2013: “How quick am I to pounce if my neighbour makes a mistake! How quickly do I pass judgement without even knowing the full facts! How quick do I call someone who holds different opinion, political or otherwise, a liar or a cheat, or somebody who is not honest whilst putting me in the best possible light of honesty and integrity! Fool me: by doing this I have become the very person I condemn in the other! Jesus asks me time and again to love with his love, which puts all categories to one side in order to be always with the person next to me: There is no obstacle, because love conquers all, and that love is always concrete, is full of action! […] I can start again despite all that has happened, all the mistakes I made. So if God allows me to start again I must allow my neighbour to start again!”

15 April 2013: “This is real challenge: how to lose my thoughts, what is most dear to me out of love for my neighbour! In my thoughts Mary at the foot of the cross came to mind as the perfect example that perhaps I overlook many a time. […] This will be my “model” that points to the essential in my everyday life. Every time I find it difficult to lose, I have to ask myself: Does it matter (DIM)? Is it more important than my dialogue with God in my neighbour?”

12 April 2013: “Today I reflect [on] how easy it is to break relationships! A word or the lack of a word; a gesture or the lack of an expression, a thought, an assumption, an expectation! I understood that our relationships are really very fragile!”

17 February 2013: “It so easy to become self-absorbed both as individuals and as groups! On an individual level I wake up every morning wondering what the tumour will bring today, how am I, what is happening for me. Then my morning prayers put me in the right attitude of thanksgiving to God for another opportunity to love him, for the health I have, for the neighbours to love in the present moment!”

6 February 2013: “12 months ago today I collapsed at work and was diagnosed with the brain tumour! What a year it has been! Full of graces, full of gifts, full of signs of God’s love for me. But there are also temptations and sufferings, such as getting fixated with dates. At the beginning I was told the prognosis is on average 14 month which gives me another 8 weeks. That is a very limited way of looking at thing, because whether that is true or not does not depend on me or anybody, but on the plan God has for me. So in the meantime live fully in the present moment. Today’s motto then is to build peace in the present moment by loving my neighbour!”

16 January 2013: “We know how easy it is to confuse our own opinions and desires with the inner voice of the Spirit, how easy it is, therefore, to fall into arbitrariness and subjectivity. I must never forget that the Reality is within me. I must silence everything within in order to discover the voice of God there. And I need to draw it out as if I were extracting a diamond from the mud: polish it up, highlight it and allow it to guide me. Then I can be a guide for others as well, because this subtle voice of God which urges on and enlightens, this lymph which rises up from the depths of the soul, is wisdom, it is love, and love is meant to be given.”

31 December 2012: “Because Jesus died on the Cross he transformed pain and suffering into love. Where I see suffering and joy, God sees love in both. I can begin again now in this present moment and every moment because God never ceases to love me. What a wonderful gift to receive, because it means that all those moments of pain and suffering in the past year I can fill with one act of love making a parcel of all those things and give them as a gift to Jesus on the Cross. My year becomes his and it is a year full of the God’s love for us. Today I dedicate to giving all my past year to Jesus on the Cross as a gift of love.”

23 December 2012: “Often I put God in a box, I see him as static, I want him to be the same, confining him to religion, church and liturgy. And yes God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, but at the same time he is also always new, a person who changes always and is life! He never loves us in the same way, because if I respond to his love his love for me will be different from before! Isn’t that a great gift? Today I want to dedicate to a special intention and giving all my love to him in every person I meet!”

1 December 2012: “Jesus Forsaken by the Father, who cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the one alongside me! What a privilege to have a brother like that. And so in these days he asks all the “whys” contained in that big why. Why do I remain so full of myself, attached to a pair of slippers when I am asked to give my life to God? Why is it such an effort for me to be rather than to do? Why am at this stage in my life? What is going to happen next?”

26 November 2012: “So, today it is meant all happen. I am waiting for the call from the hospital and then, wait a minute! Do I put my life on hold for a phone call. No, so back to the present! Yes, I am a little anxious perhaps, but all can be lived for something. Thinking of others who are really suffering, with no way out.”

23 November 2012: “After a beautiful period of light and insight during which I have come to understand many things in my relationship with God now another part of the same trip seems to open up, very much full of temptations, temptations to retreat within myself thus excluding God.”

6 November 2012: “I see that just because I try put God at the centre of my life I am not immune to the feeling and worried of what might happen. The big difference for me is that I know that my lifelong friend Jesus on the cross is always with me.”

