Humble service

Last week, Fr. Philip Powell, OP, wrote a good post on discerning whether your service to others is sacrificial in the Christian sense. He proposes asking these three quesitons:

1). Why am I doing this work?

2). Is this work good?

3). Am I perfecting my gifts?

The post was in response to the many women who have asked him how they could tell whether they were being good Christians in giving of themselves or merely "being a doormat."

Ever helpful, I left a comment referring to Bl. Henry Suso's embrace of a doormat as metaphor for his own spirituality of service. You can be both a good Christian servant and a doormat!

Or, well, maybe you can. At any rate, Bl. Henry could. As a religious mendicant, he was free to think nothing of himself to a degree we'd probably consider irresponsible of someone living in the world. And, as a personally holy man, he wasn't likely to do the wrong thing very often (which isn't to say he was prudent in worldly terms).

Maybe the distinction is between not wanting to be taken advantage of and not wanting to be taken for granted. Being taken advantage of is bad because it implies there are other things you could be doing that will use your time and effort to better advantage. This is the problem Fr. Philip addresses in his post.

Being taken for granted, though, is the expected consequence of being a servant:

"When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.'"

Of course, it's not good to take someone else for granted, but correcting that fault in another may not always belong to the one being taken for granted.

Fr. Philip had incidentally mentioned that it is always women who ask about whether they're being taken advantage of. My guess at an explanation, in thirty words or less, is that the greater fear for a woman is to refuse to help when she should, while the greater fear for a man is to be taken advantage of.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A mite hard to see

Today's Gospel is the story of the Widow's Mite, in which Jesus says:

"I tell you truly, this poor widow put in more than all the rest; for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood."

What can be missed, just going by the Lectionary, is that both Luke and Mark put this story immediately after Jesus gives this warning to His disciples:

"Be on guard against the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and love greetings in marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation."

I usually think of this story as a straightforward (if difficult) lesson in heroic virtue. But Jesus doesn't call attention to the widow merely to point out her faith, hope, and love; He points out her virtue in comparison with the virtue shown by "all the rest."

There is a lesson here in the hiddenness of the ways of God. Sure, if we noticed what the widow was doing, we would recognize her virtue. For the most part, though, we don't recognize such things. What is there in her appearance or actions that would draw our attention to her?

What we notice are long robes and seats of honor; if we didn't, then the scribes of our day wouldn't care about them. We may take such things at face value, thinking that whoever sits in a place of honor must be honorable. We may be cynical about such things, cynicism being the besetting virtue of the adolescent.

Odds are, though, we won't be seeing things as God sees them. Maybe this scribe isn't far from the Kingdom of God; maybe this widow is a miser. Even when they saw the same thing, the disciples needed Jesus to interpret it for them.

In addition to the good example of the widow herself, then, we might gain from this very brief story a little humility regarding our own understanding and judgment of the events and people around us.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A short story

Today's Gospel reading is the story of Zacchaeus, the wealthy chief tax collector. Which means it's also the story of the crowd around Zacchaeus.

The best that can be said about the crowd around Zacchaeus is that, unlike the crowd around the blind man, they didn't tell him to get down from the sycamore and stop trying to see Jesus.

What they did, after Jesus invited Himself to Zacchaeus's home and Zacchaeus quickly received Him with joy, was this:

...they began to grumble, saying, "He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner."

Such grumbling in the Gospels is usually understood as a knock against Jesus' own morals.

Note, though, that it also implies Jesus has not gone to stay at the house of any of the grumblers. They, after all, came out to see Jesus, too, and they weren't (we may presume) infamous for their crimes against Israel.

So their grumbling may not be purely idle scandal at the actions of a purported prophet. They're good people; why can't they be graced with the prophet's presence? Or, if not them, then why not someone even better than they?

Jesus has an answer, though I'm not sure how satisfying it was to those who heard it: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost."

To those in the crowd who would be His disciples, the message was clear: You, too, have to seek and save what was lost. You have to go to the descendants of Abraham I won't get to, and tell them that salvation has come to their house today. Don't keep Me in your houses for us to admire each other. Bring My word out to the people who haven't already heard it.

The grumbling of Zacchaeus's neighbors is similar to the grumbling of the Prodigal Son's brother. All that God has is theirs, if they but knew it, and that includes His joy in Zacchaeus's return to life.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Don't know much about art

Kathy Shaidle defines "social justice" as "the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems."

There's some truth to that; any fool can claim they're "working for social justice," and many of them do.

This is a shame, as I've said before. It keeps good Christians from learning about and supporting workable solutions to real problems of social justice.

