NEW LIFE TOGETHER

THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CROSS

47^TH Provincial Chapter

Saint Paul of the Cross Province

May 8, 2006

What a joy and privilege it is to be with you today, as you begin your 47^th provincial chapter.  Thank you for inviting me!

And I would like to take this opportunity, if I may, to thank you for your support for our common Passionist enterprise, Catholic Theological Union.  Thanks for sending Flavian Dougherty, Fidelis Connelly, and Xavier Vitacollona—along with your students—to begin that relationship nearly twenty-five years ago, a relationship of Passionists that has flourished over the years.  Thanks to all of your men who have been formation directors, teachers, students, trustees, and welcome visitors at CTU.  Thank you for sending your volunteers there for their orientation.  And thanks now to Terry for his great support, for David Cinquegrani for serving on the Board of Trustees, for having Robin as a highly regarded and esteemed professor on our faculty, for having Fran Landry as formation director and key staff for two of our residential programs.  This year we move into a new building and begin a new era at CTU and the Saint Paul of the Cross province—together with twenty-five other religious communities of men--is a vital part of it.

But let me turn to the crucial business at hand, the formal beginning of your chapter which caps a long and serious process of planning and preparation.

            I am very impressed and moved by the theme of your chapter, “New Life Together Through the Lens of the Cross.”  I imagine that each word and phrase of this theme has particular meaning as you have gone about your work of renewal.  Searching for new life to renew our lives and ministry, doing that together in community, and, above all, viewing the present and the future through the lens of the cross.  I was particularly struck by what I think is the most characteristic Passionist part of that theme, namely “through the lens of the cross.”   It is a way of summing up the very heart of the Passionist vocation—seeing the world—the past, the future, the present--through the lens of the cross.  Indeed, it points to the very nature of the Christian vocation itself—to view all reality through the passion and resurrection of Christ.   Paul said it with force to his Corinthian community: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (I Cor 2:2).  Seeing reality through the lens of the cross is perhaps another way of expressing the image that is also venerable for our Passionist community—namely, the “memoria passionis”—the keeping alive within us the dynamic memory of the passion of Jesus.

            The scriptures are keen on the notion of “seeing”—seeing things through the eyes of faith, seeing things from God’s way of viewing the world.  Jesus came to give sight to the blind, to make the blind see—and so, at Jesus command, the man born blind washes his eyes clear in the waters of Siloam.  At Bethsaida, the touch of Jesus’ healing hands and the paste he forms from the earth make scales drop from the eyes of the blind.  Bartimaeus, alone and listless by the roadside, pleads that “he may see”.  And Jesus chides his chronically dull disciples: “have you eyes, but do not see”?  Jesus the light of the world has come that we may see—see reality deeply, truly, courageously.  But more than that, we are asked to see the world around us as God sees it, to see it indeed through the lens of the cross—that core reality of our Christian faith that defines who God is for us, that defines the nature of the human condition, that defines our destiny as children of God.

            Allow me for a few minutes—as a homage to you and, I hope, as a small service as you begin your work that might help stimulate your imagination and your energy for the task ahead—allow me to think out loud with you about what it might mean to view our reality at this moment in our history through the lens of the cross.  In biblical terms, allow me to offer some words of exhortation and encouragement, drawing on the well-springs of our spiritual resources.  There are three perspectives, I believe, that become acutely visible when we view reality through the lens of the cross of Christ: first our common mortal humanity, secondly, the reality of sin and the need for conversion, and, finally, the triumph of love and resurrection. 

I. Our Mortal Humanity….

            What is the cross first and foremost?  What did it mean for Jesus and his contemporaries?  There is no doubt about this—the cross was a sign of death, a cruel and painful death even.  No matter how we may bejewel the cross and no matter how it has been transformed in its meaning through faith, the fact is that the cross is a sign of death and this is where we should begin.

