bearing blog

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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And now we come to the last of the Seven Last Words from the Cross.    Benson takes “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit” as a reflection upon the concept of the peace of Christ.  For the death of Christ is one picture of the Peace of Christ:  something to remember, when we at Mass hear the words “The peace of Christ be with you”; something to remember when, at every Mass, it comes time to sing Dona nobis pacem.  “Dona nobis mortem tuum” has not the same ring, and would be an incomplete notion of that Peace, but it is surely part thereof.

In the meditation upon peace, Benson pauses to warn us against Quietism, a class of heresy that I had to look up to be sure of.  Do read up on it yourself; I will summarize it as a sort of extreme end of a spectrum, one with a boundary that is to my eyes blurry:  where Abandonment to Divine Providence slips into a denial of agency whatsoever, where contemplation and striving for interior holiness precludes the possibility of good and holy acts. 

On the contrary! Interior peace, says Benson, is a prerequisite to the accomplishment of the objects of good acts; the attainment of interior peace is a signal that we are empowered to do good, not a signal that to do good is no longer required of us.

I believe what he has to say, but I think there must be more to it:  for I experience this message as somewhat paralyzing.  I do not possess interior peace, certainly not permanently; maybe just “not yet”; maybe I achieve it intermittently at best.  Anyway, whatever piece of the Peace of Christ I come to is imperfect and fleeting.  Does that mean that my activities are pointless, fruitless?  Ought I suspend activity (beyond what I’m clearly required to do as responses to my state of life) and concentrate my efforts on interior reform, or  maybe wait and pray until I find myself transformed?  Or is there sort of a oscillation, a learning from experience, regret and repentance giving way to renewal? 

I can’t count the times I have overstepped my competence, gotten ahead of my skis, and face-planted, trying to “do” Christianity.  Drawing back from that, contemplating more, competence/competing less, is the correction I have sought for the last few years.  And so I am grateful for Benson’s caution against Quietism, because I can easily see myself overcorrecting.  What I call retreating to seek Christ’s peace within might easily slide into avoidant behavior: fear of conflict, of discomfort, of making mistakes.  Still, not every conflict is specifically mine to take up.  We have to discern.

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Besides the death of Christ itself, the Peace of Christ is (says Benson) “a Peace… which, unlike other satisfying emotions, is wholly independent of external things.”

This immediately put me in mind of the Beatitude:  “Blessed are the meek” (in most English translations), “for they shall inherit the Earth.”  Here I have to apologize a bit in advance, for this is my favorite rant about Scripture translating:  I contend that English “meek” needs updating.  I am insufficiently expert to know exactly what’s the correct term, but the word in Bibles of other modern European languages connote not quite so much a  submission or submerging of the self, but a serene sailing, Benson’s “bird poised in the air”:  unruffled-ness, undisturbable, a “perfect response” to the currents and eddies that arrive.  Perhaps “mild” is a good updated English word, something with connotations of pleasant weather and of unbitter fruit.  Now, when I read the Beatitudes,  having once come to that bit in the Louis Segond: “Heureux les débonnaires” (literally de bon air, a weather metaphor), the image that leaps to mind is the storm-panicked disciples, and Christ stilling the waves.

The Peace of Christ is something undisturbable from the outside.  And yet, if the Peace of Christ is also in a sense the death of Christ, then it was the outside world that visited it upon Him.  Unless the death of Christ, the death we die with Him, the death of self, is exactly that serenity, the one that says always “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh: blessed be the Lord.”

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The Seven Last Words are words which cost the Lord dearly; He had only so many breaths before exhaustion.  Each breath (according to our understanding of the physiology of crucifixion) required effort to generate an audible utterance, generated more suffering than silence; each word a part of the perfection of His Atonement.  They are, I believe, an exemplar of poetry rather than prose:  every word counts, not a word is there that was not intended, nothing is omitted without reason.  They are his last chances as recognizable Man to shape our understanding of Himself and what He has done for us, and yet they are so brief, so clipped, so rare, so dear. 

I think it is interesting to reflect upon each of the Seven Last Words and consider how our understanding of Christ and his Passion would be changed should he have left any of them out.

Take “It is finished,” which Cat has meditated upon here.   Where would we be without that assurance?  What doctrine might we have developed without it, where might the Church have wandered?  And yet He left us in some ambiguity:  Consummatum est without an explicit subject.  We have had to make something of “it,” to use out collective judgment, even to debate and dispute it, apparently in accord with His penultimate earthly will.

But I am here to reflect upon “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  I could meditate on why He spoke this instead of nothing.  Instead I find myself thinking about something that—though it seems true—something he might have said, but chose not to say:  Friends, into your hands I commend my body.

He did not say this to them, and yet, the friends did receive His body, and cared for it the way they knew, with the resources they had.  Benson:  “this Body of His is to be laid in the cool rock tomb, with wrappings of soft linen, soaked in spices and myrrh…” It was His Friends who did this for him, unasked, uncommanded.

How difficult it is for us to notice when we have assumed something!  I have always assumed without thinking that it was His explicit will that His body be cared for, wrapped and perfumed and buried, by His friends:  that there be a tomb, that there be a stone.  The Resurrection perhaps we can take for granted.  The empty tomb itself is often identified with it.   And yet He seems not to have ordered it, not explicitly, certainly not here.  The friends perhaps had to figure out what to do with the Body of Christ without an instruction from Him. 

Having heard His last Word, they could trust that His Spirit had been commended to the Father.   Did they know what to do next—Nicodemus, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, John, the others? Did they have interior peace about it?  They were left with the Body yet unclaimed and nothing but its physical nature, no command but that of Time:  Time which, after the darkening of the sun and the rending of the veil, somehow kept rolling forward, bringing the fall of evening, the chilling of the flesh, the approach of that singular, terrifying Sabbath, that other peace of God that “passeth all understanding.”

Time, the Law, and Friendship.  They claimed His Body and loved it, and God took care of the rest.

