December 2013 – Mysteries and Manners

Book Review: Someone

December 29, 2013

I have been meaning to read Alice McDermott’s work for several years now– my father has been continually recommending her–but it was only a few days ago that I finished her newest novel, Someone.

In fact, I started it and finished it within twenty-four hours; it engrossed me in a way no other book has in many, many years.

Like most of her stories, Someone is about an Irish Catholic family living in the Bronx during the first half of the twentieth century. Well, actually, it’s about one family member in particular, but in a recent interview McDermott tells us that her novel did not start out that way.

Originally, the novel was going to be a much “bigger” project, but towards the very end of writing it, McDermott realized she had missed something. She wanted to tell the story of Marie–a rather plain and nondescript character, especially in comparison to some of the others. But in order to do that she had to change the narrative pretty radically:

[…] [T]his is the first time in my writing career that I wrote a novel mostly in third person, and then very, very close to finishing the novel, I thought, no one’s listening to her and neither is her author. […] I need to give her the first person. I need to let her tell her own story that directly. (PBS Interview)

And Marie does tell her own story. The details are sometimes breathtakingly intimate–the ordinary events of her private life laid bare for us to witness in beautiful but sometimes relentless detail. The two main love affairs of her life ring–painfully–true. Her experience as a child, the slipping away of years, her aging, all described so movingly not because they seem “universal” but because they seem so specific. She is not just “anyone”–as the title suggests.

What I love about the story is how the setting is so lovingly drawn–it is as essential to the plot as the characters are. And in this sense McDermott does what Flannery O’Connor does. (You knew the comparison was coming.) The setting is not incidental, but central, to the action of the story–and the careful description of physicality in the novel is not a materialistic explaining-away of mystery, but rather a profound hearkening toward it. Like here:

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back. The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening. Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty, city light. It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses. It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the dining room table where the cloth–starched linen expertly decorated with my mother’s cross-stich–had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood. (McDermott, Someone 10)

This description of the family apartment will be revisited later in the novel as the years go by. McDermott weaves together Marie’s memories and sometimes moves us forward and then backward in time, though the thrust of the main narrative is consistent.

O’Connor, I think, would appreciate that this novel is so deeply entrenched in a particular time and place. It isn’t hovering vacuously in a vague American somewhere, with “universal” characters untouched by their birthplace and their family. There are even, I noticed with some surprise, a couple of rather “grotesque” characters, whose physical and emotional deformities remind me of a few O’Connor characters. And there is a lot of emphasis on the human body in this novel, in all of its manifestations: living, beautiful, ugly, sick and dead. This also reminds me of O’Connor and other “sacramental” writers (whether Catholic or not).

Yet McDermott is not of the “violent intrusions of grace” school of Catholic literature. The grace she intuits is far more subtle and easy to miss–rather like the sort present in most of our own lives: ignorable but nonetheless persistent.

I think it would be easy to think of this as a gentle story. In many ways it is. But I think if you read it and close it and say to yourself, “How lovely and touching that was,” you’ve rather missed the point. Though I believe anyone who has really confronted death and lost someone they loved would not say such a silly thing.

If you’re interested in this novel or in Alice McDermott, read this fascinating piece she wrote ten years ago about her own fiction and the rather troublesome label, “The Catholic Writer.”

“The Lunatic in the Pew” by Alice McDermott

A taste–that I believe Flannery would savor:

[O]urs is a mad, rebellious faith, one that flies in the face of all reason, all evidence, all sensible injunctions to be comforted, to be comfortable. A faith that rejects every timid impulse to accept the fact that life goes on pleasantly enough despite all that vanishes, despite death itself.

What I have to say about being Catholic, then, is simply this: Being Catholic is an act of rebellion. A mad, stubborn, outrageous, nonsensical refusal to be comforted by anything less than the glorious impossible of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. (McDermott)

McDermott’s characters will accept nothing less.

“The Spirit’s Right Oasis”

December 22, 2013

A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness

Richard Wilbur

The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid
Sun. They are slow, proud,

And move with a stilted stride
To the land of sheer horizon, hunting Traherne’s
Sensible emptiness, there where the brain’s lantern-slide
Revels in vast returns.

