The Work of Shaping My Heart

God Does Not Explain Himself, But He Promises to Stay With Us

"I will lead the blind on a way they do not know;
by paths they do not know I will guide them.
I will turn darkness into light before them,
and make crooked ways straight.

These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them." (Isaiah 42:16).

I love this verse. It's probably one of the sources of the well known saying, "God writes straight with crooked lines." As a person who makes so many crooked lines, I am much consoled and encouraged by God's promises and by His presence.

O Lord, I have so little vision of the mystery of my own life that we might as well call me blind. I am blind. I do not see or feel or understand the deepest works of healing that You are carrying out within my person.

You are leading me, especially and most profoundly, in those 'ways I do not know," the 'places of darkness' and all the crookedness of the wounds of my sins. You are leading me through so many secret sufferings, through the pain of my truest prayer that so often cries out for You, trembling with hunger. 

There is always this hunger, this longing for You, Lord, that seems overwhelming. Temptations pretend that there are other ways to fill this hunger, and they come from all directions. Ultimately, they pretend to offer something of You that I can grasp and make my own. But what they offer is not You (as I have learned by bitter experience). I want You. 

Where are You, O Lord? 

Baptism has made me Your adopted son, and has enabled me to live with You in the midst of Your People, my brothers and sisters in Jesus the eternal Son, "gathered" (ekklesia) throughout history and today in Your Church. The Church and the sacraments have brought me forgiveness and reconciliation, healing, growth and strength in so many ways. 

But the crushing human weight of the effects of original sin and the scars of my own broken life remain in me in ways I don't understand. I am still so blind. 

Yet You do not forsake me. You are leading me through the anguish and loneliness that come from being a broken human being who lives in broken relationships, who remains a sinner even with all he has been given, who suffers disappointment and fears death. 

Father, I am Your child in eternal life, but I am like a newborn baby even after these many years: small, helpless, crying out, and not yet able to see.... 

I am blind... perhaps in part because of Your mercy. You shield my eyes from the things You know I could not bear to see. Or You let me have a very small glimpse: just enough to know that the pain is there so that I can abandon myself to Your loving hands, and just enough to see that Jesus is here with me. 

Father, I believe that Jesus is here in the suffering, in the places that seem senseless, in the wounds that never fully heal.

God makes a way here, a way that I do not know. He does not explain these hidden ways to me, but simply asks me to trust in Him, to persevere on the path and share in the darkness and suffering that remain in me but no longer belong to me.

He has made them His sufferings. They no longer belong to me, and no longer define me, because He has taken them through love.

Therefore, I must not try to hold onto them, as if the incomprehensible depths of suffering somehow might give me a claim against God, a pretext to turn away from Him, to doubt His promise that He "will never forsake" me. I must not hold them up in God's face and say, "I accept that You exist, but I don't accept Your world" (as Ivan Karamazov says in Dostoevsky's greatest book).

My very bones cry out, "Why?" And yet as our dear late Lorenzo Albacete put it, "God doesn't give you an answer. He just shows up."

The "answer" cannot be a solution or a formula or anything that I can grasp with my mind. My mind cannot turn this darkness into light.

The "answer" is a fact that I must adhere to with my mind, with trust. This adherence is called faith. Even in the deepest darkness, I must have faith that He is here, that He has not forsaken me, that He is leading me on paths unknown.

God's answer is not a "solution" in the sense we think we want. It's not the ultimate "self-improvement" manual. Nor is it a social or political or psychological or intellectual solution.

God's answer is Love. His Love. God's answer to my anguish and loneliness is the gift of Himself.

Infinite Love doesn't "answer the question" of my pain; it is a response that is beyond all the terms I use to try to ask the question, and all the loneliness and anguish that drive the question. Still, it corresponds to all my human questions; it even intensifies those questions while inviting me to live them within this Love. Love transforms my longing, my emptiness, my wounds.

Love turns darkness into light.

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P.S. -- God gives Himself in Jesus. He is Gift. He who is Love and Freedom can only be freely received. My human reason and freedom are respected by the God who created me in His image, as a person. Infinite Love gives Himself totally as a free gift. He wants to raise me up in this gift, giving me the capacity to receive Him and share His life.