24th August 2012: “I was thinking that living in the present is a bit like being on a conveyor belt lighting candles that come past. If I concentrate on each candle I can light it. The more candles I light the more there is light. But every now and again I get distracted by the shape of the candle, or its colour. So I miss the next one. If I run after it, I will miss even more and there is less light! So, I have to stay put and starting again I light every candle that comes past me. Is that not living the present well? If we failed one moment, let’s not worry. Does it matter, or short DIM? I got this from a friend who is well practised in this. Any time she and her husband are at risk of worrying, or missing something, or getting worked up about something, DIM does the job. […] If I have chosen the greatest thing on earth, i.e., God who is love, is there anything that matters more than that? Promptly I am put to the test with some not so good news about a friend. I cannot do anything practical in my condition, except worry. Or I can make sure I light those candle every moment for her, to root for her, to live my life for her! Loving the other means also to offer my little suffering as a token of my love for Jesus Forsaken.

Dearest Manfred, you who are now with our heavenly Father, enveloped by the Holy Spirit, by the side of our brother Jesus and our mother Mary, thank you for all the love you have shown me!

The photo at the top of this post shows Manfred Kochinky with Graziella De Luca, one of the first companions of Chiara Lubich, the founder of the Focolare Movement.

Breathe, think, struggle, love: pray

To me one of the highlights of the last weeks has been the ability to follow Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi’s Lenten spiritual exercises, delivered to the Vatican’s staff and to Pope Benedict XVI before his resignation. Being able to download them as podcasts, or purchasing their text in book form, means that anyone (who understands Italian :|) can follow them and in effect participate in an event that in the past would have been open to only a very select audience. I don’t mean to dwell on the fact of this new openness and would instead like to focus on the specific content that Cardinal Ravasi created and shared.

I have to admit that I am a huge fan of Cardinal Ravasi and have been ever since I first found out about the Courtyard of the Gentiles initiative launched by Benedict XVI and executed by the Pontifical Council for Culture under Ravasi’s leadership. The Courtyard fosters dialogue between believers and non-believers and has resulted in multiple events already at which Christian, agnostic and atheist speakers were invited to speak about different topics (the first one was in Paris and subsequent ones took place also in Stockholm and Assisi). Instead of just being a job that Ravasi has to oversee, this open, broad dialogue comes across as a core passion of his and a thread that can be traced through his publications and talks. In many ways Ravasi takes a similar view of the believer/non-believer dichotomy as Cardinal Martini did (who asserted that there is a part of both in each one of us, including himself), by declaring it as unhelpful and quoting Nietzsche, who said that “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.” Ravasi has also been quoted as saying that “[h]alf of my friends are non-believers” and answering “Absolutely not.” when asked whether he wanted to convert atheists. In short – a cardinal very much after my own heart and one who, I believe, embodies the following verse from the Gospel: “For whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:40).

Let me now return to the Lenten spiritual exercises that Cardinal Ravasi lead in the Vatican only a couple of weeks ago. Their theme was “The Face of God and the Face of the Human Person in the Prayers of the Psalms” and they consisted of 17 half-hour talks delivered over the course of a week. The topics spanned a very broad spectrum from creation, via wisdom, suffering and happiness to the family and immortality, to name but a few. While their backbone were the Psalms, Ravasi – in his characteristically open-minded style – took advantage of the insights of sources as diverse as Kierkegaard, Planck, Evdokimov, Bloch and the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III – just to give you a flavor …

The first thing that attracted me to this theme, beyond being delighted that it was Ravasi whom Benedict XVI picked to deliver it, is the fact that the Psalms are essentially the collection of prayers that Jesus himself used. Jesus, being a Jew, grew up with the Psalms as his prayer book, which means that when I pray with their help, I am following his example and am united with him. As soon as I heard that these spiritual exercises were centered around the Psalms, my first thought was immediately directed to prayer, which made it particularly pleasing that this was precisely the subject of Ravasi’s first talk too.

That’s where my ability to anticipate Ravasi’s moves ended though and his take on prayer was both novel, greatly thought provoking and deeply enjoyable. Instead of trying to give you an overview of all 17 talks, which I highly recommend in full, let me at least share what to me were the first talk’s highlights.¹

To begin with, Ravasi approaches prayer by setting out to “outline the essential map of its structure,” which he does by identifying the four verbs of prayer. The first is “breathing,” which he kicks off by quoting Kierkegaard: “Rightly the ancient peoples used to say that praying is breathing. It shows how foolish it is to talk about whether one has to pray. Why do I breathe? Because, otherwise I would die. That is also how it is with prayer.” The link to the Psalms then comes in the form of highlighting that there is a single Hebrew word – nefesh – for “soul” and “throat,” which allows for a dual reading, e.g., of Psalm 42:3 “My soul/throat thirsts for God, the living God.” This in turn emphasizes a “physicality,” which leads Ravasi to the following exhortation:

“We, therefore, have to recover that spontaneity and constancy of an explicit, praying breath that the woman of the Song of Songs [… expressed as] “I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.” (5:2). Faith, like love, does not take up only some hours of existence, but is its soul, a constant breathing.”

