...and we have a cover!

The book is set for release at Easter. 

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Thoughts on the Annunciation....

Happy Feast of the Annunciation!

Part of the text addresses the spiritual motherhood of Mary, and how it is related to the physical motherhood of millions of women. In particular, it addresses what it may mean that Mary received the news of her motherhood with love, not fear, and that resistance to fear may well be a witness not only to her love and trust in God, but her immaculate conception....

The book is scheduled to be released at Easter.  More news as I know it!  Meanwhile, from the text:

...[W]e do know how Mary received the conception and birth of the Son of God: and this gives us all the insight we have about her as a person, and her call to motherhood. That is, she did not give in to fear, and lived out her vocation in utter fearlessness. At the annunciation, being approached by an angel and the Holy Spirit, she asks a simple clarifying question (How can this be…?) and then responds “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your word.” No flash, no drama, only humble assent. In an age of historical-cultural criticism, we know that the stakes were high for her personally, in her culture: she was betrothed to Joseph but not living with him, and this seemingly illicit pregnancy could result in being stoned to death. Additionally, if it is true that she was dedicated as a child to the Temple as a virgin (as some legends offer), this pregnancy would look to the world like another grievously broken vow. It’s hard to see how anyone in such circumstances would have received this “good news” well.

But the encounter with the Holy Spirit may have assured her and strengthened her to travel 50 miles to tell the other person mentioned in the annunciation, a cousin with another miraculous pregnancy, Elizabeth. And her words are not “I’m afraid,” “I’m so worried,” or even “I’m confused” but:

...My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name (Lk 1:46-49).

That is, her response to Elizabeth’s awe-filled “you had faith” was to redirect Elizabeth’s awe to God: “Look! Look at the goodness of God! Look at what God has done! In me, in Israel, in all the small ones of this world!”

Mary’s acceptance of the pregnancy, the child, and her vocation to motherhood is rooted in a fearlessness that comes from a harmony of body and spirit, and total trust in God. If she was indeed without fear—that psychological consequence of dissociation—then perhaps she saw the birth of her son (whatever that would look like) as work, as effort, as cooperation with the Holy Spirit, but not pain. That is, perhaps she did not anticipate or experience pain because she did not give in to fear, from her acceptance of the annunciation onward. Perfect love cast out all fear.

For Mary, accepting motherhood meant to focus her energy and attention—in her case quite literally and directly—on God, fearlessly and without reserve. This was her untarnished experience of motherhood....

What would a conversation between John Paul II and Jean Vanier be like?

Some welcome news this summer: Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche intentional communities for people with and without intellectual disabilities, has been awarded the Pacem en Terris award (previous winners: Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Lech Walesa, etc.).

Jean Vanier pictured in 2008 (Photo: CNS)

 Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, an international federation of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities share life together, is to receive the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award.

For the first time in its history the US-based award is being taken overseas, to France, where Bishop Martin Amos of Davenport, Iowa, will present the award to Vanier in the village where he founded L’Arche in 1964.

The award honours Pope John XXIII and commemorates his 1963 encyclical letter Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”)....

(More of the news article here.)

I have joked to some people that the third chapter of this manuscript, on the sign of the impaired body, is pretty close to planting John Paul II and Jean Vanier in the same room and watching them have the conversation they should have had when both were alive.  They did meet--but as far as I know, no in depth conversation occurred.  Vanier's way of gentleness and openness to the other, and his focus on being an embodied ecclesial community, is lived out in L'Arche communities worldwide--and has points in common with the spirituality and phenomenology of the Theology of the Body.  Vanier and John Paul II both began as students of philosophy, and one sense that although they may be on different pages, they play from the same book.

A clip from the manuscript on Vanier and the Theology of the Body:

Vanier (and others) exemplify the phenomenological attitude when they affirm that  L’Arche is “a sign, not a solution.”....

The sign of  L’Arche fleshes out the shared reality of limitation and weakness and the common reliance on the unlimited strength of God, and points to the divine call to love as God loves. The mission of  L’Arche, as stated in its charter, is simultaneously ambitious yet humble: “Our mission is to create homes where faithful relationships based on forgiveness and celebration are nurtured. We want to reveal the unique value and vocation of each person, and to live relationships in community as a sign of hope and love.”^[3] The process of living in community together involves acknowledging weakness, and confronting fear with the concrete power of love. The end of the lived experience is celebration and joy: not that every moment is joyful, or a celebration, but that the lived experience is a real gift of life shared.

