Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with Incarnation

The Light of Christ in an Earthen Vessel: in Memory of Thomas Levergood, 1962-2021

I met Thomas at a graduate student party at the University of Chicago in 1994. I’ve never forgotten his first two questions to me. He began with, “Aren’t you the cantor at St. Thomas [the Apostle parish]?” When I replied in the affirmative, he immediately followed that up with, “Have you ever thought of being a priest?” I hadn’t…

“Le Barberousse” [Redbeard] as he was fondly known by Hyde Park francophones.

So began an intense three-year period of our friendship, during which we toured around virtually every men’s religious community in the Archdiocese and spoke, often with greater zeal than discernment, about the mystical life, Church history, founding our own monastery, etc. I had never before had such intellectually gratifying discussions about faith. Our great shared passion was mysticism, though as we walked this path together, he tended toward the Carmelite tradition and I toward the Desert Fathers. He and I would end up working at the monastery I eventually joined, helping out with cleaning the guesthouse and maintaining the grounds. It was during this time that he conceived the idea for a “Catholic think tank” at the university. Just before I entered monastic life, I was able to help out at some of the first meetings of what would become the Lumen Christi Institute.

As anyone who knew Thomas can attest, his was a most fecund mind. Some years later, I visited him at Calvert House, at what was serving as his office for Lumen Christi. He told me that some corporate leadership guru had given him advice to engage in “one act of creative destruction at the beginning of each day.” I think that the idea was to avoid procrastination by characterizing a difficult phone call as a challenge rather than as an existential crisis. The advice struck me as slightly absurd on his lips. He needed little encouragement for initiating new projects! The difficulty was always about finding adequate help. Thanks be to God, he managed, through many years of dogged work and with much competent assistance, to build up an impressive group of board members and staff who will carry on his vision.

Lumen Christi came to be so identified with Thomas that it is easy to forget just how multitalented he was. When we met, he was, among other things, contemplating becoming a poet, becoming a priest, and running political campaigns. Lest we forget, he was ostensibly working on a PhD. as a student in the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, that quirkiest program at the quirky university that he and I both loved. Most of his ideas were serious, but his imagination allowed for plenty of oddball humor, too. He once suggested that I compose a country song cycle on the ecumenical councils and even offered a melody for “Good Pope Leo and His Tome.”

Friends of Thomas will also attest that he was a complex person. His impressive resume made it easy to overlook the many obstacles he encountered throughout life. If mysticism had been our shared passion in the early years, I believe that the Incarnation became the firmer foundation for our shared reflections as we grew older. Age has a way of bringing home the limitations of our bodily existence, all the better, one hopes, to hand the reins to Christ.

These memories have been flooding my mind in recent weeks as, during his final illness, Thomas and I were able to spend more time together than we had in many years. My first thought, on hearing that he had died yesterday was that Christ had chosen the Feast of the Transfiguration as the day to call him home. It was a mystery that Thomas greatly revered. This is the day on which we are dazzled by the Uncreated Light somehow–improbably–shining through our lowly human body. What a triumphant hope this breeds in those who know its secret! Our frail human nature is absolutely no obstacle to the purifying and transforming Light of Christ. May God in His mercy send the angels to receive him, that his eyes may be opened anew to the deifying light. Rest in peace.

The “Crisis” of Candlemas

The month of February, despite its brevity, is full of critical liturgical celebrations. I use the word “critical” in a precise sense: “of, relating to, or being a turning point…” according to Webster’s. These turning points were somewhat more transparent in the old calendar, before the invention of “Ordinary Time.”

Giotto’s rendering of the Presentation

I invite you to consider the feast of the Presentation (or, as it is often traditionally called, “Candlemas”), which we just celebrated this past Tuesday. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas and is rich in symbolic associations. It is the Incarnate Word’s first visit to the temple—his temple. In the hymn at Lauds on February 2, we sang,

“Parentes Christum deferent,
in templo templum offerunt.”

”His parents carry the Christ;
in the temple, they offer the [true] Temple.

Aside from the obvious paradox in this poetic line, there is a quiet allusion to Christ’s Passion. Christ is brought to the temple as an offering, to be redeemed on the same mount where Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac to God. Not only that, but in referring to Christ as the Temple, the hymnist surely is reminding us of a different exchange. The new Temple of Christ’s Body is inaugurated and revealed through His death and resurrection [cf. John 2: 19-22].

The Magnificat antiphon at Vespers this evening (taken from the Benedictine lectionary for the office of Vigils) once again uses the word temple, but in yet a different sense. Here is the text in full, from 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

According to the traditional four senses of Scripture, Herod’s temple is the “literal” temple, and Christ’s body is the temple in the “allegorical” or Christological sense. In this quotation, Saint Paul shows us the “tropological” or moral sense. “You are the temple of God! And the Holy Spirit dwells in you!” Thus, the procession on Candlemas, accompanying Christ to the temple, is, in a sense, a procession inward, to the temple that we are. We carry lighted candles, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts where Christ wishes to abide.

