A secular Franciscan & student of René Girard reflecting on how we desire according to the desire of the other.
"Most High, glorious God, cast Your Light into the darkness of my heart, and grant me a right faith, certain hope and perfect charity, sense and understanding, Lord, so that I may know and do Your holy and true command." - St. Francis of Assisi: Prayer before the Crucifix
Yes, Christ did ascend upward and from on high sent the Holy Spirit, but he rose upward because this was more appropriate than to descend or to move to left or right. Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is actually quite incidental to the spiritual reality. For in the realm of the spirit heaven is as near up as it is down, behind as before to left or to right. The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there really is there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason St Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.” Other saints have said substantially the same thing but in different says. They mean that love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. Does this make any more sense to you? We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already through love and desire.
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing was written in Middle English by an unknown mystic of the fourteenth century.
It is difficult to love and to be loved as one would like. It is painful to realize that there are whole areas in the life of the mind that will never be revealed. Every man, one day or another, becomes aware of his poverty as a creature. And since this experience is a crushing one, the natural temptation is therefore distractions, or, as Pascal said, diversions. There is an “impatience with one’s limitations,” a natural temptation that urges us to flee before such limitations. We experience a fear in coming face to face with them, and this fear arises again and again inside us. Distractions, therefore, appear as the opposite of prayer, a refusal of our real condition, an evasion of it in favor of illusion, dream, mirage (recall man’s pursuit of different kinds of drunkenness: evasion by the flesh, art, sports, etc.).
However, the first moment of true prayer occurs in the experience and awareness of one’s limitations. We do not know what our real needs are, and we must learn them all over again each day. In this sense, prayer has the value of pedagogy, it is the great pedagogy of God. While evasion and distractions draw us away from the road to real happiness, prayer brings us back to what is most authentic in man’s quest for happiness. “The truth will set you free.” Prayer makes us free; it preserves what is most fragile and most precious in us: the integrity of our desire, that desire which, in final analysis, is nothing but the need for God. This is what prayer preserves in us, and must teach us every day, this need for God, which is the distinctive, most profound trait that separates man from the animals. Man is the only being who turns to God to obtain what is lacking for his own fulfillment. - Father Bernard Bro, o.p. Father Bro is a French Dominican priest, a distinguished theologian, and the author of many books.
My third reflection in this series on Saint Bonaventure's "The Journey of the Mind to God" focuses on chapters 3 & 4 and what appears to be a miscalculation which has led many astray by narrowing our notion of what constitutes a person.
After revealing how to "see" God in all that is around us, now in chapters 3 & 4, St Bonaventure challenges his own premise of writing this book, which is based on the revelation that Christ reveals, with a meandering into human reason tied to Plato and then adopted by St Augustine, as he gives thought to: What does it mean to be human? Or how might we best understand what a human being is? In this third step on the journey to God, St Bonaventure, consistent with St Augustine and Richard of St Victor, brings us to a precipice where he has us "reenter" ourselves. Bonaventure warns that there are risks, sighting how the mind, memory and intellect (the 3 powers we possess within ourselves) can obscure God, to the point of deception, saying that, "you will be able to see God through yourself as through an image, indeed, to see through a mirror darkly." [I Cor., 13, 12]
To grasp how treacherous a reentry can be check out this clip as the news commentator explains the degree of difficulty facing the crew and control center.
G. K. Chesterton observed how important it is to account for the trajectory (looking both ways) of an idea; "If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness." One only needs to see the sad reality of our personal and social world today to notice that we have made those huge blunders, due in part by our justification of a turn inward. St Bonaventure's reentry by way of reason, following in the footsteps of St Augustine's notion of entering into yourself, inadvertently lent itself to what has turned out to be a bankrupt concept of what constitutes a "person" in the modern day world of psychology and counseling, thus emptying the reality of "personhood" revealed by Christ of its original grounding in dialogue and relationality.
"... God who is in dialogue, stimulated the concept 'person'... In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something super-added to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation."
The article continues:
"I believe a profound illumination of God as well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must mean in terms of Scripture: not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being. The point is thus reached here at which there is a transition from the doctrine of God into Christology and into anthropology."
Cardinal Ratzinger continues:
"... if it is true, however, that Christ is not the ontological exception, if from his exceptional position he is, on the contrary, the fulfillment of the entire human being, then the Christological concept of person is an indication for theology of how person is to be understood as such... In Christ, in the man who is completely with God, human existence is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility, which consists in transcending itself, ... Christ is the directional arrow, as it were, that indicates what being human tends toward... and implies "being on the way" in the manner of human history."
Romano Guardini’s observation in his book, "The End of the Modern World"is apropos bringing us back to revelation and 'a calling' that conquers reason and is analogous to St Bonaventure's meditation on St Francis receiving the stigmata on Mt Alverno:
With the coming of Christ man’s existence took on an earnestness which classical antiquity never knew simply because it had no way of knowing it. The earnestness did not spring from human maturity; it sprang from the call which each person received from God through Christ. With this call the person opened his eyes, he was awakened for the first time in his life.
