When the applause died down and the lights went up, I sat in my seat at the center of the front row spellbound by the performance of Judith I had just seen. I’d heard her anxiety, her prayers, and her courage. I’d heard the words of the dying Holofernes. But how? The biblical text doesn’t record them. So what was it I’d heard?
The truth of the matter is that we can access our treasure, the way of life that we call Christianity, bottled only in earthen vessels. No “Golden Age” ever existed. Medieval Christians and the Reformers created pots whose beauty has waned and whose utility has diminished over time. The necessity to create new earthen vessels with which to try to pass along our treasure to others is ever with us.
Simone Weil reminds us that the first principle of helping another is not action. It is to see and respect the other. She repeatedly notes that the greater the suffering of the other person, the harder it is truly to see and hear that person. We have to work at this kind of discipline so as to be fully present to the other.
Sometimes a tradition begins by accident. I was thirty-five years old, and eighteen months into founding our new congregation, and I invited congregants to a weekend silent retreat I’d hoped to launch a practice of silent retreats in my new congregation. The Spirit had something else in mind.
beyond the cave of gloom and confusion, the prospect of a glorious light
woven eyes in these portraits, using threads of perception and compassion
thanksgiving for the creative endeavour
Much of the zeal within the Church has always come from within the Iberian peninsula beginning with Saint Vincent of Zaragoza and continuing into the mediaeval period with Saint Dominic and, in the sixteenth century, the founders of the Jesuits and the new reformed orders; Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.
Incense of blessing rises to fill the earth
…of reaching for that “beyond” for which we still have no name