The Apostle Paul on Hope

To assist our work on hope, here are the passages speaking of hope in the first few pages of Volume 2 of Is it Possible to Live this Way? I quote the passages as they appear in the book, but I have linked the NAB to facilitate looking at the context of each quote.

Romans 5:1-2

"Justified therefore by faith, we are in peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ; through Him we have also obtained through faith, the possibility of acceding to this grace and in which we find ourselves, and of which we boast in the hope of the glory of Christ."

2 Corinthians 3:12

"Strong in such hope we're full of certainty."

1 Thessalonians 1:3

"Hope that is the Lord Jesus."

1 Timothy 1

"Paul apostle of Jesus Christ by the command of God our Saviour and by the command of Jesus Christ, our hope."

1 Timothy 4:10

"We labour and suffer reproach because we have place our hope in the living God."

* *

* * *

* *

Faith - the first page of this book also refers to a few scripture passages on faith.

"the just man lives by faith"

Habbakkuk 2:4

"justice is faith"

Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38

Hope and the Horror of Loneliness

Today's first reading, Lv 13:1-2, 44-46, presents us with the shame of disease and sickness which isolates the infected person from life in human society. Sin has a certain similarity to leprosy. We tend to think of sin as a small blemish on our forehead, but it can spread, destroying our limbs and tearing apart friendship and neighborhoods. The words of Leviticus 13 must have sticken terror into the hearts of ancient people: "The one who bears the sore of leprosy [...] shall cry out, 'Unclean, unclean!'" What hell on earth to be cut off from everyone for the rest of one's life! And yet in the reading is the faintest gleam of hope, which must have seemed impossible for one who discovered in himself the stigma of leprosy: "As long as the sore is on him he shall declare himself unclean" (NAB). Could anything reverse this corruption and save us from such a death in life?

The black smudge of a cross we will receive on Ash Wednesday is a public confession of our corruption and the death we rush toward (even as it also forms the hopeful sign of the cross). Uncleanliness is not just the problem of lepers — it's my problem too. As Fr. Antonio López has written: "Ultimately, every fear is the flourishing of a suspicion that loneliness may well be the final word on human existence" (Communio 35: 174).

What a reversal it must have been for the leper in today's Gospel! Imagine the poverty and trust he would have needed in order to say, if you wish, you can heal me. And how could he have kept silent about such a restoration? But what unknown joy may have resulted from this impossible obedience?

A new hope has dawned in the world. And the seeds of this hope are firmly rooted in the human, creaturely soil of Mary of Nazareth. Fr. López tells us that "With a faith that will grow along with her child, Mary knows that a person may entrust himself entirely to God without fearing that God will desert him. Thus, we see the truth of man's constitutive relation with God in God's indwelling in Mary, and through her, in man" (179). Fr. López continues "It is characteristic of faith that it roots man in the present. Precisely because Christ brings the Father's mercy into history, however, he also becomes the certainty for the future. Hope, in this sense, is the most beautiful fruit of faith because it is the certainty that love's ever-surprising presence will remain" (179-80).

We are not alone. And nothing can separate us from the love of God. Through Mary, Jesus has taken on the stigma of human sin even to a shameful and unjust death on the cross. Having embraced sin and death, Jesus binds sinners to Himself, conquering and reversing the destructive isolation of sin. Henceforth, sin does not have the last word, but mercy. The only thing left to isolate us is self-sufficiency, self-righteousness, a smug misguided confidence in our own goodness and niceness. For, as Origen so well expressed it: Outside the Church, which is the house of Rahab [the redeemed sinner], no salvation. Hope is for those who recognize that all merit comes from Christ's faithfulness to the Father. Hope is the certain trust that God's present actions are a promise for eternity.

Work: Tenaciously Seeking the One Who Has Found Me

Several weeks ago my job ended, and in the same moment my company assigned me a new job. In some ways what was lacking in the first job gave me a hunger for aspects of the new job that otherwise I wouldn't have had a taste for. My new job is more demanding and requires greater accountability. I need toil in my life in order to grow, and I'm grateful to have been put into a position where I could want it.

