Congar - Solidarity leads to desire for salvation of all [The Wide World My Parish 1]

A man cannot content himself with the certain knowledge that the Catholic Church represents the fullness of Christianity (supposing that he has that certainty unimpaired); he needs to know what 'the others' represent in relation to that Church and the salvation of which she is as it were the sacrament. In many places, every Catholic knows people who are Protestant, perhaps a communist or two, maybe a Jew, and certainly some who 'don't care', either because of indifference or because they are positively opposed to religion. These people are his fellows, sharing a common destiny with him, and he, or she, cannot but ask how they stand with regard to his religion, his faith, and that salvation in which he believes. The Communism pervading some countries, which has imposed some of its problems on us, is in its own way underlining the question: on the one hand by the atmosphere of human solidarity and ever-growing 'worldwideness' ; on the other, by consciousness of a tremendous historical continuity which forbids us to ignore the solidarity of generation with generation and century with century. It may be that the religion of the classical epoch was characterized by a certain individualism: Peter Nicole (d. 1695), for example, declared that 'A man is created to live alone with God for ever.' A possible comment on this nowadays is one that would have astonished and even scandalized Nicole: 'Save my own soul alone? No, it shall be all or none,' Whilst not going so far as that, this feeling for human solidarity certainly haunts many Christian consciences today.*

* This feeling could be particularly illustrated from the writings of Simone Weil, but there are much older expressions of it, though inspired by different considerations. There is Dostoevsky's theme that we are responsible for all people and everything, we have to beg forgiveness for all people and everything; and St Simeon the New Theologian (d. 1022) wrote; 'I knew a man who so longed for his brethren's salvation that, with excess of a zeal worthy of Moses, he implored God with scalding tears that either those brethren should be saved with him or he be damned with them. For he was bound to them in the Holy Spirit by such a bond of love that he did not want even to enter the kingdom of Heaven if it meant having to be separated from them' (Discourse 22; P.G., 120, 424-5)

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 6

Teilhard de Chardin - Work of perfecting our souls contributes to redemption of the world

The masters of the spiritual life incessantly repeat that God wants only souls. To give those words their true value, we must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable, in its birth and in its growth, from the universe into which it is born. In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. But this summing-up, this welding, are not given to us ready-made and complete with the first awakening of consciousness. It is we who, through our own activity, must industriously assemble the widely scattered elements . . .

Thus every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world. For in presenting the christian [sic] doctrine of salvation, it must not be forgotten that the world, taken as a whole, that is to say in so far as it consists in a hierarchy of souls—which appear only successively, develop only collectively and will be completed only in union—the world, too, undergoes a sort of vast 'ontogenesis' (a vast becoming what it is) in which the development of each soul, assisted by the perceptible realities on which it depends, is but a diminished harmonic. Beneath our efforts to put spiritual form into our own lives, the world slowly accumulates, starting with the whole of matter, that which will make of it the Heavenly Jerusalem or the New Earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60-61

Teilhard de Chardin - Natural faculties transformed to adore God in Heaven

We hardly know in what proportions and under what guise our natural faculties will pass over into the final act of the vision of God. But it can hardly be doubted that, with God's help, it is here below that we give ourselves the eyes and the heart which a final transfiguration will make the organs of a power of adoration, and of a capacity for beatification, particular to each individual man and woman among us.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch.4 - The Bleeding Charity (God doesn't give us what we deserve)

Almost at once I was followed by what I have called the Big Man—to speak more accurately, the Big Ghost. He in his turn was followed by one of the bright people. ‘Don’t you know me?’ he shouted to the Ghost: and I found it impossible not to turn and attend. The face of the solid spirit—he was one of those that wore a robe—made me want to dance, it was so jocund, so established in its youthfulness.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ said the Ghost. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s a fair knock-out. It isn’t right, Len, you know. What about poor Jack, eh? You look pretty pleased with yourself, but what I say is, What about poor Jack?’

‘He is here,’ said the other. ‘You will meet him soon, if you stay.’

‘But you murdered him.’

‘Of course I did. It is all right now.’

‘All right, is it? All right for you, you mean. But what about the poor chap himself, laying cold and dead?’

‘But he isn’t. I have told you, you will meet him soon. He sent you his love.’

‘What I’d like to understand’, said the Ghost, ‘is what you’re here for, as pleased as Punch, you, a bloody murderer, while I’ve been walking the streets down there and living in a place like a pigstye all these years.’