O connoisseurs of thirst,
Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink
Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
That shimmer on the brink

Of absence; auras, lustres,
And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.
Think of those painted saints, capped by the early masters
With bright, jauntily-worn

Aureate plates, or even
Merry-go-round rings. Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven
Where flames in flamings burn

Back to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills’ bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun,

Wisely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right
Oasis, light incarnate.

I love this poem. Especially for Advent.

It seems to me Wilbur is wrestling with a philosophical problem–maybe Bishop Berkley’s strange insistence on the priority of perception over “objective” things which I learned about only recently–a problem anyway that involves a sort of Gnostic emphasis on the “spiritual” over the material world. This is, indeed, a problem to which Wilbur continually returns. His poetry is often about the dignity and goodness of the world in all it’s messiness and decay–making him rather a literary brother to Flannery O’Connor, and rather an appropriate poet to read during this Season of the Incarnation.

Wilbur gets his title from Thomas Traherne who says “Life without objects is a sensible emptiness, and that is a greater misery than death or nothing” (as quoted by Engel, here). Rather a strange sentiment for those of us who don’t want to be too materialistic during Christmas, no? Yet fleeing from “objects” is exactly what Wilbur wants us to avoid.

In this (Christmas?) poem, the “beasts of [his] soul,” dissatisfied with lowly corporeality, turn away from John the Baptist’s “shrill of the locust” in the “last groves” of trees, toward the golden “whole honey of the arid / Sun” (3-4). They “long to learn to drink / Of pure mirage” and thus set out deep into the desert, often an image suggesting retreat from the world (10-11).

Alluding gently to the wise men from the East, here the “tall camels of the spirit” traverse the sands in search of some “sheer horizon” (1, 6). It’s rather an understandable longing that we all feel–wanting to extract ourselves from the clutter and bustle of living, peeling away icky fleshiness so that we can wander peacefully in the clarity of intellect. Perhaps Wilbur is alluding to the common practice of Eastern religions and philosophies of trying to separate oneself from suffering and all forms of earthly attachment.

But Wilbur insists that such detachment is a horizon of impossibility. Such places of spiritual purity are nothing more than “fine slights of the sand”–the pun is rather irresistible–that “shimmer on the brink of absence” (19, 12-13).

He then turns, unexpectedly, to iconography: “Think of those painted saints” who were “capped” with halos (15-16). For the Eastern Church, icons are sensible ways to reach the divine. Yet you reach God by praying through them, not around them.

Similarly, Wilbur argues that going out into the desert of intellectual reverie is not the right way to arrive at truth: “[A]ll shinings need to be shaped and borne”–we should not look for the light apart from material things upon which it shines (14). And thus he calls back the “camels” of his own prodigal spirit from their arid deserts–go back the way you came, to the trees, to life, to the messy world you tried to escape:

Back to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills’ bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun

All natural, material things aglow (even halo-ed!) with the light you were looking for in the first place. This image of all things shining with heavenly light reminds me a lot of C. S. Lewis’ oft-quoted saying: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Loving Christ does enable you to see everything–even the most mundane things–in new ways. All things, especially the things you used to overlook, suddenly become important.

I hope, this Christmas, I can similarly turn back toward the messiness of living in a new way.

Wilbur concludes with the image of the Star of Bethlehem over the stable and the “right oasis” for our thirsty spirits–a humble, earthly oasis in the desert:

Wisely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right
Oasis, light incarnate. (24-28)

Thought and Language

December 18, 2013

Mali’s point about speaking with conviction is a very good one: “In case you haven’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about?” He’s being very meta, of course, by actually enacting the phenomena he is describing — using an interrogative tone when he is actually making declarative statements, interjecting with mindless phrases like “you know what I’m sayin’?” etc.

He is basically showing us the way the average teenager speaks all of the time, and the way many adults speak too much of the time.

I plan on showing this video to my kids next semester.

But I think his video raises other questions, like: What is the relationship between language and thought? How does the way we speak reveal the way we think?

Yet the funny thing about language is that it not only reflects our thinking — it also shapes it.

A lot of people think of language this way:

you think something —- THEN —- you say it

ie: language REFLECTS thought.

When really you should take into account this phenomenon:

you say something —- THEN —- you think it

ie: thought REFLECTS language.