The second verb of prayer is “thinking,” which leads Ravasi to the following affirmation: “Prayer is not simply an emotion. It has to involve reason and the will, reflection and passion, truth and action.” The model here is Mary, who, after giving birth to Jesus is reported by Luke to have “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19). Ravasi then digs deeper into the Greek word symballousa that is translated in the Gospel as “reflecting” and points out that its meaning is more of a “joining together in transcendent unity,” which is the “true “thinking” according to God.” The part on prayer as thinking concludes with a quote from Wittgenstein’s notes from World War I, where he says: “Praying is thinking about the meaning of life.”

“Struggling” is then the third verb of prayer, which has its roots in Jacob, Job and Jesus. Jacob, who at Penuel (Genesis 32:23-33) wrestled a mysterious, unknown being, so strong that it not only changed Jacob’s life and mission, but even his name (to Israel). This struggle is later referred to by Hosea as a cry to God and therefore a prayer: “He contended with an angel and prevailed, he wept and entreated him.” (Hosea 12:5). Job’s struggling prayer even refers to God as follows: “He pierces me, thrust upon thrust, rushes at me like a warrior.” (Job 16:14). Finally, in Jesus this aspect of prayer finds its peak on the cross, where he cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mathew 27:46), quoting verse 2 of Psalm 22 in his moment of extreme suffering.

The verbs of prayer culminate in “loving,” which Ravasi introduces by quoting from St. John of the Cross’ Spiritual Canticle and thereby smoothly transitioning from struggle:

“Where have You hidden Yourself,
And abandoned me in my groaning, O my Beloved?
You have fled like the hart,
Having wounded me.
I ran after You, crying; but You were gone.”

Next, Ravasi introduces the transcendence and inaccessibility of God that is prominent in some religions and starts with the example of the Sumerians, who said about their chief deity, Enlil, that he was “like a knotted bundle of yarn than no one could untangle, like jumbled-up threads where no end is to be seen.” In Christianity the relationship is one of intimacy instead, since God is addressed as “abba” – Father (or more precisely, “daddy”) and this closeness can also be seen in some aspects of Islam, from where Ravasi quotes the 8th century Muslim mystic Rābiʿah al-Baṣrī:

“My Lord,
Each love is now alone with his beloved.
And I am alone with You.”

Finally, Ravasi concludes by the following passage from Psalm 123:1-2 and leaves us in a “silent meeting of gazes, where prayerful contemplation blossoms”:

“To you I raise my eyes,
to you enthroned in heaven.
Yes, like the eyes of servants
on the hand of their masters,
Like the eyes of a maid
on the hand of her mistress,
So our eyes are on the LORD our God,
till we are shown favor.”

¹ All quotes from Ravasi’s talks here are my own translations from Italian – their crudeness is all mine.

Igino Giordani: the oxymoron of a catholic party

I have long been aware of the figure of Igino Giordani through his writings, of which the most beautiful one to me is his “Diary of Fire” and I also knew of his having been an MP in the Italian parliament, a journalist and an expert on the Fathers of the Church. It is only now though, after having read his memoirs (“Memorie d’un cristiano ingenuo” – “Memoirs of a simple christian”) that I am beginning to realize more fully the enormity of his example. While in the past I have very much admired certain aspects of his life, I am now seeing that it is really his life as a whole that is an instance of his imitation of Jesus. To give you a sense of what I mean, let me pick out just a couple of moments from his autobiography.

While I don’t intend to summarize his story, it is worth noting that Giordani (1894–1980) was the first of six children of a bricklayer and his illiterate wife and that he initially trained to become a bricklayer like his dad. Thanks to his father’s employer, who provided him with the necessary financial support, Giordani ended up attending a junior seminary and eventually studying humanities at the University of Rome. On the verge of going to university, he was conscripted and sent to fight in the First World War. There a bullet shattered a ten centimeter segment of his right femur, requiring a three year stay in hospital and a series of 18 operations (the first of which was performed without anesthetics!).

It is at this point of exposure to war, that I was particularly impressed by the following passage, where Giordani talks about the impossibility he felt of “killing a human person: a brother”:¹

“The five or six shots that I fired, in the air, I did out of necessity: I could never aim the barrel of my gun at the enemy trenches, with the intention of killing a child of God.”

