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AN INTERRUPTED ZIG, A WASTEFUL ZAG, A RENEWED ZIG
Recently I was asked by my spiritual director: why Zig Zag?
Zig Zag refers to abrupt turns to left or right, that is
deviating from a straight line or path. In the context of these essays to zig
means to return to the right path and to zag means to deviate from it.
The path, for all the baptized, is to respond to Jesus’
invitation to follow Him and we do so with the help of the Holy Spirit by
following Jesus’ footsteps which is to follow Him through each moment of life,
through the doorway of death, into the heart of the Holy Trinity, when our
pilgrimage life on earth will be ended and, indeed, we will have eternal rest.
Eternal rest not being a lack of activity for within the Communion of Saints,
until the end of chronological time, we will intercede for our brothers and
sisters still on pilgrimage and also, we will, with all the Angels and Saints
be actively adoring, lauding, loving with absolute joyful love, the Most Holy
Trinity, in whose radiant, loving presence we shall be dwelling, literally,
forever!
When I began these in 2017, with the blessing and
encouragement of my spiritual director at the time, who had guided me, fathered
me from atheistic hedonism back to faith, sacraments and ultimately priesthood
and the life of an urban hermit, he was already becoming very ill and by the
end of that summer said he could no longer continue as my director. We remained
extremely close until his death a few weeks ago.
I wrote the last section in February of 2018 guided by a new
spiritual director who suddenly was transferred across the country for studies
towards a doctorate and, before I was blessed, actually thanks to his
recommendation, with my current spiritual director, I had set this aside
because I hit a wall, namely exactly where am I going with this, how do I avoid
the pernicious ‘tmi’?
A couple of weeks ago my spiritual director, after asking
the above question about why Zig Zag, said it was time to resume this writing.
So, I read and re-read the previous essays, asking the Holy Spirit for His
guidance and so the unintended zag away has become the renewed zig with the
grace of obedience.
It is to embrace again these words from the end of that 2018
post: As Christ said, and St. John Paul loved to repeat: “duc in altum: put out
into the deep. [Lk.5:4]”, the depth of each moment. As Bernanos puts on the
lips of the dying priest in DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST: “All is grace.”
While I never write anything, not even letters, the snail
mail kind, or emails, without listening to the Holy Spirit, asking for His
words [any that are truthful, charitable are His, anything unwise, pedantic,
hyper-critical are obviously mine], I do, since normally I am composing things
in my wee brain before actual writing, often have scraps of paper with
‘ideas/themes’ on them beside the computer. Inevitably, after prayer before
writing, the scraps are just that, scraps!
At my age my parents, aunts and uncles are all dead, many of
the people closest to me in decades past also are dead, including those, such
as Catherine Doherty, most of the pioneer generation, and even some who joined
Madonna House when I did, also have died, including the aforementioned
spiritual director, father of my soul for over fifty years.
There was no pandemic of death cutting a swath of grief and
fear throughout the human family when I last wrote.
For that evil China, not the ordinary Chinese people but the
Chinese leadership, will have much to answer for at the final judgement.
Me too, all of us for, like in the parables in the Holy
Gospel, our very life, our baptismal life, these are gifts given freely by Love
Himself to us, gifts that are treasured coin for the realm and when we die must
account for how have invested – through living the Gospel with our lives
without compromise – or not, the treasure granted to us.
Frankly at times I am feverishly digging holes everywhere to
find, clean, and invest the enormous amount of coinage I fearfully buried in my
early life, growing up in the pre-Vatican II era of Jansenism, that heresy
likely the most evil one to have ever wounded the Church and led countless
people to, if not suffer complete wounded loss of faith, to find an alternative
to the Church of Rome, or even to Christianity itself.