That is, you have to be very careful what you say. Because you might start actually believing it.

People who go around searching for compliments by saying things like, “Oh I look so horrible today!” or “I don’t think I’m going to do well on that test!” — not because they actually believe it, but because they want affirmation, often end up believing those statements if they say them often enough.

What you say and how you say it shapes what you think and how you think it.

I see this all of the time with my students.

But to be more precise, the commonly accepted temporal succession between language and THEN thought, or even thought THEN language, is really quite silly. Thought and language are more like the chicken and the egg. Which came first? Well…

Your average dualist would probably say thought came first, then language.

But I’m not so sure.

“In the beginning was the WORD” (John 1:1). The nicely ambiguous thing about logos though, in Greek, is that it kind of means both “word/speech” and “rationality/thought” at the same time.

One of the things my kids say to me all the time is: “I know the answer, Ms. Shea, I just can’t say it.” Or “I remember it, I just can’t put it into words.”

False.

We have all felt this way, but we are all deceiving ourselves. As a teacher, I have found that if you cannot put something into words, then, practically speaking, you don’t really know what you’re talking about at all.

When you really and fully know something, you can also articulate it.

*Caveat: For certain people with certain learning disabilities, there may be some kind of gray area here. But for the average person without said learning disabilities, I think my claim holds up pretty well.

What’s the point of all this?

Well:

1. I think an English teacher really needs to ponder this relationship between language and thought if she plans on helping her students write, read and think coherently. So much of the difficulty in teaching, after you get past the classroom management / grading / parental horrors, comes down to getting inside the heads of the kids and figure out what the heck is going on and how to help them fix it. That’s why I try to focus on “metacognition” so much in my classes.

2. The famous Catholic “both/and” of grace and nature shows up everywhere. Separating thought and language, soul and body, grace and nature, scripture and tradition, form and matter is the kind of Gnosticism our culture suffers from very badly these days. When you separate things like that you are unable to see either of them clearly.

3. The mysterious immateriality of language and thought shouldn’t make us forget how intimately tied both are to the “stuff” we are made of — neurons and gray matter etc. But neither should it make us reduce language or thought to our neurons and gray matter either. If that is *all* thinking is, then we have really no reason to trust it.

Poets seem to understand this language-thought, word-world thing better than most.

Here is one of my very favorite poems by Richard Wilbur. Note his description of how the English language works — and his Edenic imagery at the end. For him, in Paradise, language and thought, word and world, were not separate as they are now.

Games Two

:

From barren coldness birds

Go squadroned South:

So from the hollow mouth

The way of words

Is East. When written down

As here, they file

In broken bands awhile,

But never noun

Found what it named; for lame,

Lost, though they burn

For the East, all words must turn

Back where they came

From, back to their old

Capital. Still,

As pilgrims on a hill

Fallen, behold

With failing eyes from far

The desired city,

Silence will take pity

On words. There are

Pauses where words must wait,

Spaces in speech

Which stop and calm it, and each

Is like a gate:

Past which creation lies

In morning sun,

Where word with world is one

And nothing dies.

Update:

Found this beautiful reading of the above Wilbur poem, as well as some others: “Joining World and Mind: On the Poetry of Richard Wilbur” by Rhina Espaillat

Stuff You Should Read

December 17, 2013

I have been meaning for a while to write about the Common Core, since it has been causing such an uproar in certain Catholic circles. Yet I do not think I have researched it sufficiently to say anything extensive about it yet. I know the Common Core standards for high school English (since I’ve had to try to implement them for two years), and I have spoken to “higher ups” in the ACE program at Notre Dame for their opinions on the matter–which so far seem strangely genial and un-curious.

Here are two articles that present pretty different views. To give you an idea, I am actually much more inclined to agree with Rocha, but I’ll let you decide:

1. “Why I’m Not Too Worked Up About Common Core” – Sam Rocha

2. “Common Core’s Substandard Writing Standards” – Anthony Esolen

Note: Stay tuned for an upcoming post on why I think Esolen is very wrong about his theory of teaching writing–at least at the secondary level. His claims might work better for the more sophisticated college student who already knows how to write, but from my own experience, as much as I appreciate his ideals, I think his comments are irrelevant for the high school English teacher.

