Language – eyebeleave

The dialect of faith

Language

1471 words, 7 min read

At the beginning of this year, pope Francis baptised 34 babies in the Sistine Chapel and afterwards addressed their parents with the following opening line: “There is just one thing I want to tell you, something that is up to you: the transmission of the Faith can only be done in “dialect”, in the “language” of the family, the “dialect” or “language” used by the father and mother, the grandfather and grandmother.”

I immediately liked the way Francis framed the question of how faith is transmitted – a topic that has been, and in many cases still is, fraught with difficulty and plagued by pathological perversions like proselytism – and thought that his likening it first to language and then to dialect was a stroke of genius. Also, I couldn’t help but hear “language” in my own “dialect”, which, naturally, speaks with a Viennese accent and thinks in the categories of the later Wittgenstein. I couldn’t help but think about his concept of the language-game (“Sprachspiel”), its setting in an infantile context and its complete rootedness in participativeness, self-othering and community, all of which fit Francis’ intentions like a glove.

More recently I have been thinking about what this dialect of faith is like that has been passed to me in the games my family played when I was a kid, which is what I’d like to reflect on in this post.

For a start, a bit of context: I grew up in a communist country, in a family that was deeply involved in the life of the underground Catholic Church. This gave its dialect a distinctly edgy and adventurous twang. My mum and dad took great risks for the sake of the language game of faith, which made progress the more rewarding and the stakes scarily high. As is the case with most kids though, my siblings and I were, thankfully, not fully aware of the dangers at the time. Our parents took us to events organised by a then very young movement in the Church, whose activities – like any other non-commumist-party-organized group activities at the time – were wholly illegal. This lead to the need for elaborate ruses, like pretending that it was someone’s birthday (and everyone knowing whose birthday it is supposed to be in case the police arrived) when the actual purpose of a gathering was to read the Gospel, share experiences of putting it into practice and encourage each other in doing so even under the extreme circumstances at the time.

Not only did we participate in such events, but my dad deliberately built our house to allow for large meetings to take place there. Our living room has always seemed excessively large to me, until I discovered that my dad built it (no, not “had it built”, “built it”) with a floor especially reinforced to hold the groups of 60+ people who often met there. Looking back, this was made even more reckless and dangerous given who our neighbour was – a veteran and hero of the communist resistance army from WWII and a zealous party member, who could have denounced us to the secret police in a heartbeat.

Miraculously, my dad at one point got a job in a neighbouring, non-communist country – an event reserved for the very few and only for the party faithful. My dad getting the job with all he was doing in secret and with his brother being a priest was baffling and lead to even greater risks. My mum and dad immediately saw this as an opportunity for serving the underground community they were part of by connecting it to its members on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They regularly smuggled books and audio recordings across the border for which they would have been sent to prison. One of my most vivid memories from that period is crossing the border, which was quite an elaborate game! You’d first get stopped some miles from the border itself at a barrier with armed soldiers, who would check your papers, telephone the border post and after what seemed like half an eternity, raise the barrier and let you enter the barren no man’s land behind the barbed wire fence – a stretch of land dotted with guard towers. At the border, papers would be checked again, questions would be asked, the underside of the car would be inspected with mirrors and dogs would put their olfactory senses to official use. Our parents always told us to not answer any questions whatsoever – just to say we don’t know and say that they, our parents, would answer. We, kids, found this rather odd and asked: “What if they ask my name?”. Sometimes the game at the border involved having the car practically disassembled – seats being unbolted and removed, knives being stuck into any food we were carrying to make sure they didn’t contain the seeds of the communist regime’s destruction.

At the same time those “seeds”, sought so diligently by the communist regime were there, for everyone to be seen in plain sight: my dad’s constant kindness and politeness when dealing with the border guards. Over the years he’d learn their names, strike up conversations and do precisely what the game of our Christian faith was all about: to love all like Jesus loved us. This, in fact is the first and most persistent rule of the dialect that was spoken in our home.

What sticks most vividly in my mind here are the first minutes of pretty much any car journey we took from home. No matter where we were going, whom we were going to visit or what errand needed to be run, by the time we go to the bottom of the hill my mum and dad’s house is on, my dad would – following the implicit rules of our game – ask: “Why are we going to [visit X / do Y / or travel to Z]?” And we, who played the game well too, would answer – sometimes enthusiastically, at other times out of a sense of obligation – “To love whomever we meet there!” It didn’t matter what were about to do, this “handshake” was a tuning of our instruments, a directing of our minds and wills towards the good of those we were going to encounter.

Now, for the game to be effective the “rules” had to be practiced and their application had to be demonstrated. And there was no shortage here! My dad would give his hat and gloves to a man guarding a car park in the middle of winter (and winter where I come from is winter indeed, with temperatures down to -20°C), would let a homeless man stay in our basement, providing him with clothes and food too; my mum would visit sick friends or acquaintances in hospital, cooking the most delicious meals for them and care for them at times when others could or would not visit them. My parents would be the ones there at the ends of their lives. Our house was always a cross-roads of people staying for shorter or longer periods, coming for advice and support (including a student whose priestly vocation was sustained by my dad during his military service and who is now a bishop), not to mention the hundreds of people over the years for whom my dad helped find work, a service so central to what it is to be human, as Pope Francis frequently emphasises.

Like all good games, the one we were taught was not a walk in the park or even just a challenge that took hard work but where the rewards were sure to follow. There was plenty of misunderstanding, clashes of personalities and even downright slander and ill will. A painful example here has been the expulsion of my dad from the heart of very community for which he risked his and his family’s freedom during the communist regime and to which he gave so much over many decades. Yet, this was also an opportunity for him to show us, his kids, how the game of the Gospel is played, with what dialect it is spoken in our family. In spite of the injustice done to him, he never turned on those responsible for it and has instead been both on the look-out for continuing to participate, albeit at the periphery, and supportive of us – his children – to continue being involved in it.

