The Advent of Salvation
A Catholic 301 Retreat
Homilies and talks offered as part of the Catholic 301 Advent Retreat, December 17, 2022 at the Basilica of the Assumption.
I. Salvation Is Not Arbitrary
Homily: Father Justin Gough
Arbitrary decisions are the lifeblood of the Church, a certain rector once remarked to me.
Several weeks ago, I suggested an arbitrary, skeleton of a structure for this retreat—mostly who would talk about what. That was Father Brendan’s response: Arbitrary decisions are the lifeblood of the Church. Much, actually, about this retreat was arbitrary. We made decisions simply because we had to make decisions and didn’t give them any further thought. Whether it would be last Saturday or this was, we must confess, a coin toss.
Arbitrary decisions may, in fact, be the lifeblood of the Church, because it is perhaps in these moments that we set our scheming aside and, finally, let docility and obedience to the Holy Spirit take the stage as we know we ought. That is not to say we should make every action out of impulse and chalk them up to the Spirit’s special whisperings in our ear. But all too often pride privileges our construction of the narrative over God’s, and our deceit convinces us that history is all up to us.
This has one of two effects. Our retreat master, Jean Daniélou, describes them in the introduction to The Advent of Salvation, when he writes:
We have, on the one hand, that immense faith in material progress which has given rise to a movement like communism. The root of Communist thought, as we find it in the Marxian philosophy on which it is based, is the idea that through history there is some progress being irrevocably accomplished. There may be crises, there may be revolutions. But they are mere episodes within this great ‘becoming’ which covers hundreds of thousands of years, through which the progress is taking place. We need therefore do nothing but put our faith in history, our trust in progress; we may not see it, what matters is that it is happening (11).
On the one hand, we can have blind faith history as continual, unimpeded progress. If we just keep at it, things will get better. (I find myself embracing that logic only when talking about the Orioles). Otherwise, I tend to run to the other extreme. Again, Daniélou:
At the same time––and here you have the paradox––there is a current in contemporary thought which goes in exactly the opposite direction, which thinks the world is essentially absurd, and our only possible attitude a sort of despairing humanism, which, seeing the absurdity of everything, cannot have hope, because all hope is an illusion, but tries to handle things as well as possible so as to preserve a minimum of human happiness (12).
According to Daniélou, there is history (in the materialist sense that means progress) on one side and drama (in the humanist sense that means tragedy) on the other: aspiring optimism on the left and decimating nihilism on the right. Both are the results, Daniélou would say, of a modernist view of history: an account of events that is cut off at the source from any spiritual or transcendent meaning. We can either naively trust that things will turn out or resign ourselves to accept the reality that they will implode. Those are the two options modernism leaves us.
Now, obviously, we are here because we are convinced that modernity does not have the only say. History is not closed in on itself. We are not confined to these two alternatives. Here enter today’s readings.
Jacob called his sons and said to them: ‘Assemble and listen, sons of Jacob, listen to Israel, your father.’ Jacob calls before himself his progeny and speaks to them. Matthew, son of Jacob that he is, does the summoning, calling together and placing before us all the generations of Israel of whom was born the Christ. Even a cursory knowledge of the Bible reminds that the begats are no saintly lot. The Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe1 remarks: One aim of Matthew is to show that Jesus really was tied into the squalid realities of human life and sex and politics. McCabe continues: The moral is too obvious to labor: Jesus did not belong to [a] nice, clean world… or to [an] honest, reasonable, sincere world… he belonged to a family of murders, cheats, cowards, adulterers, and liars––he belonged to us and came to help us, no wonder he came to a bad end, and gave us some hope.
The rector may be right: arbitrary decisions might just be the lifeblood of the Church. But it was this arbitrary decision that sets this retreat, in which we will consider the advent of our salvation, to begin with the way in which Christ came to us in history –– in messy, messy history.
What we’re grappling with here—what makes history so dang messy—is what Daniélou calls the terrifying power of human freedom. Communism is naïve because it fails to account for it and underestimates just how destructive it can be (and too often is). As if it needed to be said, history won’t simply just get better all on its own. But neither is it predestined to fail. What the humanists fail to appreciate is the reality of divine providence—the sobering reality that no decision is ever, in the end, fully arbitrary, but a woven part of the intricate tapestry of God’s eternal design.
All of history—the cumulative effects of human freedom—finds its fulfillment in the conclusion of Matthew’s genealogy: Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ. All that we shall consider this morning is how that is possible: how God completes and perfects history through the advent of his Son, by uniting himself to history, by succumbing to the terrifying power of human freedom, and of his own freedom, rising from it.
In the final analysis, history is perhaps not a word Christians should use. History suggests a closed circuit of human causes. The liturgy suggests a complement: wisdom. Today, the Church prays: O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to the other mightily, and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence. Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Christ is the one who orders all things sweetly. Christ is the salvation of the world, of history. Come, Lord Jesus, and save us.
II. The Narrative of Christ’s Advent and the Human Person
Conference: Fr. Brendan Fitzgerald
Luke 1:12-17
When Zechariah saw [the angel], he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
Luke 1:30-33
The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
These two annunciation stories from the Gospel of Luke tell us something vital about how we are to understand our Christian lives, something that I think we often fail to understand in our lives today. I will return to these two annunciations and our Christian lives in a little bit.