            By raising the specter of death so vividly before us, the cross reminds us of our common humanity, our mortal being, our limitations.  This was certainly so for the earliest Christian theology—the assertion that Jesus had been crucified, that he had died on the cross, was the surefire guarantee of his authentic humanity.  Paul uses the catchphrase “death on a cross” to anchor his assertion about the humanity of Jesus.  The exalted early Christian hymn of Philippians begins with Jesus in the form of God and taking the form of a slave—but this is not Gnostic play acting as a human being—Jesus truly endures death, “death on a cross” Paul adds to the hymn.  This startling and scandalous reality of the cross is the wisdom of God, Paul acclaims, because it makes clear that Jesus is one with us and dies for us.  This reality of death on the cross is what gives surety to the Johannine claim: The Word became flesh.”

            And so if we look at reality through the lens of the cross, one of the very first things we must see is the reality of our humanness, our common humanity before God, our “weakness” as Paul the Apostle often referred to it.  We are bodily beings, limited, capable of great beauty but also inflicted with suffering and loss.  Beneath all of our accomplishments and cultural differences, beneath all of our unique experiences and expertise, lies our common humanness—one that we share with the cow herder in Tanzania and the rocket scientist in Tokyo, with the high fashion model in Paris, and the day laborer in Los Angeles.   The fact that we are called Passionists, that we are vowed religious or ordained priests, or part of the extended Passionist family of lay collaborators and friends, or anything else, does not take away the fundamental fact that we are first and foremost human beings created by God and sharing our humanity with all the children of God in the universe.

            Contemplating reality through the lens of the cross might help us plant our feet firmly on the earth and give us a sense of compassion.  As Chesterton said many years ago in a wonderful essay on “eating too much”—we are all at sea and we are all seasick.

            Why is this fundamental dimension of the cross important as we Passionist gather to assess our present and to plan for the future?   We above all—we who embrace the cross as the essence of our charism—should not be shocked by our common humanness as a community.  We should not be shocked or scandalized by the specter of death—for ourselves individually or even as a community.  We should not be intolerant of our weakness and failures—as individuals or as a community.  We should not be impatient with our limitations—as individuals or as a community.  Because we are contemplatives of the cross we Passionists have a place for human weakness.  After all, our corporate logo is not that of winged victory or an eagle brandishing spears, but the cross embedded in a human heart.  One of the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that when they would be discouraged by all the problems, then Cardinal Ratzinger would tell them that on behalf of the church they could not afford the luxury of being shocked.

            I think, in fact, this has been instinctively true for Passionists, certainly in our apostolate.  We have been known as compassionate confessors, hospitable communities, not pretentious in our self-image.  And this is good.  And when we come to plan for the future, we should not forget our own sense of reality, our own limitations, even as we let our imaginations and our dreams soar.  The ability to dream and imagine is also part of our humanness, but such beautiful work must be rooted in reality.

            In one of my very favorite books, Becoming Human Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that one of the most potent forces for breaking down community is what he calls “wish dreams,” clinging to our own version of what authentic community must be.  The “wish-dreamer” are those, Bonhoeffer says, who are more in love with the community of their dreams than they are with the actual community that God gives them. 

            So here we are—look around us—this is the community God has given us.  This is the community we will live with into the future.  This is the community we must cherish and with whom we can carry out God’s will for our congregation at this time in our history.  Let us embrace each other and be tender with one another.  Let us speak the truth to each other but do so with compassion and respect.

II. The Reality of Sin and the Need for Conversion.

            If we view reality through the lens of the cross then it is not simply a matter of being aware of our humanness, our mortality and limitations as human beings.  The cross was never a neutral emblem of our common humanness.  The cross was a cruel form of capital punishment, an attempt to discredit and destroy a human life.  Jesus did not die in bed but on a cross and that makes all the difference.  In the case of Jesus, that crucifixion was a miscarriage of justice, an act of cruel and arbitrary power, a sinful act that struck down the very Son of God, a brutal crushing of the most beautiful human life that God ever created. 

            The gospels are clear that the cross of Jesus was a sign of infamy, an expression of human sinfulness.  The complicity of the religious leaders, the calculating indifference and insensitivity of Pilate, the betrayal and treachery of Judas, the cowardice of Peter and the disciples—all of these wrap the cross of Jesus in the mantle of human weakness and sin.  The gospels of Luke and John go further and see lurking behind the forces that gather to strike at Jesus the power of the demonic, ultimate evil and the harbinger of death that stands opposed to everything that is divine and beautiful.