‘That is a little hard to understand at first. But it is all over now. You will be pleased about it presently. Till then there is no need to bother about it.’

‘No need to bother about it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’

‘No. Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.’

‘Personally,’ said the Big Ghost with an emphasis which contradicted the ordinary meaning of the word, ‘Personally, I’d have thought you and I ought to be the other way round. That’s my personal opinion.’

‘Very likely we soon shall be,’ said the other. ‘If you’ll stop thinking about it.’

‘Look at me, now,’ said the Ghost, slapping its chest (but the slap made no noise). ‘I gone straight all my life. I don’t say I was a religious man and I don’t say I had no faults, far from it. But I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights. If I wanted a drink I paid for it and if I took my wages I done my job, see? That’s the sort I was and I don’t care who knows it.’

‘It would be much better not to go on about that now.’

‘Who’s going on? I’m not arguing. I’m just telling you the sort of chap I was, see? I’m asking for nothing but my rights. You may think you can put me down because you’re dressed up like that (which you weren’t when you worked under me) and I’m only a poor man. But I got to have my rights same as you, see?’

‘Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.’

‘That’s just what I say. I haven’t got my rights. I always done my best and I never done nothing wrong. And what I don’t see is why I should be put below a bloody murderer like you.’

‘Who knows whether you will be? Only be happy and come with me.’

‘What do you keep on arguing for? I’m only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.’

‘Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.’

‘That may do very well for you, I daresay. If they choose to let in a bloody murderer all because he makes a poor mouth at the last moment, that’s their look out. But I don’t see myself going in the same boat with you, see? Why should I? I don’t want charity. I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago and you can tell them I said so.’

The other shook his head. ‘You can never do it like that,’ he said. ‘Your feet will never grow hard enough to walk on our grass that way. You’d be tired out before we got to the mountains. And it isn’t exactly true, you know.’ Mirth danced in his eyes as he said it.

‘What isn’t true?’ asked the Ghost sulkily.

‘You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter. There is no need to go into it all now.’

‘You!’ gasped the Ghost. ‘You have the face to tell me I wasn’t a decent chap?’

‘Of course. Must I go into all that? I will tell you one thing to begin with. Murdering old Jack wasn’t the worst thing I did. That was the work of a moment and I was half mad when I did it. But I murdered you in my heart, deliberately, for years. I used to lie awake at nights thinking what I’d do to you if ever I got the chance. That is why I have been sent to you now: to ask your forgiveness and to be your servant as long as you need one, and longer if it pleases you. I was the worst. But all the men who worked under you felt the same. You made it hard for us, you know. And you made it hard for your wife too and for your children.’

‘You mind your own business, young man,’ said the Ghost. ‘None of your lip, see? Because I’m not taking any impudence from you about my private affairs.’

‘There are no private affairs,’ said the other.

‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ said the Ghost. ‘You can clear off, see? You’re not wanted. I may be only a poor man but I’m not making pals with a murderer, let alone taking lessons from him. Made it hard for you and your like, did I? If I had you back there I’d show you what work is.’

‘Come and show me now,’ said the other with laughter in his voice. ‘It will be joy going to the mountains, but there will be plenty of work.’

‘You don’t suppose I’d go with you?’

‘Don’t refuse. You will never get there alone. And I am the one who was sent to you.’

‘So that’s the trick, is it?’ shouted the Ghost, outwardly bitter, and yet I thought there was a kind of triumph in its voice. It had been entreated: it could make a refusal: and this seemed to it a kind of advantage. ‘I thought there’d be some damned nonsense. It’s all a clique, all a bloody clique. Tell them I’m not coming, see? I’d rather be damned than go along with you. I came here to get my rights, see? Not to go snivelling along on charity tied onto your apron-strings. If they’re too fine to have me without you, I’ll go home.’ It was almost happy now that it could, in a sense, threaten. ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ it repeated, ‘I’ll go home. I didn’t come here to be treated like a dog. I’ll go home. That’s what I’ll do. Damn and blast the whole pack of you . . .’ In the end, still grumbling, but whimpering also a little as it picked its way over the sharp grasses, it made off.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Ch.4

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (3)