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.  — Hebrews 4:15

Let's stipulate for a moment that the frequent rephrasing of the above quote is an accurate one:  He is like us in all things but sin.

Let's consider, too, some observations about suffering humans:  especially those whose suffering, like the crucified Christ's, comes at the hands of other humans.   

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One thing we know is that hurt people hurt people.  An abused child often, but not always, grows up to struggle with abusive impulses, teaches others  the same lessons they were taught long ago;  a child bullied by stronger children sometimes turns and finds a weaker victim; a person neglected as a child sometimes fearfully holds back needed support; a person whose trust was broken badly once refuses to trust again.  That sort of sin is mitigated by the obscurity and darkness generated by the sins they endured in nature, as well as by the shadows passed down in human nature itself.   In one sense none of us "know what we do," and that includes people who quite deliberately do terrible things in what would seem to be full knowledge; that universal bentness of our humanity is a sort of supernatural ignorance.  But also certain abuses appear to have a partial cause from older ones, so that a person's psychology can be darkened as well as their spirit.  And of course a human culture may itself pass down twisted notions of right and wrong, which we ought to be able to see through, but do not challenge.

When this is us, when we are hurt people who hurt people:  we are people who "know not what they do," in a sense, but who are not sinless, for Christ prayed "Father, forgive them."  

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Another thing we know is that hurt people ask difficult questions.  Hurt people want answers, and they look for them, and demand them.  Hurt people seek to make sense out of what seems to them senseless.  They come to God, or to God's representatives on earth (whether actual or self-styled) and say:  How come God has made it so that this can happen?  I do not understand.   Can you make it make sense?  And they ask it, sometimes, in ways that are shocking or impolite or subversive, or disturbingly cutting and precise.  What's worse, sometimes none of the answers satisfy them.  And sometimes there are no good answers at all.

Perhaps some of the time the hurt people's questioning is entangled with acting out, with hurting people, with sinning, in a way that makes us humans confuse them together, and judge the questioner imperfectly.  We do not see into hearts, after all.  But God sees.  And God made it clear by example that the questioning is not the sin.  For He himself asked the terrible question, the one we still cannot entirely make sense of, the one that we do not have a single satisfactory answer to (however many theories we deploy).  

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

He didn't simply point to an asker-of-this-question and say "Father, forgive him this asking of the terrible question."  No, he asked it himself.  He was suffering, and he asked that question that so many suffering people have asked.  He was like us, suffering, and he was without sin, and he suggested—out loud!—the absence of God, the reasonlessness of the world, the terror and darkness of a void.

When we meet people who are asking that same question, when we find ourselves asking it too, we must remember that "He was like us in all things but sin."   When people suffer, they need to make sense of it.   When Christ suffered, he asked the question.   

There are many ways to ask the question and to seek the answer.  It is possible to seek the answer through sin.  It is possible to first ask the question in all wounded sincerity, and then begin to seek, and for some of that seeking to be, well,a kind of wounded trying of all sorts of nature to see where it breaks. 

About such apparent sins, we must beg forgiveness, for ourselves and ("Father, forgive them") for others.  But we must never, never condemn the question of the sufferer, for Christ, suffering abuse, uttered the question Himself.

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Benson points out that many sufferers manage instead to avoid the question.  It's only when we expect God to be there; when we want him to be there; that we really, truly, and honestly would ask for the God who seems not to be there.   One of the reasons that the question is incomprehensible and even intolerable to us is that we "find our consolation in so much that is not God."  

If physical comforts are wanting to us, we find refuge in mental comfort; if mental comforts are wanting, we lean upon our friends.  Or, more usually, when the higher pleasures are withdrawn, we find relief, with scarcely an effort, in lower.  When religion fails us, we console ourselves with the arts; when love or ambition disappoint us, we plunge into physical pleasures; when the body refuses to respond, we take refuge in out indomitable pride; and when that in turn crumbles to nothing, we look to suicide and hell as a more tolerable environment.  There seems no depth to which we will not go, in our passionate determination to make ourselves tolerable to ourselves.

I would like to point out, too, that many of the God-substitutes that Benson lists here are undoubtedly good things:  the arts, friends, and the like.  Later in the same section Benson contrasts "religion" with "religiosity…a sort of professionalism"—I think that this implies that the outward actions of liturgy, the performance of piety, the reiteration of moral principles in argument and in theory, can itself be a refuge to which we flee from the terrible question whenever it rears up in our heart and threatens to enter our consciousness.   Nothing but God can be God Himself.  

There is certainly a risk that some of us who flee in more respectable directions… to our work or to the arts or to scholarship, for example… will look down our noses at those who flee to what Benson calls "lower" pleasures.  But flight it still is.  And we should recognize it even under its respectable form.

For Benson's point is that our model, Christ, our perfect example of man and God perfectly united, is able to ask, and is willing to ask.  The one who asks the terrible question is one who seeks truth instead of false consolation.   We mustn't be shocked by it, we mustn't try to quiet the askers.

Above all we mustn't spout a series of answers that by their nature will ever be incomplete, and then require the asker to be satisfied or face rejection.   

For  "the true happiness of man consists in this gradual approach to the Beatific Vision."  The terrible question, which arises almost everywhere there is suffering, has no satisfactory answers in any merely human language, and never will; it is only answered by the secure Presence and Vision at the end of all things.  

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More reflections, on this as well as on the next Word,  by Cat here.

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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This is the third section of Chapter 12, the chapter with the most detailed subdivisions.  Cat has already written about the first section and the second section; but I hope you'll forgive me for, given the chance to begin here, taking a moment to reflect on the structure of Chapter 12 and its placement within the book first.  For one of my ways into this devotional is through the framework on which Benson has decided to hang it.

Writers and readers who like a logical structure (ahem) also tend to like symmetry and parallelism.  We like the Rule of Three.  We like a book to be divided up into chapters that are approximately of equal length.  We like the outline of the main points and supporting points to be regular:  

I.

