The Scarred Face of Love

In the 2004 film production of Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey, there is a moment that stands alone in beauty and depth: the words, the scene, the faces of the actors, the looks captured; to me, this moment is the true flowering of the story.

The original book, to which this production is said to be 'slavishly' correct, is a story about a priest in eighteenth-century Peru who witnesses the sudden fall of an ancient foot-bridge, path to a popular place of pilgrimage. Five people perish suddenly; and it so affects this priest, who has begun to fall into the doubting of those who wish to understand before they will believe, that he makes it a work of six years to find out either God's providential designs for these five, or whether this was random. The conclusion would be final: either God exists or the whole universe is meaningless, and with a definite foundation of tragedy and sadness. However, the very question was the unbelief; for those who will not see (seeing is an act of faith in the spiritual) are already blind.

The priest traces carefully the lives of each person who fell to their deaths that day in the heat of Peru, and he remains inconclusive. It is the author, Wilder, who tells the real story, the story that the priest could not get to in his digging. We begin to see that each of the five people who died had suffered for love, they were, in a sense, the penitents, the ones who had finally learned what love really was: not selfish desire, addiction, lust, not a life in a peaceful garden, not even the ties of blood. They finally understood that love was to let go of all these, to look out of oneself to the ones God has put in one's life, and to learn to love as Christ loved: from the pilgrimage of the road, teaching and healing; from the synagogue, fighting hypocrisy;from their homes, helping the widow and the orphan; from the Cross, killing sin and death. To love is to lose one's life for the sake of Love, watering the vineyard of the Lord with one's own blood. To love is to love Love Himself above all.

This understanding the five came to, and as a direct result of their loving this way, they literally lost their lives: but what, again, is the end of that verse: "If you seek to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose your life, you will gain it". The five lost their physical lives but gained something more: it is apparent from the threads of the story that the omniscient narrator tells, they had gained love; and their blood watered the lives of those they left behind.

The most important of those whose life was radically changed by the death of those on the bridge was La Perichole. In the years before the accident, she was a talented and vain actress who had caught the eye of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru. She bore him a child out of wedlock, and was certainly on her way to perdition. But, in His mysterious way, the Lord had designs to save her, and the first deep knell heralding this redemption was her falling ill of smallpox. It destroyed her beauty and the surface sin of vanity began to be eradictated from her soul. The man who truly loved her, albeit imperfectly, came again and again to see her in her recluded state. She finally allowed him to take her son to Lima so that he could be educated. On his way, her friend and her son were two of those who died on the bridge.

La Perichole finally appeared at the convent in Lima, a broken and contrite woman, a woman ready to recieve Christ into her life. In the years that the priest was searching out God's providence in the fall of the bridge, La Perichole was living it. Living God's providence, finally understanding love, she was now "Sister Camilla".

The moment of beauty in the film comes when Sister Camilla appears at the court arranged by the Bishop of Lima and presided over by the very Viceroy with whom she had sinned. She comes into the court to give evidence in this trial of the priest, who is charged with heresy for trying to systematize and prove God's providential design (ignorantly trying to destroy a need for faith and make heaven on earth).

Sister Camilla flows into the court, her whole body and head veiled in a white-cloud habit, and stands easily and gracefully on the witness platform. The bishop asks the Mother Superior accompanying her, "Is this the woman who used to go by the name of La Perichole?"She answers in the affirmative and when Sister Camilla is asked to remove her veil to make sure, the Mother tries to vouch for her identity. The Bishop makes disparaging remarks about the honesty of a former actress, and without self-defense or reply, Sister Camilla removes her veil, revealing a horribly scarred face. The Viceroy winces, and the Bishop bids her step forward, asking the Viceroy pointedly if he recognizes her: after all, he knew her the best.

Sister Camilla steps forward, and looks up at her former lover, the Viceroy. To the shock of the court, he says after studying her face, "No. No. I do not recognize this woman. For all her passion, La Perichole had no love in her eyes."

Sister Camilla looks at her former lover for a moment, her eyes full of peace: and love: and forgiveness, for as some saint said, "Where there is true love, forgiveness is already there." She replaces her veil over her face, which despite all its scarring, has grown truly beautiful: beauty where before was only sparkling, hard charm.

Is this not the moment of God's providence? Are not those of us with scarring able to look yet beautiful, an eternal beauty, a spiritual beauty, a piece of heaven shining through the charred remains of our sin?

As the Sister leaves the courtroom in silence, the Mother Superior stops and says, "Those who will not see are truly blind."

