On Revelation

Last night, when I should have been sleeping, I was caught up in the mystery of Revelation. Consider, for example, the call of Abraham:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Ex 12:1-3

Were this a liturgical reading, we would hear intoned, “the Word of the Lord” and reply, “thanks be to God.” It is the Word of God, revealed to us: Revelation. But, it is not the Word of God as revealed to Abraham.

I am not interested in arguing for the historicity of the person, Abraham, or of the development of the Semitic community that came to be known as the Israelites, or of any of the other sundry scholarly corollaries that my comments would properly require to be erudite and academically orthodox. I am satisfied with the faithful presumption that there was, indeed, a man called Abram and that he was, in fact, called out of the land of Haran and into the land of Canaan. But, how was he called?

“Go from your country and you kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” How did God say that to Abraham? An urge towards a fundamentalist, literalist reading of the text is natural, and in many cases probably helpful for those who are capable of it. But, for some of us it is not possible, and in all likelihood it is simply not true. Abraham did not hear, in the sense that we hear one another in conversation, the Lord say to him, “Go from your country…” How does God say it? How does God reveal it?

Adrienne von Speyr, herself a woman marked by the heavy burden and special grace of charismatic revelation, describes Abraham’s sense of mission as follows:

It begins with Abraham’s having the initially unprovable certainty—in his faith and in his prayer, in his everyday attitude, and at time when he is specifically speaking with God—that he has a mission.*

By faith, by prayer, by everyday attitude, and by ‘specifically speaking with God,’ Abraham knows his mission. What is the distinction between prayer and ‘specifically speaking with God’? What is the sound of that metaphor, 'specifically speaking with God?' Von Speyr does not imagine an audio-theophany; her next sentence is, “This mission appears to him as an imperceptible sort of choseness.”

And Abraham acted on this imperceptible sort of choseness, following his God to Canaan and becoming the father of a great nation, out of which the Messiah would be born. And the seed of revelation sown in his personal experience would be shaped through the culture of his progeny, made a reference in folklore and tradition, and eventually committed to written word thousands of years later, celebrated as Holy Scripture and understood anew, perpetually, as Revelation, the Word of the Lord. By his unprovable certitude in God’s promise, the content of his mysterious and sublime revelation, Abraham’s imperceptible sense of choseness has been vindicated. In his seed was the line of David, and, as we will celebrate this coming Sunday, from the line of David "all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

What a great mystery, Revelation.

* Adrienne von Speyr. Translated by David Kipp. The Mission of the Prophets. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1996.

Brother Roger

Remembering Brother Roger, Martyr & Saint

For information about the history and activity of the community of Taize, see: http://www.taize.fr/

As the year draws to a close, the annual European gathering of the Pilgrimage of Trust hosted by the brothers of Taize draws near. And for many this event pulls us back to the tragic, violent death suffered earlier this year by the founder of the community at Taize, Brother Roger. While singing prayers together with near two thousand people 90 year old Brother Roger's throat was cut by an insane Romanian, Luminita Solcan.

I learned of Brother Roger's murder at work, having read of it on the internet news. I was shocked and sickened, and stricken by a wave of grief.

In the fall of 2002 I spent 5 weeks at Taize. My days there were among the most important of my life and it was in Taize that I first tasted the depth of peace and love that are the fruit of prayer, quiet, and devotion. At Taize I learned to listen to God, I learned the singular grace of liturgy and the ultimate value of rite and ritual in opening one's self to God and to conversion.

At the end of the evening prayers, Brother Roger used to sit to the side of the Church and whisper a blessing over individual pilgrims who had queued to see him. In my first night at Taize I watched this with cynicism and arrogance, wondering if the elderly monk would be humble enough to approach one of us for a blessing. But before I came to Taize, I prayed earnestly and honestly for God to bless my time there, and to teach me through it, to convert me through it. And before Brother Roger had left that evening, God answered my prayers and filled me with a terrible self-awareness of the poison of my cynicism, that black drink I took into myself in order to divert my attention from a man whose light revealed my darkness. I knew, by grace, that I needed to learn humility by living humility, that I needed to kneel at the feet of Brother Roger and accept his blessing as one from God. And I did. And Brother Roger, stooping down asked my where I came from and what language I spoke. In English, with long moments of silence and strain, he prayed a blessing over me and whispered something else that I didn't quite understand. A young brother next to Roger clarified: I had been invited to lunch with the community the next day.

In the weeks I spent in Taize I was benefited from the hospitality of the Brothers three times, sharing lunch with them in silence. After they had finished eating, they would talk a while about news, about the community, about their guests, the young pilgrims. Because I didn't speak French, the language of the community, between translations I watched the brothers and watched Brother Roger and saw in his eyes and in his smile a profound love and paternal pride in his brethren.

