Face to Face with Christ

Today, there is a lead article at il sussidario.net, an interview with Antonio Socci, about the Pope's judgment on the financial crisis. I will attempt to translate just a piece of it which is relevant to Fred's recent postings.

Giussani parlava con persone a lui vicine, in un momento di forte entusiasmo al termine di un Meeting di Rimini andato particolarmente bene. Nel mezzo dell’entusiasmo lui se ne uscì con una frase impressionante e vertiginosa: «tutto passa, l’unica cosa che resta è il tuo faccia a faccia con Cristo». E questo è anche il giudizio finale su tutta la nostra esistenza.

At one moment of great enthusiasm at the end of a Meeting in Rimini that had gone particularly well, Giusanni spoke with some people close by. In the middle of the excitement he only offered a single impressive and dizzying statement: "Everything passes, the only thing that remains is you face to face with Christ." And this is the final judgment on all of our existence.

In the Presence of the Angels from Fr. Meinrad Miller, OSB

Tomorrow (Thursday) we celebrate the Feast of the Guardian Angels, the patrons of our congregation. St. Benedict had some great quotes about the Angels in his Rule for Monasteries:

• We must erect the ladder which appeared to Jacob in his dream, by means of which angels were shown to him ascending and descending (cf Gen 28:12). Without a doubt, we understand this ascending and descending to be nothing else but that we descend by pride and ascend by humility.
• Let a man consider that God always seeth him from Heaven, that the eye of God beholdeth his works everywhere, and that the angels report them to Him every hour.
• and if our actions are reported to the Lord day and night by the angels who are appointed to watch over us daily, we must ever be on our guard, brethren, as the Prophet saith in the psalm, that God may at no time see us "gone aside to evil and become unprofitable" (Ps 13[14]:3), and having spared us in the present time, because He is kind and waiteth for us to be changed for the better, say to us in the future: "These things thou hast done and I was silent" (Ps 49[50]:21).
• "I will sing praise to Thee in the sight of the angels" (Ps 137[138]:1). Therefore, let us consider how it becometh us to behave in the sight of God and His angels, and let us so stand to sing, that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.

Pope Benedict XVI comments on the importance of music for monks during visit to France to commemorate 150th anniversary of Lourdes.September 12, 2008

For Benedict (of Nursia), the words of the Psalm: coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – in the presence of the angels, I will sing your praise (cf. 138:1) – are the decisive rule governing the prayer and chant of the monks. What this expresses is the awareness that in communal prayer one is singing in the presence of the entire heavenly court, and is thereby measured according to the very highest standards: that one is praying and singing in such a way as to harmonize with the music of the noble spirits who were considered the originators of the harmony of the cosmos, the music of the spheres. From this perspective one can understand the seriousness of a remark by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who used an expression from the Platonic tradition handed down by Augustine, to pass judgement on the poor singing of monks, which for him was evidently very far from being a mishap of only minor importance. He describes the confusion resulting from a poorly executed chant as a falling into the “zone of dissimilarity” – the regio dissimilitudinis. Augustine had
borrowed this phrase from Platonic philosophy, in order to designate his condition prior to conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16): man, who is created in God’s likeness, falls in his godforsakenness into the “zone of dissimilarity” – into a remoteness from God, in which he no longer reflects him, and so has become dissimilar not only to God, but to himself, to what being human truly is. Bernard is certainly putting it strongly when he uses this phrase, which indicates man’s falling away from himself, to describe bad singing by monks. But it shows how seriously he viewed the matter. It shows that the culture of singing is also the culture of being, and that the monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty. This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music. It was not a form of private “creativity”, in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion. Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity.

--Pope Benedict XVI, September 12, 2008

"The faith is not given us in order that we preserve it, but in order that we communicate it. If we don't have the passion to communicate it, we don't preserve it."