This raises a new "question" for my reason, a profoundly practical question that I cannot escape. Should I accept this Infinite Gift? 

I can choose to say, "No."

A gift by nature is offered freely. True love by nature is the opposite of coercion; when we love someone we seek a free response of love. Clearly this must be super-eminently true for the Infinite Gift who is Love Himself.

He wants me to say, "Yes!" He will even empower me to say a "Yes" that shares forever in His life. But He will not force me to accept Him.

Therefore, I can reject Him. There is a great mystery here, because His creative love sustains me in my very being, which means that "I" can never "totally" reject Him because then I would cease to exist. I cannot exist, I cannot be "me," without depending totally on His Love that gives me my very being, and remains always the Source of "me."

Still, He makes me free. I do not have to accept His gift of Himself, His Love and His "way of love" that He has crafted to bring me to my fulfillment. I can resist Infinite Love. I can remain blind forever, because I do not want to let go of my limitations, my nothingness, my way of measuring reality which ultimately comes down to my misery and dissatisfaction. And I can spin endless rationalizations for why refuse to let go.

I can refuse to let go of my sufferings.

But why would I resist the Infinite Gift (who gives me my being) freely offering Himself to me forever? Such a resistance is not only the ultimate misuse of freedom. It is also the ultimate failure of reason. It is the victory of fear.

I cry out in the darkness, "Where am I? Who am I? Why all this pain?" and the answer is "I am with you. I will lead you. No matter how hard, I am with you!"

I am not given "explanations" about the mysterious depths of my own life. I am given Someone who is worthy of my trust. I need to let Him pick me up and carry me. He will never forsake me.

And He will open my eyes, when the time is right.

The Drama and Responsibility of Freedom

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Today we commemorate once again the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. This past year has been notable with regard to that legacy, and we have seen some particularly graphic and frightening manifestations of the pervasive violence that afflicts our society now more than ever.

I was doing some "electronic doodling" this morning (as I continue to experiment with the ever increasing possibilities of multi-media communications). I found myself working with images of the sculpted memorial of Martin Luther King in Washington, DC, and some of his words about persons, relationships, and community.

The meme I drew up and continue to tweak in various ways is far from polished. But since my blog is a "workshop" it seems appropriate to post it here in the form it has taken.

Dr. King has given to America many vivid quotations and striking images that cannot simply be consigned to the historical past. Rather, they resonate today more than ever. I wanted these words in particular to be presented afresh and in a way that does justice to their continued importance.

This past year we have seen that racism remains a corrosive force among us, and it endures -- as do so many human social problems -- because of its foundation in the failure to recognize that every human being is a person. The crisis of isolation and disintegration and the perpetuation of violence among individuals and between groups is a crisis of the human person.

Everyone speaks of "human rights" but no one seems to know what it means to be human, or why human beings have a value that demands respect, a value that deserves to be cherished, fostered, cultivated, defended, loved. 

We are very far indeed from recognizing first and above all that each and every human person possesses a unique and ineradicable dignity which has its origin in something beyond the powers of this world, beyond any mere social consensus or political expediency.

Every human person possesses the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.

And the God who creates and sustains each of us has revealed Himself as Infinite Love.

The dignity of being created in God's image, of being a person, is lived and fulfilled in relationship to other persons. I can only discover "myself" through the gift of myself. We exist in relation to one another, and we realize ourselves in the living affirmation of "being-in-relationship." We fulfill ourselves by caring for one another, by taking responsibility for one another, by living the relationships with the persons who have been given to us.

People today speak so much about freedom, and we think we know that "freedom" means being able to choose for ourselves without being coerced or suffocated by some extrinsic power, whether private or public. But this does not mean that freedom is pure indifference, without purpose. Freedom has a meaning that comes from within itself. It is written upon our hearts.

Freedom does not exist to affirm itself, or subject itself to forces and drives within the person that are meant to serve freedom.