Students - Death_to_high_school_English — source: rovalocity.com

I just discovered a new blog (new in the sense that it is “new” to me), and I am quickly becoming a big fan: Artur Rosman’s Cosmos in the Lost. Literature, philosophy, theology – you name it – all of my favorite things seem to be here.

He has two particularly helpful posts for my English major friends out there about contemporary writers who actually take religion seriously and who aren’t suffocated by “nihilism,” which according to O’Connor is the very “air we breathe” these days:

3. Fresh Caught Fish: Part I

Note: The best part about this list is that Rosman actually gives you substantial pieces of his favorite poems by these poets, so that you can get a feel for them. I am already adding names to my Christmas list.

A taste:

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;

like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete

with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

(Les Murray)

4. Fresh Caught Fish: Part II

Note: For me, more of these are familiar names, but I am still looking forward to exploring new landscapes.

And, thanks to Rosman, a beautiful Advent reflection by my favorite theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar:

5. “Into the Dark with God” – Hans Urs von Balthasar

A taste:

Because the Lord, the High God, has taken the same path as they have: he has left his glory behind him and gone into the dark world, into the child’s apparent insignificance, into the unfreedom of human restrictions and bonds, into the poverty of the crib. This is the Word in action, and as yet the shepherds do not know, no one knows, how far down into the darkness this Word-in-action will lead. At all events it will descend much deeper than anyone else into what is worldly, apparently insignificant and profane; into what is bound, poor and powerless; so much so that we shall not be able to follow the last stage of his path. A heavy stone will block the way, preventing the others from approaching, while, in utter night, in ultimate loneliness and forsakenness, he descends to his dead human brothers. (Balthasar)

Lastly, because this Advent has been so dark — with the shootings at nearby Arapahoe High School, a major accident on LA 1 which I took every day for the past two years to drive to my old school, the anniversary of Sandy Hook, the suffering of my friends who are grieving the untimely loss of loved ones so close to Christmas… need I say more? Because it has been so dark:

6. Presence as Absence – by Marc at “Bad Catholic”

Especially this: “We feel the missing person like an atmosphere, not gone so much as everywhere, the whole world crowded as a Parisian metro with their nearness.”

Questions

December 17, 2013

I really like this guy.

Observing Advent

December 13, 2013

We […] forget that in the Book of Job at the end of the drama God declares Job to be righteous–Job, who has hurled the most outrageous accusations at God–while he rejects Job’s friends as speakers of falsehood, those friends who had defended God and had found some kind of good sense and answer for everything. […]

Observing Advent simply means talking with God the way Job did. It means just seeing the whole reality and burden of our Christian life without fear and bringing it before the face of God, as judge and savior, even if, like Job, we have no answer to give about it at all, and the only thing left is to leave it to God himself to answer and to tell him how we are standing here in our darkness with no answers. (Pope Benedict, What It Means to Be a Christian)

Also, there is this beautiful video entitled “Evil Did Not Win” by the mother of Emilie Parker, one of the victims at Sandy Hook. It has been a whole year.

And still we wait for Him.

Memory and Faith Part IV

December 10, 2013

source: byronytaylor.com

Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope…It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope. (Pope Benedict)

Read the other posts in this series on “Memory and Faith” here:

Part I

Part II

Part III

The believer is one who remembers.

As a teacher, I really like this idea.

Maybe it’s because I know how important memory is to being a good student — remembering to study, remembering to do your homework, remembering where you’re supposed to turn it in, remembering your teacher actually loves you and doesn’t want to make your life miserable, remembering the directions given two minutes ago…

But can you really fault somebody if he has a bad memory?

Well, yes, I think you can.

Setting aside the instances where some people through disease or injury lose their ability to remember (something I would like to reflect upon in a later post), memory is integral to human life. And we are responsible for our ability to remember and for our memories.

Not that we all have the same capacity for memory. And for many of us, it’s a big struggle. I know it always has been for me. I forget to do things all the the time. Sometimes I even hurt people when I forget. I forget to call, to text back, to do that chore that really needed doing but for some reason I did not think was important enough to try to remember…

Memory is something like courage. Maybe you weren’t given a big dose of it at birth, but you can cultivate it if you try. Being a good student requires cultivating your memory – and not just your ability to remember certain tasks, either. It’s an ability to remember why you are doing all this work at all. It’s an ability to remember who you really are.

