Following the publication of his letter, Laudato si’ in 2015, Pope Francis called for observing a Season of Creation from September I to October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis was joined in calling for the celebration by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch, Bartholomew. Later, the World Council of Churches joined in.
Pope Leo recently endorsed Laudato si’ and its call for environmental conversion::
“…given the evidence in various parts of the world, our earth is being ravaged. On all sides, injustice, violations of international law and the rights of peoples, grave inequalities and the greed that fuels them are spawning deforestation, pollution and the loss of biodiversity…
Environmental justice – implicitly proclaimed by the prophets – can no longer be regarded as an abstract concept or a distant goal. It is an urgent need that involves much more than simply protecting the environment. For it is a matter of justice – social, economic and human.
For believers it is also a duty born of faith, since the universe reflects the face of Jesus Christ, in whom all things were created and redeemed. In a world where the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters are the first to suffer the devastating effects of climate change, deforestation and pollution, care for creation becomes an expression of our faith and humanity.”
Now is the time to follow words with deeds.”
I hope to offer reflections on the Season of Creation each day this month.
Mark’s gospel today tells the gruesome story of the death of John the Baptist, which prefigures the death of Jesus. King Herod ordered his death, prompted by Herodias. Human sinfulness is on display in this court banquet, which the artist (above) describes very well. The women smugly presenting John’s head. The man pointing his finger at Herod and Herod denying it all. John’ eyes are still open, his mouth still speaks.
Venerable Bede says that John’s death is like Jesus’ death because they both embraced the same values. If John stayed silent about Herod’s conduct, he may have gained a few peaceful years of life, but he was more concerned with what God thought than what powerful people on earth thought.
“His persecutor had demanded not that he should deny Christ, but only that he should keep silent about the truth. Nevertheless, he died for Christ. Does Christ not say: I am the truth?
“He preached the freedom of heavenly peace, yet was thrown into irons by ungodly men; he was locked away in the darkness of prison, though he came bearing witness to the Light of life.
“But heaven notices– not the span of our lives, but how we live them, speaking the truth.” (Bede, Homily)
Wonderful line: It doesn’t matter how many years we live, but how we live them, “speaking the truth.”
For John that meant dying for the truth. What does it mean for us? It may not mean getting our heads chopped off, but we should expect some scars from the daily battle for God’s truth. ” May we fight hard for the confession of what you teach.” (Opening prayer)
The desire Augustine saw in himself he also saw in us, a desire that brings restlessness and a thirst only satisfied at the fountain of true wisdom and everlasting love – Jesus Christ.
“‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.’“The Lord himself, our God Jesus Christ, is the fountain of life; and he calls us to himself so that we may drink from him. Who will drink? Whoever loves; whoever is filled with the word of God; whoever adores enough, whoever desires enough; whoever is on fire with the love of wisdom.
See the source from which that fountain flows. It comes from the same place that the manna came from in the wilderness – for the same person is both bread and fountain, Christ our Lord and God, for whom we should always hunger. Even if we eat him, the bread, with love, even if we devour him with desire, let us still hunger for him like starving people. So when we drink him, the fountain, let us always drink him with overflowing love, filled with longing and delighting in the gentle taste of his sweetness.
For the Lord is gentleness and delight. We may eat and drink of him but still we will be hungry and thirst for more; for he is our food and drink that can never be entirely consumed. He can be eaten but there will always be more left. He can be drunk but he can never be drained dry. Our bread is eternal; our fountain lasts for ever, our fountain is sweet.
So Isaiah says: come to the water all you who are thirsty – the fountain is for the thirsty, not for the surfeited. He calls the hungry and the thirsty to himself, and they can never drink enough: the more they drink, the more they desire to drink.
