–•–•–•–

“[T]he cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.

–•–•–•–

–•–•–•–

Thomas Merton: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

Image: Ambrose; possible contemporary mosaic portrait from the Sant’ Ambrogio, Milan 

–•–•–•–

“The American Franciscan psychologist, Benedict Groeschel, believes that many people have a strong primary attraction to one or another of the transcendentals, and that this can be discerned in the lives of the Saints. For example, he suggests that for Aquinas truth was his primary transcendental, for St. Francis of Assisi it was goodness, and for St. Augustine it was beauty. After Augustine’s prayer ‘O God, make me chaste and celibate, but not yet’, the phrase for which he is most famous is the lament: ‘Late have I loved thee, O beauty, so ancient, so new’. Ratzinger’s [later, Pope Benedict XVI’s] focus on the transcendental of beauty is part of his Augustinian heritage and also one of the many points of convergence with Hans Urs Von Balthasar and John Henry Newman.” [1]

Surely this shared kinship with Augustine as a “lover of beauty” (philokales) casts light on my love for the writing of Pope Emeritus Benedict, who made as a theme of his pontificate the restoration of the beauty of the liturgy, and whose desert island book (after the Bible) was Augustine’s Confessions. And it may help explain my connection with Thomas Merton in my recent reading of his The Seven Storey Mountain, a book which may well be the Confessions of the 20th century.

The expanded excerpt, from Augustine:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness…You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Plato believed that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful were the three great transcendentals, and 20th century Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar nuanced this trinitarian view with the idea that Beauty ”forms a halo, an untouchable crown around the double constellation of the true and the good…” I’m beginning to suspect that the three transcendentals are rather like the virtues—begin with a deep and heartfelt search for one, and we will eventually come upon the rest.

—Philokales

–•–•–•–

[1] Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), p. 8.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Saint Augustine in His Study (1480)

Chiesa di Ognissanti, Florence, Italy

–•–•–•–

We often speak of our deepest and most committed loves as being our greatest “passions”. Given that our word “passion” comes from the Latin passio (“suffering”), the correlation between love and suffering made explicit in the excerpt below is not only philosophically, but also etymologically, sound.

“Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way that the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.”

“When we know that the way of love—this exodus, this going out of oneself—is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.

Love itself is a passion, something we endure. In love [we] experience first a happiness…

Yet on the other hand, I am taken out of my comfortable tranquility and have to let myself be reshaped. If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand it is so important to learn how to suffer—and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection and no longer with any inner acceptance or progress toward maturity.”

–•–•–•–

Excerpt from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict): God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald (Ignatius Press, 2002)

Image: Giacinto Brandi “The Agony in the Garden” (1650)

–•–•–•–

Whenever I hear applause break out at mass (as I did multiple times, unfortunately, as a guest in certain parish during the Easter Vigil last night) I think of two excerpts in particular from two different writers.

In his Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes,

“Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attractiveness fades quickly — it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation. I myself have experienced the replacing of the penitential rite by a dance performance, which, needless to say, received a round of applause. Could there be anything farther removed from true penitence? Liturgy can only attract people when it looks, not at itself, but at God, when it allows him to enter and act. Then something truly unique happens, beyond competition, and people have a sense that more has taken place than a recreational activity.”

The Ochlophobist writes:

“C.S. Lewis said that in heaven there will only be two things: silence and music, and that it would do us good to be practiced in both. Part of what binds the relationship between Orthodox music and Paradise is the interplay between music and silence one finds in the experience of it. Relationships require spaces. In Liturgy there is the cadence of near constant movement and near constant pausedness, acting simultaneously. While God moves towards me and I learn to move toward Him, there is at the same time the reflection, or the pronounced intuition, upon the space between us. Space that does not separate, but which unites. Sacred, personed, full space.”

The Ochlophobist goes on to affirm Ratzinger’s assertion that if we hear applause during a Liturgy, it shows the Liturgy has become a human performance, rather than something truly sacred and set apart.