Memory can be a tricky thing, though. Sometimes we think we remember certain people or events more accurately than we actually do. Sometimes we allow our present emotions to invade our memories, to taint what was good and pure with our present cynicism.

Or other times, we let the memories themselves flood us and take over our present peace:

[…] we conjure from the ether of our past a solitary-but-sharply-outlined idea, and then suddenly, one after another, memories begin to fall upon us, like bright orbs called from galaxies far beyond, and much better kept in the distance. Our disappointing families and imperfect parents, our closely held secrets and sins and sorrows and regrets, given too much free reign, begin to dominate us. They wreak havoc on our emotions and then begin to drain our spirits until we are depleted and depressed — all trust, all hope diminished. (Elizabeth Scalia at The Anchoress )

We allow the past to control our present. We refuse the present good because we hold onto our disappointments. But this, too, is a kind of forgetfulness. Holding onto certain memories to the exclusion of others is not real remembering — it’s selective myopia.

Pope Francis (whom I insist really seems to be emphasizing this inseparability between memory and faith) says in his new Apostolic Exhortation:

There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter. I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved. I understand the grief of people who have to endure great suffering, yet slowly but surely we all have to let the joy of faith slowly revive as a quiet yet firm trust, even amid the greatest distress: “My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is… But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness… It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam 3:17, 21-23, 26). (EG 6)

Or other times, our forgetfulness can take a more subtle (and I believe more sinister shape):

We settle into mediocrity–into bland contentment with our books and our friends, our jobs, our homes, even our families–whatever it is that we value. We forget ourselves in the present moment. You see this in obvious ways when people become intoxicated–but there are many things besides alcohol that can intoxicate us and make us forget and live only for the present moment: ideologies, objects, even people.

I suppose that’s a rather controversial thing to say in this carpe diem, live-in-the-present-moment culture. But I would argue that living in the present, to the exclusion of the past and the future, is also myopic and demeans us.

Even Pope Francis, famous for his freshness, his newness, his emphasis on evangelization by prophetic deeds, insists:

Nor should we see the newness of this mission as entailing a kind of displacement or forgetfulness of the living history which surrounds us and carries us forward. Memory is a dimension of our faith which we might call “deuteronomic”, not unlike the memory of Israel itself. Jesus leaves us the Eucharist as the Church’s daily remembrance of, and deeper sharing in, the event of his Passover (cf. Lk 22:19). The joy of evangelizing always arises from grateful remembrance: it is a grace which we constantly need to implore. The apostles never forgot the moment when Jesus touched their hearts: “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon” (Jn 1:39).

How beautiful, and how very curious, that the Gospel writer makes note of the time of day he met Jesus.

There are little details like this sprinkled throughout the gospels, showing some origin in human memory. So much of what was seen and heard about Jesus was passed down by word of mouth, as people recounted what they remembered from days, weeks, and eventually years before.

Before there was the New Testament, there was human memory.

Advent itself is very much a time of remembering.

I feel like Advent, in particular, is a very Jewish time for Christians. From my uninformed and outside perspective, Judaism to me seems to be very much a religion of memory–remembering God’s great deeds throughout history, and imploring God Himself to remember His Chosen Israel. And when Christianity is true to itself, it does the same thing.

In Advent in particular we are steeped in the prophets, especially Isaiah. The Christians remembered different things Jesus said and did, and recognized in those actions the hopes of Israel.

Jesus himself, on the cross, remembered Psalm 22 — perhaps at the sight of his Mother, who taught it to him when he was a little boy.

John the Baptist, this Second Sunday of Advent, reminds the people of his own time, and us, of the Prophet Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (Isaiah 40:3).

Perhaps these “paths” he speaks of are the paths of our own minds. If our memories are crooked and blocked, than whatever it is we are meant to hear will not be able to get through. God wants to come to us, but we have to clear the way.

How easily we forget who we are. How easily we forget the hole in our hearts, and fill it with other things–sometimes very good things–but things nevertheless which aren’t big enough for our longing. We forget this longing, because it is painful. It is easier to be content than to be in love.