Spiritual writers after Augustine took up the Augustine’s insights:
If you are thirsty, drink from the fountain of life; if you are hungry, eat the bread of life. Blessed are they who hunger for that bread and thirst for that fountain; they eat and drink for ever and still they desire to eat and drink. For it is lovely above all things, that which is always eaten and drunk, always hungered and thirsted for. ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’” St.Columbanus
The Church repeats his teaching in the prayer for his feast:
Renew in your Church, we pray, O Lord, the spirit with which you endowed your Bishop Saint Augustine that, filled with the same spirit, we may thirst for you, the sole fount of true wisdom,and seek you, the author of heavenly love.. Amen
St. Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 to Patricius, a pagan, and Monica, a fervent Christian. Monica, venerated as a saint, raised Augustine as a Christian, but he drifted away from that faith and practice, finding no wisdom in the Christian scriptures.
Intelligent, ambitious, and interested in everything the world had to offer, he found prestigious teaching positions in Rome and later in Milan, constantly searching for meaning in the philosophies of the day. For some years he lived with a woman with whom he had a son, Adeodatus.
In Milan, his mother Monica encouraged him to listen to the bishop Ambrose, who introduced him to the beauty and truth of the scriptures. Augustine was baptized and for more than 35 year was bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa, where he died on August 28, 430, as Vandal armies prepared to lay siege to the city.
Augustine’s many writings are treasured in the church. The classic account of his life, his Confessions, describes his discovery of how God was with him from life’s beginning till the present. He was thirsting for God and only God brings true happiness, he said. Augustine came to know God in an intimate way:
“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 breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
“O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me’”
Here’s a biography of Augustine by Pope Benedict XVI
In a beautiful section of his Confessions St. Augustine describes his mother Monica’s last days at Ostia, the seaport of Rome, where they were preparing to sail for their home in Africa. Monica, taken sick, was on her way to another homeland.
The two of them were “leaning against a window looking out on a garden…inquiring what you are and what the eternal life of the saints would be like, for ‘Eye has not seen nor ear heard no human heart conceived it’”
“For my part, my son, I no longer find pleasure in anything this life holds,” his mother said, “ What I am doing here still, or why I am still here, I do not know, for worldly hope has withered away for me. There was only one thing I desired to live for in this life: to see you a Catholic Christian before I died. And my God has granted this to me more lavishly than I could have hoped, letting me see even you spurning earthly happiness to be his servant. What am I still doing here?”
Shortly after, Monica fell unconscious from the fever.
She revived and said to Augustine and his brother at her side, “You are to bury your mother here”.
“It would be better for you to be buried in your own homeland,” his brother said to her.
“‘What silly talk!’ she replied, ‘Lay this body anywhere, and take no trouble over it. One thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be.’
“Having made her meaning clear to us with such words as she could manage, she fell silent, and the pain of the disease grew worse.”
His mother’s death was a graced time when they drank in their thirst from “the fountain of life which is you”, Augustine wrote.
We’re reading from the 1st Letter of Paul to the Corinthians for almost the next three weeks at weekday Mass. A long stretch for one of Paul’s letters in our lectionary. It’s an important letter because it gives us a good look at what an early 1st century Christian community was like. Can we learn from it how to look at our churches and communities today?
The first thing you notice– this isn’t a perfect church. It has strengths and weaknesses, but its weaknesses seem more obvious than its strengths. That’s because Paul’s letter is written to correct abuses and answer questions troubling members of this church. What’s the first thing we might learn? Our church will never be perfect.
But Paul does not begin the letter with abuses, he speaks of the faithfulness of God, who is always at work purifying and strengthening his church.
Corinth was one of the great port cities of the Roman world, a melting pot for people and cultures of every kind. It had a reputation for moral depravity. Paul went there in the year 51, after visiting Athens where he used all his his skill trying to bring the gospel to the Athenians. Evidently, his visit was disappointing. Moving on to Corinth, he went first to the Jews to announce the gospel, as he customarily did, but they turned him away. Then, gentile hearers mostly from the poor of the city embraced the faith.
The situation caused Paul to reflect on what he experienced. The church is a mystery of God. You can’t judge it by human wisdom or explain it in human terms. It’s God’s church, God’s community, and the Spirit of God is at work. It grows according to God’s plan, not human planning. His task, Paul realizes, is to discern what God wills as the work unfolds.