See, oh see, the greatness of the Lord, see Him in all things, great or small: see Him in the sadnesses and storms, see Him in the calm and joy: for He is Lord of them all. May His face, a face scarred, a face of beauty in love, be our face; may His open side be the door by which we all enter His Kingdom.

White Martyrdom

A thirty-something mom who likes classical and Gregorian is an unlikely candidate to connect with a Tool song: but I did. The song is 10,000 Days (Wings Part 2), and it seems to capture, at the root, the feeling one has when understanding finally something of the cost of martyrdom. The creative man behind this song is the son of a Christian mother who was afflicted with a stroke and spent the last 10,000 days of her life paralyzed. Her son, a rock star, with some pretty dark and disturbing songs under his belt, seems to come up for air because of her death. I don’t have a judgment as to his personal faith or not, but to me he captured something profound in this particular song. He seems to be shocked into realizing that she is now facing her eternity, and he cries to God in this song for her salvation: he rages, how can she, who loved and suffered, deserve anything less than the greatest welcome from God? How can He not give her soul wings?

10,000 Days starts out in a harmonic minor, and by bridges, slowly layers on other harmonies and finally a clamored melody (like a journey upward). Using the minor key (think of Jewish music from the captivities), but starting out with the sinews underneath, bare and vulnerable, seems to me to be less purely sentimental than akin to the deep suffering that undergirds life in the world; and accepting this as the providential disjunct between this life and the next is a fundamental part of martyrdom for the lover of Christ. Back to the song: Waiting for the melody, the following is sung quietly, bemoaning the fact that many of our churches are filled with those (-is it I, Lord?) who consider themselves saints and martyrs for Christ, but who are actually hypocrites of the worst order:

Listen to the tales and romanticize,
How we follow the path of the hero.
Boast about the day when the rivers overrun.
How we rise to the height of our halo.

Listen to the tales as we all rationalize
Our way into the arms of the Savior,
Feigning all the trials and the tribulations;
None of us have actually been there.
Not like you.

Ignorant fibbers in the congregation
Gather around spewing sympathy,
Spare me.
None of them can even hold a candle up to you.
Blinded by choices, hypocrites won't [seek / see].

But, enough about the collective Judas.
Who could deny you were the one who
[would have made it, / illuminated]
You'll have a piece of the divine.

Another layer of rhythmic harmony, in the minor, but higher on the scale and lighter, is added at the the end of this small verse and the song takes a heavenly turn, almost a turn from resentment to hope:

And this little light of mine, the gift you passed on to me;
I'll let it shine to guide you safely on your way,
Your way home ...

In the next section, he speaks about the lights going down- the loss of a suffering servant, those who are marked by their love and patience and fidelity to Christ in the midst of great trial- that this loss will leave those with little or no faith at the mercy of the inevitable judgment of God. The music echoes this by the entrance of a new and demanding rhythm from an electric guitar, but as yet still soft and in the distance. At the line, “You’re going home”, the song again takes a turn and we begin to hear a hint of the only melody, a real cry of anguish from the heart of the son left behind:

Oh, what are they going to do when the lights go down
Without you to guide them all to Zion?
What are they going to do when the rivers overrun
Other than tremble incessantly?

High as a wave, but I'll rise on up off the ground.
You [are / were] the light and the way, they'll only read about.
I only pray, [Heaven / God] knows when to lift you out.
Ten thousand days in the fire is long enough, you're going home.

Here the son lets loose the blood-gorged prayer of one who has seen a martyr but as yet does not trust God to take care of her; but understands subliminally both her and his position as penitent and supplicant before the Face of God. I resonate with the cry in the lines, “It’s my time now! Give me my wings!” Although cloaked in demanding language, I find the arching intensity of the music, and the guitar above beginning the melody, the exact representation in music of the intensity of both a martyr’s desire and thirst for God, and the lesser soul’s awe at the work and mystery of the Lord in the life of a suffering soul ascending:

You're the only one who can hold your head up high,
Shake your fists at the gates saying:
"I have come home now!
Fetch me the Spirit, the Son, and the Father.
Tell them their pillar of faith has ascended.
It's time now!
My time now!
Give me my, give me my wings!"

Give me my wings!

You are the light and way, that they will only read about.

Should we all not live, at the deepest levels, in this intensity, and thirst for the Living God? Can we desire something less and be truly human? We can only do this by making the capacity inside ourselves for God, who will then fill us with His torrent. Then we live as martyrs, white and red. A red martyr is one who we are most familiar in story- the ones who gave their lives for Christ by shedding blood. A white martyr is one who, like this singer represents his mother, as accepting suffering, accepting loss, accepting God’s will as over and above their own with love, but to the point of death: internal, unseen, but death nonetheless:

Set as I am in my ways and my arrogance,
Burden of proof tossed upon the believers.
You were the witness, my eyes, my evidence,
Judith Marie, unconditional one.