            Thus the cross of Jesus stands as a terrible symbol of human sinfulness, of the destructive power of injustice and indifference, of the capacity of humans for cruelty and oppression.  It is a piercing reminder of the aching suffering of generation after generation of human beings who have been crushed by burdens of poverty and exploitation.  All of the children malnourished and abused.  All of the women robbed of their dignity and freedom.  All those who have had their lives snuffed out before they have had a chance to breathe.  All those killed in senseless conflicts over the ages—including in our own day, at this very moment.

            Christian mystics and contemplatives throughout the ages—including Paul of the Cross—have recognized that the bloody sweat of Jesus in the garden, the flogging and torture he endured, and his anguished cry of near despair on the cross, were in reality the piercing cry of all humanity in its suffering—a suffering inflicted by sinful humanity itself.  Indeed, he bore our sins and for our transgressions he was afflicted.  Jesus, the Son of God and Son of Humanity, represents all of God’s children, especially in their suffering because of sin and injustice.

            Our own Rule and Constitutions urges us to view the cross in this fashion.  By remembering the passion of Jesus, by viewing the world through the lens of the cross, we should be especially aware of the crucified of our world today and moved to alleviate such suffering through our mission as Passionists: 

We are aware that the Passion of Christ continues in this world until He comes in glory; therefore, we share in the joys and sorrows of our contemporaries as we journey through life toward our Father.  We wish to share in the distress of all, especially those who are poor and neglected; we seek to offer them comfort and to relieve the burden of their sorrow.  The power of the Cross, which is the wisdom of God, gives us strength to discern and remove the causes of human suffering. (Rules and Constitutions # 3)

While we are aware of common humanity and compassionate towards it, we also recognize the reality of sin and human cruelty.  We recognize the need for profound conversion of heart.  Our corporate commitments, our preaching, our use of resources—all of these dimensions of our lives must reflect this awareness if we are to be true to the cross of Christ.  I see this awareness in your province plan, the repeated commitment to those on the margins—the refusal to abandon the poor—the striving to preach a gospel of justice.  However modest our efforts may be, however small may be the stream of justice that can flow from our mission, we must not abandon this part of our mission if we are to view the world through the lens of the cross.

            This past week we had the privilege of having Jean Vanier with us—he had come to be honored by CTU at our annual “Blessed are the Peacemakers” dinner.  Because he did not want to live in a hotel, we had the blessing of having him stay with us in our Passionist community.  If he is not a saint, I don’t know who is.  For more than forty years, he has lived with the mentally disabled and has been the founder of the famous l’Arche communities that bring together persons with disabilities and able-bodied people in mutual respect and love.  Last Wednesday he spoke at a forum at CTU for our students and faculty and later that day addressed a large audience at a downtown hotel for the dinner.  His message was the same: the desperate need in our world not to forget the poor and the marginalized.  Not simply out of charity or because they are in need.   But in order to be truly human ourselves we must learn from those who have nothing other than their own capacity to love.  To quell the world’s violence, to blunt its injustice, to roll back the growing gap between the have’s and the have nots, between the powerful and the weak, we must find ways to listen to the cries of the poor and to relate to them as our fellow human beings and as children of God.

            I kept thinking as he spoke his simple but penetrating and moving words, this is the message of the cross—of the Crucified Jesus whose death is a challenge to world of power and exploitation.

III.  The Cross as Sign of God’s Love and as the Way to Resurrection.

There is a final dimension of ultimate reality that looms if we view the world and our destiny through the lens of the cross, namely that this symbol which originated as a sign of death has, because of the Jesus who was crucified on its wood, become a sign of God’s unconditional love for the world and the promise of resurrection. 