“As much as I love Baroque music, Baroque masses are a performance which, especially when performed today, seem to convey more of a dedication to a cause (the “cause” of good music, fine taste, appropriate respect with regard to God, etc.) than a relationship between loving persons. Modernist liturgies are performances as well, whether it be of the minimalist pomo sort or simply some kind of tease at Jay Leno shelling out wine and bread…All of these performances are intended to flatter audiences in order to get them to assent to mere forms of ideas. There can be no actual communion, and no making of sacred spaces and things at a performance. Nothing is really blessed in such a context. The highest, at least most fitting, expression of gratitude at a performance is that of applause (whether or not it actually happens), the noise of the masses. Who applauds one’s spouse after sex, or after having given birth to a child, or after dying? I would posit only a madman, or one given to some disordering spirit. Of course the three things I list are not properly performances either, they are the giving, the handing over, of a person. So is the Liturgy. And its form involves times of touch and lack of touch, times of movement and times of complete stillness, times of sound and times of silence, words and the spaces between them. This music and silence, movement and stillness, is the icon of how it is persons actually love one another.”

Who applauds after the birth of a child, or at one’s spouse after sex, or at the moment of death, indeed? If God is present among us more intimately and profoundly than His appearance to the patriarchs of old, bringing us rebirth in the Sacrament of Baptism, offering Himself as the Bread of Life in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and granting forgiveness of sins through the Sacrament of Confession—and through all the Liturgy and the sacraments, bringing us to a holy death of ourselves into His cross and His Person, and granting us a promised share in his resurrection—surely some other response is called for than the mere shattering percussion of human commendation. A starving beggar doesn’t applaud when receiving an undeserved meal—he humbly bows. 

–•–•–•–

Painting: Michelangelo da Caravaggio, “Supper at Emmaus” (1601-02)

–•–•–•–

–•–•–•–

April is the cruelest Month, wrote T.S. Eliot. But had he lived in the southern half of the United States, perhaps he would have rather chosen March for the shame of such a distinction.

It was an unseasonably warm day early in the third month of this year, and I was sitting out in a bright Texas afternoon reading a book, in front of a venue where I was to play a show that night. The sky was a clear blue, the sun radiant, and a dry wind caught and rustled the brown leaves still clinging to the oaks—those stodgy Quercus which refuse (in the southern parts of the United States, at least) to let go of last year’s expired currency until a stack of new green paper is placed in their hands. The wind was waving the branches of the Bradford pear trees—their crowns just frosted with the white and green buds of spring. It was that time of year in which nature seems to be both clinging to winter, and bringing forth spring, at the same time.

Coming almost squarely in the middle of the Catholic season of Lent, and on a Sunday (for every Sunday in Lent remains a mini-Feast Day) such a day seems a reminder that amidst the ascetic renunciation of winter, the fullness of spring’s promise will again make good. But in the way in which death and life seem to dance around each other, rather than moving in linear clarity, recalls the fragmented narrative of a post-modern gangster film—in which time, not merely constrained to a straight line, is capable of being shuffled about like a deck of cards, a villain shot in one frame suddenly reappearing in some later (no, wait—earlier!) scene in the film.

And so we have brown leaves standing next to green buds, an afternoon of warm teasing followed by a dusk which sends us back to layers of wool. It is the unexpected temperate day struck down a week later with winter’s relapse. Occasionally (as it was in my home state of Tennessee a few years ago) it is the sudden, late frost, that withers and kills back the leaves of an over-confident spring. If December euthanizes the old, March practices infanticide. The cruelest month, indeed.

As I sat in a patch of mottled brown and green in that sun-warmed scene of horticultural contradiction, I read these words: “Christianity is always the mustard seed and the tree at the same time, always simultaneously Good Friday and Easter. Good Friday is never simply behind us, it is always here, and the Church is never a fully grown tree, for in that case she would at some point dry up and cease; but she repeatedly finds herself in the situation of the mustard seed.” Such was spoken by one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict, in his book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald (Salt of the Earth. Ignatius Press: 1996).

Lent is a time for spiritual pruning, and it happens to correspond to this time “in-between” winter and spring—a time in which death and rebirth seem are together in simultaneous view. It is a time in which the leaves are stripped bare (with the exception of those stubborn oak tress, of course). It is this barrenness which makes March a time for pruning—for with the pure skeletal form of the plant now made visible, we can see just where to make the essential cuts to restore proper shape, or to remove dead or infected sections. With some plants (perhaps once a year, or perhaps only every few years) we may even make those more radical cuts which will encourage new and vigorous growth—sometimes cutting almost all the way to the ground to “reset” the form.

It is in this bareness of winter that we can see both what the plant is now, and what it should become. It is this ascetic clarity which helps us make the cuts—and the purifying sun and wind which helps the wounds cleanly heal. And with the just-visible dusting of green and white buds, and the occasional warm breath of wind, one can hear the promise that winter’s pruning will not be made in vain.