In Ist Corinthians we have Paul’s humble acknowledgment that, though he is founder of this church, he is a servant among many servants. Other teachers, Apollos and perhaps Peter, labored in this church and factions have gathered around them. There’s a danger when human teachers take the place of God, Paul writes.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.Therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who causes the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive wages in proportion to his labor. For we are God’s co-workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Corinthians 3, 6-9)
We’re God’s field, God’s building. What’s God planting? What’s God building? Questions for us to ask.
We remember a mother and her son this week, St. Monica and her son St. Augustine. I heard a song long ago that said: “A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing.” Augustine could have sung that song.
In his “Confessions,” he praised God for bringing him “late” to a faith he found beautiful; he also acknowledged a mother’s tears and prayers helped bring him to Jesus Christ. She was like the woman in the gospel. As she brought her dead son to be buried, she met Jesus. He saw her tears, stopped the funeral procession and raised her son to life.
“ I was like that son,” Augustine says. ‘I was dead. My mother’s tears won me God’s life.”
Like many women of her time, we don’t know much about Monica. She married a man named Patricius, a tough husband who put her down and went out with other women. They had three kids, but Augustine was special; she followed him, hoping be would be the person she knew he could be. Above all, she wanted him to have faith.
He was a hard son to deal with, smart, well educated, hooked on the “lovely things” about him, deaf to her advice, blind to the path she wanted him to take, but she followed him anyway, convinced God had something big for him to do, and she finally got her wish
Doesn’t she sound like many today? How many today love their kids, or their husbands or their wives or their friends, but worry they’ll get mixed up in the wrong things–not going to church, deaf to the gospel? But they stick by them anyway.
That’s not easy to do and so it’s good to remember Monica and the moving words to God Augustine wrote in his Confessions. Did he ever show them to her, I wonder?
“O beauty every ancient, O beauty ever new. Late have I have loved thee. 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 breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Fittingly, the church celebrates Monica’s feast on August 27th, the day before her son’s.
Because God reveals himself to us gradually, day by day. The scriptures are a privileged place where God speaks St. Paul says today to the Thessalonians: “We thank God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received it not as the word of men, but as it truly is the word of God.”
God speaks to us in our readings. “They make the voice of the Holy Spirit sound again and again in the words of the prophets and apostles…The Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talk with them,” the Constitution on Divine Revelation says. (DV 21,22)
“The Lord be with you,” we say, announcing the gospel. Jesus is with us now, speaking to us here and now in our readings..
How should we hear and read God’s word? Some say by reading and listening deeply. Deep listening, deep reading is more than listening and reading for facts. “Give us 20 minutes we’ll give you the world,” one news stations says. and for 20 minutes we hear facts. We browse online, looking for facts, for news, for entertainment. The online world is awash with facts. That kind of reading and listening, some say, endangers our capacity for deep listening and deep reading — for contemplation.
Prophets like Ezechiel say they devoured God’s word. They ate it, chewed on it, digested it. That’s because God feeds us little by little. We learn little by little. We absorb little by little. We are slow learners.
Deep reading not only applies to the scriptures we read, it applies also to the prayers we say and saints, like St. Augustine, St.Monica, St. John the Baptist, whom we remember this week.
Blessed Dominic Barbari, whom the Passionists remember today, reminds us of the power of daily learning. He never attended a major university or got a degree, yet he ministered to brilliant figures, like John Henry Newman. He is an example of daily learning.
From September 1st to October 4, the Feast of Francis of Assisi, we are celebrating with other Christians a Season of Creation. We need to see creation prayerfully in a deeper way than a weather report..
Prayerful deep reading and listening leads to more than facts. It leads to what God wishes to say, and we never know what that will be. “When you open your sails to the Holy Spirit, you never know on what shores you will land,” St. Jerome said.
“The word of God is now at work in you who believe.”
John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a prominent member of the Anglican Church, was canonized a saint by Pope Francis in Rome on October 13, 2019. Newman was received into the Catholic Church by the Italian Passionist, Blessed Dominic Barberi.