Thinking about my childhood, but also my adult life, I can see clearly how it is the Gospel that my mum and dad have made the language, the dialect of their family. The Gospel, where God’s self-noughting, self-othering love draws humanity into itself and where humanity, like a child, giddy with enthusiasm at times, nursing its wounds at others, learns and re-learns to take wobbly steps towards its family, the Trinity.

The broken bread, shared and eaten

On 26th June this year, the Spanish priest and writer Pablo d’Ors (appointed consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture by Pope Francis) published an essay entitled “Will anyone in the Church dare?” in the magazine Vida Nueva, because of which he has since been accused of heresy and condemned by no less than three Spanish bishops.

Let’s first take a look at the essay in question (rendered in my own, crude translation):

The sacraments of the Church now mean virtually nothing to the vast majority of those who still participate in them. A sign that no longer signifies isn’t a sign anymore, but a game of magic. Christian rites, and the symbols in which their foundations lie, have degenerated, for the majority of believers, into pure magic. Of course men and women today still need magic, that is, words and gestures that in an automatic and irrational way connect us with the transcendent. But that’s not the point.

I argue that many of the behaviors of priests and lay people during the Eucharistic celebration are fundamentally magical, not religious. Can you imagine the apostles kneeling before the bread or Jesus collecting crumbs from a plate? These behaviors reflect our attitude towards the sacramental sign being much more magical than religious.

For them to convey meaning, signs have to be understood. The doctrine of ex opere operato, which postulates that the sacrament is effective irrespective of the understanding of the recipient, has disconnected the sign from the subject and has degenerated and objectified it. The sacraments need to be understood, at least to some extent. Otherwise, they sacramentalize nothing, which is what is happening today in our temples. Nobody understands anything. What our masses remind me of most is Beckett’s theater of the absurd.

Let’s take the example of the Eucharist, whose symbols are bread and wine. Bread is, of course, something everyday, soft and nutritious. That bread is a symbol of God means that God is something everyday, that God is soft, that God is nutritious. But if the symbol is the bread, the sign or sacrament is the broken bread, shared and eaten. So that what it is about is to break and share the bread consciously; to lift it to one’s mouth consciously; to, consciously, chew it and swallow it.

Consciously means knowing that it is not just about giving bread to others, but about be being bread for them, to turn yourself into the food that relieves their need. Eating of this Bread gives us the strength to be bread. In the same vein, the sign is not simply the wine, but the wine shared and drunk. Drinking from this Wine enables us to be wine for others. And wine is blood, that is, life: to be life for others.

And storing the Eucharist in a tabernacle, what’s that about? Have we not said that the true sign is sharing it? A proof of our mentality being magical is that we think that God is more in the tabernacle than outside it. But that … is absurd! It is not as if he were more there than elsewhere. It is that he is there to … show us that he is everywhere, so that we may remember it. God is everywhere, we say, but then we endeavor to put him into a box. Enclose him in a few theories we call theology and symbols that we call sacraments, but that do not sacramentalize anything.

There is only one solution: to explain everything as if it had never been explained before, because maybe that’s the situation; and it is, of course, to be all done as if for the first time, perhaps because it is the truth. We will see then, in wonder, the power of our symbols, we will save our rites, we will discover, at last, their transformative power for the human soul.

But will anyone in the Church dare? Will anyone present these symbols and rites not only as those in which the most genuine Christian identity is encoded, but as symbols and rites of universal value, suitable for everyone, Christian or not? Will someone, finally, present Christianity as a religion that includes humanism, not one that excludes it or is exclusive?

Respect for difference from other spiritual traditions must not make us lose sight of Christianity as a universal humanizing proposition. I detect in my contemporaries not only a hunger for spirituality, but a desire to recover, in an understandable and contemporary way, the religious tradition we come from. Care for silence, a sensibility that is growing, will bring with itself a care for the word and the gesture. But, will there be anyone in the Church who dares? Where will be the prophets who’ll make us understand that the only possible fidelity to the past comes from creativity and renewal in the present?

And now, for completeness’ sake, let’s look at the criticism leveled at it by José Rico Pavés, one of the three Spanish bishops who have condemned this essay as heretical (again in my own translation and only focusing on the passages that specifically address d’Ors’ text):

[I have] read the article by Pablo d’Ors entitled ‘Will there be anyone in the Church who dares?’ with sadness and concern. Sadness, because of finding, in so little space, such a vast number of doctrinal errors whose consequences are dramatic for Christian life. Concern, noting that the article’s author is a writer and priest, and since not long ago, a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Without offering any proof beyond his own perception, the author affirms in a way that exudes absolute certainty that “The sacraments of the Church now mean virtually nothing to the vast majority of those who still participate in them”; he argues that “many of the behaviors of priests and lay people during the Eucharistic celebration are fundamentally magical, not religious”; and, as an argument, ask the reader whether they can imagine “the apostles kneeling before the bread or Jesus collecting crumbs from a plate” (sic); he blames the doctrine of ex opere operato for disconnecting the subject and the sign, objectifying and degenerating it; he explains the Eucharist departing from the bread as “a symbol of God”, whose meaning is “to break and share the bread consciously”, from which he deduces that the Eucharistic reservation in the tabernacle becomes meaningless, and he considers it a proof of our magical mentality to think that God is more present in the tabernacle than outside it.

The author proposes to “explain everything as if it had never been explained before,” and to present the sacraments as “symbols and rites of universal value, suitable for everyone, Christian or not” showing “Christianity as a religion that includes humanism, not one that excludes it or is exclusive”. But, he asks finally, will someone in the Church dare to implement this solution?

To find in so few lines so much nonsense results in a great weight. Does the author know what the Catholic Church means by sacrament? Does he ignore the difference versus magical rites? Does he know that the sacred character of the sacraments does not lie primarily in the meaning that we give them, but in being born of the salvific will of Christ to communicate his Life to us? Why doesn’t he mention even once the word faith and the verb to believe? Does he think that the sacraments can be understood without faith? Does he maybe not know the teaching of the Church on the permanent presence of Christ in the Eucharist, on the eucharistic reservation and worship due to this Sacrament of Love outside of the Holy Mass?