As strange as it may seem—or as Paul put it, as “foolish” as it sounds--we Christians believe that the death of Jesus is truly a sign of God’s unconditional love for the world.  The Gospel of John interprets the death of Jesus precisely in this way: “No greater love than this…”    To offer one’s life for another; to risk even death for the sake of another—is the ultimate sign of human love and devotion.  No one can ask for more.  Christians understand the cross as signifying that powerful and overwhelming message about the quality of God’s love for the world, revealed and exemplified in the death of Jesus for others.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.”

Jesus’ own willingness to give his life for others becomes as well the fundamental ethic for the followers of Jesus.  As Christians we believe that true humanness, true greatness is defined by our capacity to give our lives for the sake of others.  “To lose your life is to save it” Jesus teaches us. This is not servile self-denial, but true love—transcending ourselves for the sake of other. Something done on a daily basis—sometimes heroically and dramatically, sometimes routinely in a thousand acts of goodness and self-sacrifice for one’s child, one’s spouse, one’s friend.

We believe that this teaching and example of Jesus is not a mere sectarian perspective valid only for Christians but a revelation of the true nature of the human person before God. To transcend one's own needs and concerns and to give one's life out of love for the other is the most noble and defining character of the Christian human being in the eyes of God.

You know there are a lot of examples of this in our world today, examples of heroic virtue, of giving one's life for the other that are abundant and so eloquent. I think for example of the tragedy of September 11, of the firefighters and rescue workers, to the people on the plane that crashed not far from here, United Flight 93 that is now celebrated in a film, that prevented another tragedy at the cost of their own lives.  I think of the rescue workers and health care people in New Orleans who worked long hours in the wake of that terrible hurricane, seemingly abandoned by everyone else, to care for people in need. I think of the young men and women in our armed forces Iraq who in an uncertain cause are still willing to risk their lives for their county.  I think of parents who forsake their own needs so that their children can go to college.  I think of sons and daughters who defer their own plans to care for an ill or aging parent.  I think of the young men and women in your volunteer program who give a year of their lives to serve the poor in Honduras and Haiti.

            We know in our hearts that the real heroes in our society, the truly great human beings are not the overpaid professional athletes or movie stars but ordinary people doing truly noble acts, acts that the teachings of Jesus tell us reveal the true character of the human spirit before God.  

            The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness has said that sometimes situations of horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. "The real mystery," he added, "is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness."

            This kind of noble human love is symbolized in the passion and death of Jesus; this is the profound meaning of the cross.  And this is one dimension of the cross that we as Passionists do not want to forget and which we want to proclaim in our ministry on behalf of the church.  When we truly transcend ourselves for the sake of someone else, we are most truly human and bear the spark of the divine.

Finally, we believe and know that the passion of Jesus did not end

with death.  Keeping alive the memory of the passion, viewing reality through the lens of the cross,  also means remembering that while the cross is a sign of suffering it also a sign of triumph, because love is more powerful than death.  And the crucified Jesus becomes the Risen Christ.  And his empty tomb is an entrance way to abundant life.  Year after year in every parish throughout the world—as we did just a couple of weeks ago--we celebrate the Triduum, Holy Week, the core mysteries of our faith.  There is Good Friday but also Easter Sunday—they cannot be separated.  Jesus passes from death to life.  Christianity affirms both the reality of suffering and loss and the bounty of life renewed. 

There is a wonderful story told about Saint Theresa of Avila who one day was praying intensely in her room and the devil decided to attempt to deceive her.  He appeared to her in the form of the Risen Christ.  At first Theresa was overwhelmed with ecstasy and fell to her knees in adoration of this beautiful vision.  But as she peered at the figure of Christ she suddenly stood up and said, “Get away from me, Satan!  How did you know it was me, he said.  “No wounds, no wounds.”  The startling and exquisite portrayal in the gospels of Luke and John—the Risen Christ appears, his risen body luminous with glory, but he still bears his wounds.  The early church knew that the Crucified Christ and the Risen Christ were one—and that the Risen Christ would never forget his wounds of love on behalf of the world.

I think we all sense we live in a time when there is a brooding sense of uncertainty, of anxiety, of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  The confusing threat of terrorism and war; the undertow of uncertain economic conditions, the lack of confidence in so many of our institutions—the family, education, government, even the church itself. 