First, let’s talk about the etymology of the word ‘person.’ Maybe you have heard this before, or maybe I have told you something about this before, but the word ‘person’ exists because of the Christian desire in the first centuries of the Church to understand the life of God and salvation history. The English word ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona, which itself is a translation made of the Greek prosopon. In Greek, a prosopon is a mask—a face—that an actor wears in a dramatic performance. To wear a mask within a drama is to assume the role of a particular character, and sometimes in ancient drama you would see a single actor wear a variety of masks within a single performance.
We take much for granted now, but maybe you can imagine living as a Christian scholar in the early Church, looking back at the Christ-event as it has been told to you through liturgy and tradition and whatever recorded scriptures you might have access to, and asking yourself: How many gods do we believe in as Christians? The Old Testament speaks of God the Father all of the time, the God of creation who has established covenants and given laws. Christ tells us directly in the Gospels that he is sent from the Father, that he and Father are one, that the one who has seen Christ has seen the Father. So, is Christ a god too? And then there is the Holy Spirit, whom Christ says is even greater than he is, a Spirit who will be given to those who believe in Christ as a source of grace and consolation. Is the Holy Spirit also a god? And let’s just say we go ahead and jump to the Christian conclusion that the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are all the same God, well, how are we going to distinguish the Father from the Son and the Son from the Spirit and the Spirit from the Father? There is one God, sure, but there is also some kind of distinction in God of which we need to make sense.
The road to a solution really takes off through the work of the Christian scholar Tertullian toward the end of the 2nd century. Tertullian decided to look at scripture and ask a simple question: Who in this moment is speaking, the Father or the Son or the Spirit? We could also ask: Who in this moment is acting, the Father or the Son or the Spirit? And what Tertullian decides to do is use the Greek term prosopon to distinguish one divine speech from another, one divine action from another. In the history of theology, the method of biblical interpretation that Tertullian develops is called ‘prosopological exegesis.’ We can understand scripture, make sense of the life of God and salvation history, by looking at the revelation we have received and asking ourselves: What mask is God wearing at this moment? What role is God playing? There are some kinds of divine actions that seem to belong to the work of the Father, others that belong to the work of the Son, and still other divine actions that belong to the work of the Holy Spirit. All of the sudden, we are able to talk about God as a Creator, as a Redeemer, and as a Sanctifier—one God who lives as three distinct prosopons, or as we know the word today, three distinct persons. A single God who lives as a Trinity of persons.
The use of the term prosopon to make sense of the life of God and salvation history is maybe the single greatest development in the history of theology. Not only does the term person allow us to understand something of the Trinitarian life of God, but the term person also helps us to make sense of the life of Christ. We say that Christ is human and divine, but where is the place of union between humanity and divinity in Christ? Does Christ have two souls, one human and the other divine? Or does Christ have two distinct minds, one that comes from God and the other that comes by way of natural human generation? Or is there only a single divine soul in Christ that inhabits and animates a mortal human body? For centuries, the Church was divided bitterly—sometimes violently—over these questions about the life of Christ. The solution to our Christological struggles comes in the middle of the 5th century, at the Council of Chalcedon, when the Church declared that:
He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, and Only Begotten, who is made known in two natures united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction between the natures is not at all destroyed because of the union, but rather the property of each nature is preserved and concurs together into one person (prosopon) and subsistence (hypostasis). He is not separated or divided into two persons but he is one and the same Son, the Only Begotten, God the Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ.
We call this theological reality the ‘hypostatic union,’ a union of two natures at the level of personhood. In this case, divine personhood.
Why so much talk about the theological etymology of the word ‘person’? Well, the point I want to make is that the word ‘person’ as we know it today develops out of an effort to identify distinct realities—distinct persons—who exist in relationship with one another. The word ‘person’ gets at the essential truth that human beings are corporate—we belong to one another in relationship—long before we exist as individuals. Our corporate nature as human beings forms the necessary background against which we try to carve out a space for ourselves as individuals. We belong to others before we belong to ourselves, we are social before we are individual. And right there in the history of the word ‘person’ we can see these vital realities: God and human beings bound up with one another through time.
I say that these realities are vital because we are living in a world today that has inverted the order of relationship in our human lives. The modern West, at the very heart of its political theology, is structured upon a vision of human life in which we first exist as individuals, individuals who then come together to form a society. Why do we individuals come together to form a society? Political philosophers have given many answers over the centuries. Some have said we form a society of rules and law to keep ourselves from killing one another, others so that we might protect our property, others so that we might make use of our natural tendency toward compassion. Regardless of the reason we form society, the political theology of the West is built upon the foundational claim that human persons are individuals first, and corporate—social—persons second. There is a chance that the inversion comes by way of our own Christian history. In the early 6th century, the Christian scholar Boethius defined the human person as: an individual substance of a rational nature. Maybe you can see the problem with the definition. Where is the corporate—social—reality of human personhood in those words? The relational dimension of the human person gets lost through philosophical introspection, and it is probably the case that the new definition of the human person given by Boethius sets in motion a very slow revolution in ideas that comes to redefine political life in the Christian West about a millennium later.
