Ash
Wednesday Conference: Heroism
February 14, 2018
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
In my rector’s
conferences for Lent, and in light of our book, I would like to spend some time
meditating on the ideal of Christian heroism. It is a topic about which we have
plenty of interlocutors. And, of course, primary among them may be the Danish philosopher
cum theologian, Soren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard’s ideal
of faith, contained in the image of Abraham, particularly in the episode in
Genesis of the Binding of Isaac, demonstrates the essence of faith, the essence
of heroism for Kierkegaard, and that is a complete and utter reliance on the
will of God and a denial of any connection to values proposed by the world; in
other words, complete irrationalism.
I am also thinking
of the famous book of the philosopher William Barrett, Irrational Man, a book that has had a tremendous impact on the
ideal (I use of the word ironically), the ideal of postmodernism. Abraham is
the hero of faith because he promotes a complete rejection of the world, an
ideal that the Lutheran Kierkegaard espoused. It is not the Catholic ideal of
heroism, however.
In my opinion, contra Kierkegaard, heroism is not a
denial of the things of the world, heroism is, rather, a conquering of the
things of the world, a using the things of the world in order to accomplish the
ideals of God. Isn’t that the message of the Incarnate Word, after all? Isn’t
that the ideal we hear in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians?
Have this mind among
yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,who,
though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be
grasped,but
emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born
in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled
himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.Therefore God has highly exalted him and
bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and
under the earth, and every tongue
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The
mind of Christ is something involved
with creation. Is that not the real message of Christian heroism? Is Christ not
our model in how we are to engage the world? Recently, a student, for some
reason, asked me to name four heroes of the priesthood, saints who, in my
opinion, were examples of the true spirit of the priesthood. I named four that
I would like to expound upon a bit this morning.
Here is Maximillian
Kolbe. He was born in 1894 in Poland, the son of a German father and a Polish
mother. He entered the Franciscan order in 1910. He worked all over Europe, in
Cracow, in Leuven in Belgium, even in Japan, where he founded a monastery in
Nagasaki. During World War II, he began a systematic project of hiding Jews in
Poland. It was for this he was arrested and placed in the concentration camp at
Auschwitz.
Just a few months
after coming to Auschwitz, prisoner 16670 made a generous offer. When ten
prisoners were randomly sought for execution in the place of three escapees,
one of those chosen cried out: “My wife, my children!” This led Kolbe to
volunteer to take his place and he was placed in isolation with ten others and
they were starved to death. One by one, they succumbed till only Fr. Maximilian
survived. The Nazi guard ended his life with a lethal injection. His body was
burned in the crematorium.
He chose to do what
he did not because of any natural relationship with the man, and not because of
friendship. He chose to do what he did because of their relationship in Christ,
a relationship written in the heavens and written in history, but one that may
or may not be known in the human scheme of knowing. Relationship is there to
acknowledge the value of human life.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here
is John Henry Newman, standing at his writing desk in the old barn at
Littlemore. He turns the pen over and over in his hand. He does not realize
that he continues to touch the thing to his tongue until a black streak has
appeared on his lips. He is thinking. It is what he does best. It is late. The
candles are burning down. It is night, truly dark, but also a night of the
soul. Something in him is resolving, something he can’t place, not yet.
Now
he begins pacing around the room, poking his head into this bookcase and this
drawer. He needs the power of words, printed words, but none, he knows, will
suffice until he writes them himself. He needs the power of God, but he will
never find it until he has the resolve to do what he knows must be done, but it
is something he is afraid to do. He thinks. He walks. He negotiates.
Then,
he sits in the old chair, the one that has followed him from his college rooms
to this old converted barn hard by the parish church at Littlemore, outside of
Oxford. My God, he thinks, as he sinks into its familiar contours. My God, it
is late. And truly, it was late. He almost never thought about St. Augustine,
but tonight in the loud silence of Littlemore he did. He thought about
Augustine:
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being, were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.
But
then, for John Henry Newman, the burning suddenly stopped and he wrote a note,
scribbled a note to a Catholic priest. Then he sank back again in the chair and
he wept. It was as it should have been.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here
is Damien De Vuester, the Belgian missionary priest, half a world away from his
native Flanders, standing naked in front of a small mirror in his bedroom in
Hawaii, in the leper colony of Malouki. His finger explores the first lesion he
has found, the first wound, cross wound, scar wound that has appeared on his
body, knowingly telling the ideal he has long been seeking, to be with his
people, his torn and broken people.
Thanks
be to God he is now with them. He is now a leper. As he stands there in his
nakedness, probing the wound as Thomas probed the wounds of the Risen Lord, he
thanks God. He knows what must come next. The spread of sores, the sense of
being outcast, the eventual deterioration of his body, his limbs, and then, his
mind. He knows this will cast itself upon the waters of fate like so many
stones he has already seen cast.
Suddenly,
a shiver quakes his body. It is not cold. There is never cold in this furnace.