Most people who come as guests to Taize only spend a week there, but there is always a group of young people who stay longer, sometimes a year or more, the group referred to in Taize as permanents, and it was with this group that I lived. Each of the permanents had exposure to Brother Roger, and each loved him and trusted him.

I imagine most people who pass through Taize would agree that Brother Roger seemed obviously a saint. I know enough of the Roman Catholic Church to know that they would not approve of his being called as such; indeed, many resist terming John Paul the Great a saint before it is official. I am of the mind that there is value to the official classification of saintliness, but that one is not made a saint because he or she is so declared. Rather, one is declared a saint because the light of transfiguration shines from their face. As the crowds in Rome shouted "Magnus! Magnus!" and "Santo Subito" so cried the hearts of the thousands who travelled countless miles to kneel at Brother Roger's feet for a blessing. And I expect that they will continue to come, kneeling not at his feet but at his gravestone, praying to him and with him, still receiving his blessing, a blessing as one from God.

His blessing will continue also through his legacy: the community of more than 100 brothers at Taize. I pray God's blessing on the work of the Pilgrimage of Trust, as thousands will gather in Milan to meet the New Year. And in communion with our Pope, Benedict XVI I pray in concordance with his words:

Dear young people, at a time when you are living a beautiful ecclesial experience of encountering others, sponsored by the Taize Community, Pope Benedict XVI joins you all in prayer.

In expressing tribute to Brother Roger who desired these international meetings in order to root in young Christians a spirit of brotherhood and peace lived out concretely, the Pope's wish is that the dialogue among yourselves, who have come from different countries and different Christian denominations, as well as the meeting with the Christians of Milan who are welcoming you, will enable you to form new ties that will be seeds of peace among people. May the example of the founder of Taize and the tireless testimony of Pope John Paul II in favor of dialogue and peace encourage you to be peacemakers in your turn! In a world made fragile by many situations of tension, and in our developed societies marked by new forms of violence that affect the young in particular, the Pope invites you to witness with simplicity and joy to the Spirit of peace who dwells within you, as a result of the gift that the Lord Jesus made of himself, once and for all, on the Cross, for the love of all. For, as the apostle Paul says, "he is our peace" (Eph 2:14) and invites us to forgive, the sign of an absolute love.

Entrusting you to the prayer of Mary, Mother of the Lord and of all those who have become his brothers and sisters, the Holy Father grants you with all his heart an affectionate apostolic blessing, as well as to the Taize brothers, to the communities and the families who are welcoming you.

A Few Steps Backward, Confessing and Apologizing

I feel the need to defend this enterprise before I properly start it. I know its an unattractive characteristic, the preemptive apologetic, one that reveals a degree of insecurity and, as is often the case with insecurity, pride. But my vices are what they are and in good Catholic manner I feel better confessing them, validating my confession with apologetic.

How do pride and insecurity play into the initiation of a web log?

Well, I write because I want to be read, or, in the more colloquial sense, to be heard. It is a lovely exercise of the mind, to write something daily. Our capacity to formulate our thoughts into words, articulating, condensing, editing, reviewing, and pronouncing that which begins ethereal until it becomes visible and comprehensible by another intellect, our ability to write, grows only through use. And the blog is an excellent medium on which to practice our skill, and to develop it. But, that isn't the reason why I want to start a blog. If that were reason alone, I would simply write in a journal, or compose essays outside of a public forum. Instead, I chose a medium that is more exposed, open to the wandering eyes of the world-wide-web and to those of my friends and family whom I invite. Because this way, I can be heard.

Is the desire to be heard an expression of pride? Or is it a natural human desire, a part of our quest for self-discovery and self-actualization? The desire for self-expression is a desire oriented, rather obviously, around the self, and so falls easy prey to the many snares of egoism. There is a thin line between the desire to express out-of-self and the desire to express self, singularly and willfully. When our self-expression is directed inward, when the message expressed is SELF, a perverse cycle of egotistical pride is generated and perpetuated.

I admit that there is some pride in my want to write a blog. But I acknowledge that SELF is usually not an interesting message, and so I will try to keep it to a minimum.

And as for insecurity, well, I am fully aware of the cliche quality of a blog on religion. There are many, many blogs of this sort and many will be better than mine. To that inevitability I say, paradoxically with humility, I will do the best I can and acknowledge that it is very little.

Incidentally, if you would like to learn more about blogs on religion and the nature of discourse on God on the internet, read Jonathan Last's article, God on the Internet, in the December issue of First Things. http://www.firstthings.com/

A Beginning

A beginning blogger and a dinner request; didn't Maslow say hunger beats self-expression by a long shot? More after perogies...