How is it possible that almost 50 years after the encyclical Mysterium Fidei (03/09/1965), the same weak proposals concerning the Eucharist and the sacraments, which were already rejected by Pope Paul VI, continue to spread today? In these times, it may be that the only thing that we need to dare is this: believing with the Church, believing in the bosom of the Church.

So, here we have two texts: an essay on the popular lack of understanding of the sacraments and a call for their revival, and a refutation of that essay. But, you could ask, why should I care about a Spanish argument between a priest and a bishop? Well, I can certainly tell you why I care: because this is one of the few examples I have seen so far of a theologian accepting Pope Francis’ invitation from paragraph 49 of Evangelii Gaudium:

“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).”

When I read d’Ors’ essay, what I see is someone who is concerned for the good of the Church, who sees his “brothers and sisters […] living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ” and who identifies an anachronistic and life-detached exposition of the sacraments as a barrier and as a source of degeneration. He perceives a perversion of the sacraments to the point of being confused with magic – not in the good way of Arthur C. Clarke’s: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but by deforming a gift from God that builds on faith but that does not suppress reason into a mere irrational, “God-spray” gimmick. A danger that has a reminder built into the very vocabulary of magic, where the term “hocus-pocus” itself is likely a corruption of Jesus’ words at the last supper: “Hoc est corpus meum.”

d’Ors then offers readings of the Eucharist that are simple, broadly understandable and that powerfully underline its being gift, communion and source of life. He finally makes a call for a new language, a new explanation, explicit (very much like last year’s Synod on the Family), points to the latent hunger for transcendence in the world (a need also recognized by atheists) that the Church is called to sate, and closes with an exhortation to continuity through renewal (wholly in-line with Benedict XVI’s ““hermeneutic of reform”, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church”).

Yes, d’Ors is critical of the doctrine of “ex opere operato,” but he does not deny it, only attributing negative consequences to it (or – arguably – its misuse). He also speaks about God’s presence in the tabernacle pointing to His presence outside it, which is in fact in line with how the Catechism speaks about it: “God, who reveals his name as “I AM,” reveals himself as the God who is always there, present to his people in order to save them.” (§207) and – incidentally, quoting from Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei:

“The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III, 73, 3c.) In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” (Council of Trent (1551)) “This presence is called ‘real’—by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.” (Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei 39)” (§1374)

d’Ors’ sentiment about the tabernacle pointing to God’s presence all around us is also very much along the lines of St. John Chrysostom’s homily on the Gospel of Matthew where he too warns against false formalism and where he calls for a harmony between Eucharistic adoration and – to borrow Pope Francis’ words – a care for His flesh in the poor:

“God does not want golden vessels but golden hearts. […] Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First, fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table. Will you have a golden cup made but not give a cup of water? What is the use of providing the table with cloths woven of gold thread, and not providing Christ himself with the clothes he needs? What profit is there in that? Tell me: If you were to see him lacking the necessary food but were to leave him in that state and merely surround his table with gold would he be grateful to you or rather would he not be angry? What if you were to see him clad in worn-out rags and stiff from the cold, and were to forget about clothing him and instead were to set up golden columns for him, saying that you were doing it in his honour? Would he not think he was being mocked and greatly insulted?”

I do not wish to dissect Bishop Pavés’ words or speculate about the motives of his choice of what to focus on or why he transferred the lack of understanding that d’Ors describes and laments among the faithful to a supposed lack of d’Ors’ understanding of Church teaching. Instead I would like to close with appreciating d’Ors’ clear desire to see the sacraments understood and brought closer to the lives of the faithful today and to extend their gifts to all, whether they be in the Church or beyond it.

The face of mercy

Arcabas prodigal son

On Saturday evening, on the eve of Mercy Sunday, Pope Francis proclaimed the opening of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy that will run from 8th December 2015 until 20th November 2016 by presenting the bull of indiction, Misericordiae Vultus – “The face of mercy.” At 9.5K words some have called it “Evangelii Gaudium II” already, and in terms of significance of content, it is not hard to see why. If you have the time and inclination, I would very much like to encourage you to read it in full, but, if you prefer, the following is my selection of key passages from this important statement.

To begin with, Francis identifies mercy with Jesus and its recipients with all of humanity:

“Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. These words might well sum up the mystery of the Christian faith. Mercy has become living and visible in Jesus of Nazareth, reaching its culmination in him.” (§1)

“How much I desire that the year to come will be steeped in mercy, so that we can go out to every man and woman, bringing the goodness and tenderness of God! May the balm of mercy reach everyone, both believers and those far away, as a sign that the Kingdom of God is already present in our midst!” (§6)

A love that to God is “visceral,” fatherly and motherly is then presented as the motivation for mercy:

“[T]he mercy of God is not an abstract idea, but a concrete reality through which he reveals his love as that of a father or a mother, moved to the very depths out of love for their child. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this is a “visceral” love. It gushes forth from the depths naturally, full of tenderness and compassion, indulgence and mercy.” (§6)

Several parables are then pointed to as examples of Jesus explaining what mercy means, with a particularly poignant one being the parable of the ruthless servant in which mercy becomes “a criterion for ascertaining who his true children are”:

“In the parables devoted to mercy, Jesus reveals the nature of God as that of a Father who never gives up until he has forgiven the wrong and overcome rejection with compassion and mercy. We know these parables well, three in particular: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the father with two sons (cf. Lk 15:1-32). In these parables, God is always presented as full of joy, especially when he pardons. In them we find the core of the Gospel and of our faith, because mercy is presented as a force that overcomes everything, filling the heart with love and bringing consolation through pardon. […]