A.

1. 1. ..
   2. ..
   3. ..

B.

1. 1. ..
   2. ..
   3. ..

…and so on, with the narrator descending stepwise in each section and subsection to approximately the same depth before rising up again, clearing their authoritative  throat, and beginning again with a new part.

Benson mostly does this; the other chapters in the book are all similarly long and similarly detailed; but he has not done this with Chapter 12.  This chapter is ruled not by Three, but by Seven:  the centuries-old devotion of the Seven Last Words (though it is also called the devotion of the Three Hours).  And so Chapter 12 is considerably longer, Benson having delved into each Word via a handful of reflections as if it were a chapter of its own, but having organized them all into one stretch of time on Calvary.

This is a remarkable renovation of the devotion, to consider it anew in its specific sense as an expression of Christ's friendship with us.  And in another sense it is unremarkable, because that is what we do (or at least what we can do) every time we sincerely pick up the smooth-worn popular devotions of our Faith:  find something new and specific in them that opens something inside us, whether it's a piercing for a tiny beam of light or a door to a whole new realm.

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Of course, the decision to make the Crucifixion chapter stick out more than the others is not unreasonable, given our conviction that the Cross is the pin or axle around which all of history turns; so the irregularity is a bit of a key to understanding where the importance lies.  It is unexpected, and so it helps point us to something greater.

There is an unexpected asymmetry within this chapter as well, or perhaps it is a symmetry-that-is-not-quite-a-symmetry.  

We often see odd backwards-reflections when we contemplate Mary.  She also sticks out of history, or fails to fit into it in the tidy way that we orderly people expect; she is also a kind of turning-point, a protrusion from the world.  We call her Mary, Undoer of Knots: she possesses a symmetry that does not repeat itself, but the kind that runs the ends of the great human tangle backward through themselves until the knot comes free.  We call her the New Eve:  not because she is a repetition of Eden's woman created without sin, but because she is a renewal of her.   We contemplate the Heart of Mary and the Heart of her Son, caught in the paradox that though the Creator precedes all His Created in the order of eternity, the Immaculate Heart has preceded the Sacred Heart in the order of time and creation where they both came into being.  

Jesus speaks, apparently symmetrically, to Mary and John at the foot of the cross.  "Woman: behold your son.  Behold your mother."  He gives them to each other.   This event is rich in meaning for us, and I cannot possibly scratch the surface of it here, except to say that it would be a mistake to seize on just one of the possible ways of seeing it, whatever appeals to us most, or whatever we most recently heard with the ring of conviction.

Benson, I am sure, is not giving us a sole way to interpret this word when he structures his chapter to highlight its meaning as part of our Friendship with Christ.   This word from our Friend functions as a command to draw nearer to each other, to give an attribute to our common bond with our neighbors, our fellow Christians, our fellow human beings.     That bond is a bond of adoption and a bond of blood both, the blood being Christ's.

The symmetry-asymmetry comes from the fact that we might be tempted to see the proto-bond between us and our fellows as represented by the gift-of-each-other that Christ commands from the Cross to Mary and to the beloved disciple.  As Mary is united to John, we might think, so we are united to one another in Christ.  But a careful examining of the chapter shows that it is not so (or at least, not only so).  The symmetry is really a complementarity. 

Scripture itself notes:  After Mary and John receive the words, the disciple takes her into his home; she becomes his Mother and he his Son; and this is not and has never been a symmetrical relationship, not in the patriarchal society of the Middle East under the Roman Empire, not today.   If our bond is a bond of adoption and blood, then we here together are siblings in Christ, united with him not just by a simple Friendship, but by a shared bond with his very own Mother.   Let us take her each one into our home, cherish her, listen to her, love her and live with her together.

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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The twin chapters of "Christ in the Saint" and "Christ in the Sinner" were very satisfying in their symmetry, and I'm very glad that Cat incorporated both into her most recent meditation.

I think that "Christ in the Sufferer" must disappoint many who turn to it in hope, at least if the few comments in our little reading group were to be believed.  

Some of us, being sufferers ourselves, are looking for instructions on what to do with our own suffering.  We have been told that we ought to unite our sufferings to Christ's.  We may have been told that we ought to "offer up" our sufferings, perhaps on behalf of some other soul; for example, one person reported being taught that suffering should be offered "for the poor souls in Purgatory."

But exactly how one does this is always left unsaid.

Others of us, and I count myself among them, may be searching for help learning what to do with other people's suffering.  We may feel helpless faced by the suffering around us:  faraway suffering that we only read about, or a suffering person right in front of us, whether it is a stranger or a loved one.  Maybe it is our appointed duty to do something particular to help; it can be a relief to know it; but perhaps what we can do is useless or incomplete, and then we are still left with suffering we can't help.  Or maybe we don't know what to do:  to say "it's not my job" seems wrong, and yet the fear that we might make it worse if we don't understand what we are doing is not an ungrounded one (see:  book of Job)!  Faced with a third suggestion, that we should suffer-with the sufferer, com-passion-ate ourselves… if we are not naturally feelers of others' feelings, how can we make ourselves do it?

There seem to be no easy answers here either.

And Benson's chapter does not help us.  He remains distant from the sufferer.  He does not help the sufferer, and he does not help the one who would serve the sufferer.   What are we to make of this?

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One possibility is that Benson simply doesn't know the answer, that he himself has searched and come up just as empty.   Another possibility is that however forlornly we wish for him to reveal the secrets of offering up our suffering, or of easing the suffering of others, it is simply not within the scope of this book, and he knows it.

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I've noted before that The Friendship of Christ functions in many ways as an act of apologetics, and so it is accessible to the person who has only a partial understanding of Catholic Christianity as well as to the well-catechized person who wishes to enter more deeply into relationship with the Christ who dwells there.  