Freedom is made for the giving of self. Through freedom the person exists as a gift, the "I" lives in relation to the "Thou." This common unity builds a solidarity that discovers more relationships to others and generates more love.

It constructs "community" -- communion of persons in love.

We are challenged to "let freedom ring" -- to live our freedom by choosing to affirm the dignity of every human person, choosing to give ourselves in love, choosing to live in communion with God and with one another.

Or we can choose to horde ourselves; we can choose to live according to our whims, our impulses, our perceptions, our prejudices, our fear.

And we will reap a harvest of violence, and more violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr. remains important to our history today, reminding us of what it means to be persons, to give ourselves, to live as children of God, as brothers and sisters.

He legacy remains with us, to remind us to be free, to remind us of the drama and responsibility of freedom.

Charles Peguy: A Poet for France and for the World

I have not forgotten the importance and the gravity of the Centennial that commenced this past summer. In these early days of September the initial German offensive into France was stopped outside of Paris in the "Battle of the Marne." But within this battle, we must recall the 100th anniversary of what seemed at that time only one of a multitude of tragic but otherwise unremarkable battlefield deaths.

It was a brave death, leading an offensive charge, taken out by a single bullet to the brain. He was a brave man, a soldier who loved his country and defended his homeland, a Frenchman, a man of peasant stock, a recently mobilized reserve Lieutenant who owned a book shop and printing press. He was a craftsman who chose and cut his book pages and set his type with great care. But not many people appreciated it.

He was only 41 years old, but the world and life and death and eternity and the deep sky and the stones of cathedrals filled his head and his heart, and he had written passionately in essays and poetry that very few people read or cared about in his lifetime.

No one knew that from his pen the French language sang in ways it had never sung before. No one knew that while he wrote, perched atop stacks of old page proofs, an entire movement of literature was being born. Indeed, it was more; it was a new Esprit.

It would inspire a great revival in French literature, poetry, philosophy, and even theology. It was a flame that would spread out into many lights in the darkness of the coming generations -- rays of hope in the terrible, desperate darkness.

But when the great poet Charles Peguy fell in the Battle of the Marne on September 5, 1914, he was as little known as the times and the turmoil that were destined to fall upon Europe; as little known as the grandeur and the heroism of so many people who would come after him -- who would read his work from out of the ashes of the Great War, and find therein the humble courage of the human person held in the hands of God.

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Charles Peguy

From the poem Freedom [n.b. God is the speaker]:

...I myself am free, says God, and I have created man in my own image and likeness.

Such is the mystery, such the secret, such the price

Of all freedom.

That freedom of that creature is the most beautiful reflection in this world

Of the Creator's freedom. That is why we are so attached to it,

And set a proper price on it.

A salvation that was not free, that was not, that did not come from a free man could in no wise be attractive to us. What would it amount to?

What would it mean?

What interest would such a salvation have to offer?

A beatitude of slaves, a salvation of slaves, a slavish beatitude, how do you expect me to interested in that kind of thing? Does one care to be loved by slaves?

If it were only a matter of proving my might, my might has no need of those slaves, my might is well enough known, it is sufficiently known that I am the Almighty.

My might is manifest enough in all matter and in all events.

My might is manifest enough in the sands of the sea and in the stars of heaven.

It is not questioned, it is known, it is manifest enough in inanimate creation.

It is manifest enough in the government,

In the very event that is man.

But in my creation which is endued with life, says God, I wanted something more.

Infinitely better. Infinitely more. For I wanted that freedom.

I created that very freedom. There are several degrees to my throne.

When you once have known what it is to be loved freely, submission no longer has any taste.

All the prostrations in the world

Are not worth the beautiful upright attitude of a free man as he kneels. All the submission, all the dejection in the world

Are not equal in value to the soaring up point,

The beautiful straight soaring up of one single invocation

From a love that is free.

Why Does Freedom Matter?

St. John Paul II on freedom. What does he mean? How do we understand freedom?

On this Independence Day weekend it is worth asking ourselves, "Why do we care about freedom, anyway?" And after we have gone through all the standard replies learned over the years, do we really know what freedom means? Do I know why my freedom is important for me? Do I know how to live freely? What does freedom mean, for me, for human beings, for society?