“[In the parable of the “ruthless servant,” (Matthew 18:21-35)] Jesus affirms that mercy is not only an action of the Father, it becomes a criterion for ascertaining who his true children are. In short, we are called to show mercy because mercy has first been shown to us. Pardoning offences becomes the clearest expression of merciful love, and for us Christians it is an imperative from which we cannot excuse ourselves. At times how hard it seems to forgive! And yet pardon is the instrument placed into our fragile hands to attain serenity of heart. To let go of anger, wrath, violence, and revenge are necessary conditions to living joyfully. Let us therefore heed the Apostle’s exhortation: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph 4:26). Above all, let us listen to the words of Jesus who made mercy as an ideal of life and a criterion for the credibility of our faith: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Mt 5:7): the beatitude to which we should particularly aspire in this Holy Year.” (§9)

Having set out the centrality of mercy in Jesus’ teaching and identified it with Him, Pope Francis places it at the basis of the Church and insists that “nothing in her preaching and in her witness to the world can be lacking in mercy”:

“Mercy is the very foundation of the Church’s life. All of her pastoral activity should be caught up in the tenderness she makes present to believers; nothing in her preaching and in her witness to the world can be lacking in mercy. The Church’s very credibility is seen in how she shows merciful and compassionate love. The Church “has an endless desire to show mercy.” Perhaps we have long since forgotten how to show and live the way of mercy. The temptation, on the one hand, to focus exclusively on justice made us forget that this is only the first, albeit necessary and indispensable step. But the Church needs to go beyond and strive for a higher and more important goal. On the other hand, sad to say, we must admit that the practice of mercy is waning in the wider culture. It some cases the word seems to have dropped out of use. However, without a witness to mercy, life becomes fruitless and sterile, as if sequestered in a barren desert. The time has come for the Church to take up the joyful call to mercy once more. It is time to return to the basics and to bear the weaknesses and struggles of our brothers and sisters. Mercy is the force that reawakens us to new life and instils in us the courage to look to the future with hope.” (§10)

Next, two complementary points are made about language and silence: the need for merciful expression and for silence so as to hear God’s Word:

“It is absolutely essential for the Church and for the credibility of her message that she herself live and testify to mercy. Her language and her gestures must transmit mercy, so as to touch the hearts of all people and inspire them once more to find the road that leads to the Father.” (§12)

“The Evangelist reminds us of the teaching of Jesus who says, “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:36). It is a programme of life as demanding as it is rich with joy and peace. Jesus’s command is directed to anyone willing to listen to his voice (cf. Lk 6:27). In order to be capable of mercy, therefore, we must first of all dispose ourselves to listen to the Word of God. This means rediscovering the value of silence in order to meditate on the Word that comes to us. In this way, it will be possible to contemplate God’s mercy and adopt it as our lifestyle.” (§13)

To complement the positive expressions of mercy, Pope Francis also sets out a negative one (negative in the sense that it proscribes rather than prescribes) that echoes his “Who am I to judge?” that so many have downplayed since it was pronounced in an interview rather than an official, magisterial document:

“The Lord asks us above all not to judge and not to condemn [cf. (Luke 6:37-38)]. If anyone wishes to avoid God’s judgement, he should not make himself the judge of his brother or sister. Human beings, whenever they judge, look no farther than the surface, whereas the Father looks into the very depths of the soul. How much harm words do when they are motivated by feelings of jealousy and envy! To speak ill of others puts them in a bad light, undermines their reputation and leaves them prey to the whims of gossip. To refrain from judgement and condemnation means, in a positive sense, to know how to accept the good in every person and to spare him any suffering that might be caused by our partial judgment and our presumption to know everything about him. But this is still not sufficient to express mercy. Jesus asks us also to forgive and to give. To be instruments of mercy because it was we who first received mercy from God. To be generous with others, knowing that God showers his goodness upon us with immense generosity.” (§14)

Pope Francis then links mercy to the Father’s self-giving that he characterizes using the hallmarks of the life of the Trinity:

“Merciful like the Father, therefore, is the “motto” of this Holy Year. In mercy, we find proof of how God loves us. He gives his entire self, always, freely, asking nothing in return. He comes to our aid whenever we call upon him.” (§14)

Leading his exposition of mercy to practical measures, Francis points to the corporal and spiritual acts of mercy that the Church has advocated since its beginning:

“Jesus introduces us to these works of mercy in his preaching so that we can know whether or not we are living as his disciples. Let us rediscover these corporal works of mercy: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. And let us not forget the spiritual works of mercy: to counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offences, bear patiently those who do us ill, and pray for the living and the dead.

We cannot escape the Lord’s words to us, and they will serve as the criteria upon which we will be judged: whether we have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, or spent time with the sick and those in prison (cf. Mt 25:31-45). Moreover, we will be asked if we have helped others to escape the doubt that causes them to fall into despair and which is often a source of loneliness; if we have helped to overcome the ignorance in which millions of people live, especially children deprived of the necessary means to free them from the bonds of poverty; if we have been close to the lonely and afflicted; if we have forgiven those who have offended us and have rejected all forms of anger and hate that lead to violence; if we have had the kind of patience God shows, who is so patient with us; and if we have commended our brothers and sisters to the Lord in prayer. In each of these “little ones,” Christ himself is present. His flesh becomes visible in the flesh of the tortured, the crushed, the scourged, the malnourished, and the exiled … to be acknowledged, touched, and cared for by us. Let us not forget the words of Saint John of the Cross: “as we prepare to leave this life, we will be judged on the basis of love.”” (§15)

That mercy is not about following rules, but about a going out towards those who are in need of it and a respect for their dignity, is put clearly next:

“For his part, Jesus speaks several times of the importance of faith over and above the observance of the law. It is in this sense that we must understand his words when, reclining at table with Matthew and other tax collectors and sinners, he says to the Pharisees raising objections to him, “Go and learn the meaning of ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’ I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mt 9:13). Faced with a vision of justice as the mere observance of the law that judges people simply by dividing them into two groups – the just and sinners – Jesus is bent on revealing the great gift of mercy that searches out sinners and offers them pardon and salvation. One can see why, on the basis of such a liberating vision of mercy as a source of new life, Jesus was rejected by the Pharisees and the other teachers of the law. In an attempt to remain faithful to the law, they merely placed burdens on the shoulders of others and undermined the Father’s mercy. The appeal to a faithful observance of the law must not prevent attention from being given to matters that touch upon the dignity of the person.” (§20)