This is a very apologetic chapter, and the apologia defends here against the category of accusations sometimes called "The Problem of Pain."   Almost anyone who has dabbled in apologetics will have encountered this, and it is a fundamental enough problem in the human condition that practically every religion or philosophy must address it in some way or another.  

Why do we observe that the just and the innocent suffer pains beyond that which can do them any discernible good?

Christianity does have answers for this, and Benson discusses some of them in this chapter.  At the moment the thing that I would like to point out to my well-catechized readers is this:  Being well-catechized, or being a faithful Christian believer, is not a foolproof inoculation against error in the matter of The Problem of Pain. 

I daresay you do not have to look very far among your acquaintances of the faithful and well-catechized sort to find someone who, if pressed, can be shown to believe in at least some cases that suffering is sufficient evidence of the sufferer's deserving the suffering.  They are Job's comforters; they believe that divine justice requires divine retribution.  It's extremely common, and I suppose that few of us have successfully resisted the temptation to classify a sufferer as having "asked for it" at one time or another, beyond the evidence.  Another extremely common error:  the assumption that if the apparently innocent do suffer, it must be for their own good, or must meet some need not otherwise met.  You see this in the wretched encounters with the "it's God's will" people.

Why are we like this?  We do not like to live with uneasy realities.

Anyway, Benson is careful to point these errors out to us in this little apologia.  The Problem of Pain is not what arises from "the direct and evident consequence of sin to the sinner;" it is the different problem of what arises beyond that.  Indeed the very real existence of evident consequences of sin can soothe us into thinking that, once we have associated sin and consequence in one-to-one correspondence, we have solved it.     But Benson ticks them off:  Christianity does not allow us to believe that God is not just; it does not allow us to believe that divine justice enacts retribution for past-life sins; it does not allow us to believe that the innocent cannot suffer needlessly (or, the logical equivalent, that the needlessly suffering are therefore not innocent).

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Personally, I think that Benson's answer to the question of "how to unite our sufferings to Christ" is that we do not need to take any steps at all; that Christ suffers in the sufferer through nothing more than the fact that an image-bearer suffers.  It is the common humanity of ourselves and of the Suffering God-Man that unites human suffering with the Cross, no more.  There may be comfort and peace to be found in making some kind of act of oblation of suffering; there may be virtue to be gained in exercising patience, in refraining from lashing out at people around us.  But the essential meaning of suffering already belongs to its every instance, in my view, and is given it by Christ.  As Paul says and Benson emphasizes, "I fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ," and we are given no further explanation.

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One of the uneasy realities that we find it hard to live with:  the instruction that the Christian must take up his cross, which seems to indicate an instruction to suffer willingly; and yet the instruction that we must ease the suffering of the sufferers (cf. the hungry, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, etc.).   

There is a risk that Christians might interpret this as instructing them to tell the hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned that they should bear their crosses.

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I believe that the scope of this chapter, with regard to the friendship of Christ, that if we recoil from suffering, we are always and in some way recoiling from Christ.  Not that there's something wrong with taking steps to prevent or mitigate suffering, either in ourselves or in others; that isn't the kind I mean.   There is no risk that we will somehow eliminate the possibility of suffering.  There will always be enough to go around; it is out there somewhere; if you cannot see it, keep looking.  

(N. B.  I've written about this before, in a meditation on II.12 of The Imitation of Christ, "On the Royal Road of the Cross."  There is no escape from the Cross; in fact the Cross is precisely that:  whatever suffering must be borne.  So there's no risk that by alleviating suffering that may be alleviated—as distinct from pushing the suffering onto someone else—we are refusing to bear it.)

My interpretation of Benson's instruction on "how to" unite her pain with His, to offer her pain as "the instrument of His atonement" — these are the words he uses — is that the believer has the possibility of knowing that she "fills up" what is wanting in the suffering of Christ.  For Christ suffers when we humans suffer, and thus our suffering is part of the atonement.  He went willingly for our sakes; we Christian believers can align our will with His and accompany him.  It is not the same thing as "God wills our suffering;" it is more like, "God can take this and do something with it — has already done so."  All we need do is trust:  that we not deny the justice and love of God in the face of it; that we not deny that Christ is found there, as well as on the lovelier roads; and in fact that there we know Christ in a way we would not otherwise come to know.

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Next:  Part III begins.

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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Cat wrote on "Christ in the Saint:"

It is the lifelong struggle of humans to realize that the imperfections that we consider "ours" — the yearning to cling to some pleasure, the death-like grasp on The Plan, the small tendencies to comfort and security and power that manifest themselves in self-absorption and lies and the little ways we use other people — do not truly add any flavor to our character or interesting edge to our personalities. Every person on earth — except the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom Benson rightly devotes the first half of this chapter — has known the bitter pleasure of clutching some favored sin closely to ward off the suffocating dullness of sanctity. If I give up this stupid thing, which gives me some fleeting pleasure, what is left? The long boring slog to heaven.

The saints are proof that surrender does not bring death. 

I, though, still have  saint with a much shorter slog to sainthood in mind. 

As I read Chapter 9, so soon after Chapter 8 (about the Sinner, so soon after the Saint), my mind returned again and again to that place in the Gospel where the Saint and the Sinner hang close together, with Christ in the middle between them.  

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I reflected early on that, settling down to meditate upon Christ in the Sinner, I might all too quickly revert back to meditating upon Christ in a Saint.  This is because with few exceptions, all our Saints have also been Sinners; some of our most popular Saints are famous for their repentance and their conversions, documented by someone else or even by themselves.  The woman weeping at Jesus's feet; Paul, recovering his sight; Augustine, confessing to every generation of Christians.  When we wish to contemplate Christ in the sinner, we may well think about these people; especially when we are considering the ones to whom Jesus himself reached out in history, personally transforming their lives. 

It's not wrong, for at the moment of transformation, they were still Sinners; not yet Saints.  On the other hand, there's a certain bias, a failure to discern part of the picture, if we only work backwards from Saints to the Sinners they once were.  For the world is filled with Sinners who are not yet Saints.  And history is filled with Sinners who may be Saints, though if they are it is unknown to us; who perhaps are not Saints and never will be.  