Pere Teilhard might, again, have said with St John of the Cross, "the centre proper to each of us, the centre of the soul, is God".* His own words, indeed, are better and more accurate, "The centre of centres", and, again, "Centrum super centra". Such was for him, "at the heart of the world, the heart of a God". No doubt he was more familiar with The Book of St Angela of Foligno, which he had read before 1916, since he quotes it freely in La Vie Cosmique and refers to it again in the Milieu mystique. He was later to quote it again in the Milieu Divin, probably after re-reading it in the translation his friend Pere Paul Doncoeur† brought out in 1926. "I saw", says St Angela, "that every creature was filled with him"; and again, "I see him who is being, and I see how he is the being of all creatures." He translated this classic doctrine into his own words when he spoke of the "transparency of the universe", to the eye of faith—which is for him the "milieu divin". He placed it, of course, in its proper perspective, too, when he explained that it is impossible to set God "as a focus at the summit of the Universe without, in doing so, simultaneously impregnating with his presence even the most insignificant evolutionary movement "; it is impossible, therefore, to see in this "supreme consciousness" a "higher pole of synthesis" without at the same time asserting its "omnipresence" and "omni-action".‡ This means that the immanence of God is seen as deriving from his transcendence, and is thus the exact contrary of immanentism. 

Elsewhere Teilhard adds, "God the eternal being in himself, is everywhere, we might say, in process of formation for us". Here, every word should be weighed. One should not concentrate only on the second half of the sentence, and, above all, the words "for us" should not be overlooked. It will be noted, too, that, in the correlative assertion of a dynamic immanence, the idea of divine transcendence is in no way over-shadowed. "The majesty of the Universe" does not obscure for him "the primacy of God." While Pere Teilhard, in the hope of rousing the Christian of today from a lethargy he believes hostile to the spread and even the maintenance of his faith, urges him to "discern, below God, the values of the world, at the same time he is careful to urge the humanist of today to "discern, above the world, the place held by a God ".§ And it is with the same care to maintain the correct relation between immanence and transcendence that he speaks of Christ: "The risen Christ of the Gospel can never hold, in the consciousness of the faithful, his primacy over the created world that, by definition, he is to consummate, except by incorporating in himself the evolution that some people seek to oppose to him."

Here his teaching echoes his prayer: "Lord, grant that I may see, that I may see You, that I may see and feel You present in all things and animating all things." "If so many souls have been touched by his message", writes Jean Lacroix, "it is perhaps primarily because he knew how again to make of the universe a Temple."||

If man, as Teilhard understands him, is to fulfil his destiny, he must add the voice of his consciousness and, throughout all his activity, of his freely given homage, to the hymn that rises up to God from all creation. That is why we may speak of "Pere Teilhard's cosmic liturgy": and why, too, The Hymn of the Universe was a happy choice of title for a miscellany of prayers and meditations selected from his writings.¶

* The Living Flame, I, 3. 

† La Vie Cosmique, p. 57; "God is everywhere, God is everywhere (St Angela of Foligno)." Le Milieu Divin, p. 116; "The Creator and, more specifically, the Redeemer have steeped themselves in all things and penetrated all things to such a degree that, as St Angela of Foligno said, 'The world is full of God'." Cf. The Making of a Mind, p. 130. 

‡ L'Atomisme de l'Esprit (1941); Oeuvres, VII, p. 61. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, De ascensions mentis in Deum, gradus 2: "Were another world to be created, God would fill that, too; and if there were to be more worlds, or even an infinite number of worlds, God would fill them all. . . . with his omnipotence and wisdom, he is present everywhere" (Montpellier ed. 1823, pp. 40-1). 

§ Quelques reflexions sur la conversion du monde (1936), p.2. L'Energie humaine (1937); "... above creation ..." (VI, p. 10). In 1952, a San Francisco newspaper printed a report from a French newsagency [sic] to the effect that "the God of Pere Teilhard was becoming a God immanent in the evolution of the world". On 3 Aug., Teilhard wrote from New York to Pere Andre Ravier, "What annoys me in this business is the offhanded way it makes me jettison a divine 'transcendence' that I have, on the contrary, spent all my life in defending—though seeking at the same time, it is true (like everyone, but by using the new properties of a universe in process of cosmogenesis) to reconcile it with an immanence which everyone agrees must be given a progressively more important and more explicit place in our philosophy and religion." 

|| Le Sens de l'atheisme modern (1958), p. 28. Cf. letter of 7 Aug. 1923: "With himself, Man brings back to God the lower beings of the world. Sin consists in falling back among them;—virtue in carrying them along with him." 