It is not fear. There can be no fear when all is already known. It is the
shiver of recognition, of seeing in the mirror, in his naked body, the body of
his Lord, his God. He has the opportunity now to share in the sufferings of
Christ, and it is beautiful. That shiver is the recognition of a self-knowledge
that has been coming to be since the first day of his awakening to Christ. That
shiver is seeing, oddly in a mirror, the face of God, face to face, the face of
God. In a lesion.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here
is Philip Neri. Not the reclining effigy in the Chiesa Nouva, nor the painted
image, striking a pose in fiddleback vesture, not reclining at table with the
rich and famous, but as he was. He was impeccably dressed, groomed from the top
of his well-coiffed tonsure to his pre-Gucci slippers, soutain, just so, and
standing, squarely in a pile of shit in the middle of Rome’s least salubrious
street.
He
didn’t mean to be standing in shit, but shit was what was presented to him on
this outing and, do you know what the wily to-be saint did? The fool laughed.
It was just more shit in a day of shit. It was excrement in the middle of
diamonds, the diamonds being seen by him so attuned to beauty in the poor, the
needy of this least salubrious street of Rome. That is because in Philip Neri’s
heart there was already seared the branded chords of heroism, of seeing the
world, in all of its shit, as something beautiful and worth maintaining.
Perhaps
he was able to do that because that is what he knew about himself. He knew the
sin that dwelt beneath that immaculate exterior. He knew the longing that burst
through those fiddleback vestments. He knew the love of God that overflowed in
him, making him messy with love, imperfect with love, totally in love with the Divine Master. He knew
everything there was to know, and so, standing in a pile of shit meant nothing
to him, nothing at all.
He emptied himself, by taking the
form of a servant
These
are four of my priest-heroes; four saints whose stories, whose lives, have
moved me in my own search for some modicum of holiness in my own priesthood
these past 25 years. Naming these four heroes, however, does not exhaust for me
the ideals of heroism in the priesthood. There is heroism certainly in the
great and dramatic stories. There is perhaps even more in the small stories,
those priests who imbibed the priesthood day and night and rest today in
unvisited tombs. How many examples of heroic priests can we find?
Here is the priest
who answers the phone at 2:30 in the morning. Father, we need you. Mother is
passing now. The priest is awake in a moment. He wasn’t really sleeping. He was
thinking about this old lady and her passage to heaven. He knew the call could
come. He wanted to give these children space, but he also wanted to be there
with them, to be there with her. He longed to be with them and only awaited
their invitation.
He pulls up to the
house armed only with two things: some cheap oil and an even cheaper piece of
bread. At least that is what they were in the world’s eyes. In the eyes of
faith, they were the clavis caeli, the keys of heaven. He just walks
into the house, into the living room where a makeshift bedroom has been set up.
Around the hospital bed are children and grandchildren, brothers and sisters.
The old woman struggles to breathe. The gasping is rhythmic and then not.
The priest steps up.
He embraces this one and that one. He sits down by the bed and holds the old
woman’s hand. He is there at 3 in the morning. He is fully present at 3 in the
morning. Bless, Father. Send, Father. Absolve, Father. And the priest words
become God words at 3 in the morning in the living room of a regular suburban
house. God comes to suburbia at the hands of the priest. He must be a hero even
though he realizes that he is still wearing his pajama pants.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here is a Saturday
afternoon in a musty, very musty, reconciliation room in a mid-city parish. The
priest is antsy. He doesn’t like to sit still. He wants to be involved. He
wants to be in the forefront. He is a new priest who has not yet learned the
angelic message of sitting still in the presence of God, the ideal of attendre. He sits and hears a stirring
on the other side. It is a minor stirring, a tenuous stirring. There is a cough
on the other side of the sheltered screen.
“Uh … Bless me
father,” a husky male voice calls out. And then another long pause. You are now
impatient. And then a cry, a sob and moan. “Bless me father. I don’t know what
to do. It has been so long. I am so long away. It took everything I had to come
here. Don’t kick me out. It’s been 30 years since my last confession.” And you
realize this poor soul’s last confession took place before you were born. “It’s
been 30 years. I don’t know everything I have done.”
And then, God takes
over. He takes over your ignorance and your impatience. God takes over. And
Christ is present. Forty minutes later, the absolution is given, the assurance
is given. And as the man gets ready to go, suddenly a disembodied hand reaches
around the screen and you grasp it for dear life and you, the priest, realize
that the hand is the hand of Christ, reaching out to you. Reaching out to a
hero of the confessional.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here is a Tuesday
morning and a young priest is presiding at the funeral of an 8-year-old girl
who was killed in a car crash that also claimed the life of her mother. He is
pacing back and forth in the sacristy. He has written a homily, but he does not
like it. It is trite. It is untrusting. He scratches at the paper and fiddles
with the structure of everything on the page. He has no idea what to say in the
face of such loss, such tragedy.