What I'm saying is, we've already contemplated Christ in the Saint.  If we are really going to contemplate Christ in the Sinner, it means contemplating Him not only in those Sinners for whom we already know the happy ending… but contemplating Him in those Sinners that have no happy ending.  Not yet; and even in those Sinners that perhaps will have none ever.

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Christ was crucified between two thieves, or revolutionaries, or both; between two Sinners. 

Christ died on the cross between a Sinner and a Saint. 

I think it is a little bit unfair to contemplate the Good Thief and think merely, "I am contemplating a Sinner."  It's not wrong—with few exceptions, all saints are sinners—but we are ignoring two things when we do this.  First, we are contemplating the Good Thief from a perspective that knows he is really a Saint as well; second, there is a perfectly appropriate example of a Sinner right there on Christ's other side. 

There will never be a better example of how Christ is reflected both in the Saint and in the Sinner.  The three men look alike in their agonies from the feet of the crosses.  Benson says, "For the crucifix and the Sinner are profoundly, and not merely superficially, alike in this—that both are what the rebellious self-will of man has made of the Image of God…"  Melanie Bettinelli and I have discussed this concept before as the concept of the "damaged icon."

So let's look at the other man.

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Matthew (Mark is similar):

Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.  And those who passed by derided him…. "You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself!  If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross."  So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself.  He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.  He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said 'I am the son of God.'"  And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way.

Luke:

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him.  And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left…. One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ?  Save yourself and us!"

Placed ("in the same way") on the lips of the thief-who-is-not-the-identified-Good-Thief are all the words of mockery:  Save yourself, if you are the Son of God.  You said you were King; look at you now.  And words of tempting and testing:  We will believe in you… if you come down from the Cross.  He trusts God; let God deliver him.

The man is a known sinner, justly condemned; dying in agony, a picture of ugliness; spending the last moments of his life in mockery, hatred, blasphemy, and revulsion; when another choice and another example is right before him.    And yet he persists.  And he is the very mirror of both the Saint and of the Savior.  

Benson reminds us that Christ is not just with Sinners like this—here, willingly crucified in company with him—but within Sinners like this—willingly crucified in compassion in the Sinner's heart and soul—willingly residing, radiating unreceived grace, in the heart even as it rejects him, as long as the man's breath lasts.  When Christ prays, "Forgive them, they know not what they do," he means this man as well, for he sees his heart, all of our hearts; he's there, His image, His spirit, His goodness; damaged, and not yet gone.  

+ + +

The Good Thief has always been one of my favorite characters in the Gospel to contemplate.  I fear I've turned my attention too much to what is only part of the story.  The other thief is just as precious.  He was, as a human being.  And he is, in this story that has come down to us, as an example and an image.  I cannot begin to plumb the depths of the mystery and meaning of the three crosses on the hill, but I can start by remembering always that there are three.  

In the Good Thief, God takes the damaged icon and restores it.  But take a step back and see the picture as a whole:  the crucifix and the sinner, side by side, what man made of the Image of God, before God said to an image-bearer, "Today you shall be with me in Paradise."  

Isn't it obvious that we must contemplate them both?    I, at least, have not heard Him speak those words to me yet.

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

+ + +

Cat wrote about the last chapter, "Christ in the Church:"

Our judgment is not infallible; we see that every day in a million minor ways. Our desires, though sincere, though educated, though acute, must be tested. Our love needs a foundation if it is not to be blown away in the first storm. 

This foundation is friendship with the Church, with the Church as Christ himself…. It is the Church we must be friends with, learning her teachings, tracing her through history, loving humanity through her as Christ does.

Benson's last point is addressed to the person who rebels against this submission as an obliteration of his judgment and gifts, his individuality….[T]oday I wonder if a more common objection might be to befriending the Church when it seems a place to shelter evil, an institutional cover for child abuse and sexual control. The glamor and mystique of the institution seem designed to blind the faithful and take advantage of them.

Yet, if the Church is Christ himself, the glamor is like the purple mantle the soldiers draped over Jesus, covering his torn body. 

I like the concept very much of the purple garment being like all the "glamor and mystique" that people sometimes see when they view the institutional Church.  Some people are attracted by the pretty things, and other people are repelled by them or suspicious of them; but it isn't, after all, the prettiness that we are meant to be contemplating but the Christ beneath.  

Benson takes a lightly mocking tone towards the Priest, I think deliberately, anticipating some of the criticism that non-Catholics often level at us:

She exalts, it is said, fallible humanity, in the person of the priest whom not even she believes to be infallible… If it were merely the Ideal Society that was exalted, some excuse could be found; but it is the individual human priest who, as a matter of fact, in the eyes of Catholics parades in the garments of Christ…

"Parades in the garments of Christ!"  It is the sneer of our critics.   And Benson says:  Yes. Yes, exactly.

Yes, that is what our priests do.  Parade in the garments of Christ:  which, as Cat pointed out, means (among other things) that purple mantle by which He was mocked, and also the seamless tunic for which lots were thrown, and the underthings that protected His dignity, all those bits that adhered to the flesh as they were in the end stripped off.  It must also mean the ordinary clothing of the worker and the itinerant preacher, the swaddling clothes; and the wrappings of the tomb.

[P]arades in the garments of Christ, and is thought to be clothed with His prerogatives.  This is largely true.  

I see the two chapters, "Christ in the Church" and "Christ in the Priest," as two aspects of a very similar concept.  The Church is made up of human beings, and the priest is a human being; and we relate to Christ through our relationships with these human beings.  (Even when one thinks:  well, I relate to the Church through physical objects, the buildings and the incense and the art; humans designed, made, and selected them, poorly or well).  We may even literally be friends with some of these human beings, or they might possibly be our very real enemies; or perhaps we find them agreeable or distasteful according to personality.