I was reminded of this when I came across this prayer service proposed by some Dominican Sisters for use (inter alia) in celebrating the Feast of St. Martin de Porres, Patron of Social Justice.

To me, it reads more like a fundraising letter for a pacifist political action committee than a prayer service, but what really stood out for me was the interpretation of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Mother and Father, who art in heaven...

I guess this has been going on for as long as people have been daft enough to think calling God the Father "Mother and Father" is a good idea, but I just noticed it now:

Is there a less happy conjunction than the neologism of "Mother and Father" with the archaism of "art" (with, no doubt, all the "thy"s that follow)?

If you're going to rewrite a prayer to make it sound like 1989, why would you keep the parts that make it sound like... well, every other year since Modern English emerged?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Happy St. Martin Day!

Today is the Feast of St. Martin de Porres, a Peruvian lay friar of the Order of Preachers and patron saint of, among other things, social justice and barbers.

His patronage of barbers follows from his time as a barber. His patronage of social justice follows from his personal experiences; his mother was a former slave, his father a Spanish nobleman who ignobly abandoned her and their two young children, and within his Dominican convent he also experienced class- and race-based bigotry.

St. Martin is also the patron saint of the Southern U.S. Dominican Province, which runs the St. Martin de Porres Shrine & Institute in Memphis.

St. Martin himself, from what I've been told, wasn't particularly occupied with issues of social justice as such. The virtue that consumed his life was charity. He sought out lowly positions from which he could serve others in love, and spent thirty-five years as infirmarian, caring for (and often miraculously healing) the sick of his convent and his city.

One story is told of a time when an epidemic was raging through Lima. Brother Martin brought those he met who were sick to the convent, until his prior ordered him to stop, lest all the friars in the place get sick. When he then found a man on the street bleeding from a knife wound, though, Br. Martin brought him to his own room to treat him. The prior scolded him for disobeying his order, and Br. Martin apologized, saying, "I did not know the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity."

The prior then commanded him to do as he saw fit in caring for those he met.

Link | John da Fiesole
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At the present time

A sacrament unites the present moment, the moment in which the sacrament is celebrated, with the moment of Christ's death on the cross. (And also with eternity, with the Day that has no evening.)

This union is a for real and true thing, not merely symbolic or suggestive. If I say a sacrament causes time to fold on itself, bringing those moments into direct contact with each other, my language is metaphorical but the meaning is not. It really happens.

(This, by the way, is what makes the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass a re-presentation of Jesus' sacrifice on Calvary, not a repetition.)

From this, it seems to follow that Jesus, Who after all instituted the Sacraments, intended His death to be made present -- really, truly present -- to nearly every future moment. And I'm using the word "moment," not "instant," because the sacraments (and, of course, the sacrifice from which they arise) are human events, not scientific events. On a human scale, a weekly celebration of the Lord's Supper is close enough to "every moment" for my purposes here.

What that means -- that from eternity Christ desired to be present in His suffering and death at every moment of our own lives -- could be contemplated for a lifetime.

As the Month of the Rosary winds down, though, I'll just point out that Jesus' mother was present at the moment on Calvary that is made present in the celebration of every sacrament.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Rarely affirm

But, when necessary, affirm.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Amnesty

Alls I know about Catholic-Anglican relations is what I read in the blogs. I don't have any personal insight or opinion about the import or wisdom of setting up Personal Ordinariates, whatever those might be.

I do, though, have an opinion about the sort of reaction to yesterday's news exemplified in this comment by Michael Sean Winters:

But, I worry, too, that some of these newcomers will also be nostalgists, anti-feminists, and anti-gay bigots.

Some have suggested this translates to worrying that some of these newcomers will profess Catholic doctrine. But even granting that some Anglicans may join the Catholic Church out of sheer cussedness, I say:

So what?

I joined the Catholic Church out of sheer helplessness. When I was baptized as an infant, I not only lacked a good reason to become Catholic, I lacked any reason; I flat lacked reason altogether.

A Church that practices infant baptism is not a Church with demanding membership requirements.

I get, of course, that someone who has reached the age of reason ought to join the Catholic Church if, and only if, he believes the whole of the Catholic Faith. By the same token, though, parent ought to have their children baptized if, and only if, they believe the whole of the Catholic Faith, and I've heard no one grumble about the children of nostalgists, anti-feminists, and anti-gay bigots joining the Church.

Full communion with Christ's Church is a big deal. Too big, I'd say, for us to screw with it much. Let the Church welcome those who demonstrate the wish to be a part of her, and leave the personal judging to God.

To put it crudely, you either let in all heretics who ask sincerely, or none. Turning up your nose at only certain heresies is mere bigotry.

Link | John da Fiesole
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