¶ Some hasty readers have referred to this as "Hymn to the Universe", a mistake that points to a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard's thought. I have also seen it called "Hymns to the Universe". A similar mis-reading is referred to later (pp. 95,188). 

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 26-28  

The penultimate paragraph and its accompanying footnote remind of something Bishop Barron has said about God's intention that humanity have a priestly role in offering the natural world to Him as sacrifice. I'll try to find the video where he talked abut that and reference it here.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (2)

Pere Teilhard de Chardin lived, with great intensity, this prime truth, constantly recalled in Scripture and Christian tradition, by the Fathers of the Church and the great scholastic theologians, no less than by the mystics. With all these, he held that God is both "further than everything and deeper than everything". His master St Ignatius Loyola, in particular, had taught him to "contemplate God as existing in every one of his creatures. He 'venerated an omni-presence', resting on and losing itself in the peace a deep intimate union." St Teresa would have been delighted to meet him on her road, to save her from the "half-baked doctors, always so ready to take exception" who would not leave her in peace, as she entered into her mystical life, to believe that God is present in all beings; Teilhard could have set her mind at rest by assuring her that God's intimate presence is not an impossibility but a solid fact. He could have told her, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas, that "God must be present in all things, and that in an intimate manner". Here, again, is what a Thomist theologian has to say, whose only concern is to state the most fully traditional teaching: 

Many of the objections and difficulties we meet in connection with our relationship to God, arise from our considering God as a stranger, as someone other than ourselves. This, to put it plainly, is simply untrue. Our habitual concepts tell us only about personalities exterior to and therefore foreign or strange to our own. When we are concerned with God, we must realize that we are concerned with a being who is certainly distinct from us, but who is at the same time the reason for our own being. ... If I take myself, suppressing all my imperfections and magnifying to infinity my own poor perfections, even those most personal and peculiar to myself, the most incommunicable, then I have God. That is why theologians can say, "God is not another, he is virtually and eminently myself, he is an infinite myself, pure act." Deus est virtualiter ego ipso, as John of St Thomas puts it. It is thus that, while completely rejecting pantheism, we retain anything legitimate that may be contained in its tendencies."*

If this is indeed bold doctrine, which of the two writers expresses it the more boldly? However, St Thomas, too, was already accused of pantheism,† and for this same reason. Some contemporary critics of Teilhard's thought accuse him of a "deception", on the ground that beneath his repeated affirmations of the personality of God there lies an "unacknowledged pantheism"; without realizing it, they are continuing to bring forward last century's accusation against scholasticism in general and St Thomas in particular of an "implicit pantheism", the reason behind which was an inability to envisage any true personal monotheism except in the position of a God who is "cut off from the world". The only difference is that the earlier critics did not put forward their objection in the name of orthodox Catholicism; they maintained, on the contrary, that such a "cosmic pantheism", the fruit of all "metaphysical theology", was "essential to consistent Catholicism".‡ Their unconscious disciples might well bear that in mind. 

* Pierre-Thomas Dehau, O.P., Divine intimite et Oraison, in La Vie Spirituelle, May 1942, pp. 412-13. Sec also J. J. Surin, Guide Spirituelle (ed. M. de Certeau, 1963), pp. 138-9. 

† The half-truth that explains, though it does not justify, this accusation has been pointed out by M. Etienne Gilson (La Philosophie au moyen age, 1922, II, p. 144; 1925 and 1930, p. 302): "In Thomism itself there is a sort of virtual pantheism that a mere relaxation of strict doctrine would allow to come out into the open but that would thence cease to be Thomism. On the other hand in Eckhart, we find, if not a deliberate, avowed, pantheism, at any rate what is in fact, though disavowed and denied, pantheism". (In the 1944 edition, pp. 698-9, this view is less forcibly expressed). 

‡ Charles Renouvier, De l'idee de Dieu (L'annee philosophique, 1897, pp. 3-15); Philosophie analytique de l'histoire, vol. 3 passim; Histoire et solution des problemes metaphysiqus, p. 166; Correspondance avec Charles Secretan, p. 11. Cf. Marcel Mery, La critique du Christianisme chez Renouvier (1952), I, pp. 308, 361, 399; II, pp. 218, 226-8, 380, 405. 