Let’s get back to the annunciation stories from Luke’s Gospel. What do we see in the divine messages given to Zechariah and Mary? To my mind, what we behold in these divine encounters is a vision of the human person that is wholeheartedly corporate. Mary and Zechariah are told that to each of them will be born a son, and both Mary and Zechariah are given foreknowledge about the essential identity of the child to be born. These will be human lives whose essential identities are bound up with the salvation history of the world, and with the nation of Israel. The lives of Christ and John the Baptist are first and foremost—metaphysically and historically—social. The lives of Christ and John the Baptist are inextricably associated with a mission that serves the design of God for the salvation of the world. The lives of Christ and John the Baptist are bound up with the whole of cosmic and human history. And for Mary and Zechariah to understand the lives of their children requires an understanding of salvation history. Zechariah cannot understand the life of his child apart from the history of Israel; Mary cannot understand the life of Christ without the language of covenant and creation.
It is the historical dimension of our human lives that I think we have lost in modernity, the thought that our lives are bound up with the whole of cosmic and human history. Because we understand ourselves first as individuals and only secondarily as social creatures who belong to one another, we tend to talk about history only to the extent that history is a product of individual narratives that we control and craft for ourselves. We still love to talk about the history of our families. Why? Well, what else is a family history than a story of many individuals making choices and performing certain actions over the course of time. We still love to talk about the history of nations and wars and political movements. Why? Well, what else are these histories than the stories of many individuals making choices and performing actions over the course of time. The way we talk about history today follows from a particular vision of human agency, human freedom. Human beings are creatures who make choices, and the choices we make shape the course of history. History comes from us, as individuals. We make the choices, and later we tell the stories about the choices we have made. Those are the stories we like to tell ourselves.
There is no doubt that the loss of the corporate and social understanding of the human person has taken its toll both on Christianity and on our own spiritual lives. We no longer understand ourselves as historical creatures who belong to a divine narrative—cosmic in scope and eternal in duration—that necessarily defines how we ought to live. Here are two examples. Look at the crisis in vocations within the Church today for long enough, and you will find an understanding of the human person that is thoroughly modern. Talk of vocation gets lost in the narrative of personal choice. We start by asking a child “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and then create an education system that is wholeheartedly dedicated to bootstrapping personal destiny. You can be whoever you want to be if you set your mind to it. Work hard enough and you will succeed. Look at the crisis in politics within the world today and, again, you will find an understanding of the human person that is thoroughly modern. We have traded talk of eschatology—the completion of all things in Christ according to the divine plan for the world—for talk of progress and civil liberties. History is up for grabs. Politics matters because politics sets the course of human history. History—a personal history, a family history, a national history—comes from us. We craft the narrative. We tell the stories.
I spoke just now of history and politics, but let’s get closer to home: If you were asked to give a personal history, how would you tell the story? What would be your point of departure? Most of us, I imagine, would look back on our lives to find those decisive moments in which choices we have made and actions we have performed changed our lives forever. Maybe we would look to our personal history and find events and developments that were outside of our control: an accident, an illness, a decision made by someone else that directly impacted our lives. But those are the kinds of experiences that we too easily discount as random, and not because our lives are a part of a larger narrative—the narrative of salvation history. We modern human persons understand the course of our lives as a reality that we have constructed for ourselves—sometimes there are obstacles placed in our way, but those are the kinds of dramatic accidents that just make for a better story. Wherever we are in life, we’ve worked for it. We’ve earned it. And even when we talk about getting vocation right—about making a choice because of God’s will for our lives—the language we use to describe our vocation often defaults to the language of individual choice: “I decided,” “I knew what God wanted,” “God called me and so I acted.”
My claim is not that faith demands we not make choices in life. There is no doubt that we need to make choices in life. God is not looking to demolish our freedom or diminish our personhood. We need to cooperate with the grace God offers. We, like Mary and Zechariah, need to give our Yes to God. The choices we make matter. Our decisions are of consequence.
The claim I am making isn’t about freedom and choices at all. I want to make a claim about something deeper, a claim about vision, a claim about the context in which we find ourselves making choices in freedom—choices that matter. Here is the question that I really want to ask you: Do you understand your life as a part of the story of salvation history? Because your life is absolutely a part of the story of salvation history. Jean Danielou says of the coming of Christ into the world through the Incarnation that:
It was necessary—according to Saint Irenaeus’’s most beautiful line of thought—for man to take on divine habits, and God take on human, because the Incarnation itself was not something thought up in a hurry, and every part of God’s work upon us takes place in time. The same is true of the development of our souls; the history of mankind itself is reproduced in them, and we find they also need to be habituated to divine things (5-6).
The Incarnation plays itself out again and again in every human life. There is no reason, when we consider our lives or the lives of those whom we love, to think about our lives differently at all from the way that Mary and Zechariah are asked to think about the lives of the children to be given to them. The life you live is only yours to the extent that you perform the role you are assigned in the story of salvation history. You—like John the Baptist and like Christ, like Mary and like Zechariah—are given a mission for the sake of the kingdom because you belong to others ,and you belong to God. And the failure of Christians to understand themselves as caught up in the drama of salvation history harms the life of the Church. The whole suffers for the failure of the part—it always has, and it always will.