It is a time when the church itself and we Passionists in particular cannot forget that if we are conscious of the wounds of Christ we must also not forget the glory of Christ and God’s unbreakable promise of life.  “Can anything separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul asks in his letter to the Romans.  “No…for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:37-39).

            That conviction—that life is stronger than death, that love is more powerful and enduring than hatred—is a message that we need to carry with us today.  Right after the terrible days of September 11 I came across a newsletter sent out by an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi in New York to his followers.  The words stay with me and I would like to share a paragraph with you now:

Dear Friends,

What is the remedy to Wanton Hatred? Our rabbi of righteous memory answered this many times, with clarity and certitude: Wanton Love. Raw, cold-blooded, fanatical, baseless, relentless hatred can be matched and combated only with pure, undiscriminating, uninhibited, unyielding, baseless, unsolicited love and acts of kindness.

But we need not just plain love. We need love that costs us. Love that we get nothing back for.  There are people in the world that are committed to sowing their hatred. We need to be willing to lose sleep, to suffer losses, to be uncomfortable, to sacrifice our pleasures, in order to help another human being -- with at least the precision, determination and passion that Evil's compatriots employ to fulfill their mission of hate.

Every one of us can make a difference. Our Rebbe would always quote the Maimonidean adage: Each person should see himself as though the entire world is on a delicate balance and with one deed he or she can tip the scales. Only a few handfuls of evil people can seem to turn our world upside down. Let us not underestimate the power of each of us to turn it upright again.

Every good act, every expression of kindness and love, will be a thousand antibodies to neutralize the viruses put in place by the forces of evil. In response to darkness, we will fill the earth with light. To defeat evil we will saturate our globe with good.

And when we do our part G-d will surely do His part to protect us and transform our world to the one we all hope and yearn for, one that will be filled with His glory, like the waters fill the ocean.

                                                                                    Amen.

            The cross, ultimately, is God’s way of reminding us that the force of God’s love is more powerful than any force of evil or hatred or death.  That is a message of hope that is the foundation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is the message we Passionists must strive to proclaim through the works of our ministry. 

            There is even something more…  The cross of Jesus did not end in lingering death but in the power of resurrection.  If we contemplate reality through the lens of the cross then we must also see our lives and our destiny in the light of the resurrection.  The conviction of resurrection is what gives hope and meaning to the cross of Christ.  We are Passionists but we are also people of the resurrection.

            In his beautiful homily at this year’s Easter Vigil in St. Peters, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the resurrection in eloquent terms worth remembering.  He noted that the reality of the resurrection brings an entirely new level of life and being to our universe.  He compared it to a mutation in evolution.  “…Christ’s Resurrection, he noted,…is the greatest “mutation”, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its  development; a leap into a completely new order that concerns us, and the concerns the whole of history.”  The pope went on, “At the Last Supper Jesus anticipated death and transformed it into self-giving.  His existential communion with God was concretely an existential communion with God’s love, and this love is the real power against death, it is stronger than death.  The Resurrection was like an explosion of light, an explosion of love…which ushered in a new dimension of being, a new dimension of life in which, in a transformed way, matter too was integrated and through which a new world emerges.”

            This conviction that the cross is the unimpeachable sign of God’s love for the world, that it leads to an explosion of light and love that has changed our destiny and our world forever, is something that we should not only preach as an essential part of our message of the cross, but is something we need to take to heart ourselves at this moment in our Passionist history.  Confidence in God’s love for us.  Confidence that we are people of the resurrection—viewing the future in this way should ultimately dissolve our anxiety and enable us to plan and decide and build with serenity.  We are not dead—we are alive.  The Passionists are alive.  Saint Paul of the Cross province is alive.  And God is with us.  This is not hokum or whistling in the dark.  It is the deepest conviction of our Christian faith on which we have wagered everything. Whatever should befall us.  Whatever circumstances we may have to face—we will not die but live because of the Crucified Christ who gave his life for us and abides with us still.

                                                                        Donald Senior, C.P.

                                                                        Catholic Theological Union

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