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 24-26 

I had no idea that there was an historical Catholic/Protestant controversy connected to this, although it makes sense if the Incarnation is at the foundation of the Catholic (in this this case Thomistic) position. I included that last convoluted footnote so I could follow up and see if I can find any of the documents related to that discussion.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (1)

We know that in his formulation of the Christian faith Pere Teilhard, seeking for greater fidelity to the thought, the tactical sense, and the very words of St Paul, would have liked to win acceptance for the expression "Christian pantheism",* as opposed to all the "false pantheisms", whether new or old, Eastern or Western, crude or subtle. Sometimes he risked using the words, explaining them, however, in a way that made any wrong interpretation impossible. Occasionally one feels that it went against the grain to have to refrain from doing so. There are other passages in which he simply contrasts the Christian or the "guest of the divine milieu" with pantheist. In any case, quite apart from the actual terminology, there can be no doubt that of all contemporary thinkers it was Teilhard who was the most outspoken opponent of pantheistic concepts of Godhead. He vigorously rejected every type of "pantheist bliss". In every doctrine, whatever might be said for it in other respects, that describes the "final state" as "a faceless organism, a diffuse humanity,—an Impersonal" he denounced its "betrayal of the Spirit". On one occasion he spoke of the "triumphant joy", retained even in his "worst hours", that he drew from his faith in the transcendence of God. At the same time he held that "we must love the World greatly if we are to feel a passionate desire to leave the World behind"... He knew also that "the false trails of pantheism bear witness to our immense need for some revealing word to come from the mouth of Him who is"... He sought, too, to do more than reject or refute pantheism: by establishing the "differentiating and communicating action of love",† he neutralized its temptation.

What perhaps introduces some confusion into this subject is that too many people in our modern West, even including some who are extremely firm in their faith and heedful of the spiritual life, are apt to forget the divine Presence and the divine Action in all things—even indeed at the natural level. It is here that a superficial cult of the spiritual has done a great deal of damage. Just as many, when they have to consider their final end, can only oscillate "between the concept of an individual survival that leaves beings isolated from one another, and a reflection that absorbs them into the one", so the divine transcendence is too often conceived, or rather imagined as itself, too, being purely exteriorized. As Pere Abel Jeanniere has said, "Among many who are opposed to the thought of Teilhard we find an underlying mental attitude which allows no possibility of distinction except in separation and mutual exteriority." It was of these people that the author of the Milieu Divin was thinking when he said: "Of those who hear me, more than one will shake his head and accuse me of worshipping Nature." In fact, "however absolute the distinction between God and the world (since everything in the world—and the world itself—exists, even at this present moment, only by divine creation), God is present in the world and nothing is more present in it than the God who creates it: for 'it is in him that we live, and move, and have our being'". Deus non creavit, et abiit (St Augustine.) 

* Cf. Mgr. Lucien Cerfaux, Le Chretien dans la Thiologie pauhnienne (1962), p. 212, on 1 Cor. Is. 28: "The ancient Stoic formulas, pantheist in tone, the identity of the one with the whole, God all in all, are Christianized. Personal monotheism asserts itself. ..." Or again, Edgar Haulottc, S. J., L'Lsprit de Yahme dans l'Antsen Testament (in the symposium L'Ilomme ileums Dieu, 1964, I, p. 28) on Acts t 8.24-9: Paul "puts the language of the Bible into words that can be understood by the Epicureans and Stoics to whom he is speaking. ... He relieves 'the whole', 'the one', 'the origin', 'life', 'breath', from the implication they have in Stoic thought with impersonal cosmic forces; instead, he brings these realities into the same circuit, so to speak, as the personal creative force of God." 

† One cannot help seeing here a kinship of thought with Maurice Blondel. In the same year as Pere Teilhard was writing Le Christ dans le Matiere, Blondel was writing to Pere Auguste Valensin: "I can no longer remember very well the arguments you remind me of in connection with the Catholic antidote (through the Eucharist) for the terrible evil of pantheism. I was trying, no doubt, to show the strength of that pernicious doctrine, precisely because of the profound sense it shows of the problem of in some way getting the finite and the infinite to cohere and live together. And it is to escape both a baneful immanentism and a frigid, unintelligible, incommensurable, transcendentalism that one can find (as a Catholic, not spontaneously as a philosopher) an illuminating sweetness in the Verbum Caro, which affirms the distinct absolute reality both of God and of the creature, and their most intimate union" (5 April 1916). Earlier, on 30 Oct. 1915, Blondel wrote: "It is the first and last temptation of all who refuse to receive the word of God."