It doesn't mean "the absence of all restraints" or merely spontaneous activity without guidance about the reason why human beings act. A chaotic "freedom" in society -- a disoriented space for the expression of impulses, urges, appetites, and desires -- does not lead to a utopia of independent self-realization. Rather, it inevitably results in the emergence of an oppressive social system in which the strongest and most powerful people impose their desires on everyone else.

Fundamentally we need to be free because, as human beings we know that we are made to live for something, to pursue, obtain, embrace, and be embraced by the mysterious reality that calls out and awakens our freedom in the first place.

This embrace is what freedom seeks in order to realize itself. This is what freedom "wants" to do from the moment it springs up from the profundity of the human heart, and therefore this is what freedom "ought" to do. The word "ought" is not opposed to freedom. It does not imply the dehumanizing imposition "from the outside" of alien rules that reduce and manipulate the person. It expresses, rather, the exigencies of freedom itself.

Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II) was a man who knew what it was like to be deprived of freedom. He knew what it was like to be prohibited by human powers from doing what free people ought to do, which is to try to know and love things as they really are, to search for the meaning of life, to help one another, to cherish the dignity of every human person, to walk toward one's destiny, to love one another. Freedom is for love. And this love does not rest, does not become fully free, until it gives itself to the Infinite One who alone is worthy of it, who draws it continually, beyond all things, toward the infinite life that has been promised to every human heart.

We have been created for Infinite Love. This is why freedom matters.

Free as a Bird?

Wouldn't you like to be free as a bird?

I wonder where that expression came from. As I write this, we are watching one of those BBC nature videos. The erudite voice of some distinguished British gentleman is telling everyone about the glorious life of animals, which basically consists in sleeping, seeking food, mating, and avoiding predators. And it is a wonderful thing, in its own way, the multitude of diverse ways in which animals all over the world -- in all their many colors and shapes and sizes -- use their remarkable instincts to seek food, to mate, and to avoid predators; in a word, to live. But it takes a bit of the romance out of my lonely black bird. There is surely much poetry in his sturdy vigil, perched atop a fence post. All the splendor and spontaneity of his instincts are focused on the task of living. For him it means spying the worm, the grub, tending the nest, avoiding the cat.

But he is not free.

He is bound to this labor. He comes forth from his shell, struggles into flight, searches for food, perpetuates his species without even knowing what he is, searches for more food, and one day dies. But the whole sky is full of birds. Flocks of birds in full flight. They give no thought to their freedom, or their burdens.

It is we who find the image of freedom in their flight.

It is we who are melancholy at the recognition of their passing lives.

The animals, in their unreflected innocence, remind us that the whole world is passing away. And perhaps too, there is an echo in animal life of the sadness at the heart of creation, a sadness that reflects something irretrievably lost.

Yet we do not get caught up in the mourning of this loss. Our gaze upon the natural world and our poetry are full of hope. We yearn for the freedom of the birds. We watch them in flight and we sense the promise of freedom. For the eager longing of creation awaits the revelation of the children of God. There is another mystery at work at the heart of creation, and it whispers in our hearts a restlessness, an expectation, a promise.

The birds will return to the earth and be joined to it. And one day, the earth will be transformed. The mystery of this is hidden from us.

But we will fly. We will be free.

The Foundation of Our Social Problems (Part 1)

Our world as seen by Google

Clearly the world is in a great deal of trouble. Many good people are engaged in practical action, dialogue, and the kind of realistic negotiations that are so often necessary to maintain a fragile peace or to secure fundamental human rights.

This work is necessary, and indeed heroic because it requires immense energies and creativity to find ways to patch up a crisis or bring some measure of relief or protection in situations that require continued vigilance. Social problems are never solved once and for all. They must be grappled with again and again.

The human ideal remains elusive in this world, and yet the human quest for justice and compassion must press forward here and now, placing its ultimate hope in something greater than our capacities.