And yet friendship with Christ-in-the-Church is not quite the same thing as having warm feelings about the parish secretary or the Archbishop or the other dudes in the men's prayer group or appreciating the sweep of a ceiling or a sparkle of colored glass.  And friendship with Christ-in-the-Priest is definitely not the same thing as having a particular priest as your buddy, someone you might buy a beer for, or appreciating your pastor for his good homilies and diplomatic leadership.

+ + +

It's a good thing, too, because (as Cat alluded) these human connections fail us so often, sometimes in spectacularly horrible ways.

+ + +

A good part of this chapter is a defense of the priesthood.  I'm concerned mainly with what it means to find friendship with Christ in the priest—and it seems to me that by this Benson means friendship with Christ in the priesthood and its attributes, friendship with Christ-as-the-High-Priest.  Because of course friendship with Christ can be found in the human personality of any particular priest you happen to meet or know; I suspect, though, that we are going to meet this particular image of Christ in later chapters, such as "Christ in the Saint," "Christ in the Sinner," "Christ in the Average Man."  Because of course a given priest could be any of those things, and God help him, he may eventually be all three.

The priest is a man whose job is to willingly do the will of God.  All of us have the job to do that!  But the particular version of this, for the priest, is—at very particular and crucial moments—to submit his own personality totally to the personality of Christ; to accept with John the Baptist, "I must decrease, and he must increase;" and to give God permission to use his hands, his voice.  Christ "energizes,"  Christ "exercis[es] the prerogative of mercy," Christ "mak[es] himself present in…the Sacrament."  The priest consents. 

So where is the friendship?

[Christ] exhibits, in that atmosphere that has grown up about the priesthood, through the instincts of the faithful rather than through the precise instructions of the Church, attributes of His own Divine character, in sympathy with which constitutes the friendship of those who love Him.

I think when people talk about having that "personal relationship with Christ," it is very easy for them to be picturing a relationship with the human nature and character of Christ only:  the same sort of imagination that gives us the parlor-game of "Which historical character would you like to have dinner with?"  We close our eyes and there is Jesus, copied from a picture we saw once, in sandals and tunic, sitting in our living room.  We try to make friends with this Jesus.  Even if we imagine a Jesus speaking in our interior hearts, it's a human-sounding voice. We try to make that connection feel as like a human friendship as possible.  When it really does feel like that, we understand it to be a grace and a consolation.

And it's not wrong!

But we must also make friends with the Divine character of Christ.  And for that we have not much in the way of models from practical experience.  

Benson is telling us that friendship with Christ is also "sympathy with attributes of His own Divine character," and that we are able to develop some of this by having a devotion to the priesthood.

Not the priest, but to the priesthood:

Devotion to the priesthood… respect for the office, jealousy for its honor, insistence upon the high standard of those who fulful it—these are nothing else but manifestations of that Friendship of Christ of which we are treating… Not to lean upon the priest…—but to lean indeed upon the priesthood—this is reliance upon Christ.

Can I just point out here the bit about high standards?  When we (ahem) cover over serious failings of individual priests, make excuses for them,  excessively defer to them, or make them into celebrities, we're in direct opposition to all that helps us develop sympathy with attributes of the Divine character.   So let's shut down any idea that this is an apologia for clericalism.

+ + +

On a personal note, I found these two chapters incredibly reassuring as a reader.  When I first picked up the book, I thought that I would be learning how to begin a Friendship that I had never, ever, been able to really form.  But in Benson's explication of the Church and the Priest I recognized a Friend I already had.  For I have long had an attachment to the Mystical Body and a love for the Order of Melchizidek, so to speak.  When I sit in Mass surrounded by the atmosphere, however inauspicious it may seem (sometimes entirely because of the inauspiciousness), I feel the weight of centuries:  I feel myself among a crows of countless Christians, listening to so many homilies, including some very bad ones, from some very bad priests, and yet receiving grace all the same from those very hands.  It is a miracle that Christ has made himself so poor, I tell you, so as to reach into all the parishes and missions and cells of the world by such hands and voices.  

I am a person who finds it hard to rely on people.   And somehow God's friendship has found me through my mistrust, by letting me know that no matter what those people are like, His word that He comes to me through them is good.

+ + +

Next:  Cat on "Christ in the Saint."

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

+ + +

Cat ended her last post about Chapter 4, the Illuminative Way with a brief meditation on the humility required even of the "illuminated":

No man is an island. We are created to be in community, and not a community of our own creating. Benson cautions that a soul, enamored of the interior illumination of Christ, must, conversely, also be willing to submit to Christ as he reveals himself to the world in the Church. This is not the Church as interpreted by the World, as interpreted by charismatic figures, as interpreted by people who want to use it for their own means, but as the Church interprets herself through Christ, in her teachings, traditions, and documents — the True Church, not the idea of Church.

Ideas are heady things. The Purgative way strips away ideas from reality. Now the Illuminative Way emphasizes the reality behind ideas — the testing of spirits, as St. Paul says. Otherwise, we can be lead away by high spiritual contemplation to do practically terrible things. "Rely not on your own understanding," cautions the Psalmist. Christ does not illuminate us and no one else. We have a part in the Body of Christ, and Christ tells us that that Body is the Church….

And so it behooves a true Friend of Christ to draw not only from his strength, but from his humility. And this humility is one of the greatest qualities to consider when looking for guidance from people who claim to speak in Christ's name. Do they model, not just his zeal or his power, but his humility as well? If not, better test that spirit some more. 

It is fitting to consider the example of Christ's humility, and how we might emulate it, before turning to Part II and its initial chapter, "Christ in the Eucharist."  For of all the avenues down which this Figure advances to approach us, the Eucharist is the appearance that Benson identifies most with Humility: 

"It is in this mannter, then, that He fulfils that essential of true Friendship, which we call Humility.  He places Himself at the mercy of the world whom he desires to win for Himself.  He offers Himself there in a poorer disguise even than 'in the days of His Flesh…'"

I have always been fond of Aquinas's hymn "Adoro Te Devote," which functions admirably as a prayer to take to heart in the presence of the Eucharist.  My favorite verse is the third:

In Cruce latebat sola Deitas,

At hic latet simul et Humanitas,

Ambo tamen credens atque confitens,

Peto quod petivit latro pœnitens.