But Vanier also says that community is not achieved but received, not a goal but a gift. Living together, guided by the above mission, opens our hands to receive that gift. And in doing so, he undercuts what I think can be a subtle temptation: the purpose of welcoming people with disabilities into small community, into the Church, into our families, is not first and foremost to witness. It is a response to a call from God to love as God loves. It requires a “spiritual seeing,” as Scheler would say, that all human beings are our brothers and sisters, called in Christ to be adopted sons and daughters of God. In doing so, Vanier clarifies what seems to be a temptation among first readers of the Theology of the Body literature: as central as the doctrines of Incarnation and incarnation are, the audiences are not about seeing the body of oneself or another in isolation. It is about the visible lived experience of call to love and response to love, of relationship to God and others. It is about the divinely ordained witness to love. This is seen in a powerful way by the union of a man and woman in sacramental marriage, and as John Paul II argues, was given to us at the dawn of creation as a sign of how we are called to be in union with God. I argue this can be seen in a woman giving birth, yielding to the work of the Holy Spirit, living out the “pre-given language of self-giving and fruitfulness” through answering the call to motherhood.  The relationship of those who are obviously impaired to those of us who are less obviously impaired gives us practice in loving one another without preconditions, in accepting our identity as beloved children of the Father, and in sensing how our mutually sensed limitation and weakness points to God as our fulfillment. The sign is fully manifest in the finite human being’s relationship to the infinite God and each finite other.

---

[1] A good summary of this notion is provided by John Swinton, in the preface of Living Gently in a Violent World, 17.

[2] Living Gently in a Violent World, 34.

[3] The Paradox of Disability, 60.

Congratulations to Vanier and L'Arche for this well deserved award!

Corpus Christi and the Theology of the Body

A little late for the feast of Corpus Christi, but reflections on the eucharist are always on time....

From the the chapter on impairment as sign, in a reflection on the Incarnation as love, gift, and self-limitation of God:

...An even more exacting reality is the Eucharist as the chosen self-limitation of God. As modern desert father Carlo Carreto said, “Either Christ is a raving madman, or He is truly omnipotent and merciful Love, who has found the most direct road to our hearts, a road that will not frighten or scare us, a road that is as simple as could be.” Sharing his very life—body and soul, humanity and divinity--through the humble, sustaining consumption of transubstantiated bread and wine is as divinely self-limiting as one can possibly imagine. But do imagine, as Carlo Caretto does, what that tells us about God:

Why do you find it strange that I should have wanted to become bread through love?

Have you no experience of love?

When you have loved, really loved, have you not wanted to become bread for your beloved? …

You can argue about the Eucharist as much as you like, but on the day love really takes hold of you, perhaps you will understand that Jesus is not a fool or a madman.

To be able to become bread! To be able to nourish the whole world with his flesh and blood!

I am terribly selfish and fearful when faced with suffering, but it I could become bread to save all humanity, I would do it. If I could become bread to feed all the poor, I would throw myself into the fire at once.

No, the eucharist is not something strange: It is the most logical thing in the world, it is the story of the greatest love ever lived in the world, by a man named Jesus.*

If we cannot understand the eucharist through the strange logic of love, we cannot understand the incarnation. The eucharist is a natural extension of the Incarnation of God. It is also an extension of the law of love: “You shall not … stand by idly when your neighbor's life is at stake” (Lev 19:16).

If love is to offer oneself to the other, the Eucharist makes perfect sense. The hermeneutic of the gift reaches its pinnacle in this reality, and it is why we organize our entire faith around it. The law of the gift is presented, taught, and realized in our offering and participation in the Eucharist.


*  Carlo Caretto, The God Who Comes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974), pg. 115-6.