Eventually.

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–•–•–•–

“The next day was St. Patrick’s Day, and the massed bands of all the boys and girls in Brooklyn who had never had an ear for music were gathering under the windows of the New Yorker offices and outside the Gotham Book Mart. And I, an Englishman, wearing a shamrock which I had bought from a Jew, went walking around the city, weaving in and out of the crowds, and thinking up a poem called April, although it was March. It was a fancy poem about javelins and leopards and lights through trees like arrows and a line that said: ‘The little voices of the rivers change.’ I thought it up in and out of the light and the shade of the Forties, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and typed it on Lax’s typewriter in the New Yorker office, and showed it to Mark Van Doren in a subway station.

And Mark said, of the shamrock I was wearing:

‘That is the greenest shamrock I have ever seen.’

It was a great St. Patrick’s Day. That night I got on the Erie train, and since I was so soon, I thought, to go to the army, I paid money to sleep in the Pullman. Practically the only other Pullman passenger was a sedate Franciscan nun, who turned out to be going to St. Elizabeth’s: and so we got off at Olean together and shared a taxi out to Alleghany.

On Monday I prepared to go and be examined for the Army. I was the first one there. I climbed the ancient stairs to the top floor of the Olean City Hall. I tried the handle of the room marked for the medical board, and the door opened. I walked in and stood in the empty room. My heart was still full of the peace of Communion. 

Presently the first of the doctors arrived. 

‘You got here early,’ he said, and began to take off his coat and hat.

‘We might as well begin,’ he said, ‘the others will be along in a minute.’

So I stripped, and he listened to my chest, and took some blood out of my arm and put it in a little bottle, in a water-heater, to keep it cosy and warm for the Wassermann test. And while this was going on, the others were coming in, two other doctors to do the examining, and lanky young farm boys to be examined.

‘Now,’ said my doctor, ‘let’s see your teeth.’

I opened my mouth.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve certainly had a lot of teeth out!’

And he began to count them. 

The doctor who was running the Medical Board was just coming in. My man got up and went to talk to him. I heard him say:

‘Shall we finish the whole examination? I don’t see much point to it.’

The head doctor came over and looked at my mouth.

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘finish the examination anyway.’

And he sat me down and personally took a crack at my reflexes and went through all the rest of it. When it was over, and I was ready to get back into my clothes, I asked:

‘What about it, Doctor?’

‘Oh, go home,’ he said, ‘you haven’t enough teeth.’

Once again I walked out into the snowy street.

So they didn’t want me in the army after all, even as a stretcher bearer! The street was full of quiet, full of peace.

And I remembered that it was the Feast of St. Joseph.”

–•–•–•–

Thomas Merton. The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt Brace & Company: 1948) pp. 314 - 316

–•–•–•–

The events of the conclave behind the walls of the Sistine Chapel generally remain shrouded in mystery—but through Cardinal Sean O’Malley and a few other insiders comes a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the moments leading up to yesterday’s “white smoke” decision.

No matter how beautiful the chapel, Chicago Cardinal Francis George said, the acoustics aren’t great. The presiding cardinal, Giovanni Battista Re, had to explain each step in the ritual twice, once to each side of the room. Other than that, there was only silence.

“The conclave is a very prayerful experience,” O’Malley said. “It’s like a retreat.”

Each man wrote a few words in Latin on a piece of paper: “I elect as supreme pontiff…” followed by a name.

One by one, they held the paper aloft, placed it on a gold-and-silver saucer at the front of the room, and tipped it into an urn. And then the tallying began, with three cardinals — known as scrutineers — reading out the name on each slip.

But with the results of the first count, the field remained “wide open”, and the crowd outside soon saw black smoke billow from the chimney.

On Wednesday morning, the conclave continued.

“When you walk up with the ballot in your hand and stand before the image of the Last Judgment, that is a great responsibility,” O’Malley said.

There were two votes before lunch, and the field was narrowing. But the smoke was black again, and the crowd was again disappointed. This time, however, they didn’t leave the square.

At lunch, O’Malley sat down besides Bergoglio. ”He is very approachable, very friendly,” he said. “He has a good sense of humor, he is very quick and a joy to be with.” But with the vote going his way, Bergoglio was uncharacteristically somber.