"On the Cross, Divinity alone lay hidden; but here, Humanity conceals itself at the same time." 

Christ in the lowest and meanest of all humans still bears the image of God with which all of us are indelibly marked; Christ as a dead, ground, flat, parched crumb?  Not even the barest hint of the image remains.

"Yet both believing and confessing, I seek what sought the thief, repenting."

+ + +

When I opened my book to read the chapter, I expected it to be a chapter about encountering Christ in the reception of Holy Communion.  In fact I began taking notes speculating about the usefulness of this chapter to people who, for one reason or another, may not receive:  the very young, those living where access to Communion is restricted, those in irregular marriages or other situations which preclude reception of the sacrament, and even those who are not Catholics.  Especially when I encountered the paragraph:

Jesus Christ, then, dwells in our tabernacles to-day as surely as he dwelt in Nazareth, and in the very same Human Nature; and He dwells there, largely, for this very purpose—that he may make himself accessible to all who know him interiorly and desire to know him more perfectly.

You see, that adjective:  "accessible!"  I thought I had found an objection.  In the act of Holy Communion, Jesus is most assuredly not accessible to all, at least not immediately. 

But in fact the chapter is not really about Communion.  It is divided into three parts, according to which Benson treats of three different ways which human beings may know Jesus our Friend in the Eucharist.  (Consuming Him not, in fact, being necessary to the knowledge!)  And those three different modes of knowing our Friend are as material object, the work of human hands; as Sacrificed Victim; and as Food.

We may know Him in these forms merely by contemplating the Eucharist itself, or by contemplating the behavior of believers:  our design of churches and chapels with the Tabernacle at the focal point, our reverential handling of the matter, the words of consecration, our adoration, our processions, our hymnody, our careful attention to how one must prepare to receive… even, maybe, in the pastoral barriers that keep some people from reception of the Eucharist.  It is our treatment of the Eucharist that communicates its meaning to the curious onlooker.  

Flannery O'Connor, in a letter, famously wrote:

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ 

That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

+ + +

So, Benson gives us a sort of tricolon diminuens:  from a crafted object we can move around, display, detest or adore; to victim killed by our cruelty; to a piece of food.  He descends further and further at the mercy of the world, that is, us.  And even when we are not eating Him, he is totally accessible to us, in fact to everyone, under this form.

For anyone, anyone at all, can come into the Church and contemplate Him there in the Tabernacle, or slip into a pew to hear Mass and consider the words and act of Consecration, or perhaps arrange to spend the third part of an hour in the chapel of Adoration where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed.  No one will check your credentials, at least at the public hours.

Many a time I have done this myself.  I have looked intently for a long time at the round white wafer, and thought:  The Apostle John saw a human being fixed on a gibbet, and also was looking invisibly upon a God.  In a like way I see a bit of stuff, fixed under glass in the monstrance, and also am looking invisibly upon a Man.  Man and God as well, but let's take it one step at a time, shall we?  John knew the God; shall I know the Man?

+ + +

If Humility is the attribute of friendship which Christ in the Eucharist most displays, then we can learn from it something new about friendship itself.  For to make a friend is to place oneself, to some degree, at the mercy of the friend.  We allow them to have their way with our hearts.  If not, it's not a true friendship.  And in the Eucharist, if we understand nothing else, we can understand that Christ has become for us a thing, body, blood, soul and divinity, all wrapped up in a tiny package, not even a penny's worth of flour, which we can walk away from, treasure, or sell.  To contemplate that, to accept it, and to go on contemplating and remaining and watching, is to be His literal companion.

Next:  Cat on Chapter 6, "Christ in the Church."

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

+ + +

Previously, Cat wrote on Chapter 2:

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," Jesus says to each soul (Rev. 3:20), which seems to reinforce the idea of him being external. But wait! He goes on to say, "If anyone hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me." But we do not provide this meal to Jesus. He is the meal on the other side of the door, just as he is the door (or the true gate), and he is the house, and he is all in all. He is already in everything, and longs to be recognized. Our part in fostering this friendship is not to invite him where he is not, but to recognize and welcome him where he already is.

He is the meal, and He is the house, and He is the door.  I really like all that Cat says about this.  Lingering over it, I find myself wondering what it means for there to be an if… anyone opens the door.  He is a voice on the outside of the door, and a meal inside of the door, and He is even the door, and yet He is not a door that opens of its own accord.  

The soul must hear the voice.  The soul must open the door.  The soul must eat the meal.   What can these be other than free acts of the will, if the metaphor is to hold?  Acts of aligning our will to the will of God—but under God's own power soaking and penetrating everything already, like a compass in a magnetic field?  We must be exerting a constant contrary effort if we are to keep pointing our own way, and I suppose we are.  

Perhaps He is a door that opens of its own accord, and the soul is straining to keep it shut.

+ + +

Benson's Purgative Way (to be followed by the Illuminative Way, next chapter) is written as if it were a linear progression, a path.  There is a bit of hedging with words like "usually" and the sort, leaving room for some unusual folks to experience purgation differently.  For example:  

And extremely often, the first sign… lies in a consciousness that there is beginning for her an experience which the world calls Disillusionment….This then is usually the first stage of Purgation:  she [the soul*] becomes disillusioned with human things, and finds that however Christian they may be, they are not, after all, Christ.

…

The next stage of Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the Disillusionment with Divine things.  The earthly side has failed her, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to seem to her as if the Divine has failed her too.

…

There follows… a third stage before the Way of Purgation is wholly passed.  She now has to learn the last lesson of all, and become disillusioned with herself.