But (and here is another key for our spiritual lives) the part also suffers for a failure to see the whole. I’ve only been a priest for a little over two years, but there are so many people who have spoken to me about a failure to see God at work in their lives or in the life of the world. And my thinking is that seeing God at work in our lives or in the life of the world is hard when for our point of narrative departure, we are trying to fit God into the story we are telling. How we understand ourselves today as modern persons—persons who are first individuals and then social, corporate creatures—eliminates the space for divine action in our lives. We’re looking for God to conform to our expectations, to play the role in our story as we have crafted the narrative. The inversion of human person in modernity, maybe we can even say the ‘perversion’ of the person in modernity, has left us with a self that is absolute and a God who is relative. And so, we spend our years looking for divine action in our lives, waiting for God to play the part we have assigned to him, and wondering why it is that God seems so distant, so absent.
The way forward for us is to eliminate the inversion of modern personhood. To cultivate for ourselves a vision of the human person that is once again corporate, social, and historical. The story of salvation history is our story—it is the overarching narrative that gives the context to every human life—and each of us is called to play a part in the divine drama that God has scripted. You can imagine the life of a child who becomes so preoccupied with his or her own ambitions that the overarching narrative of family life no longer gives life meaning. Family tradition loses its value. The child drifts away, loses touch with his parents and siblings. And not because some choice made against family, but rather because the child has chosen to craft a new narrative, a different narrative, about his or her life. And maybe a point comes in which the child really starts to question why his or her parents don’t show their love they used to show their love. Maybe the child starts to wonder why he doesn’t have the same kind of relationship with his brothers and sisters thathe used to enjoy. Maybe the child begins considering family estranged, distant, absent. How will the child ever get home?
The answer I want to give you is to say that the child will get home again as soon as an older narrative is restored, and the child starts to see him- or herself once again as a creature with a given history. We are born into a narrative that gives essential orientation to our lives—life looks a certain way because we are born into a given history. The child who does the work of love for the sake of family will never lose sight of the love of father or mother, brother or sister. Likewise, the child of God who does the work of love for the sake of the kingdom of God will never lose sight of the love of Christ. How could the laborers in the vineyard ever lose sight of their master when they spend their days laboring alongside of him? How could Zechariah lose sight of God when his very life, and the life of his son, is understood as an inextricable part of the story of salvation history? How could Mary ever feel herself lost and estranged from God when the narrative of her life, and the life of her Son, is wholeheartedly bound up with the story of God’s love for the world he created?
So, what I really want to say to you all today is that we need to start telling a better story about our lives, and that the Advent of Christ gives us the perfect opportunity to do so. We are corporate, social, historical creatures. We are human persons who belong to God—and not to ourselves. I like what Jean Danielou says toward the conclusion of The Advent of Salvation: To be a prophet means not simply to give witness to divine history but also to be the instrument of its accomplishment (172). Well, I imagine that just about everyone here today is baptized, which means that you are conformed to Christ who is priest, prophet, and king. You are born into a divine history and are called to live as an instrument of its accomplishment.
To celebrate the Advent of Christ is to celebrate the perpetual coming of Christ into the world. An Advent of Christ that repeats itself in the life of each and every human generation. And so, the story of salvation also reproduces itself in each of our lives—if we let it. Almost two-thousand years ago, Christian thinkers needed to create a new word to make sense of our lives and the life of God as wholeheartedly relational—and historical. The coming of Christ into the life of the world changed the way we understand the narrative of our lives, and we today need to set to the side the fictions we have written for ourselves and restore for the world the story of our salvation.
III. The Last Precursors
Conference: Father Justin Gough
I’m the type of person who has to write to figure out what I think. I have, therefore, sat down to write—and thus figure out what I think—about the middle section of this book too many times in the past couple of weeks than I'd normally care to admit. This has been to the dismay of the rector, who has asked me several times in the last several days what I was going to talk about so he could belay off me.
I offer that not only as a kind of anticipated apology but also because the precursors of the Christ that Daniélou treats in this section are the ubiquitous type that, to me, define the whole of the Christian dispensation rather than any individual part. Now, their ubiquity makes it difficult for me—meager thinker that I am—to say anything meaningful about they, for they are difficult to nail down and continue to one particular context rather than another. But it is precisely their ubiquity—their omnipresence throughout the Christian regime—that makes them figures worth Daniélou’s attention. To me, it would seem almost trite to preach an Advent retreat on these figures about whom we hear so much in this season: John the Baptist, the angels, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. But to Daniélou, they are so integral to the season that they are coextensive with the Christian life itself.
Now, we should remember that in Daniélou’s mind, it is always advent. Our liturgical calendar celebrates the season for four weeks (and this year, a full four weeks at that!), but in reality, the season is ongoing. That is because Advent is about awaiting the coming of Christ and, as Saint Bernard reminds us, there are, in fact, three comings of Christ in history: (1) his physical birth at Bethlehem, (3) his triumphant return in glory, and (2, between them) his spiritual coming into our souls. Every minute of every day, we are waiting for Christ; and, thus, we are constantly in advent.