In the first afternoon ballot, the cardinals were getting close to a decision. But not quite. They started over, and the scrutineers read out the names. And it began to dawn on the men that their work was done.

“It was very moving as the names were sounding out,” Brady said. “Bergoglio, Bergoglio, and suddenly the magic number of 77 was reached.”

The cardinals applauded at 77, and again once the tally was complete. ”I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. A cardinal asked Bergoglio whether he accepted the papacy.

“I am a sinner, but as this office has been given to me, I accept,” he said, according to three French cardinals.

Bergoglio’s reaction—from a kind of somber dread, moving to a humble and peaceful acceptance, almost mirrors Raztinger’s own reaction to the events of the 2005 conclave which made him pope. In a speech to a group of German pilgrims who came to Rome for his installation mass, the newly-named Benedict XVI recounted that,

“When, little by little, the trend of the voting led me to understand that, to say it simply, the axe was going to fall on me, my head began to spin. I was convinced that I had already carried out my life’s work and could look forward to ending my days peacefully. With profound conviction I said to the Lord: Do not do this to me! You have younger and better people at your disposal, who can face this great responsibility with greater dynamism and greater strength.

“I was then touched by a brief note written to me by a brother cardinal. He reminded me that on the occasion of the Mass for John Paul II, I had based my homily, starring from the Gospel, on the Lord’s words to Peter by the Lake of Gennesarate: ‘Follow me!’ I spoke of how again and again, Karol Wojtyla received this call from the Lord, and how each time he had to renounce much and to simply say: Yes, I will follow you, even if you lead me where I never wanted to go. This brother cardinal wrote to me: Were the Lord to say to you now, ‘Follow me,’ then remember what you preached. Do not refuse! Be obedient in the same way that you described the great Pope, who has returned to the house of the Father. This deeply moved me. The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness.

Thus, in the end I had to say ‘yes.’ I trust in the Lord and I trust in you, dear friends.” [1]

Last night, after Pope Francis’ public debut on the balcony of the Vatican, in his words to the crowd (before whom he bowed for several moments in request for their silent prayer), and in the ride to dinner and the events following, this man showed humility, a sense of humor, and perhaps finally a peaceful acceptance of his new and daunting role.

After the address, a car came to take the new pope to dinner, and buses for the rest of the cardinals.

The car returned empty.

“As the last bus pulls up, guess who walked out,” Dolan said.

Francis had dinner with the others.

They toasted him, “then he toasted us and said, ‘May God forgive you for what you’ve done,’” Dolan said.

By the time the night was over, cardinals said, the new pope seemed comfortable in his new robes.

“Last night, I think there was a peace in his heart,” O’Malley said, “that God’s will had been accomplished in his life.”

Pope John Paul II was an extrovert pope—a former actor who seemed to come alive in the spotlight, he was a philosopher who became renowned for deepening our understanding of the human person. In Pope Benedict XVI we had the shy introvert—the renowned Biblical theologian, a man renowned during most of his life—from his time at the university, then as doctrinal advisor to the Vatican, and finally as holding the office of St. Peter—as a teacher able to synthesize deep truths from seemingly disparate times and places into a beautiful and clear whole. With Pope Francis’ status as a Jesuit (an order founded by St. Ignatius, a former soldier who brought his military discipline to bear on the interior, spiritual battle), his MA in Science, his Latin American heritage, and his taking of the name “Francis” (out of the devotion he shares with St. Francis for the poor) one already gets the sense of a papacy destined to have its own character—perhaps distinct from any preceding. A Jesuit priest or brother is never allowed to seek office, but occasionally an office will seek a Jesuit. This week, an office of the Catholic Church has sought a Jesuit in a way like never before—and brought us not only our first Jesuit pope, but our first Pope Francis.

Was the Holy Spirit, in the moments leading up to the conclave decision, enjoying a moment of humor between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity: “NO ONE expects an Argentinian Jesuit Pope!”? I would certainly not care to go on record as speculating on the ways of dialog and humor within the Holy Trinity—most especially, as to whether Monty Python references are ever made. (Even the question as to the nature of humor, when removed from the bounds of temporal time, remains far above my current pay grade.)

All in all, it is an exciting time to be a Catholic. For in the middle of this desert of Lent, we have been the sudden gift of a brilliant bouquet of flowers—wrapped of course, in austere, Franciscan burlap.