Several recent articles in Traces have helped me understand work better, and which I've blogged about at Broken Alabaster (1, 2). I've also been challenged by Scott, Sharon, and Suzanne to meditate on the theme of the Diakonia: "Something that Comes First," notes from a talk of Fr. Giussani's at an assembly in 1993: 

 "Ten or twenty years later, the same experience proceeds if your point of departure is the impact with a new reality and, 'as a child rests in its mother's arms,' you abandon yourself, follow, obey, because that diversity doesn't spring from your imagination or thought, from your dialectical skill or your obstinancy, from everything, that is, that has kept you away for years: it's something other, irreducibly new — an event — to be obeyed" (4).

The word that recurs in this talk is "diversity" or "human diversity." Now, this different humanity is someone whom I've met who paradoxically brings me closer to the most diverse people I may speak with during the day. The word diverse reminds me that I will always be surprised by this different humanity. It means that those I regard as adversaries may in fact bring me to gape in wonder at the world. Something different, new, an event, obedience — where better to find all this than at work: where reality resists the inevitible expectations of my thoughts, and where assigned tasks bring me together with people that I wouldn't find through common interests or the usual affiliations and associations?

How can it be that I'm discovering the value of work at the age of 41? I've seen it before — more than once — and yet now there's something else. My friend, Salvatore, pointed out bluntly: "you need stability," and I agreed with him, but how to find stability? When I mentioned this need to another friend, he pointed me to a definition in Is It Possible to Live this Way, vol 1: "[virtue] is a habitually correct attitude toward the known object" (117). Over time, this definition has percolated within me. It's one thing to realize at this moment or another moment the value of work, the greatness of reality, the gift of human diversity; it's another to cultivate the habit of rediscovering it every day, every hour, every minute. And how do I rediscover it? By obeying, by submitting to my condition — not blindly or like a robot — but wholeheartedly giving myself to the needs that I see in front of me. And I'm never disappointed when I do — I'm always surprised by something great. What's really amazing is that on a day like today, a lazy, distracted day filled with excuses, this tender sprout of a virtue is still with me and presses with certainty that something great is here if only I would look for it. The victory is not me, not my coherence, but that someone great has found me, and if I turn I will see him.

Advent Retreat 2008

Beginning Day, which was only two weeks ago, startled me a bit. I had thought of this previous year as a time when the School of Community I attend was a bit stuck, not yet being publically announced, and not being missionary enough. But at the Beginning Day, I saw that despite my feeling stuck, things in this area have been moving — like the blooming of a flower shown in fast forward.

On Saturday, I attended the Advent retreat, which was up at the Abbey Crypt Church at St. Benedict's Monastery in Atchison, Kansas. Fr. Meinrad led us. I saw Daniele, Salvatore, and others. As usual, Salvatore said a couple of words that really cut through to the core of what I need to do. I saw Francis again and met Michael, two students at Benedictine College. Listening and taking notes have become something ordinary, a continuation or a heightening of the work done during the week or at School of Community. I appreciated the way that Fr. Meinrad brought in lines from the liturgy of this time but also what he has been reading, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire.

I pondered a bit the Messianic secret of St. Mark's Gospel: Jesus tells those cured to say nothing, but they can't help but announce what God has done for them. And, I thought a bit about St. Joseph, who is depicted in a chapel below the Abbey Church. Joseph is holding a mallet in one hand and a nail in the other but he has no tension toward that act. Instead, he watches with care as Jesus the toddler imitates the act with an earnestness. How did Joseph witness to Jesus? He too guarded the Messianic secret, and yet how could it have been kept from anyone that Joseph came into contact with? Jesus is here with us as He was with St. Joseph. Witness begins with a changed humanity and culminates in the explicit announcement, but only after the straining of every sinew has witnessed first.

We do things to tell others that we have done them (observes Pascal), but what is primary is that we take the journey of knowledge first. In Mark's Gospel, the parable of the sower comes a little bit after the pharisees chastise the disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath. Did Jesus see grain fall on the ground at this point and wonder at the destiny of every seed? that one will feed the birds and that one will sprout and die, but that other one will fulfill itself and produce more grain. But this is also how the birds are fed, and man also in more ways than one. So, Jesus would seem to say, the main thing is not first of all telling what happened, repeating to others the impression one had in a moment. Instead, look at what happens, ask what is the ultimate source, meaning, and teleology of it — abide in what happens first of all, for yourself, as an awareness of who cares for you in this way — and then, when you can't hold it in any longer, you may share it with others.