But it is better to be in love.

Advent, I think, is supposed to reawaken in us this longing for God. True waiting means waiting with hope and longing and expectation. Patience does not exclude this desire for–for perhaps we don’t even know what. But remembering our own hearts in this way is an essential part of being Christian–and, I would even say, of being human:

Together with Jesus, this remembrance makes present to us “a great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), some of whom, as believers, we recall with great joy: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God” (Heb 13:7). Some of them were ordinary people who were close to us and introduced us to the life of faith: “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice” (2 Tim 1:5). The believer is essentially “one who remembers”. (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 13)

Sometimes music can help us remember. I think this is one of the most beautiful renditions of my favorite Advent/Christmas song I have ever heard.

It helps me remember.

Freedom Hangs Like Heaven

December 5, 2013

“Freedom Hangs Like Heaven” by Iron and Wine

Lyrics here.

He Comes

December 2, 2013

Advent, this powerful liturgical season that we are beginning, invites us to pause in silence to understand a presence. It is an invitation to understand that the individual events of the day are hints that God is giving us, signs of the attention he has for each one of us. (Pope Benedict, Homily at First Vespers of Advent, November 28, 2009)

The priest’s homily yesterday for the First Sunday of Advent was very simple but very good. He told this story–which I am retelling as closely as my memory allows:

There was a monk who had been praying for a very long time, perhaps for years, to see the Lord face to face. Finally, in prayer, the Lord informed him that He would come and visit him the very next day.

Thrilled, the monk finished his prayers and went to bed, but it took him a long time to fall asleep because he was so excited. Morning came and he looked out the window at the beautiful sunrise and thought to himself, “Today is the day I will see the face of God!”

The bells rang for morning prayer and for Mass. The monk had gone every day for the last thirty years, but today he decided to stay in his room because he did not want to miss God when he came to visit him.

A long while later, about mid-morning, there was a knock on the door. The monk, trembling, opened it– only to find the concerned face of his brother monk, who was worried about him because he had not come to Mass that day. “Are you all right?” The monk assured his friend that all was well, and he hastily closed the door to continue waiting for God.

About an hour later there was another knock at the door. Again, however, the monk was disappointed– it was only another brother reminding him of his duties to care for the sick friars, to change their bedsheets, to give them their medicine. “Would you mind covering for me today?” pleaded the monk. “I am waiting for a very important Visitor!”

His friend agreed, and the monk continued to wait for God to arrive.

The day went on. Evening came. It was time for the monk to shut the gate to the monastery. He bustled out of his room to do this quickly, but before he could shut it some travelers called out to him not to shut the door. They begged him to let them in.

“I am sorry – can you please come back tomorrow?” the monk said. “I am very busy this evening. I am waiting for an important Visitor!”

The monk closed the gate and rushed back to his room.

The hours crept by. The monk was feeling more and more discouraged and upset. He watched in dismay as the clock struck midnight.

The day was over – and the Lord had not come as He said He would.

The monk knelt down to pray again. “Why didn’t you come?” he asked. “I waited for you all day long, and you never came.”

The Lord answered him, “I did come. In the morning when you woke, I was in the sunrise, but you did not see me there. I was there at morning prayer and in the Mass, but you were not there to meet Me. I was there in your brother monk who came to check on you, but you did not recognize me. I was there again in your sick and dying brethren, but you did not come to minister to Me. I was there in the travelers seeking food and shelter, but you did not let Me in. I did come.”

what-would-Jesus-cut-POOR — source: urbanchristiannews.com

I think there are several ways in which we can find this story very unsatisfying.

1) Our consciences are troubled. We recognize this story as being another version of the Last Judgment described in Matthew 25:31-46 – “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you did not take me in…” We, with the monk in the story, reply, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?” (cf. Mt 25:44). And we know that we do this all of the time, through our inattentiveness.

As a teacher I am bombarded by students for seven hours a day, sometimes nonstop, during class but also outside of class. It’s funny because during my off-hour or after school, I am sometimes sitting at my desk, reading a book by the Pope or a blog about the Gospel readings, and I find myself annoyed when students come in – “Hey Ms. Shea, I lost my copy of that homework.” “Hey Ms. Shea, I know I said I would come tomorrow to take that quiz, but can I take it now instead?” “Uh, Ms. Shea, do we have any homework for tonight?” And I swallow my annoyance and think to myself, ugh, I’m trying to read about God here–completely forgetting that God is knocking at my door at that moment through the needs of my kids.