–•–•–•–

[1] Excerpt from Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI (Ignatius Press: 2006)

–•–•–•–

Last night, Benedict XVI gave his last words of public address as Bishop of Rome. During his short speech from the Castel balcony, he said, “I’m no longer the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic church – at least, at 8 o’clock I won’t be – now I’m just a pilgrim beginning the last part of his journey on earth.” Herein, the Church enters Sede Vacante: the seat of the Bishop of Rome, the Holy See of Peter, is vacant.

One doesn’t know what it’s like to lose a pope if one has never had one. I know I didn’t feel much when Pope John Paul II passed away. I was a recently baptized early 30-something, comfortable within non-denominational Christianity, with no pope – just a pastor who didn’t claim any authority but the Bible he opened up and studied. And yet, the more “Catholic” my little worshiping community got it with its forms, the more I liked it. Particularly moving for me was a service called Tenebrae – literally, Latin for “darkness”. I loved the service for the entering and leaving in silence, the series of readings from the crucifixion account, the moments left throughout for silent reflection – and for the drama of the candlelight against the high, bare white walls of the chapel of the (coincidentally) former Catholic convent.

Still, none of this on its own would have been sufficient to prompt me to investigate the truth claims of the Catholic Church. Priests, robes, processions – and talk of mortal sins? The whole thing seemed too big, too old, too institutional, and too foreign. But within that year, a longtime friend (who was, and remains, a kind of older brother to me) made his conversion to the “Roman Catholic” Church – and by the end of our second extended phone call on the subject, I could feel my attitude changing from one of deep suspicion, to deep curiousity. What unfolded in the years to follow was a conversion – and though each story of conversion is beautiful in its own way, this is not the post in which to recount it. A conversion is a moving from shadows into light, and this post is about a move from light (the visible) to shadows (the obscured).

On the night before Good Friday, at the end of the Maundy Thursday mass, the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist is not placed back in the Tabernacle, and no mass is celebrated until the Easter Vigil. It is a time of holy shadows – we keep vigil with Christ in the garden, go with Him to the cross, wait with Him entombed. The passion, death, and burial of Christ is marked with a kind of holy darkening.

After Pope Benedict’s speech last night, I saw a tweet from a Benedictine nun, Sister Catherine Wybourne: “Trying to find an analogy for how today FEELS — it’s like when we strip the altar after the Maundy Thursday Mass and empty the water stoups.”

Sister Wybourne’s words recall a passage in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, in which Cordelia Flyte, the youngest sibling of an aristocratic Catholic family, tries to explain to the devoutly agnostic Charles Ryder, just what it feels like when a chapel is de-consecrated:

“They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; Mummy’s requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in – I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me – and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?”

The light of Christ can never be extinguished from the Church; and yet, part of the Catholic faith includes a kind of re-making-present of various moments in the life of Christ, both in the individual heart of the believer, and in the collective heart of the Body, the Church. The pope, as visible head of the visible body of Christ, is a kind of sign: an icon (Gk. eikon, “likeness”, “image”) of Christ to the world. For the Church on earth to lose Her visible head, and to wait for a time in the shadows, is to enter in some way into a kind of darkening of death or entombment. And yet, we wait in joyful hope and expectation, knowing all the while that Christ is faithfully steering the Barque of Peter to Her final destination. The joy we possess in these moments is of a different kind than the exuberant G major of a Vivaldi “Gloria”. It’s perhaps more like the inevitability of a low and resonant bell – a solitary bell which, in time, will become part of an entire chorus. In these moments our joy is not so much a bright light, as much as a candle held close – but there is even a kind of beauty in the shadow of a candle on a bare white wall.

–•–•–•–

–•–•–•–

–•–•–•–

“The first key to being a saint is perpetual honesty.” (Peter Kreeft)

–•–•–•–

One of my favorite lines in the Gospels has for many years been Christ’s short affirmation of the disciple Nathanael: “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.” How marvelous to be given such a compliment by the Son of God, Himself! How I long for the same to be said of me!

Jesus’ words to Nathanael are echoed in the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in a 1996 interview, in which he speaks about Pope John Paul II (the man to whom Card. Ratzinger, as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was for many years theological advisor):

“The first thing that won my sympathy was his uncomplicated, human frankness and openness, as well as the cordiality that he radiated. There was his humor. You also sensed a piety that had nothing false, nothing external about it. You sensed that here was a man of God. Here was a person who had nothing artificial about him, who was really a man of God and … [a] person who had a long intellectual and personal history behind him. You notice that about a person: he has suffered, he has also struggled on his way to this vocation.”