Daylight dims leaving cold fluorescence.
Difficult to see you in this light.
Please forgive this bold suggestion:
Should you see your Maker's face tonight,
Look Him in the eye, look Him in the eye, and tell Him:
I never lived a lie, never took a life, but surely saved one.
Hallelujah, it's time for you to bring me home.

A white martyr, like the priest-saint who gave his life-blood to hear confessions many hours a day for many years; the nun who desired to die a thousand martyrdoms-and did so all within the pastoral walls of her convent in the daily giving over of her will to Love; the woman who prayed her husband and her children into sanctity at great loneliness and cost to her own dignity- the list goes on and on. We read these stories with some tremulousness and awe, but at a certain distance, as if a wall of glass separates us from these silent sacrifices of love, these heroic sacrifices. Only when we begin to desire to have the capacity for the love of God does He begin, gently, and perfectly contoured to our weaknesses, show us the immensity of any martyrdom; that death is death- of the self or the body. But no martyrdom is true that is not born of –simply, love- and love at an intensity that 10,000 Days portrays. It is that pounding thirst of the doe at the stream, the hunger of Christ for souls- the baptized eros that colors and warms charity. For to give your body to the flames, without this Love, is worth nothing. It would be the stupidest thing I can think of to do. May God preserve us from that.

Rather, it is the angst of seeking the Beloved in the cloud, the handing over of one’s will to Him in the silence and darkness, with no word spoken, no prenuptial agreement, no deposit-guarantee. It is to love, to give oneself because of deep, passionate love for God. The secret is that we could not have this but that He loved us first. He watches ardently at the gate for the approaching soul. He looks for us to have courage, and to cultivate strong desire, which are the necessary preparation for real love to take root: and then martyrdom for love of Christ and the souls He loves- the greatest thing we can, each of us, do.

In these light and dark swirled days of ours, we will most of us, be called to some penultimate moments of white martyrdom: for the sake of truth, or purity, or protection of the innocent. It will only be fruitful in love, love for God and the other. Fruitful in the sense that we do not necessarily know, in this life, what our sacrifices of love and will have done, like a providential wind blowing seeds. I do know that it becomes difficult to look at ten thousand days, or fifteen thousand, in this restless world, searching for the Lord through the dark glass. St. Paul says that we wish to exchange our earthly tent (body) for the heavenly one; but that those who are holy wish to stay or go, as the Lord wishes. This is love. But it doesn’t make the thirst less, but the thirst in itself has its own consolations; and I believe the Lord delights in consolation of His children. I understand now St. Therese’s desire: I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth. To be able to love, deeply and freely, to be allowed some small part in the salvation of others (Christ’s gift).

Yet how can I, like Tool’s writer, make this bold suggestion? In my small, white martyrdoms, I see how weak I am, how narcissistic: but I can hope, and all, all of this is my romance with the Lord. Religare, the root word of religion, means to ‘be tied to’. To be tied to something is to be constricted, and everything on this earth would constrict for ill if we tied ourselves to it- but many of us do. The glory and power of God bursts out clearly, like a pole of light piercing and destroying darkness, when we know that to be tied to God (or tied for the sake of God) is to be tied like as to a life-cord, pulling us up out of the frothing sea; to be tied to God is to be pulled to freedom and love. The Catholic Faith (religion) is the cord, martyrdom the weight of Love.

Epilogue to Salt

In the year or so since writing about salt and the Jews, I have had some thinking moments-on this subject. I recently read an article asking the question, “Who are the Jews?”- and this brought me to read Romans, and also gave me a new focus in my reading of The Life of Christ by Ven. Catherine Emmerich.

Who are the Jews, who are they with whom the Covenant of Salt was made? Are they the occupants of Israel, the somber families in black clothing in the Bronx? I suppose the very questions reveal some new confusion in my mind; but a very big clue tugged at me in my reading about the meeting of Our Lord and Nathanael. “Ah”, said Jesus, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile.”

I noticed here a few things. Jesus does not call him ‘Jew” or ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Semite’, all of which would have fit him. He chooses ‘Israelite’. St. Paul, in Romans, uses this term as well, and on an overview look, seems to make a differentiation by the use of the different terms. Both Our Lord and St. Paul seem to speak of ‘Israelite’ and ‘true’ as being connected.