Pope Francis then goes on to situating mercy in an inter-religious context, with a particular focus on Judaism and Islam, and with a call to open-mindedness, respect and peacefulness:

“There is an aspect of mercy that goes beyond the confines of the Church. It relates us to Judaism and Islam, both of which consider mercy to be one of God’s most important attributes. Israel was the first to receive this revelation which continues in history as the source of an inexhaustible richness meant to be shared with all mankind. As we have seen, the pages of the Old Testament are steeped in mercy, because they narrate the works that the Lord performed in favour of his people at the most trying moments of their history. Among the privileged names that Islam attributes to the Creator are “Merciful and Kind.” This invocation is often on the lips of faithful Muslims who feel themselves accompanied and sustained by mercy in their daily weakness. They too believe that no one can place a limit on divine mercy because its doors are always open.

I trust that this Jubilee year celebrating the mercy of God will foster an encounter with these religions and with other noble religious traditions; may it open us to even more fervent dialogue so that we might know and understand one another better; may it eliminate every form of closed-mindedness and disrespect, and drive out every form of violence and discrimination.” (§23)

The next day – on Mercy Sunday, Pope Francis returned to the starting point of Misericordiae Vultus, where he identifies mercy with Jesus and went on to spell out the basis of that identity: 

“[T]he Lord shows us, through the Gospel, his wounds. They are wounds of mercy. It is true: the wounds of Jesus are wounds of mercy. […]

Jesus invites us to behold these wounds, to touch them as Thomas did, to heal our lack of belief. Above all, he invites us to enter into the mystery of these wounds, which is the mystery of his merciful love. Through these wounds, as in a light-filled opening, we can see the entire mystery of Christ and of God: his Passion, his earthly life – filled with compassion for the weak and the sick – his incarnation in the womb of Mary.

Faced with the tragic events of human history we can feel crushed at times, asking ourselves, “Why?”. Humanity’s evil can appear in the world like an abyss, a great void: empty of love, empty of goodness, empty of life. And so we ask: how can we fill this abyss? For us it is impossible; only God can fill this emptiness that evil brings to our hearts and to human history. It is Jesus, God made man, who died on the Cross and who fills the abyss of sin with the depth of his mercy.”

Synod14: Truly love families in difficulty

Francis at synod

Continuing with my coverage of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family (see the other posts here), today I’d like to pick out some passages from the Vatican’s official notes on the discussions of yesterday afternoon’s 2nd session of the Synod, where important points were made, first on the need to engage with the world as it is today, also adapting our language in response to it – and, I’d argue, also our understanding, since a simple rephrasing is not going to be sufficient, or even possible, since true dialogue alters all parties involved in it:

“[T]here has emerged the need to adapt the language of the Church, so that doctrine on the family, life and sexuality is understood correctly: it is necessary to enter into dialogue with the world, looking to the example offered by the Vatican Council, or rather with a critical but sincere openness. If the Church does not listen to the world, the world will not listen to the Church. And dialogue may be based on important themes, such as the equal dignity of men and women and the rejection of violence.”

The importance of sharing lived experiences of putting the Gospel into practice, instead of dry and dead theory, was emphasised next:

“The Gospel must not be explained, but rather shown – it was said in the Assembly – and above all, the lay faithful must be involved in the proclamation of the Good News, demonstrating the missionary charism. Evangelisation must not be a depersonalised theory, but must instead ensure that families themselves give concrete witness to the beauty and truth of the Gospel. […] The Church, instead, must be “magnetic”; it must work by attraction, with an attitude of friendship towards the world.”

Next, a point from the opening document was underlined, by returning to the importance of recognising the good there is in every situation, and making reference to the law of gradualness that Cardinal Kasper spoke about in his now-famous speech during the last consistory, that St. John Paul II also put forward in his Familiaris Consortio, and whose basic idea is to recognise the need to gradually approach a desired end state, as if following stepping stones from wherever a person or family is in the present:

“[E]ven imperfect situations must be considered with respect: for instance, de facto unions in which couples live together with fidelity and love present elements of sanctification and truth. It is therefore essential to look first and foremost at the positive elements, so that the Synod may infuse with courage and hope even imperfect forms of family, so that their value may be recognised, according to the principle of graduality. It is necessary to truly love families in difficulty.”

Worth noting is also the variant on the above that Fr. Rosica reported during the press conference, where he quoted a Synod Father as saying: “There are different expressions of what is family today and we have to be sensitive to that.”

Finally, the notes also addressed the need to present the good of sexuality: “[T]he essential value of sexuality within marriage was also considered: sexuality outside marriage is discussed so critically that married sexuality can appear almost as a concession to imperfection.”

The discussions from this morning’s session are then summed up in a separate note, where the fist point raised was a call for emphasising the positive and the vocational nature of marriage:

“The suggestion was to look not only towards remedies for failure of the conjugal union, but also to focus on the conditions that render it valid and fruitful. It is necessary to transmit a vision of marriage that does not regard it as a destination, but rather as a path to a higher end, a road towards the growth of the person and of the couple, a source of strength and energy. The decision to marry is a true vocation and as such requires fidelity and coherence in order to become a true locus for the growth and the protection of the human being.”

Next, the need for extensive preparation and accompaniment was stated, also with the consequences of failure bluntly put on the table:

“[M]arried couples must be accompanied throughout their path in life, by means of intense and vigorous family pastoral care. The path of preparation for the marriage sacrament, must therefore be long, personalised and also severe, without the fear of eventually leading to a reduction in the number of weddings celebrated in Church. Otherwise, there is the risk of filling the Tribunals with marriage cases.”