Beyond marriage? Other primal signs that benefit from The Theology of the Body

From the book:

The challenge of the Theology of the Body for theologians is that to speak of the re-reading of the body is not to work in the realm of metaphor. Metaphor has an honored place in religious language, but to speak of the ensouled body as a pre-given language is more primal than metaphor: the creation of the human being, by a God who graciously communicates in every means possible his desire for union with humanity, is its own sign that points to God, a pre-verbal language that is seen most clearly through the lens of Christian revelation. But as spiritual sign, there are other primal human experiences that benefit from the insights of the Theology of the Body: the act of giving birth, the reality of being limited (or impaired), and the process of physically dying. Indeed, if the ensouled body is natural and intentional sign, then these realities not only could have meaning, they do communicate meaning. The question is not whether they are meaningful, but rather, what do they mean? As “first language,” the sphere of the sign must be taken seriously as essential to understanding God's plan for the universe. John Paul reflects on this reality to evocative effect in the second half of the audiences: what it means to be man, woman, and called or not called to earthly marriage. But as spiritual sign, there are other primal human experiences that benefit from the insights of the Theology of the Body: the act of giving birth, the reality of being limited (or impaired), and the process of physically dying. Indeed, if the ensouled body is natural and intentional sign, then these realities not only could have meaning, they do communicate meaning. The question is not whether they are meaningful, but rather, what do they mean?
  ...

The text continues as a constructive project: what would it mean to interpret childbirth, impairment, and dying as primordial spiritual signs? How could the background and insights of the Theology of the Body literature help us to perceive the spiritual reality of these three experiences? My presumption is that these realities are not on the same level as John Paul's reflection on the sign (and sacrament) of marriage. But they are vocational realities, like marriage. They are calls to God. And I will argue that they were designed or shaped by God to draw us to Himself, through entering the depths of the law of the ekstasis. They express the reality of our call to receive and to give. As such, they are spiritual signs to ourselves and the world of God's continuously enticing love.

On Pope Benedict XVI's abdication: a different understanding of dying as sign

From the book, the beginning of the chapter on the sign of dying:

Pope Benedict XVI, Feb 2013

As I mentioned earlier, my father-in-law died a very long and disabling death, suffering mini-strokes that affected his balance, strength, and memory.  After years of peaks and valleys, he moved into his last days at home, with the help of hospice and his family.  My husband broke away from our family travels to fly home and be with his parents and siblings for the last five days.  There was prayer, waiting, brief talking, observation, prayer, sacramental anointing, more prayer, more waiting, steps away to take a brief walk, and more prayer.  Finally, his father died, and hours later, I asked my husband how he was.  He smiled wanly and shook his head in wonder, saying “That was the most intense retreat I have been on in my entire life.” 

In a less intense manner for most of us, there was a kind of long, observed dying of Pope John Paul II as well.  John Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease years before his death in 2005.  Over the years, many commented on how he seemed to be dying in a very emphatically public fashion: traveling until near the end, meeting people, giving audiences, allowing the world to see him grow increasingly frail and shaky, a rather active Pope until close to the very end.  There were people who questioned that choice, commenting that he should step aside and allow a healthier man to serve in such a crucial leadership role.  But there seemed to be something very deliberate in this prayerful living out of his final days, a bodily ars moriendi for the world.  When he died in his apartment, many thousands were holding candles and praying in a multi-day vigil in Saint Peter’s Square—and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them named it one of the more intense retreats of their lives.

As Pope Benedict surprised the world by resigning his Papal ministry (technically, abdication) due to the challenges of extreme old age, many have remembered that Pope John Paul II stayed in the Papal office until the very frail end, and some have lamented that we will not see that witness within Pope Benedict's papacy.  Personally, I respect the Pope's conscience on this decision, and think that as the human race ages into increasing length of life and mental frailty, this will become more common, if not the norm.  But Pope Benedict is teaching us, by example, a great deal about dying this week.  Renouncing a ministry he has served faithfully for years, for love of the Church, despite considerable old age, is a kind of dying.  Choosing to abdicate (no long goodbye, no last Easter, etc.) and retire to a cloistered setting to devote himself to study and prayer for the Church: that is a kind of dying.  Even making a decision--that is, to abdicate--that he knew would be hard on many of the faithful and almost scandalous to a few is also a kind of dying.  

In his few public statements since the announcement, he has underscored that the Church belongs to Christ and he has full trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us toward a fruitful path.  One of the questions animating this chapter on dying as sign is from A. Reimers: "How is the dying body given in love?"  Although it is clear that Pope Benedict XVI has no disease that is in itself mortal, it is also clear: he is dying.  In the largest sense we all are, but he is closer to it than most and is keenly aware of that.  The events of the past few days offer us a touching example of trust and humility and show us, in a different manner than John Paul II's death, how we live and die by giving ourselves to God.