--Monsignor Luigi iussani, Written contribution to the XXI plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, 2004

Father Meinrad Miller, OSB
Chaplain of Benedictine College
Subprior of St. Benedict’s Abbey

Faith: The ultimate expression of an affection for oneself

Faith:
The ultimate expression of an affection for oneself
International Assembly of Responsibles of Communion and Liberation
La Thuile, Italy, August 19-23, 2008
Tuesday evening
August 19, 2008

Introduction
Julián Carrón

Nothing rings more true to men and women aware of themselves than the consciousness of their need; for this reason, nothing expresses what we are better than crying out, the cry of the needy person to the only One who can respond to this need. Therefore, let us begin this gesture of ours by helping each other, supporting each other to be totally ourselves in this cry, asking the Spirit to come to our aid.

Come Holy Spirit

I greet you one by one and welcome you to this gathering of responsibles, desiring that it be—as said in the title we've chosen for this responsibles meeting—"An Adventure for Oneself," an adventure for each one of us.
To prepare us and help us understand what this means, the Lord always makes events happen, rather than using a lot of words; He made another event occur just before our encounter, another exceptional fact: the death of our friend Andrea Aziani, a missionary in Peru, who worked for many years in the university, and who has left a mark wherever he's been.
In a letter Andrea wrote years ago to a friend (who had left for a meeting with the university students of Cuzco), a letter Fr. Giussani later quoted, Andrea expressed well his heartfelt desire, "I am certain that in this 'missionary bath' of these days there will emerge and grow, powerful and glad in you—and thus in all of us—the consciousness, the certainty of Christ in us and for us. O quam amabilis es bone Jesu." These are the words of a man who is almost confessing it to himself, without thinking in the least that today we might read it to everyone! He continued, “…that someone would fall in love with what we’ve fallen in love with!” This is the desire that what you love becomes a love for everyone, that others as well can be seized by He who has seized us. “But for this to happen, we have to burn, literally be aflame with passion for man, that Christ may reach him. ‘The flame must burn.’” Fr. Giussani, commenting on this letter, said, “I challenge you to find a similar testimony, anywhere, any time, in any part of the world, with any man.” Testimony doesn’t mean words, but an experience perceived, penetrated, lived, felt, inevitable, inexorable, superabundantly evident.
There’s no need to add anything to these words of Fr. Giussani’s about Andrea, words that brought to my mind the deaths of other friends of ours, like Fr. Danilo (who spent years in Paraguay and was beginning in Argentina), Giovanna (for years in Uganda), and Alberto (tried by long illness): witnesses to the death, all placed before us at the beginning of this encounter. I can’t think of them without there coming to mind that great expression—which describes our situation—pronounced in the Letter to the Hebrews, after listing an interminable series of witnesses to the faith, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” These witnesses had their gaze fixed on Jesus and traveled their life in this race to reach Him who had reached them, and they lived this testimony before our eyes, so we might see how it is possible to live the faith in this cultural and historical context of ours.
At the same time, many of us have had the opportunity to begin reading the text of the Equipes of 1982 and 1983, in which Fr. Giussani—after the visit to John Paul II, when the Holy Father said, “You have no homeland, because you cannot be assimilated to this society”—described how we are without a homeland if we want to live with our eyes fixed on Jesus. This makes us perceive on the one hand the importance of these witnesses, and on the other, the decisive importance of doing the journey we proposed at the Fraternity Spiritual Exercises, because in order truly to be able to live without a homeland, the faith must truly satisfy, and not be something just made of words. This is why I emphasized at the Exercises that the test of faith is satisfaction, and this putting together of faith and satisfaction is decisive, because so often we speak of faith as if it had nothing to do with satisfaction: we would find satisfaction elsewhere, according to our frameworks or images, as if there were no real and true relationship between faith and satisfaction. Instead, beginning to put them together enables us to start the verification to assess up to what point for us faith is the acknowledgment of something so real, of a Presence that is so real, true because real, that it brings satisfaction.
Therefore, the work ahead of us in these days can’t possibly be just throwing words to the wind or someone developing whatever reflections might come to mind; instead, it will be the verification of whether faith brings with itself this satisfaction, which enables us to live in any situation with our eyes fixed on Jesus, author and perfecter of faith.
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From the CL website. See the booklet insert in Traces for the rest...

(also posted at Come to See)