The importance of appropriate language and of dialogue surfaced again this morning:

“[T]he debate focused on the need to renew the language of the proclamation of the Gospel and the transmission of doctrine: the Church must be more open to dialogue, and must listen more frequently (and not only in exceptional cases) to the experiences of married couples, because their struggles and their failures cannot be ignored; on the other hand, they can be the basis of a real and true theology.”

To flesh out some of the above points, the press conference that followed at 1 pm Roman time included specific examples of what such a renewal of language needs to address. Fr. Rosica, the English language Vatican spokesperson, noted that terms like “Living in sin,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “contraceptive mentality” were singled out by the Synod Fathers as examples of “harsh language” where there was a need for change that would demonstrate the Church’s openness and love. Cardinal Nichols, who was also present at the press conference, characterized the atmosphere at the Synod as one where bishops are “speaking as priests, members of families, and not as academics,” adding that “It’s very lovely.” 🙂 On the same note, the Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro – also a participant of the Synod – noted that “the attempts to paint a picture of fighting among cardinals melt like snow in the sun. At the Synod what is lived is an experience of Church …”

The Church is not only for good people

Due to the brief break in masses at Pope Francis’ residence – the Domus Sanctæ Marthæ – over the Christmas holidays, the set of 43 sermons he delivered there since the beginning of September until the end of 2013 can be considered their second season.¹ In this post, I will again look at his sermons’ textual features, compare them against the first season and share with you some of my favorite moments from Francis’ homilies during this period, that haven’t already been referred to in the blog posts I wrote over the same period, which are frequently inspired by them or at least make reference to them.

In terms of the latest season’s language, it very much remained like that of the the first, with a heavy focus on Jesus – by far the most frequently used word throughout. The remaining nine of the top ten most frequently-used words were: God, Lord, you, our, him, Church, people, life and Christian (in that order) which means that eight of the top words from the first season remained unchanged, with only “love” and “what” dropping our of the top ten, being replaced by “Christian” and “people.” The specific shifts of these words are also worth noting from the following figure:

S02vs01

While even a relatively small dataset like the above fifty pairs of word frequencies is big enough to have lots read into it, it’d still venture to make the following observations: first, that “Lord” no longer outweighs “God,” second that the gap between the frequency of “our” versus “you” has dropped significantly and third that “Church” and “people” are on almost equal footing instead of the former being said almost twice as often as the latter in the previous season. I don’t mean to build an elaborate analysis on the above features, but they strike me as indicators of an even greater closeness between Francis and his audience.

Worth noting is also the further reduced Gunning-Fog readability Index (from an already very low 6.6 to 6.3), which indicates an increased ease of the text and that this is achieved at the same time as an almost doubling of the text’s lexical density (from 15.2 to 25.3). All of this points to Francis’ words being very accessible, while at the same time holding substance.

Both as an example of his style and as a way to pick out some of my favorite moments from these last three months, the following five are passages from Francis’ homilies that particularly spoke to me:

“Those who live judging their neighbor, speaking ill of their neighbor, are hypocrites, because they lack the strength and the courage to look to their own shortcomings. The Lord does not waste many words on this concept. Further on he says that he who has hatred in his heart for his brother is a murderer. In his first letter, John the Apostle also says it clearly: anyone who has hatred for his brother is a murderer, he walks in darkness, he who judges his brother walks in darkness. And so, every time we judge our brothers in our hearts – or worse still when we speak ill of them with others, we are Christian murderers: A Christian murderer…. It’s not me saying this, it’s the Lord. And there is no place for nuances. If you speak ill of your brother, you kill your brother. […] Gossip always has a criminal side to it. There is no such thing as innocent gossip. […] Some may say that there are persons who deserve being gossiped about. But it is not so: Go and pray for him! Go and do penance for her! And then, if it is necessary, speak to that person who may be able to seek remedy for the problem. But don’t tell everyone! Paul had been a sinner, and he says of himself: I was once a blasphemer, a persecutor, a violent man. But I have been mercifully treated. Perhaps none of us are blasphemers – perhaps … But if we ever gossip we are certainly persecutors and violent. We ask for grace so that we and the entire Church may convert from the crime of gossip to love, to humility, to meekness, to docility, to the generosity of love towards our neighbor.” (13th September)
“You can’t govern without loving the people and without humility! And every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‘Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path.’ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good. The man or woman who governs – who loves his people is a humble man or woman.” (16th September)
“The Church is not the Church only for good people. Do we want to describe who belongs to the Church, to this feast? The sinners. All of us sinners are invited. At this point there is a community that has diverse gifts: one has the gift of prophecy, another of ministry, who teaching … We all have qualities and strengths. But each of us brings to the feast a common gift. Each of us is called to participate fully in the feast. Christian existence cannot be understood without this participation. ‘I go to the feast, but I don’t go beyond the antechamber, because I want to be only with the three or four people that I am familiar with …’ You can’t do this in the Church! You either participate fully or you remain outside. You can’t pick and choose: the Church is for everyone, beginning with those I’ve already mentioned, the most marginalized. It is everyone’s Church!” (5th November)
“When we look at a father or a mother who speaks to their little child, we see that they become little and speak with a voice of a child and with the manners of children. Someone looking in from the outside think, ‘This is ridiculous!’ They become smaller, right there, no? Because the love of a father and a mother needs to be close. I say this word: to lower themselves to the world of the child … If the father and mother spoke to them normally, the child would still understand; but they want to take up the manner of speaking of the child. They come close, they become children. And so it is with the Lord. The Greek theologians explained this attitude of God with a somewhat difficult word: “syncatabasis” or “the humble and accommodating disposition of God who lowers Himself to make Himself one of us.”” (12th December)
“There is a third coming of the Lord: that of every day. The Lord visits His Church every day! He visits each of us, and so our souls as well experience something similar: our soul resembles the Church, our soul resembles Mary. The Desert Fathers say that Mary, the Church and our souls are feminine, and that what is said about one can be said analogously of the others. Our soul is also in waiting, this waiting for the coming of the Lord – an open soul that calls out, ‘Come, Lord.’” (23rd December)

¹ For a review of the “first season,” see here.