It is important to reflect upon the roots of the particular social malaise of today: roots that are as old as human history and yet have a particular significance for our times because our society has obfuscated these roots in unprecedented ways. This is a challenge to us to look explicitly at what so many are trying desperately to evade, and make sure that we ourselves do not forget these roots and the urgent need to address them.

Beneath so many of the problems of our society it is possible to recognize a foundation (or, rather, the profound sense of an absence of foundation). Human beings have no sense of the ground upon which they stand. Often today this is evident in the most basic circumstances. People are disconnected from the human foundations of their own families, and they lack the experience of social stability or of any traditions or customs. They lack any strong human investment in a particular place or a community, and it is difficult to find sustaining motivation for constructive activity or commitment.

Underlying all this human instability is a more radical, existential insecurity. Our society feeds this insecurity insofar as it pretends that the human world is a self contained entity filled with inexplicable yet also autonomous human beings. Our social environment says that human persons come into existence from nowhere and live for nothing, and at the same time that they are invested with the power to act and the freedom and responsibility to define themselves.

It is a bipolar vortex between insignificance and urgency. The human person feels as if he or she is just "here" in time and space, hanging onto existence by a slender thread, and yet wanting to be here, to be and to be more, although the person does not know how or why. There is no foundation, and it is terrifying to just hang here swinging one's legs over an abyss of extinction. Not surprisingly, the person looks for something, anything, that has the appearance of security; something that feels like solid ground on which to stand.

Of course, people don't often feel consciously the naked terror of having no identity, no foundation, no reason for existing. It's an unbearable experience, and most of the time the survival instinct kicks into gear and people quickly find some reason, some seemingly solid reality in the world that will give them a purpose for existing; something they can belong to. Or else they bury themselves in external distractions. But even with the wildest distractions, the feeling lingers subconsciously and so people feel compelled to say things like "I'm trying to find myself."

The presupposition in this society is that your own bare self exists in radical solitude and lack of definition and value. You have no value unless you have found something or someone (or some cause or group) that gives value to you.

No wonder we are so desperate.

No wonder we sink ourselves so readily into factions and ideologically driven groups that wear labels. They give us a sense of belonging. They "validate" our existence.

And no wonder we are willing to wage ruthless war against any idea, group, or person who opposes our faction, or questions its adequacy. We have become convinced that it's a matter of survival, that our identity is at stake -- the very meaning of our existence.

But wait. Do I really belong to nothing in myself? In this moment, am I simply "here," scrambling to assert myself into a self-defined meaningful identity?

Let me, JJ, consider what I experience about myself right now. I would say that I'm here in this moment trying to write something coherent, trying to communicate with others, so as to serve them (and to be appreciated by them -- haha, let's be honest). I want to be "in union with other people," or rather to deepen my union with them.

I find myself "here," in this moment, in a way that can seem frightening but in reality is challenging and dramatic. I am here with a need. I need goodness, love, and not only appreciation but also self-giving. Yes, there is a profound anxiety and lack of self-confidence in me, a fear of nothingness, a sense of insignificance and an impulse toward self-assertion -- but that is not all there is to my being. There is also the fundamental desire to give myself, the intuition of a richness that wants to share itself. I know that my existence is good. No matter how obscure it may seem, I know that I am grounded in something fundamentally, radically good, and that I am responsible to that good, which is the root of me and at the same time "other" than me.

We live in such fear. But what is fear? It is the response to the possibility of losing something. This implies that something is already there, something more fundamental than our fear. It is goodness, truth, and beauty: fundamentals of existing that we do not define.

It is the fact that we are given to ourselves by Another, that our existence is rooted, firmly, in the love of Another. But this Other is beyond anything in the world. The world everywhere points to this Someone, and opens up a journey to seek His fullness, and to belong fully to Him and thus to everyone and everything else.

I exist as "gift" of this Someone, and so I am truly myself by being a gift, by giving myself, by loving.

Our society needs to grow more into an environment that affirms the value of the human person as created by God and called to give his or herself in love ever more fully to God and to others according to God's wisdom. Foundational human experience is complex and ambivalent because human persons have a brokenness; they are burdened with an affliction. They are overwhelmed by anxiety and a desperate sense of the need to create their own identity, because their connection to the transcendent Mystery, the creating, sustaining, infinitely loving Other, so often seems shrouded and obscured.