Without falling into the swamp of being a polemicist about
life since Vatican II, these almost sixty years later, two examples of why,
among many other reasons, the Council was both urgently necessary for, and a
true gift to, the Church and the world, and why, among other reasons, because
of the chaotic aftermath in the immediate post conciliar period, and what
lingers from that period, it can be said of the Council that it remains an as
yet uncompleted event of grace,
Like the stench of a broken sewer pipe that lingers long
after the pipe has been repaired until a stiff wind clears the air, it
literally took St. John XXIII’s opening of the windows to clear the air from
the stench of Jansenism, rigorism, triumphalism, which lingered in various
areas within the universal Church, and sadly is resurgent within the lives of
not only ultra conservative Catholics but within other Christian denominations
as well.
Fundamentally Jansenism was obsessed with sin, had a
seriously distorted notion of the body, primary source of sin for them, an
obsession with mortifications that not only bordered on but
easily crossed the line into masochism, as a false emotional
sense of spiritual comfort, for the Jansenist notion of God was of a punitive
being. Not heard of much these days but in those days many souls suffered the
pernicious emotional and spiritual anxiety of scruples, a fear that no matter
having received absolution in Confession one could never be sure God was no
longer angry with us or no matter how diligently we practiced virtue we
actually had not achieved virtue.
I only recall the reference to God loving us in those years
when I read the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux. For all the sense of
the transcendent in the pre-conciliar liturgy, the awareness of the transcendent
given by the beauty of stained glass windows, statues, votive candles, the Real
Presence of Jesus front, and centre in the tabernacle of the main altar, people
participated under the heavy yoke of fire, brimstone, and damnation homilies.
No surprise then in those days during Sunday Mass many people remained in the
pews at Communion time because they had not gotten to confession Saturday
afternoon or, given the Eucharistic fast in those days, was from midnight on,
from all food and water until Communion time, had given into hunger or thirst.
So along comes Good Pope John, as he was known, a peasant
who grew up within a family of deep faith and love, whose experiences during
WWI in the Italian Army, of fascism between the wars, as a Vatican diplomat in Turkey
helping rescue countless of our Jewish brothers and sisters from the claws of
the SS, his pastoral experience after the war as Patriarch of Venice, knew
exactly what Catholics, indeed the world needed: to be reminded God IS Love,
and loves us with divine mercy.
As to the unintended consequences of the Council one single
example: When I arrived to be pastor in a small rural parish, entering the
church for the first time I was surprised to see that the original main altar
and two side altars were still there, but stunned by what had replaced them as
the altar for celebration at the edge of the sanctuary, what can only be
described as a plywood cupboard. The plywood top had no altar stone, a hole had
been drilled into the top for a microphone wire, and the top was held up by two
cabinets containing in one the sound system’s amplifier, in the other what can
only be charitably described as bric-a-brac.
There was no altar stone with relics of martyrs and saints
there and I could not shake the sense, when I would kiss the altar at the
beginning and end of Holy Mass, I was kissing dead wood.
The sensus fidelium, is a charism of laity and clergy alike
that, no matter what may be swirling around us, fidelity to praxis of faith, to
the content of revealed faith is immutable.
From that charism flowed an incredible gift from a man in
the parish who came to me one day and asked if we could have a ‘real’ altar.
Thinking he was offering to somehow purchase one I said I’d ask the bishop for
approval for the purchase so we could fund raise.
He smiled, we were talking in the sacristy, and said to
follow him outside to the parking lot.
I did and was stunned to see one of his sons in the back of
a pick-up truck, grinning as he took a tarpaulin off a large object, revealing
it to be a beautiful marble altar sparking in the bright sunlight.
Apparently, the man’s son worked in a factory some hours
away and, thankfully, not in our diocese. The factory would send him to take
scraps of metal and wood to a particular dump for such materials and it was
there that very day he had spotted the altar, called his dad who went to help
his son, with a few volunteers from the factory, to manhandle it into the
truck.
We installed it, I made sure the plywood thing was burned,
called the bishop who was delighted to come and re-consecrate the altar.
All IS GRACE.
© 2021 Fr. Arthur Joseph
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