Francis’ “grammar of simplicity”

Yesterday the 28th World Youth Day has come to a close in Rio de Janeiro and there would undoubtedly be a lot to say about it. Instead, I would like to look at a different, yet related, topic today, which is that of Pope Francis’ daily morning sermons, delivered at the Domus Sanctæ Marthæ (DSM). Since his election in March, Francis has been inviting different groups of Vatican staff and other visitors to join him for morning mass at his residence of choice, during which he’d deliver a short, off-the-cuff-style reflection, inspired by the day’s readings. Since these morning masses, and the homilies they contained, have now been suspended for the summer months, one can consider their first season, so to speak, as complete, and reflect on them as a whole. These, by my count 123, homilies form a corpus that is not only important in terms of the themes that it addresses, but also as a body of linguistic content, and it is both of these aspects that I would like to reflect on here.

Before proceeding to the DSM homilies, it is worth hearing the following point made by Francis on Saturday, during a lunch with Brazilian bishops, since it is the key to unlocking their language:

“Another lesson which the Church must constantly recall is that she cannot leave simplicity behind; otherwise she forgets how to speak the language of Mystery. Not only does she herself remain outside the door of the mystery, but she proves incapable of approaching those who look to the Church for something which they themselves cannot provide, namely, God himself. At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people. Without the grammar of simplicity, the Church loses the very conditions which make it possible “to fish” for God in the deep waters of his Mystery.”

With the above in mind, let’s turn to the DSM homilies. According to the Vatican’s spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, the morning homilies are spontaneous instead of delivered from a prepared written text and a “‘complete’ publication, therefore, would necessarily entail a transcription and a reworking of the text at various points, given that the written form is different from the spoken one, which in this case is the original form chosen intentionally by the Holy Father.” The result would be “‘something else’, which isn’t what the Holy Father intends to do [with his daily homily] each morning.” As a result of this primarily spoken and spontaneous form of the morning homilies, only summaries and quotes from them are available, instead of full transcripts. These summaries, furthermore, include notes on who was present at the individual masses, on what the readings of the day were and addenda like “the Holy Father said,” “pope Francis noted,” etc.

As a direct linguistic analysis of the summaries would be skewed by the above additions, I first parsed the 123 summaries and removed from them any text that went beyond a transcript or paraphrasing of Pope Francis. The end result are 27K words, resulting in an average of 220 words per sermon, which corresponds to about half a page of written text. The end result are only snippets of what Francis said and a degree of separation between his full, albeit short, sermons and the record available publicly is inevitable, and indeed in accord with Francis’ own wishes.

Running a textual analysis on the above corpus yields very interesting results, which make plain the simplicity of the language Francis employs:

The total of 27,132 words result from using only 4,118 different ones, which is less than the typical vocabulary of a 6-year-old.
The Gunning fog readability score of the text, which derives from the number of words per sentence and the percentage of complex words used, is 6.6. This is at the very bottom end of the scale and matches that of the Bible (with popular novels coming in at 8-10 and academic texts at 15-20).
The average sentence length here is 13 words, where 17 is typical and 11-13 is considered easy.
Word length too is at the low end of the scale, with an average of 1.49 syllables per word (as compared with typical language having 1.66).

That Francis speaks simply can easily be seen when listening to him and the above just underlines how consistently and persistently he does so during his morning sermons.

Turning to the content of his homilies, the word cloud at the top of this post shows the 50 most frequently used words, where font size is proportional to frequency. As can be seen immediately, “Jesus” is the word that Francis uses by far most often (2.3% of the time), followed by “Lord” (1.5%), where the two top words are in fact synonyms in this context. Comparing this to an analysis of his first sermons after being elected pope, it can be seen that his focus on the person of Jesus is a constant feature of his preaching. If we combine these two words, the second most frequent word becomes “our,” which, to my mind, underlines the sense one gets of Francis being one of us, referring to issues and ideas applicable to an “us” that includes him, rather than a “you” that he is removed from. Worth noting is also that the highest-ranked verb among the 4K words used in these homilies is “love” (7th among all words). A final point to pick up on in terms of word frequency is that of the top 50 words, only two imply obstacles or prohibition by themselves: “cannot” (48th) and “without” (49th). Looking at four word phrases, the most frequent one is “the word of God” (used 41 times in these 123 homilies) and in third place comes “the name of Jesus.” Francis continuously stays close to the person of Jesus, even just from the perspective of the vocabulary he employs, stays close to the congregation he addresses and is overwhelmingly positive.

Since I have already written at length about some of Francis’ DSM homilies in earlier posts, I would here just like to highlight some of the aspects that stood out to me while editing the text of these 123 sermons:

Francis uses the term “pope” quite generously: he refers to the apostle Paul by saying that he “is a Pope, a builder of bridges.” and he also refers to Tawadros II in the same way, and has the following to say about him to the morning mass congregation: “Today there’s a good reason for joy in this house, where we are hosting the Pope of Alexandria, the Patriarch of the See of St Mark. He is a brother who has come to visit the Church of Rome to talk and to make a journey together.”
Similes are a great favorite of Francis’, and he uses them liberally: “The confessional is not a laundromat,” “To solve the problems of life it is necessary to look reality in the face, ready like the goalkeeper of a football team to grab the ball whatever side it comes from,” that God is “not an indefinite God dispersed in the air like a spray”, that Jesus is “like an engineer, like an architect; He tells them what He will do: ‘I am going to prepare a place, in my Father’s house is my dwelling’,” that the Church is like a mother (“How would you feel if someone said: she’s a domestic administrator? ‘No, I am the mother!’ And the Church is Mother.”) and that some Christians are like pickled peppers (“Sometimes these melancholy Christians faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life”) are just a couple of examples.
Francis draws inspiration from a very broad range of sources, including his grandmother (who’d tell him and other children in the family: ‘Look he is dead, but tomorrow he will be Risen!,’ when visiting the tomb on Good Friday), a man who worked for the diocese of Buenos Aires (“before going to do any of the things he had to do, he would always whisper to himself: ‘Jesus!’”), Pope Paul VI (who “said that you cannot advance the Gospel with sad, hopeless, discouraged Christians”), the martyrs of Nagasaki (“each one helped the other, they struggled mightily and spoke of Jesus as they awaited the moment of their death”), the garment factory collapse in Dhaka (which “killed hundreds of workers who were being exploited and who worked without the proper safety preoccupations. It is a title, which struck me the day of the tragedy in Bangladesh: ‘How to die for 38 euros a month’”), an electrician who prayed for his daughter’s recovery (“Miracles do happen. But we need to pray with our hearts: A courageous prayer, that struggles to achieve a miracle, not prayers of courtesy”) and a priest, who, when he was appointed bishop worried about his unworthiness (to which his confessor told him: “But do not worry. If after the mess Peter made of things, they made him Pope, then you go ahead!”).