For all the confusion to which it inadvertently contributed, the saving feature of Augustine's (and Bonaventure's) inward turn was that, like Trinitarian interiority, it was premised on communal, not a self-contained subjectivity... Where Augustine (and Bonaventure) turned inward in order to find God, the Western thought turned inward in search of a self-sufficient source of knowledge, truth and identity.
The slippery slope of the inward turn, as it attempts to locate the concept of person at some place "in" the psychic inventory, has proven to be a major hurdle to what is the most essential, radical and counter-intuitive element in Trinitarian thought - the relationality of God revealed by Christ. Though both Augustine and Bonaventure fashioned 3 'powers' (memory, intelligence, and will) to the human mind paralleling the relation of the three Persons to the divine essence, their inward turn unfortunately brought with it an implosion and 'self-centeredness' that we in the Western world find ourselves buried under today.
Christ unveils self-sufficiency as a myth revealing humans as interdividuals like mosaics: we are beings that are fashioned in and by diverse relationships. The difference between the romantic myth of 'individual' and the anthropological revelation of 'interdividual' revealed by Christ is like the difference of someone hiding a light under (or in) a bushel versus someone placing a light on a stand. Another way of saying it is if you look at a stained glass window of an old cathedral from the street - from outside, you will only see pieces of dark glass held together by strips of black lead (the turn inward). But if you cross the threshold and view it from inside (embracing yourself as creature, God's instrument), allowing the light to shine through, you will see a breathtaking spectacle of colors and shapes.
The appropriate inward turn, revealed by Christ, provides an ever expanding view of God's love and sacrifice for us. I thought this video clip apropos to help visualize the saving feature of Augustine's and Bonaventure's turn inward seeking God rather than conceiving of a subject as contained within itself.
The Journey of the Mind to God was born out of Bonaventure's meditation on the stigmata of St Francis. Bonaventure saw the imprinting of the wounds of the Crucified on St Francis as his union with Christ - a final emptying or dying of his self - thus like St Paul, he could say: "With Christ I am nailed to the Cross. It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me." [Gal. 2:20]
This meditation from The Magnificat reflects on how radically different Christian spirituality is to modern day secular psychology where it is all about self - loving yourself. What makes the righteous shine is not about first loving your self but truly loving our all loving God who shines forth upon His children, His Grace and Blessings. At mass this morning, Father asked us to thank all the wonderful grand-parents leaving their imprint and tradition on us. In this thankfulness we see how we really are - a weaving of many relationships - we are more inter-dividual, being molded and shaped by our relationships along with the Holy Spirit than we are separate and 'individual' like pseudo-psychology would make us out to be.
What Makes the Righteous Shine
What then have we to do? We must realise that God is our tremendous lover, that he is our all and that he has done all our works for us. We must believe in God and not in ourselves; we must hope in God and not in ourselves; we must love God and not ourselves. As Saint Augustine told us, there is one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe and unto the end of time. We have to enter into this one man - this one Christ - by faith, hope, and charity. We have to find our all in him. He is our full complement and our perfect supplement. No matter how weak we are, he is our strength; no matter how empty we are, he is our fullness; no matter how sinful we are, he is our holiness. All we have to do is to accept God's plan - to say as Christ said coming into the world: "A body thou hast fitted to me; behold I come to do thy will, 0 God." We have to accept the self, and the surroundings, and the story, that God's providence arranges for us. In humility we must accept our self - just as we are; in charity, we must accept and love our neighbour just as he is; in abandonment, we must accept God's will just as things happen to us, and just as he would have us act. Faithful compliance with his will and humble acceptance of his arrangements will bring us to full union with Christ For the rest, let us gladly glory in our infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in us. In our weakness and in our love we shall thus become one with him, and there shall be one Christ loving himself.
DOM M. EUGENE BOYLAN, o. ClST. R.
Dom Boylan (+ 1963) was a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount Saint Joseph, Roscrea, Ireland.
From the notes: "Saint Bonaventure follows Saint Augustine in his conception of history as a most beautiful drama, composed by God and acted by mankind.(1) The beauty of this drama and its meaning, however, can be grasped only through faith and on the basis of revelation. But since we are in such a position that we can witness only a small part of this drama, we need Holy Scripture to raise us to a point from which we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day."(2)
WOW! Gazing into this mystery is truly a challenge for any of us, especially if we are using only our reason, and that is why Bonaventure insisted that we see that reason must be conquered by revelation.
(1) "conception of history as a most beautiful drama, composed by God and acted by mankind."
Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world, in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.
We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world.
In another section of the tape Gil continues:
So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world. ...
... It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people - be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgivenness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, "I live now not I, but Christ lives in me."
I am always blown away by his reflection... Ah, wait now, we have one more part to the original reflection.
(2) The beauty of this drama and its meaning, however, can be grasped only through faith and on the basis of revelation. But since we are in such a position that we can witness only a small part of this drama, we need Holy Scripture to raise us to a point from which we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day.