2) Another reason we might find this monk story unsatisfactory in some way is a lot more subtle, and I noticed the temptation in myself as soon as the priest ended his homily. It was a kind of disappointment — that God had promised to show that monk His face but really only meant showing it in ordinary and mundane ways. Huh. Typical. If that’s all He meant, when why didn’t He say so? And why does it always have to be this way? Couldn’t You show Your real Face just once?

We then feel a sort of fake sympathy for the poor monk in the story (who is, of course, ourselves). We think, I bet that poor guy always praised God for the sunrise, always went to prayers and Mass, always helped his sick brothers and took in the travelers. He messed up this one time because of an obvious misunderstanding, and now he’s going to be judged? How is that fair?

And, while we’re at it, why doesn’t God ever mean what He says? He gives so many extravagant promises (read the Old Testament) and they are never fulfilled in the ways we want them to be. Israel was waiting for a Messiah–and what they got was a poor carpenter, a weird rabbi, who was eventually killed by Rome anyway.

But if we step back a little, we can see how wrongheaded these complaints are. The monk was wrong to stay waiting in his room, just as we are wrong to stay waiting in our humdrum lives until some “sign” forces us out of our drab complacency into sudden holiness.

And the Israelites knew what a fearsome thing it would be to behold the Face of God. Moses was afraid he would die, and he covered his face with his robe when the Spirit of the Lord walked by his mountain. To ask to “see” God is really no small matter – and I wonder if perhaps we really know what we’re asking for when we make such a demand.

3.) The third reason for feeling this story is somewhat unsatisfactory is very similar to the second. We (or maybe just I, as the case may be) go back to all those supposed “appearances” of God’s face — God’s version of keeping His promise to the monk. Well, how are we supposed to believe that God comes if we only ever see Him in these ordinary things? Doesn’t the core of our faith rest upon Miracles, after all — the Incarnation and Resurrection? But that was 2,000 years ago. Can’t there be a miracle for us, today?

It’s a tough question. Why does God — if He exists — choose to remain so hidden from everybody. Why does He make it so difficult for us to see Him? If He wants everyone to be saved, then why doesn’t He do something about our blindness, our deafness?

The Church replies that He did do something about it. He became a human being. He died to save us. Read your Bible.

But even so we are unsatisfied. That was so long ago! I wasn’t there! How can I be expected to trust the (strangely) ordinary writings in the Gospels that I cannot verify for accuracy, by people I never met, in a language and culture so different from mine, and composed in a time when accuracy maybe even meant something different than it does now?

But that’s how He is, I realized as I sat back in my pew with a sigh yesterday. That’s Who He is.

The Mass itself went on, and He came–as He always does–in ordinary bread and wine. Nothing spectacular. No show. No obvious suspension of the laws of nature forcing us to believe that He was there at all. Just ordinary bread and wine. Just the miserable faces of the poor. Just the annoying faces of your coworkers or family members. Just the stable and the manger.

God is humble — and perhaps even shy. He does not force us to see Him, or to love Him, or even to look for Him. He leaves that up to us and our freedom. And if we don’t really want to see Him, then we won’t.

Advent is all about our waiting, but it is also about His Coming.

And Christmas, we pray, is when those two movements meet each other.

This beautiful poem comes to mind:

He was born in an obscure village
The child of a peasant woman
He grew up in another obscure village
Where he worked in a carpenter shop
Until he was thirty

He never wrote a book
He never held an office
He never went to college
He never visited a big city
He never travelled more than two hundred miles
From the place where he was born
He did none of the things
Usually associated with greatness
He had no credentials but himself

He was only thirty three

His friends ran away
One of them denied him
He was turned over to his enemies
And went through the mockery of a trial
He was nailed to a cross between two thieves
While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing
The only property he had on earth

When he was dead
He was laid in a borrowed grave
Through the pity of a friend

Nineteen centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race
And the leader of mankind’s progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life.

(Dr. James Allan, 1926 – Source )