As an aside, I would mention that there are some lovely meditations that correlate the parts of the Mass to the life of Christ. You can find them online. Some could be considered a stretch, such as the way the priest used to walk from one side of the altar to the other and back as resembling Christ being taken from Annas, to Caiaphas, to Pilate, etc. In any case, we typically (and rightly!) speak about the Mass in relation to Christ’s passion on the cross – i.e., as the holy sacrifice of the Mass. But (and I do not mean to diminish in any way the Mass’s sacrificial nature) the Mass is also profoundly incarnational. Every Mass is not only a representation of Calvary, but also Bethlehem, and (to be more correct, because we’re pro-life after all) also Nazareth. In Nazareth today is an altar bearing an inscription of the most wonderful verse of the prologue of the Gospel of John, Verbo caro factum est, but it adds an important qualifier: hic. Hic verbo caro factum est. The Word became flesh here. Nazareth is unique as the historical site at which God the Son did take flesh. But the same could just as truly be inscribed on every altar on which the Mass is said. Every altar upon which the host is laid is the manger which held the child. That is to say, the same Christ who came 2000 years ago and who will come again at the end of time, is the Christ who humbles himself to share in our humanity each and every day, on every altar, throughout the world. Preparing ourselves for a single Mass requires a season of advent.
That brings us to the question of who prepares us and Daniélou’s three answers: John the Baptist, the angels, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Truth be told, he has a lot to say about each, and it’s all wonderful and worth our reflection. For the sake of brevity, I’ll limit myself to making just a couple of observations about the trio.
John the Baptist
I preached a homily last Sunday on John the Baptist that could have borrowed its title from C.S. Lewis’ memoirs: Surprised by Joy. I feel guilty saying that because it admits that I have (or perhaps had) a rather narrow or one-sided view of the Baptist. To me, John is always the crazy, bug-eating dude out there in the wilderness spitting fiery words against hypocrisy wherever he sees it. Because of that, I don’t tend to think of him as all that joyful, but then I’m reminded of how he jumped for joy in the womb and all that stuff I said about him being the friend of the bridegroom, and I have to admit that he was certainly more joyful than I’d give him credit for.
Perhaps my inability to reconcile penance and joy can be explained by the apparent inability for anyone else to pull it off for themselves. I don’t know about the kinds of hair shirt-wearing, twice-weekly fasting, piously pescatarian folk you hang out with, but the ones I know tend to be pretty blue. So I figure John must have been the same way, right? Well, Daniélou thinks I’m wrong. Even amidst John’s extreme penances, he is extremely joyful. Let’s listen to our teacher:
The striking thing about John the Baptist is the mixture in him of a tremendous spirit of penance, and inner jubilation, the union of great penance with great joy. However, there is a link between great penance and deep joy; the greatest penitents have always been the loudest in rejoicing. There is no joy greater than the joy of Francis of Assisi, of John of the Cross, of the Curé of Ars, of the Fathers of the Egyptian desert (70).
How can we account for John’s joyful penance? What was John able to do that others are not? And let’s not be the kind of Pharisees he’d denounce, we ourselves tend to bear our penances with at least a little grudge, don’t we? Who among us isn’t hangry on Ash Wednesday?
To my mind, penance and joy possess a reciprocal relationship, where one leads to and benefits the other. Penance is the self-dispossession of lower goods for the sake of the highest good: union with Christ. When the highest good is attained, joy – delight in the sensible good at hand – is the only authentic response. Such joy, finding no equal without penance, returns to penance and leads the soul to dispossess itself further and further, drawing deeper and deeper into joyful union with its one true spouse.
I think a lot of people think that penance is supposed to make you feel bad, so they reject the joy that’s supposed to come with it. Joy, or any happiness at all, must be a sign that you haven’t suffered enough. I’m not sure where people find that idea in the gospels or in the lives of the saints, but I can assure you it’s not there.
Some of you may remember from the series I did last spring watching The Chosen that some who came had a really difficult time with the idea of Jesus having a sense of humor. One or two people told me that cracking jokes and laughing at them was beneath him. I’m not sure what could be beneath the one who emptied himself, took the form of a slave, and descended all the way down into Sheol, but apparently those who commit the unforgivable sin of having a good time are confined in a realm even beyond the final circle of hell.
Now, since this is a retreat, I supposed I’m supposed to give you some questions to ponder, so here’s a few: (1) Is the detachment I embrace in my life as a Christian resulting in joy? (2) Is the joy I experience leading me to a life of greater detachment and drawing me closer to Christ? And, more simply, (3) Can I take a joke?
Penance – if we’re doing it right – should always lead us back joyfully to the Eucharist. To close our reflection on this first of the last precursors, let’s hear again the words of Psalm 43:4-5 (which used to precede the celebration of every Mass): Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy; and I will praise thee with the lyre, O God, my God. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
The Angels
Although the titles the Angelic Doctor and the Seraphic Doctor have already been given to Saints Thomas and Bonaventure respectively, in the unlikely case Jean Daniélou is ever lauded with such praise, his extensive theology of the angels might be enough reason to make one of those old cats give theirs up. Daniélou devotes a small section in this book on the angels, but his angelology runs deep throughout his works.