I’ve often wondered why Newman asked for Dominic to receive him into the church. Dominic, a Passionist missionary recently from Italy, was more than a zealous Catholic priest and religious. I think Newman saw in him something he treasured, namely his devotion to the mystery of the Passion of Jesus.
For Newman the mystery of the Cross interpreted everything. “The death of the Eternal Word of God made flesh is our great lesson how to think and how to speak of this world. His Cross has put its due value upon everything which we see.”
Shortly after his conversion Newman wrote “The Mystery of Divine Condescension.” (Discourses to a Mixed Congregation” 14) It’s a wonderful reflection on the mission of Jesus described by Paul the Apostle in his Letter to the Philippians, “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but he emptied himself…” The reflection also reveals in a striking way Newman’s personal relationship to God.
He begins by considering at great length the mystery of God. God is beyond anything we know. God is infinitely beyond us. “There is a gulf between me and my great God. Yet, I’m a human being, I need someone who can weep with me, and rejoice with me, and in a way minister to me. How can I hope to find that in the Infinite and Eternal God.”
(God) is so far above us that the thought of Him does but frighten me; I cannot believe that He cares for me…I know that He is loving towards all His works, but how am I to believe that He gives to me personally a thought, and cares for me for my own sake? I am beneath His love; He looks on me as an atom in a vast universe. He acts by general laws, and if He is kind to me it is, not for my sake, but because it is according to His nature to be kind…”
My complaint is answered in the great mystery of the Incarnation,” Newman continues.
God discloses himself to us. God discloses himself, first of all, in nature. Nature is part of the mystery of divine condescension. Newman has a beautiful section in his reflection about finding God in nature.
But nature gives us only a glimpse of the glory of God. God’s condescension goes so much further. In the mystery of the Word made flesh, the Creator humbles himself to the creature.”Your God has taken on Him your nature.”
What form do we humans expect God to take? “Doubtless, you will say, He will take a form such as “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard of” before. It will be a body framed in the heavens, and only committed to the custody of Mary; a form of light and glory, worthy of Him, who is “blessed for evermore,” and comes to bless us with His presence….He will choose some calm and holy spot, and men will go out thither and find their Incarnate God. He will be tenant of some paradise, like Adam or Elias, or He will dwell in the mystic garden of the Canticles, where nature ministers its best and purest to its Creator.”
But, “the Maker of man, the Wisdom of God, has come, not in strength, but in weakness. He has come, not to assert a claim, but to pay a debt. Instead of wealth, He has come poor; instead of honour, He has come in ignominy; instead of blessedness, He has come to suffer. He has been delivered over from His birth to pain and contempt; His delicate frame is worn down by cold and heat, by hunger and sleeplessness; His hands are rough and bruised with a carpenter’s toil; His eyes are dimmed with weeping; His Name is cast out as evil.
He is flung amid the throng of men; He wanders from place to place; He is the companion of sinners. He is followed by a mixed multitude, who care more for meat and drink than for His teaching…And at length “the Brightness of God’s Glory and the Image of His Substance” is fettered, haled to and fro, buffeted, spit upon, mocked, cursed, scourged, and tortured. “He hath no beauty nor comeliness; He is despised and the most abject of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity;” nay, He is a “leper, and smitten of God, and afflicted”. And so His clothes are torn off, and He is lifted up upon the bitter Cross, and there He hangs, a spectacle for profane, impure, and savage eyes, and a mockery for the evil spirit whom He had cast down into hell.”
O Jesus, I cannot comprehend you more than I did, before I saw you on the Cross; but I have gained my lesson. I have before me the proof that in spite of your exalted nature, and the clouds and darkness which surround it, you can think of me with a personal affection. You have died, that I might live.
“Let us love God,” says your Apostle, “because He first loved us.” I can love you now from first to last, though from first to last I cannot understand you. As I adore you, O Lover of souls, in your humiliation, so will I admire you and embrace you in your infinite and everlasting power.”