Christ’s words of affirmation to Nathanael occur near the beginning of the Gospel of John, with Jesus calling his first disciples Andrew, Simon Peter, and Philip. Philip goes to tell Nathanael about Jesus, and Nathanael scoffs, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip prompts him to “come and see”. In hearing Jesus’ words, Nathanael is taken aback: “How do you know me?”, he asks. Jesus replies, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

We are left here to guess at Nathanael’s moment “under the fig tree”. Was it one in which Nathanael made himself open and honest before God? Perhaps this moment of honesty and faith prepared him to accept his vocation (from Latin vocare “to call”) – the call of Jesus which came to him through Philip.

Nathanael’s defining moment of faith recalls another important “under the fig tree” moment in the Book of Genesis–the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall. In a kind of reverse image to Philip’s invitation for Nathanael to “come and see” Jesus, we find the serpent inviting Adam and Eve to “taste and see” that they will become “like God” if they partake of the fruit of the forbidden tree. Just as Nathanael scoffs at his friend Philip’s claim that anything good can come from Nazareth, the serpent scoffs at God’s claim that Adam and Eve “will surely die” if they eat of this fruit. Immediately after eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, the eyes of Adam and Eve “were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” In a realization of their shame before God, they use the leaves of the fig tree to hide themselves both from God and from each other.

If Adam and Eve’s moment “under the fig tree” is one of hiding and moving away from God, Nathanael’s is one of revealing and moving (inwardly) towards God. Instead of marking a break in the relationship, the fig tree marks for Nathanael a moment of restoration – an act of honesty, a rejection of falsehood, which prepares him to (despite his initial scoff) receive his call to “come and see” the Son of God. Being one “in whom there is nothing false”, Nathanael is given the gift of seeing God, and his words are one of the first verbal witnesses to Christ’s hidden identity: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.”

Pope John Paul II has been given the status of “Blessed” – the first step in canonization, the process by which the Church officially determines a person to have been a “saint”. A saint is someone who, through the grace of Christ, attained a heroic level of virtue while still living on earth. Every virtue is at its core the personal recognition of, and conformity to, truth. To be conformed to truth is to be conformed to the image of the “true Israelite” – the Savior who did not come to abolish the Hebraic Law, as much as to bring the Law to consummation in Him. The Apostle Paul affirms that to be a Christian is to be a true Israelite – to be one who is “a Jew inwardly”. The Jew entered the community of faith through circumcision; the Christian enters the community through baptism – but the path to remaining (or becoming) the “true Israelite” is always traveled through the deep realization and working out of one’s own faith. This realization and ongoing conformity to the truth must in parallel be an ongoing rejection of that which is false – not merely one false ideology or another, but in a deeper way, the falsehoods which exist within one’s own person, which must be recognized and rooted out during the course of one’s life.

In his words on Blessed John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to say that,

“He lived through the whole drama of the German occupation, of the Russian occupation, and of the Communist regime. He blazed his own intellectual trail. He studied German philosophy intensively; he entered deeply into the whole intellectual history of Europe. And he also knew critical points in the history of theology that lead far from the usual paths. This intellectual wealth, as well as his enjoyment of dialogue and exchange, these were all things that immediately made him likeable to me.”

Indeed, with but a few minor alterations, much of Benedict’s words on John Paul II could be said of Benedict, himself: he lived through the drama of the Nazi uprising, saw firsthand the failings of one after the another modern ideology and theological imbalance – from Fascism and Marxism to liberation theology and Christologies removed of their transcendence. An academic and intellectual par excellence, Benedict has shown himself – both during his time as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and as the Pontiff of Rome – to be patient and generous in dialogue, as well as firm in his commitment to truth – a truth which is no mere affirmation of an abstract, but a truth which is meant to work itself out thoroughly in the hearts, minds, and lives of all people. In time, perhaps the Church will declare Pope Benedict XVI, along with John Paul II, as a man in whom truth, by grace, has worked itself out in a radically sanctifying way.

The first key to being a saint is perpetual honesty. To become saints, we strive not only to think and speak truth, but to ever more deeply become Truth. We strive to become those “in whom nothing is false”. To become saints, we strive to become like the True Israelite.

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Recording studio: Nashville, TN 2012