You might be thinking: do we really need to bother with angels? After all, we want people to believe in God and in Christ. How can we expect them to believe in what really matters when we go on talking about these spirits that seem superfluous to the whole thing? Now, there is undoubtedly a hierarchy to the truths of the faith and a priority of some over others, but they are all nevertheless connected. We believe God is the creator omnium visibilium et invisibilium, and angels are part of his invisible creation. To disregard them is to disregard the God who created them and thought it wise that they should exist. Daniélou, on the contrary, did not consider the angels to be separate from the Christian regime, but integral to it. Moreover, he wrote about them at great length, not merely on account of his own interests, but because he thought recovering the place of the angels within the Christian life would save the Gospel from the restricting immanence of modernity that excludes any possibility of transcendence.
If Daniélou were alive and here today, he would perhaps agree with the statement that angels are less the cause of people no longer taking the Gospel seriously than they are the opportunity for people to believe in the Gospel again. That is to say, we should not talk about angels less for fear of people walking out; rather, we should talk about them more, as inhabiting a realm of which modern man is curious but otherwise has no access. We can see a great paradox today. People, on the one hand, reduce all real knowledge to the purely scientific and exclude the possibility of angels because they can be neither seen nor observed in themselves. But at the same time, people today are curious and desirous of means to take them out of themselves, away from their seeable and observable reality and into something other. New Age spiritualities, forms of meditation, drugs, alcohol, pornography, technology, social media, and the like are all, either in themselves or in some uses, replacements for religion, the new method of transcendence above and beyond the immanence of the world.
In Daniélou’s words (and I quote him here at some length):
The angels represent a tremendous broadening of our whole spiritual outlook, which is why I lay such stress on them. At a time when the limits of the visible world seem to be almost disappearing, when astronomers tell us of whole worlds of stars beyond the stars we see, of other, farther milk ways, when they tell us that the starry universe expands indefinitely and spreads out forever in what we can only call space; at a time, too, when the history of the world seems to be going dizzily further and further back, and we are discovering that the world existed for millions and millions of years before man came on the scene at all; it really seems, in view of all of this, that the picture Christianity gives is a very narrow one, because our interest turns merely on the history of mankind.
Now human history is obviously only the tiniest dot in the history of the material universe. But if we put it in its proper place, not within the visible cosmos, but in the spiritual cosmos, if we show that the Christian conception of things sees in fact an immense spiritual universe, made up of spiritual worlds of which mankind is just one, then our view of things takes on a grandeur, and a vastness which seems to me to answer one of the great needs of today. At a time when men are feeling conscious of the immensity of the universe, we can show that Christianity brings them into a universe mightier still. And I think that the theology of angels, by widening our view of the spiritual cosmos, is our means of doing this (81-82).
Over the summer, our theology nerd group that gets together every month to discuss articles from the Communio journal read some stuff about Teilhard de Chardin. This was around the time when those breathtaking images were released from the James Webb Space Telescope. We were discussing the cosmic effects of sin: how sin not only damages myself and my fellow man, but also creation on the whole. Until then, I had been OK with that last part, but seeing deeper into space than ever before, I found it difficult to wrap my head around how our sin (humanity’s in general and mine in particular) could have any effect whatsoever all the way out there. A friend reminded me that humans are not the only fallen rational beings. Angels, also, sinned, and the fallen ones do, indeed, prowl about the world (i.e., the cosmos) seeking not only the ruin of souls but the disruption of God’s ordered creation on the whole.
So, the angels help us to think bigger: to see history as more than a series of material causes effected by human freedom but as part of a larger spiritual narrative. Whatever happens in the world, therefore, can never entirely be explained scientifically. Daniélou quotes a delightful passage from Origen: There are angels in charge of everything, of earth as well as air and fire, that is to say, all the elements. They are also the instruments the Word uses in governing all the animals and plants, and the stars of the sky. [Thus] if it were not for the presence of invisible administrators the earth would not bear what we say it produces by nature, water would not spring up and run in fountains and streams, the air would not remain pure and give life to all who breathe it (90). Returning to our idea of Wisdom from before, the Word governs the world in Wisdom through the instrumentation of the angels who are intimately involved with the natural effects that we humans perceive.
But the angels are not simply responsible for making it rain and starting the fire: the work in which the angels are most particularly associated by the Word is the highest work of all––the work of Revelation and Redemption (90). The Word uses angels to reveal and to save his people. We know from sacred scripture that God chose Israel as his own inheritance, but Daniélou follows the Fathers of the Church who considered the other nations to be the responsibility of the angels. Every people on earth, therefore, has an angel assigned to it with the responsibility to prepare its way to receive Christ. This explains, then, how pagan nations were able to contemplate high levels of truth without yet receiving God’s specific revelation. Plato and Aristotle, for example, didn’t simply get lucky. It’s not by accident that their teaching found great resonance with Christian teaching, for, in the end, they come from the one same source of truth. At the same time, however, there are also demons at work among these nations, and so there is always the admixture of error that must be sifted out. The Fathers of the Church would call this process stealing the gold from Egypt.