Candlemas at the Monastery, February 2, 2020

Again, the beauty of this theological reality is accompanied by a serious challenge for us: that we strive to be more and more faithful to our baptismal vows. After all, in our baptisms, we died to ourselves, and we were conformed to Christ’s own Passion, that we might also be conformed to His Resurrection. If we are, with Christ, the temple of God, then we are also an offering to God. Let us, then, today, rededicate ourselves, to “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God [Romans 12: 1].” In making this effort, we will undoubtedly discover various resistances to this spiritual renewal, and this in turn will help us to craft a realistic and effective ascetical plan for Lent, only eleven days away.

The world needs spiritual pioneers more than ever. Let us accept God’s invitation and join the saints’ procession to the final temple (the “anagogical” temple), the Church Triumphant in heaven.

Remember Beauty: God Is Near

Beauty is an epiphany. Encountering someone or something beautiful opens a sudden abyss before me. The arrestingly beautiful object arrives as an answer to a question I had not thought to ask. And yet the answer is not the end, but the door into a cascade of mysteries. In other words, the right kind of aesthetic experience is theological.

Our first experiences of the beautiful are always embodied. They are encounters with real objects: sunsets, the Milky Way, Lake Michigan, forests, cardinals, orchids. Artists use their inspiration and ingenuity to craft beauty in artifacts: paintings, music, cathedrals, gardens, vestments. By a process of abstraction, we can think of ideas as beautiful. For example, I find a number of mathematical equations strikingly beautiful. But this “disembodied” version of beauty is always analogous to the embodied version of beauty.

So we are presented with an important paradox involving beauty. It is, on the one hand, theological and mysterious. At the same time, beauty is embodied and real. I opened by saying that beauty is an epiphany. An epiphany happens when a material object reveals a spiritual meaning. We see the object, and then we also see “beyond” it to significance. Beautiful objects are bridges between the material world and the infinite.

The Fibonacci sequence present in the interior of a sunflower.

For several reasons, I am planning a series of posts on beauty, particularly beautiful music. The goal is not to distract, but to model ways in which we can redirect our focus from the virtual to the real. This idea began with a request from a friend who was encouraging me to write more after my posts of April and May. Then, last week, a pastor from a non-denominational church addressed the brothers on various topics relating to his ministry in a neighborhood that faces challenges of poverty and violence. The two of us briefly discussed the role of anxiety in outbreaks of violence, and he urged me to write more on this topic. I will do that, and one way into this topic is through what the ancient monks called natural contemplation, and what I might call “beauty and the real.”

Beauty is often thought to be a luxury of a leisured wealthy class, irrelevant, say, to a community dealing with with poverty. To me, this sidelining of beauty is a major mistake. Beauty is a patrimony, even a right, of all human beings. More importantly, the loss of beauty produces anxiety and despair, the very ingredients that continue the cycle of violence and poverty.  

Now let me tie a few things together. The visiting pastor shared a number of very helpful insights. He noted that the uptick in violence in Chicago has been fueled, in no small part, by the increase in social media use during the coronavirus lockdown. A key source of harm of the lockdown has been the retreat by larger and larger groups from the real into the virtual.

The Garden of the Phoenix in Chicago’s Jackson Park, a gift of the people of Osaka, Japan.

Remembering beauty can help to bring us back to the real, to ground us. Moreover, beauty can reawaken in us a desire for a genuine life of the spirit. Beauty reminds us that we are made for a life that transcends insipid materiality. Beauty awakens hope, a very important theological virtue for us to cultivate at the moment.

In follow-up posts, I am going to be speaking more about “natural contemplation.” This practice, seemingly forgotten in recent centuries, consists in the habit of seeing things as God intended them to be seen. Since all things were created through God’s Word, all things reveal God, if we learn to view them properly. This would further imply that all things that exist are beautiful at some level, and that the experience of beauty can be a reliable indicator of God’s nearness and the soundness of our best intuitions. Once again, the created world needn’t be reduced to pedestrian materiality, but should instead, through faith and hope, be elevated and “sacramentalized.”

For today, I would invite each of my readers to take time to notice beautiful things around us. Take a few moments to contemplate the beautiful persons you’ve known and the beautiful experiences that you have had. Perhaps you could go further and think about the eternal beauty that the faithful believe awaits us in heaven, a beauty that breaks through even now when we gather to pray and celebrate God in the holy liturgy.

Jesus first manifested His glory by the gift of fine wine at Cana.