It is said that Heber, the father of the Hebrews, was given a language that was different from all others, to make his descendents better able to live apart from other families, or races. Six generations later, Abraham was born into his line and Abraham’s faith became the stuff of future nations. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, became Israel, the father and personification of ‘isra-el’, or he who struggles with God. It is true; he fathered a nation who struggled with God, like a child struggles to be born. In the providence of God, the connection between Himself and mankind was a national, racial one, although it seems that even at the early stages, people were grafted in, like Joseph’s wife.

This nation, in the desert, struggled with God and despite their weaknesses and betrayals, was allowed to receive the law, the first step in regeneration for all of us. They struggled with God and were sent into captivities. What were they at the time of Christ, at the time of St. Paul? Were there any left to hold God’s grains of salt?

Jesus rejoices in Nathanael as a true Israelite. He recognizes one who struggles with God, without guile: struggling can have two meanings, and the fullness of the saying is apparent in both meanings for a true Israelite. They struggle in the sense of allowing themselves to be yoked with God for truth and salvation, and in failures they fight with God and later plead from Him His forgiveness. Yet in all this struggle, they are without guile, or cunning and deceitfulness.

One can also see who the true Israelite is, inheritor of God’s promises, that Jesus is showing us- by whom he denounces as false. Although they call themselves Jews and Israelites and worship in the Temple and teach in the synagogue, although they claim to interpret the religion for the people, many of the Pharisees are full of guile, full of their own interpretations, full of their heritage and race- they reject God in person, instead of truly struggling. In reading Holy Scripture and books of the life of Christ, like Fulton Sheen’s or Ven. Catherine Emmerich’s, one can begin to put together a picture of what Christ was looking for. The leaders of a town, usually the Doctors of the Law or the Pharisees, would invite Him to a feast and He would say, “I have other hunger” and would go out to find those who were waiting for Him. Often this was the poor and the sick, but also included some wealthy people.

He looked for those who, as St. Paul says in Romans, were circumcised primarily in the heart: that is, the sign of salvation was in the disposition of the heart. He went among the Jews first, looking for “true Israelites in whom there is no guile” and to try to convert those whose hearts were hard; but of course, He knew where it was useless and where there was hope. At the end of His mission to the Jews, He begins to speak more openly of Himself as the Temple, a Temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt: Ven. Catherine Emmerich has a vision in which He says to the Pharisees of one town, “You are destroying the Temple, stone by stone, you are tearing it down with your own hands”; and she was given to understand that He was speaking mystically of the destruction of the particularly Jewish claim to salvation, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Crucifixion of God they brought about most directly.

Thus, in Romans, St. Paul speaks of the Israelite of the circumcised heart, the true Israelites. He is following on Christ’s words and example and on his own deep experience both as a Pharisaical Jew and as a true Israelite, who came to belief in his Savior God. He speaks of those Israelites who have been made jealous by the salvation of the Gentiles, those who God will come to save in the end: he says, “And all Israel will be saved.” There is much worth pondering here, because in the present age, where are the Israelites? It is not by color or pedigree necessarily: it is by the heart. This only God can truly see, only He knows where the salt will draw out the impurities before the end- that is, where the Church will be able to reach among those who call themselves Israelites. It is not for us to know now, and so we must reach out to all and call, “Come and see! I have found the Messiah!”

Resting on the stupid idea that the “Jews have their own covenant and we shouldn’t offend them by evangelizing” is failing the true Israelites.

You Are The Salt of the Earth

A Reprint

A little more than two years ago, there was some furor in Catholic news circles about the claims of some bishops that "the Jews have their own covenant, they don't need to convert to the Catholic Church."

This shocking statement, in its various forms, must be making the Brothers Lemann laugh at the stupidity, or weep at the consequences. They were twins, born into a Jewish family in the later 1800's, and later converted to the Catholic Faith- finally, becoming priests and evangelists to the Jews. In fact, during Vatican I, they were trying very hard to have a document approved by that council which dealt with the desire and purpose of conversion to the Catholic Faith for the Jews. It is with irony that we look back at the statement made at the time that Vatican I was interrupted by WWI- "It is with great hope that the document prepared by the Frs. Lemann will indeed be approved by the council when it is again convened." When the Vatican Council was recovened, the world was shuddering under imminent social and moral revolutions, and the Vatican Council would become the least likely forum in which a document by the Frs. Lemann, advocating evangelization of the Jews, would receive approbation.