I have dwelt on Daniélou’s cosmology because it is important for us to remember that not just the salvation of the world is mediated through the angels, but so is ours, too, as individuals. Again, Origen: Every man has two angels, the good one who leads him to what is right, the wicked one leading him to evil. Daniélou continues: Before baptism, the good angel was almost powerless and the evil spirit held sway over the soul; after baptism it is just the opposite, but the conquered demon still tries to delay the soul on its path to holiness.
Now, Daniélou naturally emphasizes this tension because he is, after all, a Jesuit, and therefore leans into one of Saint Ignatius Loyola’s most important teachings: the discernment of spirits. Our internal desires, the thoughts of our heart, come from either good spirits or bad, and we must discern, with God’s help, which is which. Good spirits are accompanied by calm, soothing, joy, alacrity, and courage. Bad spirits result in noise, uproar, cries, terror, disturbance, and fear. Daniélou explains: The good spirit works in the soul by showing the reward to be hoped for, by communicating a taste for God’s gifts, whereas the other only offers pleasures of sense from which nothing good can be god, and which serve only to bind weak souls more firmly to earth (99).
All this has a purpose. The angels have an end: to prepare the way for Christ. For this reason, the work of angles is more perceptible at the beginning of the spiritual life. Perhaps those of you who are converts can point to sudden, strange, and otherwise inexplicable moments in your life that you could now consider to be angelic intervention. Perhaps you also wonder where those days have gone! We can all likely look back at something in our life that forced us to take the Gospel seriously, and we probably all also would like a little bit more of that to reignite the fire. It seems that Daniélou is telling us that the angels all had something to do with it; but the fact that our Christian lives are less dramatic now (in the sense that we’re not being inundated by the same kinds of religious experiences that we were before) Daniélou thinks is the result of the angels having fulfilled their job: they have led us to Christ. The angels have prepared us, and Christ has taken root in our souls, and now we must learn from the teaching and example of Christ himself.
A few questions regarding the angels: (1) Am I aware that history is saturated with angelic presence, that I am subject to spiritual influence? (2) Can I identify moments in my life that are like the dramatic intervention of the angels we see in the Bible? (3) How have those moments led me to Christ? (4) Could I perhaps help someone else identify the work of an angel in their life and, also, be a mediator that announces to them their salvation?
The Blessed Virgin Mary
Like every encyclical written for the last two hundred years, all that naturally leads to a conclusion with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary is the one whom Christ most perfectly and completely dwells. She is the one true Christian. She is the Church.
By the way, I recently realized something interesting about the kind of education the Church offers through buildings and what we call them, which is to say that we should care more than we probably do about the names we give things and how we decorate them. I grew up in Baltimore, and so cathedrals have always been associated with Mary: this Basilica of the Assumption and the new Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. I vaguely remembered my confusion when I was much younger at the idea that you would name a cathedral after any other saint. Mary gets a cathedral, but Saint Thomas More? Great guy and all, but if the cathedral is the most important church in a diocese, and Mary is the most important saint, why wouldn’t you always just put the two together? Now, there are probably enough titles of Mary in the Litany of Loreto to name the entirety of the Church’s cathedrals, but obviously it is good that we honor other saints, too, in our greatest houses of worship, especially when there is a particular connection between a saint and a city. But my reaction indicated to me that, even while I was young, I had an inchoate sense, thanks to these two Marian cathedrals, of what I hold firmly today: that the Church is at her essence Marian. And I knew that simply from the buildings themselves, long before I ever started reading these dangerous thinkers like Ratzinger, Balthasar, and Daniélou.
The identification of Mary with the Church is one that each of those thinkers make. It is a hallmark of Communio theology and, more to the point, of the Second Vatican Council. Although the Council decided for largely ecumenical reasons not to have a separate document on Mary, it did include Mary as the final chapter of the dogmatic constitution on the Church. Writing over a decade before the Council began, here is Daniélou: What we are dealing with is one of the most mysterious of all truths–no concession to reason, but rather a grave difficulty for reason–that a woman was chosen to be the Mother of God, and that, according to God’s unchangeable plan, this woman was to have the same relationship to the members of Christ as she had to Christ Himself (102). That is to say, the Church is supposed to be what and who Mary is.
Returning to where we began, Daniélou reminds us:
We live always during Advent–we are always waiting for the Messiah to come. He has come, but is not yet fully manifest. He is not fully manifest in each of our souls; He is not fully manifest in mankind as a whole: that is to say, that just as Christ was born according to the flesh in Bethlehem of Judah so must He be born according to the spirit in each of our souls.
The whole mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus is forever being born in us. We have got to be always transforming ourselves into Christ, taking on the dispositions of His heart, the judgments of His mind; for the whole meaning of being a Christian is to become bit by bit transformed into Jesus Christ (109).
Now, just as God prepared all of humanity to receive Christ through Mary, so too does he prepare us to receive him also through her: so Mary goes on playing a leading part in preparing for every subsequent coming of Christ (110).
Daniélou makes many splendid observations about how Mary has been at work and is palpably present in the pagan religions of the world. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to consider them. But he sees her going about, through the hill country in haste, preparing the way for her Son. He identifies female, virginal figures who resemble the purity of Mary. This is no argument for religious syncretism. On the contrary, Daniélou sees Mary present in each, and in each she is there as the anticipatory grace that prepares the way for the sanctifying grace of her Son.