There isn't any hedging, however, in the placement of the Way of Purgation before the Way of Illumination in the structure of the book.  

I think perhaps that Benson is showing us that, while the precise journey along the Way of Purgation can vary—perhaps some of us skip over the "first" or "second" stages mentioned in the book, perhaps some of us have to go through a stage he hasn't mentioned, perhaps we take the stages out of order, perhaps we retrace our steps over and over again—no Illumination is possible without some Purgation that precedes it.

I think we'll know more about this when we have dived deeply into the next chapter.   But my thought is that we don't necessarily become entirely purged before we can begin to be illuminated at all; rather that every illumination must be preceded by a thorough purgation of whatever bit is standing in the way of the light.  We'll see if I am on the right track when we have finished reading Chapter 4 and can look at the thematic whole that is made from chapters 2, 3, and 4.

+ + +

There's a reason why I find myself wondering if some of us have to go through a stage Benson hasn't mentioned.  I am apparently not the only person (based on some of the discussion in our little Facebook reading group) who has trouble identifying with the first two stages.   I mean, I do know people who were brought to a crisis of faith when they were

brought face to face with some catastrophe in external matters…an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some scandal in Christian life…. She had thought that the Church must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ, or the priesthood stainless…

I am only revealing my own hubris and inborn cynicism, but I cannot imagine being taken in by the idea that the priesthood is stainless.

I can imagine other people being shaken to their core by serious scandal.  I know it happens.  There's a reason scandal is a sin and that is because it is in fact dangerous to people.  I am not trying to trivialize it.  I'm just saying I don't think I ever had the illusion that the human things in the Church were perfect, or that they had to be. 

Nor, to move on to the second stage, did I have the illusion (at least not intellectually) that my feelings at any given moment were a reliable source of information of what really is good or what really is true, such that a drying-up of my prayerful feelings should bring about a crisis of faith.   (Although it definitely can bring about a crisis of fidelity, as one is much less likely to go through with one's morning prayer if one is not feeling particularly warm towards the practice at the time.  My solution to that has been to drink my coffee first.) 

Nor do I think it makes any sense at all to place the blame on Christ that, after years of asking "only say the word and my soul shall be healed,"

behold! she is the same as ever.

(Lord.  Say the word already.)

I wrote in the margin of my book, "If intellect supersedes emotion, it's not THAT hard."  

One possibility here is that Robert Hugh Benson was fairly careful about following the Rule of Three and didn't want to list any more "stages" in the Way of Purgation.

Another possibility is that he mostly covered an emotional aspect of the first two stages (disillusionment with human things, and disillusionment with divine things)  for reasons of his own particular experience and emphasis. 

Because how could there not be an intellectual purgation as well? 

Those of us who are unsentimental by nature don't risk building a plush Christ out of pious feelings and attractive liturgy and china-doll priests. 

But we do risk building a wooden Christ out of unshakeable principles and reasonable arguments.   

Some of us do not run the risk of becoming cynical because we have lost our illusion that romance is truth.  We never thought that, so we are unlikely to say with Benson's soul, "Perhaps, after all, experience is the only truth worth having."

But we do run the risk, when our principles and arguments fail to save us, of saying with Pilate, "What is truth?"

+ + +

The third stage of Benson's purgative way is placed last for a good reason:  it's really the ultimate end of purgation, the stripping of the self, the very interior of our interiors, the opening of the last door to let Christ into the very center.  And I do not think I understand it much at all; and a plausible explanation for that is, well, not being done with it.  

[I return to this paragraph as editor and I notice:  There's the intellectual hubris raising its head again.    Here I am suggesting that a lack of holiness is, in some way, equivalent to a lack of understanding.  The soul defends itself even in the examination of itself.]

I do understand [argh, there I go again] the temptation of ceasing to progress through despair and how the despair is "pride under the very subtle guise of extravagant humility:"  for if "I must sink back again to the common level," well, then, I get to be the uncommon fish in the common pond, don't I?  The nicest of the damned?  Or if I say  "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man"—well, could I not be motivated by simply no longer wanting to hear the voice that I hear accusing me?

+ + +

I just have two more little notes I want to make, both of which look forward to later chapters.  

The latter, first:  We have just seen that we are supposed to be disillusioned from the idea that "human things… however Christian they may be, they are not, after all, Christ."   And yet, when we arrive at part II, we are going to learn how we literally find Christ in… humans.  The priest, the saint, the sinner, the average man, the sufferer… and the Church, which is a body of humans, and the Eucharist (this being a bit easier for Catholics and perhaps Lutherans and a few other Christians who will not call it Merely A Human Thing; Catholics, at least, will say that it is A Human).  So when we get to part II it will be interesting to see precisely how Benson means to say Christ is in each of these things that is not part of the illusion.  

The other, nearer.   I am drawn to re-reading the Gospel episode alluded to here:

Now is the very instant in which the beloved soul, having learnt her last lesson of the Purgative Way, is fit to "cast herself into the sea" to come to Jesus.

The footnote is to John 21:7, just after the disciples cast the net to the right side of the boat on the direction of the unrecognized Jesus, and catch all the fish.  The translation I have at hand says:

The disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord!" When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his clothes, for he was stripped for work, and sprang into the sea.

I find myself a little hung up on the pause: "he put on his clothes, for he was stripped for work" before casting himself into the sea.  Is it something we should emulate, or an acknowledgment of some imperfect hesitancy?   Hard to say.  Anyway, the whole episode strikes me as worthy of keeping in mind as we turn to what follows the soul's "casting herself into the sea," that is, the Illuminative Way.

Next up: Chapter 4, "The Illuminative Way," with commentary by Cat.

___________________________________ 

*I'm inclined to attribute the use of the gendered pronoun here to a tradition of Christian spiritual writing in Romance languages, in which the noun meaning "soul" is grammatically feminine; it also has two practical benefits, distinguishing by pronouns "she" the soul from "He" (Christ), and subtly recalling the relationship in which Christ is Bridegroom.