True, it would be very interesting to see how the Frs. Lemann might deal with the Jewish question of conversion after the horrors of both WWII and the revolutions that destroyed the entire fabric of societies- and possibly dragging the Church's worldly understanding of Herself and Her role into the smoke of the ruins. However, the passion of the Apostles, notably St. Paul, all the way down to the twin priests, the driving desire to help their brethren in blood to see the reality of the Messiah in the person of Jesus, is the same. No amount of historical events, as terrifying as they may be, could possibly account for the Jewish-convert bishop in Israel, who stated sometime in 2004 that conversion of the Jews was not necessary. This is not an organic change of thinking, it is not on the same spectrum, it is a radical departure. What is the rationale?

In my last post, I discussed the Covenants of Salt- one with the priests in the desert during the Exodus, and later with David. These covenants, because of the nature of the 'salt-covenant', are kept forever. Therefore because the Jews consider these to be proof that although God may punish them for millennia, He will never completely reject them. The idea of there being a New Covenant, or New Testament, which supersedes the Old, including the Covenants of Salt, is completely foreign and blasphemous to the Jews. And since the horrors of WWII, including the Jewish Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the growth of Jewish power in media, politics and culture the world over, the question of Catholic evangelization to the Jews has become a hot-point for controversy and charges of intolerance, "old-time Catholic imperialism". "Anti-Semitism". The stance of the Frs. Lemann, or Fr. Fahey, that of the passion to convert everyone, but especially the Jews since they are the nation out of which the Lord came, is simply against the current of mainstream Catholic thinking since Vatican II. Opening wide the doors and windows to the world does not mesh with sending out the calvary to convert the Jews.

It is quite possibly and probably true that the Covenants of Salt are indeed forever: yet they were made between God and the Jews- He does not change, He does not break faith. That same God came to Moses in the desert as one friend to another, to David as a loving and disciplining Father, and then He came to the Jews through the immaculate womb of a simple Jewish girl, as was promised and foretold for hundreds of years. He came as a bringer and omniscient interpreter of the Law, and as the heir of David's kingdom. Indeed He came and at the same time, fulfilled both Covenants of Salt. But the Jews rejected Him. Yet the salt remains, neither could retrieve the salt from the other's pouch, and so even in an attempt to reject Him and thus break the Covenants, the salt says: "No, you cannot break this covenant. It is forever."

Does this mean, then, that the Jews have their own covenants with the Lord, and that they will be saved regardless of our converting them? It is true that St. Paul tells the Christians in Rome, "I say then..Hath God cast away His people? God forbid, for I also am an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin... God has not cast away His people, which He foreknew ...I say then, have they so stumbled that they should fall? God forbid. But by their offence, salvation is come to the Gentiles; that they may be emulous of them. Now if the offence of them be the riches of the world... that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in. And so all Israel should be saved, as it is written...For the gift and calling of God are without repentance. For as you also in times past did not believe God, but now have obtained mercy, through their unbelief; so these also now have not believed, for your mercy, that they also may obtain mercy"(Romans XI).

We do not know what is in God's mind concerning the Jews. But He is the same God as did die on the cross at the hands of His own, and they will know Him as the Messiah with certainty someday. So why would we not be called, as always, to convert them to the God to Whom they will most certainly recognize before the end of the world? And I think it is of course no accident that Our Lord said, "You are the salt of the earth, if this salt loses its flavor, it is of no use but to be thrown in the fire."

The salt of the earth. The mineral that keeps the heart beating, that preserves, that purifies, so precious and so necessary to life. It was salt that enabled the ancient Hebrews to stop being a nomadic people, a people moving along with and depending upon the herds for sustenance, for salt is necessary to the body for life. Meat carries its own salt; but with the possession of the mineral, the nomadic Hebrews were able to settle and provide their own salt, seasoning foods grown in the fields.

We, the ragged beggars hauled from the streets to the banquet of the King because His own people would not come, we are the salt for the world, and I think, for the Jews. We are, as St. Paul says, "to make (the Jews) emulous"- of the salvation given us by the King of the Universe. We are the intermingled grains of the Salt Covenants, grains provided by God, which cannot be recovered, because we are spread out throughout the earth, and therefore, we are in some way the keepers of the Covenants: we are the grains of salt, not inert, but alive and with the flavour of passion for Our Lord, the Messiah.

If we lose that flavour, that passion to have all know Him as their Saviour, if we opt out of our calling to preach to all nations, that desire and thirst for souls, Jew and Gentile alike ( "In Christ there is no Jew or Gentile"), then we have lost our flavour as salt and are fit for naught than the fire. We must evangelize in season and out of season, in times of ease and times of persecution. Woe to those shepherds who not only lose their flavor, but discourage others from evangelization.