In the beginning

This is my third attempt at starting a post¹ that I have been thinking about intensively all weekend (and that follows a train of thought that I have nursed on and off for years). Why write about it now? Because I believe I have finally understood something that has been staring me in the face for years: the opening line of St. John’s Gospel is a joke!

“Whoa!” I hear you say “Hold it right there!” Before you start crying “Blasphemy!” or “Stone him!,” please, do hear me out.² I don’t mean to say that it is ridiculous, frivolous, trivial or inconsequential. On the contrary! I believe that I can now see a twist of humor in it that furthermore alludes to complexity that would otherwise have taken tomes upon tomes to try and spell out and that would have been well beyond St. John or the Christians of the first many centuries.

Picture this (imaginary, non-canonical!) scene:

God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are sitting around a table, chatting (you can imagine that this is what they spoke about in the scene Rublev painted, if you like):

Father: OK, guys, let’s get John started with his Gospel.

Jesus: Dad, can we have him spell out how it all started, and not just open with my birth?

HS: Sure(!), but the maths might be a tad beyond him, don’t you think?

Jesus: I didn’t mean to give him the full recipe, HS! This is not about repeatability and independent verification …

HS: So, were you thinking along the lines of the atemporal – yet dynamic, hyper-dimensional, infinite, partaking in the finite, linear, half-axis of time and being delimited in space? Even if we dumb it down to the level of philosophy, it’s still a tall order (although if anyone can do it, I can!).

Father: Look, HS, Jesus does have a point – we could give them a sense of what is going on, without having to bring Ambrose, Thomas or Albert forward. Surely you can think of some little quip to point them in the right direction.

[A “moment”’s silence later.]

HS: It’s a bit cheeky, but how about this – and I’m just riffing here (plus they’ll have to wait for Ludwig and Martin to start unpacking it) …

Jesus: Get on with it! We may have all eternity, but I’d rather get back to giving Sidd some more hints.

HS: All right, all right! How about John opens with this: “In the beginning was the Word!”

The Father and Jesus look at each other, wide-eyed, exclaim: “Genius!” and the triune bursts out laughing.

The insight I had, while walking to mass on Sunday morning and thinking about Dei Verbum, the Johannine prologue and Descartes’ “cogito,” was the following: Saying “In the beginning was the Word” is like starting a recipe with “knead the dough.” A word cannot possibly be the start: it requires a language, other words, syntax, grammar and speakers and listeners who know how to play the games it facilitates. Saying “In the beginning was the Word” is saying “Look, this is as far back as we can take you, but know that there was lots that came before.” It places at the beginning an innocent-looking entity: a word, yet one that vehemently points beyond itself. To meaning, to reference, to relation, to function, to communication, to a meeting of minds. With a simple sentence, John (with some help), gives a masterclass on the inevitability of the preexisting and the core of Trinitarian relationships, where, like a word, each person points beyond themselves.

“Alright,” you say, “but why call it a joke?” I believe the structure of this sentence is precisely that of all one-liners: the first part (“In the beginning”) prepares you for a certain set of expectations and the second surprises you with something that just does not fit (“the Word,” which cannot possibly be in the beginning :). This is exactly what Kant meant with “Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing.” Not wanting to kill humor with explanation, let me leave you with another example of the same comedic form: “Every winter when the first snow fell, I’d run to the front door with excitement, start banging on it and shout: “Mum! Dad! Let me in!”” (Milton Jones).

Realizing the above, I started seeing the Johannine pattern elsewhere too. Descartes, starts with “cogito ergo sum,” in an attempt to draw a line and derive a philosophy from that stake in the ground. Yet, it is a line that carries a lot of baggage beyond itself. My own earlier attempt too, which tries to take the “cogito” a step further by starting with “Language” is nothing but an explicit acknowledgement of such a necessary preexistence and in no way escapes or circumvents it. Unsurprisingly, the account of creation in Genesis uses the word/language mechanism for indicating the process of creation, where matter is spoken into being (“Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3)). More surprisingly, one of the Hindu creation accounts (the Nasadiya Sukta in the Rigveda) also employs a similar, though not identical, mechanism: “The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining […] that was the primal seed, born of the mind.” Even the creation account of the Sumerians (The debate between Sheep and Grain, written in the 3rd millennium BC), highlights the role of language in the process: “the great gods, did not even know the names Grain or Sheep.”

What is clear to me from the above is the fundamental role of language in the process of something coming from nothing, which in a sense undermines the idea of a true nothing having preceded the something. With this in mind, the Christian identification of Jesus with “the Word,” which I have been wondering about for years, makes perfect sense. The Father makes himself known to us by speaking his Son, who in turn points back to Him: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) and then: “The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves.” (John 14:10-11, with a nice hat-tip to orthopraxy).

So, let me finish with a one-liner: “In the beginning was the Word.” 🙂

¹ In a previous version I would have taken you through Lemaître, the Planck epoch and the opening lines of the Tanakh, before getting to the Johannine prologue.
² Thanks to my über–bestie, PM, for his Nihil Obstat and Transferitur (the Imprimatur of the digital age) – much appreciated!