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 21-23

I'm reading Lubac's book alongside The Divine Milieu to help myself process the harder bits of Teilhard as I go. The very sound of the phrase "Christian pantheism" is shocking, if not actually scandalous, but I find the concept as described by Lubac and Teilhard both uplifting and edifying. The incorporation of the Incarnation into the argument by Blondel in the second footnote is key, I think, since the whole thing must hang on that.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

O'Brien - The greatest in the Kingdom is "the smallest"

In Michael O'Brien's novel The Father's Tale (chapter 41), the protagonist Alex is imprisoned in China. Two of his interrogators, Dr. Xia and his young translator Pin, reveal themselves to him as secret Christians:

“Alexander,” said Pin in a whisper, “we are Christians.”

“If you are Christians,” Alex said, with a certain hostility, “what are you doing in this devilish institution?”

Xia answered. “We will not remain here long." . . .

“I am a recent convert. For several months I have been a Gospel disciple—Protestant, you say—and Pin is Tsen-tu-tong—Catholic.” . . . 

“I am a [Party] member in name but no longer in spirit. I am a political officer at my faculty in the university. But soon I will . . . retire. For reasons of health. Then I will become an evangelizer.”

“Dr. Xia has risked everything”, Pin said. “There are more and more like him. But the harvest is greatly in need of harvesters. He is learning wisdom swiftly.”

“Before I leave the work of the devil, I will undermine it”, Xia declared with quiet intensity. Pin lowered her eyes.

Seeing this, sadness filled Xia’s eyes. “Pin does not agree with me. She has asked me to leave immediately this work. But there are things to be finished, good work, setting captives free. Is this not in the Gospel, Pin?”

“Yes, but in another sense. We cannot work for the devil even for good purposes.”

“I am leaving soon. Give me time, my mother.”

This was an incongruous utterance, for Xia was in his sixties and Pin in her midtwenties.

“Why are you here, Pin, if it’s the devil’s work?” Alex asked.

Xia answered for her. “In the eyes of the state, she is nothing more than a worker. Her peasant background and lack of connections to the Party make it difficult for her to study. Yet she is a genius of languages, Mr. Graham. She has no academic future, and so I hire her as my translator from time to time, usually for ordinary work at the university. She is here with me because Cui thinks she is one of us. He does not suspect me. “In a free country, she would be a professor. Now she works in a factory to earn her living, and at night she moves about the city and countryside tending the flock of the Lord.”

“Doctor,” Pin interjected, “you need not speak of my situation.”

Ignoring her, Xia went on. “She has been responsible for the conversion of hundreds, including me, including other Party members. The Holy Spirit works through her, swift, far, deep. She prays with everyone who is willing to pray, Catholic and Protestant, upstairs and downstairs. She is mother to many, though, as you see, very young.” . . .

“Alexander,” said Pin, leaning forward earnestly, speaking in a low voice, “do not lose the grace that was given to you. It is difficult to trust. We know how difficult it is. You must pray again, and let our Lord show you the truth.”

There was a quality, an authority, in her words that could have come from nowhere else but the realm of Christ. Alex regretted his suspicion and bowed his head.

“I’m sorry”, he said. “You’re risking a lot, aren’t you? You’re doing it for me.”

“And for the flock of the Lord”, said Xia. . . . 

“Your brothers and sisters in China, they know of you”, Pin said. “Many are pleading with heaven for you.”

“Why for me? I’m not important. Not in any way.”

“You are a brother”, said Pin. “That is important enough. Does not Saint Thomas Aquinas teach that one human soul, any human soul, is worth more than the entire value of the material universe?” . . . 

“One thing is certain: for you, all paths lead to the cross. I am sorry. I do not want to tell you this. . .”

Her eyes strained with pain, Pin said, “It is better to be prepared, Alexander, than to cling to false hopes. Still, we must hope and pray.”

Shaken, Alex whispered, “You’re right. It’s better to know.” . . . 

Pin plucked some dry stems of pond flowers and braided them. When Alex looked up at her, she reached for his hand, timidly at first, because the gesture was entirely alien to her culture. She looked into his eyes with compassion and encouragement. Her face was so pure, he could hardly bear it. He glanced down at his own hands, which seemed to him naked, scarred, dirty. Sinner’s hands.

“A gift for you”, she said.

Overwhelmed, he could not speak.