But that is not to say that Mary is only at work outside the Church. On the contrary, she is very much at work inside too (and, boy, do we need her!) bringing the Church into the purity and perfection to which she is called in final glory. Simply: What we are seeing in the Church is a gradual manifestation of our Lady. Whenever we see Christ forming in souls, we see Mary. Every share in holiness is a share in grace that Mary already has. As the Church becomes more the Church, she becomes more and more Mary.
From those theological and pious thoughts, what might we sit with for reflection? (1) Am I able to notice how Mary prepared me to know her Son? (2) What within me now does her presence challenge to set aside to allow Christ to be born in me? (3) To what does her motherly encouragement aspire me to attain, in my vocation or my mission in the Church?
IV. Your Life As a Gesture
Meditation: Fr. Brendan Fitzgerald
The whole mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus is forever being born in us. We have got to be always transforming ourselves into Christ, taking on the dispositions of His heart, the judgements of His mind; for the whole meaning of being a Christian is to become bit by bit transformed into Jesus Christ, so that we truly become children of His Father, for the only real children of the Father are those who have fully “put on” the Son, and the mystery of the Christian life is that each soul becomes Christ.
In the same way Christ has not fully come in regard to mankind as a whole; though He has come in certain peoples, He has not come in others. There are whole stretches of humanity in which Christ has never been born. The mystical Christ is not yet complete. He is still incomplete, lacking members, and the perfect missionary is for Christ to come in the whole world, for His body to attain its fullness of stature (109-110).
Here is a thought experiment for you: how incomplete might a gesture be before the gesture loses its meaning? Imagine raising your hand only halfway in class, and the look of the professor as he or she tries to make sense of your intention. Or imagine recognizing an old acquaintance at a distance and only slightly extending your hand to wave them over before lowering your arm. What would your old friend be left to think? Do you want to see them or are you waving them off and telling them to leave you alone?
Jean Danielou describes the life of John the Baptist as a gesture toward Christ. The whole of John’s life functions as a referent that points toward the Messiah. Each word and every action—the whole of a life—is given over to a mission: to prepare the way of the Lord. In the most remarkable of ways, once Christ begins the work of redemption, John the Baptist returns to obscurity just as suddenly as he appears in the narrative of the Gospel. John the Baptist erases himself. His life is a gesture that points toward Christ, and once Christ has appeared, there is nothing more for John to give. For John, there is no way to distinguish between life and mission. The conclusion of the mission is the conclusion of a life.
Maybe we don’t think of the lives of saints as gestures toward Christ, but the life of every saint is just this kind of gesture. Maybe we remember the particular action of one saint, or a story from the life of another, or the famous words or teaching of still yet another saint. But what we really remember are whole lives—complete gestures—that point toward Christ.
The problem for us, much of the time, is that our lives in Christ are gestures that are incomplete. There is some remainder of life, some part of our identity, that we have not yet given over to our mission. And what is our mission? To prepare the way of the Lord. Though Christ has accomplished the work of redemption, our lives are called to continue with the work of John the Baptist. “The Mystical Christ is not yet complete,” says Jean Danielou. There are those in the world who do not know Christ. There are those in the world who need the gesture of a human life to give orientation and direction to their search for God.
No one, I don’t think, really remembers words. When it comes to the life of faith, sharing that life, explaining that life, we talk a lot about what we teach and how we teach it. We fight about the truth all of the time. We focus on our words. We place our value in what we say. We obsess over matters of doctrine. Why? Well, here is the real truth: words are cheap. A Christianity that is reduced to a formula of words is a Christianity that does not make many real demands on us. We focus on words and the rest of life—action, commitments, forms of sacrifice and thanksgiving—become less important. Am I a Christian? I am. Because I say the right things. Because I believe the right things.
But is the gesture of your life toward Christ complete? Here is a truth worth remembering: many, maybe even most, of the saints in our Christian tradition said things that were wrong, made claims about doctrine and teaching that are not correct. Give me a work by St. Augustine or St. Thomas and I will find you a claim that is not correct about God or the world. Open a work of apologetics by St. Irenaeus or take out a homily from St. John Chrysostom, and you just might find an articulated belief that the Church has since refined or corrected. And you know what? None of those errors matter, because no one really remembers Augustine or Thomas or Irenaeus or John Chrysostom for their words. We remember their lives.
There are likely only a few saints who never made a false claim about Christ or some element of our Christian faith, and my guess is that these are the saints who spoke more with their lives than with their words. The Blessed Virgin Mary is one of these saints. And so is John the Baptist. These saints of so few words are those who speak the loudest in the life of the Gospels. And why? Because their lives are gestures toward Christ that are complete.
The Mystical Christ is not yet complete. Christ is perpetually coming into the world, and we are called to gesture toward Christ with the whole of our lives. There comes a point when a gesture that is incomplete is a gesture without any real meaning. The mystery of the Christian life, says Jean Danielou, is that each soul becomes Christ . . . unless it doesn’t.
Herbert McCabe, OP, “The Genealogy of Jesus” in God Matters (Templegate, 1991), 246-249.