Christ instituted the Mass so that we can enter into His Mystery - This Drama. The Mass was not conceived in the language of modern day 'me-ism' rather we are first opened and prepared to receive the Liturgy of the Word (likened this to a willingness to sacrifice yourself) and then we actually enter into the drama - we take our part as actors in the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
Wondrously and mysteriously, The Story is presented and re-presented to us so as to jar our memory, the memory for which Christ asks us, "Do THIS in remembrance of me," so that with the opportunity, given to us at each Mass, we can shout 'yes' or amen and actually participate in it's trajectory so that "we can view and comprehend it in its entirety — from the creation of the world to judgment day."
At every Mass we are encouraged to repeat Mary's 'yes' and to enter into THIS Journey - to make our life apart of THE Story. Saint Bonaventure's book is retelling this very journey to God.
So memory matters! We improve our memory through repetition and ritual and it is here that humankind enters the drama within the Mass.
In a class on the updated Mass I find myself constantly going back to Lk 11, 29-32 and that there IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here. Then on the feast day of St. Bonaventure appearing in The Magnificat was this reflection and also found here: The Journey of the Mind to God.
Living for the "SOMETHING GREATER"
If you should ask how these things come about,
question grace, not instruction;
desire, not intellect;
the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study;
the Bridegroom, not the teacher;
God, not man;
darkness, not clarity;
not light, but the wholly fire
which inflames and carries you aloft to God
with fullest unction and burning affection.
This fire is God,
and the furnace of this fire leads to Jerusalem;
and Christ the man kindles it
in the fervor of His burning Passion,
which he alone truly perceives who says,
"My soul chooses hanging and my bones death" [Job, 7, 15].
He who chooses this death can see God because this is indubitably true:
"Man shall not see me and live" [Exod., 33, 20].
Let us then die and pass over into darkness;
let us impose silence
upon our cares, our desires, and our phantasms (imaginings).
Let us pass over with the crucified Christ
from this world to the Father [John, 13, 1],
so that when the Father is shown to us
we may say with Philip:
"It is enough for us" [John, 14, 8];
let us hear with Paul:
"My grace is sufficient for thee" [II Cor., 12, 9];
let us exult with David, saying:
"My flesh and my heart have grown faint; Thou art the God of my heart, and portion forever" [Ps. 73, 26].
"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting; and let all the people say:
So be it, so be it! Amen! Hallelujah!" [Ps., 106, 48].
In my formation studies with the SFO I gleaned that for Bonaventure, divine revelation, not human reason, is the way to God. God is to be revealed, not reasoned. Truly there IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here [Lk 11, 29-32]. Bonaventure's emphasis on revelation does not mean that we do not make use of reason. Bonaventure plainly demonstrates that devotion has to be prior to mere intellectualism.
I believe that Rome's revisions of the word use at the Mass is challenging us to move out of the false notion that we only represent an independent 'self' and enter more fully into the Mystery just as Bonaventure says, "(W)e may come to think that mere reading will suffice without fervor, speculation without devotion, investigation without admiration, observation without exultation, industry without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without divine grace, the mirror without the divinely inspired wisdom." (P.4). On the other hand, Bonaventure tried to be well-balanced in his reasonings, that is, being scholastic without leaving the realm of monasticism; being religious and spiritual but also intellectual.
In whatever Bonaventure wrote he intended to awaken us all to the One Reality: that there is something greater than... (myself) here. Reason has to be conquered by revelation. Contemplation can not stop on the first or second level, where the rational soul contemplates the outer world and itself but recognizing that it is not complete in itself. The true and final contemplation is when the soul sees beyond the outer world and itself; when it ascends with the whole of creation above itself. There IS Something Greater than... (myself) Here!
So I contend (with Bonaventure's help) that the revised wording of the Mass challenges us all to enter more closely, more reverently and more humbly into this Mystery of Sacrifice, Real Presence and Communion. Suddenly the words, "Lord, I am not worthy" ring so powerful.
Let us push straight to the heart of the matter. What is the core, the central message of the revelation of Jesus? Surely it is of the unconditional love of God for us, for each one of us; God, the unutterable incomprehensible mystery, the reality of all reality, the life of all life. And this means that the divine love desires to communicate its holy self to us. Nothing less! This is God’s irrevocably will and purpose; it is the reason why everything that is, is, and why each of us exists. We are here to receive this ineffable, all-transforming, all-beatifying love. Well-instructed Christians know this notionally but, alas, few know it really. And here I must add an important reminder that knowing it “really” does not imply “feelingly.” To know really – or really to know – means living that knowledge, living out of it. It means that our way of looking at things, our attitudes, out actions arise from this knowledge. Of this real knowledge we use the word faith. This must give us pause and make us very cautious to claims to faith. “Of course I have faith!” We can feel quite indignant if someone implies otherwise! My experience tells me that real faith is rare and it is best we acknowledge this so that we may really work at believing.
Basing ourselves, therefore, on what Jesus shows us of God (and we Christians have only one teacher, Jesus the Christ, who is our way), we must realize that what we have to do is allow ourselves to be loved, to be there for love to love us.