QOTD: Carrying the Answer to the Crisis

Then, political commitment is approached as cultural work, because we are aware of what it means to work for a cultural need. It is a question of the awareness of a people that grows deeper and deeper, in contact with the events, the clarity that we carry within us the answer to the crisis.

Our position in cultural commitment is that of a people that deepens its awareness of carrying within itself the principle that can resolve the crisis for everyone. We bring salvation.

Fr. Giussani, In Faith, Man and People

Obedience and the Shema Yisrael

Thanks to Suzanne for bringing in the Hebrew. One of the priests at my parish last week preached on Jesus's allusion to the Shema in the Gospel of Matthew.

Mt 22:34-40 (NAB)

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

And here is what the Shema says:

"Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One
(Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever). And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them. When you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart."

Fr. Giussani has a way of mentioning significant details in an offhand way, and it's only during the Assembly that somebody presses on and gets to the importance of the details. And here's what Don Gius says about his friends, Manfredini and DePonti:

"Why did I become such a great friend of Manfredini and DePonti, whom I was always with? From third year of high school to fourth year of theology we were always together — always — I mean always! — and nobody ever said anything because the great reason that we were together was so evident to everyone. In fact, anyone who showed up, at any moment of the day or week, would have heard us speaking about certain things, so much so that a lot of people said, 'Oh brother, not those guys again! and they left. The same people who left other things! Why did we, who didn't even know each other, become such close friends? Because we began to intuit and to speak about certain things, things apart from which life was not worth living. This was the depth that God gave us the grace to have at thirteen or fourteen years old: to understand that apart from certain things, in other words, from Christ, life was not worth living in the literal sense of the term. (Is it Possible? Vol 1, p150).

To hear, shema, is to listen, to ponder, to speak of at all times and strive to understand and internalize it more. To set up reminders on one's head (thoughts) and on one's hand (action), at the doorpost and gate (the transition between house and world). Or as Fr. Carrón said in La Thuile in August, "Testimony doesn't mean words, but an experience perceived, penetrated, lived, felt, inevitable, inexorable, superabundantly evident."

To attend and to speak (to listen and to witness)

This post is a footnote to Fred's post, Whoever gives up his or her own point of view to follow Jesus...becomes a person capable of facing anything.

Proverbs 21:27-31 (from the Interlinear Bible: Hebrew, Greek, English), a literal translation of the Hebrew:

"The sacrifice of the wicked is hateful: how much more when he brings it with an evil intent! A false witness shall perish; BUT THE MAN WHO ATTENDS WILL SPEAK FOREVER. A wicked man hardens his face, but the upright sets up his way. There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel before the Lord. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but to the Lord belongs deliverance." (Proverbs 21:27-31)

The word that is translated as "attend" is, in Hebrew, "shema," the first word of the prayer, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one..." It is also the root of the name "Simon," or in Hebrew, "Shemon."

Here are excerpts from Strong's translation of "shema":

"To hear intelligently (...attention, obedience...) ... hearken, obey, publish, understand, obedient, diligently ... consent, consider, be content, give ear, indeed, listen, proclaim, regard, ... witness ... undivided attention... to gain or get knowledge ... suggests summoning the person ... Hearing can be both intellectual and spiritual... To hear means not only to hear what is said, but to agree with its intention or petition ... To have a hearing heart is to have discernment or understanding... An annunciation."

The Hebrew word for "speak" used in this proverb is "dabar." Here is the definition:

"...to arrange; but used figuratively (of words), to speak... promise, tell, commune, pronounce, utter, command ... answer, appoint, bid, declare, destroy, give name, rehearse, be spokesman, subdue, teach, think, use... This verb focuses not only on the content of spoken verbal communication but also and especially on the time and circumstances of what is said. Unlike 'amar,' (to say),' 'dabar' often appears without any specification of what was communicated. Those who 'speak' are primarily persons (God or men) ... In 2 Samuel 23:2 David says that the Spirit of the Lord 'spoke' to him ... Among the special meanings of this verb are 'to say,' 'to command,' 'to promise,' 'to commission,' 'to announce,' to order or command,' and 'to utter a song.' [...]" When the word 'dabar' is used as a noun, it means "word" or "utterance." Here is a bit from that definition: "...The 'word' of God indicates God's thoughts and will..."