The family is there
for the two caskets, large and small. The parish is there to support a family
that is … was… is at the center of the parish’s life, its paschal life. The
whole school is there, including the little girl’s whole third-grade class,
hair-slicked and dressed up more than just uniform-dressed-up. The time comes
for the homily. Your pitiful pages are yawning in front of you and you step up
to the ambo. You clear your throat. Nothing comes out.
And then, something
else happens. You decide to do something. You pull up a chair from where the
acolytes usually sit. You ask the third-grade class to come forward. You ask
them to sit around you and you decide to talk about their classmate, the little
girl and her mother, now somewhere else and not in the two odd boxes in the
aisle. You finally speak up and you ask a question, a simple question: What
does it mean to remember? One little boy shoots his hand into the air. He is
emming and emming to get your attention, like you could miss him with his
cowlick and his toothless smile.
Yes, Ernest.
“Remember is to be gone away, but still be here and here,” as he points to his
head and his heart. And you realize at that moment that Ernest is your hero. He
got it right. He said it better than you ever could. He is your hero. And you
know at the moment, no matter how long your priesthood goes, children of
prophesy like Ernest will always be here and here.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
Here is a Wednesday
evening and the new, young pastor is presiding over a parish council meeting in
a small rural parish somewhere in the Midwest. The people are mowing him down.
They are running full charge over this green little shepherd. The sheep are
ruling the fold. I’m going to tell you this and I’m going to tell you that. Mr.
X and Mrs. Y completely disagree and both want their way.
The priest looks
glazed over. He looks askance as he is raked over the coals by his seniors.
They are all his seniors, all old enough to be his parents. How do I get this
back? How do I gain control of this meeting? How do I show them something? Bam!
Suddenly, he slams his fists down upon the table, silencing all of the harping
and complaining. Bam! He does it again. Bam! Three times is the charm. Then
dead silence. More silence. Wait for it. He finally speaks.
That is what the
Holy Spirit wants to do in our parish. God is trying to get our attention. He
wants to come into our lives here in an important way. We can’t always hear him
because of our bickering and moaning, our complaining and our testiness. Let’s
see if we can pray together and get the action of the Spirit working in our
lives, in the lives of those poor people in this county. Can we listen for a
minute? Can we pray for a minute? This really happened to a priest I know. He’s
my hero, and not just a little bit.
He emptied himself, by taking
the form of a servant
There are countless
other stories that might be told. Heroism is not a flagrant rejection of the
world, any more than Lent is a rejection of the world. Heroism is an embrace of
the world, in all of its blessings and all of its compromises. Heroism is a
living into the mystery of Christ, a mystery to which we are invited in this
Holy Season to embrace more fully, more passionately, more profoundly.
Heroism is not doing
great things, but in the words of St. Theresa of Calcutta, it is doing small
things with great love. I wonder if that could be our Lenten resolve. To learn
to be heroes, not by flagrant acts, but by doing small things with great love.
Here is the newer
seminarian, tentatively opening his door for the first time. Will anyone stop
by? Will anyone visit? He doesn’t know quite what to make of this new world he
has entered. He doesn’t quite know what to make of these men, many of whom do
not even speak the same language. He takes a chance and opens his door. Two
hours later, the people are still milling about and drifting in. Over time,
that shy man becomes a new kind of person, a person open to the unexpected. He
becomes a man ready to receive new things, new people, new realities. He
becomes a Christian hero.
Here is the
seminarian in the hospital for CPE, making cold calls for the first time. He is
scared. What can he possibly have to offer anyone? He hasn’t lived that much.
He has not really known suffering, sickness, death. This place smells like
death. It reeks of blood and death. And he walks coldly unto that room and he
wants to say the right thing and he is scared.
And then he realizes
he doesn’t even have to talk, that mostly what people in need need is someone to hold their hand a
little bit. And this manly fellow learns that there is no shame in holding
hands with those in need, those who, in all of the prodding of needles and
probing of probes, need some flesh to touch them that may not be swathed in
latex. Can I do that? Will my hyper-sensitized masculinity allow me to do that?
That is heroism.
Here is the deacon
standing up to preach in this chapel for the first time. “Depends” might be in
order here. The homily is too long. The homily is too short. The joke falls flat.
The moment of truth comes. He receives the blessing from the priest. He needs
the blessing. He reads the Gospel, he clears his throat and now, this is him
talking. This is all him. This is on him. This is what he has to say. This
exposes his spiritual reality. This is his spiritual persona.
And then, somewhere
in the middle of this prepared mess, the Spirit breaks through like the
brightness of the Father’s glory. He is a deacon. He is an ordained man. He is
a slave of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ who speaks through him. Here is
Christian heroism in a man that yesterday, before his ordination, was only in potentia.
He is in the person
of Christ. He presents an ideal of heroism.
He emptied
himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And
being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point
of death, even death on a cross.
Who are these
Christian heroes?
All of them are
heroes.
And … All of you are heroes to me.
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