Upon being discharged from hospital at the end of the war, Giordani immediately finds himself confronted with another battle: that of opposing the fascist regime and the alignment of parts of the Church with it. Here he speaks out against clericalism, which is:

“an exploitation of religious power for the political ends of a government, a party, a bank, … [… It is an] iron belt, disguised as gold, by which the freedom of the children of God was restrained, the proclamation of the Gospel deformed and the spirituality of the Church compromised.”

And adds that:

“During other periods Christianity was being attacked in the name of reason and freedom, while today we can affirm that it is only by a destruction of reason and freedom that Christianity can be attacked.”

A particularly poignant assessment of that period is also expressed by him as follows:

“Christ wasn’t crucified because Judas betrayed him, but he was crucified because Pilate washed his hands of him.”

Giordani’s outspoken attacks against the abuse of clerical power and offenses against reason, published also in the monthly “Parte Guelfa” whose editor he was, led to a clear and direct condemnation by Church authorities in 1925. Instead of rebelling and placing himself in opposition against the Church, Giordani chose obedience and published one final issue of the magazine. There, on the first page, he reprinted the authorities’ condemnation and added that the magazine “submits itself fully” to the Church’s judgment and “happily offers its loyal and disinterested allegiance,” evidenced by its decision to shut down. This struck me in many ways like St. Thomas More’s silence, which in “A Man For All Seasons” was described as “bellowing up and down Europe!” or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s obedient submission to being denied permission to publish his theological and philosophical works.

After the war, Giordani moves from being part of the antifascist resistance to joining the public political life, which results in his becoming a member of the Italian parliament. Here, the following reasoning about how the Church and politics are to relate struck me in particular (and I believe it prefigures the Vatican II position also expressed in Lumen Gentium²):

“The Church incarnates the Gospel: but it mustn’t become a party, confuse itself with a category (party or regime) because it is catholic, i.e., universal, and, as the mystical Christ, it must love all, serve all, even enemies.”

All of the above paints a very clear picture to my mind of someone who was all about following Jesus, disregarding whether that brought him into conflict with state or Church, but also of someone who did it with tremendous humility and, as the memoirs’ title indicates, simplicity. A great example of this attitude is also the following event:

“One day Pius XII called me […] and asked me: “Giordani, but what have you written in that newspaper³ of yours? I have received complaints saying that you are a revolutionary” He then quoted a phrase from my latest cover story, where it says that the excess of the rich is the lack of the poor: that unjust or unjustly used property is theft.
“Holy Father,” I answered, “that is a quote from Saint John Chrysostom.”
“But you should have said so …”
“Holy Father, when an article is written in half an hour or an hour, there is not time for citing sources.”
“True, true, ” he said, beginning to smile, “They say that you are a revolutionary. But, don’t worry, they also say that about me: what do you think? In fact, in these days, Roosevelt put it as “too radical””
“But,” I replied, “a true christian is necessarily a revolutionary: don’t we want to change the world? But, our revolution is beneficial, it builds rather than destroys; brings love instead of hatred, it brings society back together in solidarity.”

There would be so much more to say about him (e.g., his life as a lay, married person and father of four, his establishing of the modern Vatican library (and publishing a journal of library science that both the Moscow and Beijing libraries subscribed to during the height of communism), his career as a writer, his encounters with the great minds of the 20th century, etc.), but that will have to wait for a future post. To conclude, let me instead leave you with the following poem by Igino Giordani, which also gives us a glimpse of his interior life:

“I have begun to die
and what happens,
matters to me no more;
now I want to vanish
in the forsaken heart of Jesus.
All this sinning,
by greed and by vanity,
in love disappears:
I have reconquered my freedom.
I have begun to die
to death that no longer dies;
now I want to rejoice
with God in his eternal youth.”

It should come as no surprise that Igino Giordani – Servant of God – is in the process of being recognized as a saint – a saint I will be very proud of!

¹ All the quotes from Igino Giordani here are from “Memorie d’un cristiano ingenuo,” with the crude translations from Italian, for which I apologize, being mine.
² “[T]he faithful should learn how to distinguish carefully between those rights and duties which are theirs as members of the Church, and those which they have as members of human society. Let them strive to reconcile the two, remembering that in every temporal affair they must be guided by a Christian conscience, since even in secular business there is no human activity which can be withdrawn from God’s dominion. [… I]t must be admitted that the temporal sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world.” (Lumen Gentium, §36)
³ “Il Quotidiano” was a daily newspaper, directed by Giordani 1944–1946.