“Will you open your hand, Alexander?” she said.

He opened his right hand but quickly clenched and withdrew it.

“It is for you to decide”, she said gently. “You are free to open or not to open.” He opened his hand.

She cupped his hand in hers. Hers were warm, flawless ivory, a small temple.

“Who are you?” he said, unable to look at her.

“I am the smallest”, she answered.

She placed into his hand a tiny fish woven from strips of dry weed.

Boylan (2) - All united with Jesus at the Cross; He knew and died for each individual sin of our lives

[At the Cross] we were one with him. There he saw every single one of us and every single event in our lives. There he knew, in particular, every single sin of our lives, and made atonement for it, so that there is no sin which cannot be forgiven. This point is of capital importance. We can never exhaust the treasury of our Lord’s satisfaction, nor come to the end of his mercy. It is not merely that he made a general provision for what might happen; he actually satisfied for every single sin we commit. There is a deep mystery involved here. In some way, at least, by his knowledge, we were present and united to him on Calvary, in his death and in his resurrection . . . Perhaps we may glimpse the full reality, if we take literally Saint Paul’s reference to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.

Dom M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. - from The Mystical Body: The Foundation of the Spiritual Life [quoted in Magnificat, April 2021]

Part 1 | Part 2

Boylan (1) - Sacraments unite us to every point in Jesus's life, especially Crucifixion

This moment [the Crucifixion] is the center of all history; it is the focus and the center of all Christian life. In a sense, it stands in juxtaposition with every moment of history, and with every event of each man’s life. One remembers how some maps of the world are drawn in Mercator’s projection so that the North Pole, expanded into a line, is due north of every point on the surface of the globe. The sacramental system has something of this power of extending its pole or center; it “extends” Christ, and also Christ’s sacrifice, so that he is in contact with every point of space and time . . . 

One can take any single moment or event in one’s own life and place it in vital contact with any single moment or event in the human life of Christ. And every single event of Christ’s life on earth must be considered as taking place in vital contact with each and every event in the lives of each and every member of his Mystical Body . . .

Dom M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. - from The Mystical Body: The Foundation of the Spiritual Life [quoted in Magnificat, April 2021]

Part 1 | Part 2

Balthasar - Jesus as humble human being, not "hero" or "demigod"

This new reality rests on the incomparable claim of the man Jesus of Nazareth to be able to speak and act with the authority of the God of Israel and the Creator of the world, the claim to be the conclusively valid Word of God to Israel and the whole world, as a human being and not as a hero or demigod as the pagan religions imagined them. This unsurpassable claim, which also demands an unconditional “following”, is presented with incomparable humility, naturalness and closeness to the poor and despised and also always as a fulfillment and yet unexpected surpassing of Old Testament prophecy.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen (1980) - in chapter titled The Incomparable

This is a small point, but one that never occurred to me specifically, although it certainly should have at some point in my getting a bachelor's degree in Classics. Experts in mythology often point to the parallels between Jesus and the heroes of various mythological systems (e.g. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but miss the huge divergence—that is, Jesus's humility. In His humanity, he is presented as merely human, with all the weaknesses that entails. In addition, He insists on identifying with the lowest and weakest among us—the poor, the sick, criminals, the possessed. Then in contrast to this, we have His miracles and claims to divinity. The two together place him both below and above any mythological hero—humanly lower but divinely infinitely higher. He is truly Man and truly God, not a third thing that somewhere between the two. This is the paradox of the Incarnation, and it has no parallel anywhere in mythology. It is, as C.S. Lewis says, the True Myth.

St Charles Borromeo - Jesus prepares a place for us

By his Ascension he has prepared for us a place as he had promised, and has entered as our head, in the name of us all, into the possession of the glory of heaven. Ascending into heaven, he threw open its gates, which had been closed by the sin of Adam; and, as he foretold to his disciples at his Last Supper, secured to us a way by which we may arrive at eternal happiness. In order to give an open proof of this by its fulfillment, he introduced with himself into the mansions of eternal bliss the souls of the just whom he had liberated.

Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566 - overseen by St Charles Borromeo) p.60

I love this description of the Ascension because it includes us as well as Jesus. He enters Heaven, not alone or for His own sake, but "as our head" and "in our name", bringing with Him our forebears in faith and ensconcing them in their new heavenly homes to show us what lies in store for those who follow.

