In the Apostolic Letter announcing a Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI wrote:
Ever since the start of my ministry as Successor of Peter, I have spoken of the need to rediscover the journey of faith so as to shed ever clearer light on the joy and renewed enthusiasm of the encounter with Christ. During the homily at the Mass marking the inauguration of my pontificate I said: “The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.” It often happens that Christians are more concerned for the social, cultural and political consequences of their commitment, continuing to think of the faith as a self-evident presupposition for life in society. In reality, not only can this presupposition no longer be taken for granted, but it is often openly denied. Whereas in the past it was possible to recognize a unitary cultural matrix, broadly accepted in its appeal to the content of the faith and the values inspired by it, today this no longer seems to be the case in large swathes of society, because of a profound crisis of faith that has affected many people.The crisis of faith is a result of many things, one being our mimicking culture's relativism thus trivializing the significance and meaning of the indelible imprints we all have been given in our lives. Whether these imprints in our souls are negative or positive, they are hard-wired in us. The relativism and resistance to the indelible marks, and how they come to possess us - move us - inevitably results in a lack of character (a lack of the sense of substance) as we are left isolated and closed off to the gift of forgiveness - a mere shadow of what we were created to be.
The word indelible means - a mark that cannot be removed - everlasting - imperishable - abiding.
As Pope Benedict XVI invites us to contemplate - only by way of an indelible mark worthy of inclusion and induction into a body of persons, opened up by the reception and transmission of forgiveness, can a rediscovery of faith be encountered.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 698 explains as follows the significance of the image of "seal", used as the indelible mark to that of "sacramental character":
| 'The Father has set his seal' on Christ (John 6:27) and also seals us in him (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:23, 4:30). Because this seal indicates the indelible effect of the anointing with the Holy Spirit in the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, the image of the seal (σφραγίς) has been used in some theological traditions to express the indelible 'character' imprinted by these three unrepeatable sacraments. |
All of us have experienced indelible imprints; some that grow us, provide strength through faith, and of course some imprints that restrict and close us off to life. Lately, the readings at Mass have had more of a restlessness to them - a crispness that stirs in me something ancient yet something new. This stirring has brushed up against the indelible imprints in my soul (the defining marks of who I am as a person) and I thought I would share 4 of mine here.
1) Rooted in the Franciscan tradition I have taken in some of the "logic" of Saint Bonaventure's thought which is found in the coincidence of opposites. Ilia Delio wrote in Simply Bonaventure, "The notion of the Word as a center (and meeting) of opposites figures prominently in the structure of Bonaventure’s thought... Bonaventure identifies Christ as the coincidence of opposites..."
I have allowed my mind to wade through the debris that is often left in the center or aftermath of such 'collisions of opposites' so aptly stated by Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, OFM;
The Day After - a 1980 documentary about Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the Manhattan Project.
2) The cross is a mercy. As Father Simon Tugwell observes, “it is the cross and only the cross that provides a constant point of reference in the chaos of our world, because there is all our poverty and helplessness and pain, all our yearning and all our mutual injustice, taken up into the stillness of God’s everlasting love and made into the instrument and revelation of his unchanging will.”The cross is a mercy as it holds the tension of opposites together - the transcendence and human - those who have gone before and those 7 generations in the future - and it is by way of this mercy that the Scriptures open us to be made new bringing us forth from our ashes to be the fruits of charity;
3) From James Alison, "What sort of difference does Rene Girard make to how we read the Bible?"
(W)hat Girard does with texts is in itself an education in the art of “doing things with texts” which is what we see Jesus do in the New Testament. It is the realisation that the centre of meaning is not to be found in the texts themselves. The centre of meaning is real, historical, non-textual, or not primarily textual, and the texts themselves are certain sorts of monuments to this real, historical, pre-textual reality.
James continues with this hard and fast image of an indelible mark:
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so intense were the explosions that the light from them etched what look like photographs of buildings and protrusions on the walls of other buildings. Each one of those light-etched walls is a monument to the unimaginable, and unsurvivable reality of the explosion, some hints of whose force can be read off from its monuments. And for Girard the centre of meaning, the unimaginable explosion, is a highly agile and dynamic centre in which two apparently opposed things are happening at the same time.
Obviously the texts can be powerful, yet we must journey through them to the centre of meaning - to the self-giving nature of Christ and the cross - order in the chaos – to the gift of faith through forgiveness. If we allow only the text to be the centre of meaning, never touching the gift of life, we will forever again be looking in the mirror and the consequences of “the day after” and the violence of our knowledge.
"The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."Waking up "the day after" is wallowing in the culture of men and mirroring the imprint of violence. As Christ-links however, we are called to mirror the culture of God where we are commissioned to reflect the true indelible imprint of Life and Creation. Graced by way of an induction into the liturgy and worship at the Mass, we are at once poured out and filled by this gift in the form of forgiveness.
4) There is a story of a little girl whose mother had given birth to a baby boy. The little girl asked her parents to leave her alone with the new baby. They felt her request was inappropriate, so they said no. Over time though they changed their minds and decided to let her have her private conference with the baby. The parents allowed their little girl to venture into the baby's room alone, but they had left the door open a crack - just enough to watch and listen. They saw the little girl walk quietly up to the baby, put her face close to his, and say,
"Baby, tell me what God is like. I'm starting to forget."If you are like me and others who I have shown this quote, the usual reaction is to get all sentimental. Well I'd like us to strip the sentimentality lens off and rediscover the journey of faith rooted in an awareness of how easy it is to stray and to forget. We are challenged every minute to be opened and thus becoming a mirror of forgiveness, an indelible mark, that has been received in an unfathomable, unmerited and mysterious faith.
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