And this obscure ambivalence in our self understanding is rooted in the whole of human history and its origins, the "original sin" which is the cause of the divided heart that we all experience within ourselves. We cannot pretend that it's possible to ignore these basic truths about the human person and still find real solutions to social problems or make the world a more human place. This is the basis of the human problem, and we must not forget it. No theory or political or economic system is going to make it go away. We need to be aware of it, and as much as possible help others to be aware of it. Of course, we also want to remember and witness to others the answer that God Himself has provided, the miracle of His presence among us.

We do not need to make ourselves or find something that gives value to our being. We have been made, we have value, we are loved. We need to be healed and to grow into our true greatness, to attain the likeness in love of the One who loves us.

The Realization of Freedom

"It is in the total dimension
of our fulfilment
that freedom will be realized,
according to its entire nature,
as capacity for total satisfaction.
Freedom is the capacity for the infinite,
the thirst for God.
Freedom, then, is love,
because it is the capacity for something
that is not us:
it is Another."

~Luigi Giussani

A New Kind of Hope

Yesterday was the great feast day of St. Agnes of Rome, a twelve year old girl of noble family at the beginning of the fourth century. She openly professed her Christianity and died a martyr, which is certainly extraordinary in itself for a young girl. But there is another reason why Agnes is regarded as one of the great saints of the Church.

Carved statue of St. Agnes from the shrine at St. Agnes Catholic church in Arlington, Virginia.
Agnese Janaro was baptized in this church over 14 years ago. Was it really that long ago?!

The earliest accounts praise St. Agnes's heroism and her purity. Clearly she made an astonishing impression on those who witnessed her martyrdom and communicated her story. The traditions that come down from various sources, and that are reflected in the ancient liturgical texts for her feast, indicate that even before her martyrdom this young girl had already given over her life to Jesus in a total dedication--one that would inspire and shape the personal identity of countless women over the next 1700 years.

Agnes had consecrated her virginity to Christ, not for a term of service like the vestals of pagan Rome, but forever. She sacrificed her natural vocation to be a wife and mother in this world and embraced a life of virginity as a witness that God alone was the love of her heart. Christ would be her true husband, and as His bride she would begin to reflect the glory of the life of the resurrection by remaining a virgin, by being entirely for God and God alone, offering Him her entire identity as a woman.

But this was not her idea. It was He Himself who had called her. In the liturgy, Agnes says, "My Lord Jesus Christ has espoused me with his ring; he has crowned me like a bride."

There is no disparagement of earthly marriage here. Marriage itself serves as a sign of what she found, and finds its own fulfillment in being this sign.

Rather, something happened to this twelve year old girl, Someone revealed to her a new kind of life, an eternal life that was already dawning in that moment of her heart, a life and a love worthy of all she had and all she was, worthy of following exclusively, a life greater than any human hope even as it fulfilled the promise hidden in all hopes, a life that could not be broken by all the power of the most powerful Empire the world had ever known, a life greater than the whole universe: eternal life in communion with the God who is Love.

"I am espoused to him whom the angels serve; sun and moon stand in wonder at his beauty."

It was this Beauty that made her utterly fearless. It was a Beauty that so filled this child that all the connivance and energetic cruelty of the powers of this earth could not prevail against her freedom, even when they dedicated all their deception and all there brute force to crushing that freedom.

They did not prevail.

Now, Agnes of Rome sings in glory, in the company of a multitude of women who followed as she did, into martyrdom, into the prayer and silence that seeks Him alone and in so doing lifts up the cry of the whole world, into an exclusive devotion to Christ wherever He is found, seeking to bring comfort to His heart, seeking Him as missionaries, teachers, care-givers, companions and servants of the poor, workers of mercy. St. Agnes leads the song that brings sweet breezes of consolation to the weary, and the strength of a new kind of hope for all of us in the face of every danger and every kind of violence:

"What I longed for, I now see; what I hoped for, I now possess; in heaven I am espoused to him whom on earth I loved with all my heart."