Danielou - Three ways that Jesus is the answer to Job

Jesus is the immediate answer to Job because he shares his suffering and is the only one to do so. Suffering encloses a man in solitude, puts him outside communion with his fellow men. Between Job and his friends an abyss was cleft. They regarded him with astonishment as a strange being, as the sudden appearance of the unprecedented in the midst of the very ordinary, as one marked with a sacred sign. But they could no longer get to him. Only Jesus could cross this abyss . . .  And it is only because he has first shared the suffering of everyone who suffers that in him and by him every man who suffers can find communion with other men.

Jesus is furthermore the answer to Job because he gives a meaning to suffering. Not that he explains it, for it does not come within the sphere of explanation. But he puts it into the world of the supernatural. Suffering is the means whereby the righteous man may be reunited with the sinner. It exists in a sinful universe. But the suffering of the righteous shatters the logic of suffering and sin. It allows suffering to exist where sin does not exist; and because it is bound up with sin, by this very fact it allows the righteous man to take the load of sin upon himself and so to destroy sin. It allows the righteous man to enter into communion with sinners. Thus Jesus unveils the hidden meaning of Job's suffering, a suffering which remained a mystery to Job himself. 

Finally, Jesus is the answer to Job because he does away with his suffering. Suffering cannot be accepted any more than it can be explained. If love can cause someone to take suffering upon himself, it is the love therein alone that is lovable and its final purpose is to do away with suffering. The book of Job is in the end a book of hope . . . Jesus took suffering upon himself in order to do away with suffering. More still, he descended into the lower region to reach the very root of evil, so that those who had been grafted thereon might be freed from evil. Thus the Resurrection of Christ is the supreme answer to the heart-rending cry of Job. 

Jean Danielou, from A Word in Season, Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours, VII Ordinary Time Year II (Weeks 1-17)

This is a great high-level view of the Christian understanding of suffering. The second point, that Jesus gives meaning to our suffering, is probably the least understood. We tend to think of this as helping us understand our suffering, in order to feel better about it. But the deeper truth here is that Jesus gives efficacy to our suffering. Danielou's argument is that since Jesus's suffering on the Cross was the actual means by which the sin of humanity was cleansed, and since we can unite our suffering to His, our suffering can actually be used by God in the work of redemption. Our suffering does not have "meaning" only in the sense of being able to be understood in some way, but also in the sense of having purpose—in fact, having the power to do good for our own soul, the souls of others, and the world.

Von Speyr - Jesus desires salvation of all (also includes her interpretation of "the elect")

When Paul speaks of the elect he means definite individuals. He sees before his eyes the image of the disciples who followed the Lord: they are types and models, the central light falls on them. That this light falls from them on to others, is brought by them to others, is a new truth not excluded but included in the first. At first Peter is intended, or John, and not Zebedee, though he stands near the circle of light. The number itself is the Son’s secret. It could be that the Father means “many” and that, to speak in a human way, he allows himself to be surprised by the work of the Son who demands “all”. Little Thérèse “chose all” when she was offered a basketful of things to choose from. She chose not only what was beautiful but also the unattractive. Thérèse is only imitating what is the deepest in the attitude of the Son of Man: he was the first “to choose all”, even the last human being in the basket of creation, perhaps unrecognizable because of sin, but beautiful because the Father created him.

Adrienne von Speyr - Unpublished, quoted in preface to The Victory of Love

The second half of this is a wonderful description of Jesus's desire that all be saved (1 Tim 2:4), with an interesting trinitarian angle. As for the first half, I'll be interested to see whether von Speyr develops this thinking about election later in the book or perhaps elsewhere in her writings.

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch.12 - Least on earth, greatest in heaven (reminds me of Mum)

This is one of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. It reminds me so much of Mum, and it encapsulates the contrast between earthly and heavenly greatness.

All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light; and on earth I knew nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the reflected lights cast upward by moving water. A few moments later I realised my mistake. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers—soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A 
robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer’s features as a lip or an eye.

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

‘Is it? . . . is it?’ I whispered to my guide.

‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’

‘She seems to be . . . well, a person of particular importance?’

‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

‘And who are these gigantic people . . . look! They’re like emeralds . . . who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’

‘Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.’

‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son—even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. [99]Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’

‘And how . . . but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat—two cats—dozens of cats. And all those dogs . . . why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

‘They are her beasts.’

‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’

‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

I looked at my Teacher in amazement.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.’