Celebrating the Unmaking of the One Ring; a Homily for Annunciation

[The following is the edited text of my homily for March 25, 2020. This is the traditional date of Good Friday and of the Annunciation, and it is the date that J.R.R. Tolkien gives as the date upon which Gollum fell into the fires of Mount Doom, thereby destroying the One Ring and ending the terror of Sauron.]

In our scientific age, atheists demand evidence for the existence of God. For me, among the weightiest bits of evidence is simply the prevalence of belief. Many persons claim not only to believe in God, but to know Him. This requires an explanation. And it’s not enough, I think, just to claim it as some mass delusion—that’s simply kicking the can down the road. Why this particular mass delusion?

A scientist such as Richard Dawkins may well answer that ancient persons were trying to explain the natural world and lacked science, and so posited gods as causes of natural phenomena like lightning. In other words, ancient persons were failed versions of himself. Other more political versions of this attempt at explanation claim that the invention of the gods was a cynical ploy by authority to consolidate power over an awestruck populace.

Contemporary atheists are hardly the first to speculate on this. The Biblical book of Wisdom already gives other explanations for the origin of the gods–or what the author would call “idols.” He notes a longing for beauty in all peoples, and that the beauty of the cosmos moves the observer to imagine that the mysteriously remote magnificence of the stars betokened divinity; or that the power of fire or water signified the presence of the divine [see Wisdom 13: 1-3]. Elsewhere, the Biblical author speculates that a grieving father would make a statue of a recently lost young child, and that his attachment to this statue would grow into a kind of piety, and that the dead child would undergo a kind of apotheosis, a divinization [Wisdom 14: 15-16].

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires”–Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

In the last two hundred years, learned explanations have become more and more sophisticated (though, alas, I must exclude Mr. Dawkins from any claim to sophistication on this point). In the early nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach saw God as an outward projection of humanity’s inward nature, in some sense representing the infinite desire for order, meaning, and goodness that we observe in human nature. Later, Emile Durkheim applied this insight anthropologically so that God becomes a representation of collective society. The most ambitious, and, to me, the profoundest attempt to account for the origin of the gods is that of René Girard (1923-2015). Girard, whose work drew him back to his childhood Catholic faith, noted not only the widespread belief in the gods, but the near-universal connection of the gods and violence, encoded in the ubiquitous practice of sacrifice in the ancient world. He drew attention to the catharsis that takes place when a tense and fearful community focuses its anxiety and violence unanimously on a victim, that is, when a community chooses a scapegoat. The killing or banishment of this scapegoat brings about peace and restores order to the community. Since peace and order are desirable for both the community and the individual, the scapegoated victim paradoxically becomes a benefactor to the community and gradually becomes a god in the community’s mythological imagination. The connection with authority comes about because kings and others in positions of governance are extremely convenient scapegoats, easy to blame for everyone’s problems. There is an important exception to this mechanism. The prophets of Israel, that fiercely monotheistic nation, are constantly alerting the people to the arbitrary injustice at the heart of human society, this need to generate peace and order by generating victims. Because of God’s championing of the victim, the idea of a true God begins to distance itself from the “gods.”

“Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.”–Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Now I bring all of this up, and I hope that it’s interesting, because the constant in all of this is human desire. We all have desires, some of them not so good, but all of them leaving us in need of fulfillment in some way. Unfulfilled desire leaves us vulnerable, even anxious and fearful. Perhaps worst of all, the noblest things that we desire: justice, truth, beauty, are always just out of reach. This is that infinite desire that Feuerbach rightly noted.

What we proclaim today is that the Great Desire of earth [cf. Haggai 2: 6-7), what all human beings long for in some way, is no longer out of reach. Not because we have figured out finally how to attain the truth, but because the Truth Himself came to us. The Son of God validates the best of human desire by becoming human, sharing these desires with us. Jesus hungers and thirsts, has friends, attends wedding banquets and public festivals. He restores children to bereaved parents, he feeds the multitude, he quiets threatening waves, he relieves lepers of “social distancing” by cleansing them. But profoundest of all, he desires to do His Father’s will as the one thing necessary; he desires justice for all; he desires that all men see in the beauty of the cosmos God’s great love for those made in His image and likeness. He desires that all be set free by knowing the Truth. In the Incarnation, which we celebrate today, Truth Himself has come down from heaven, and in taking human nature to Himself, has made justice spring up from the earth [see Psalm 85: 10-11].

The idols of the nations are an image of distorted desire, stuck in the infernal logic of “the world.” Jesus is recognized, even in His lifetime, as the true fulfillment of all that is best in what we desire. The Apostle Philip found Nathanial and said, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote [John 1: 45].” After the Resurrection, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus unwittingly said to Jesus himself, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel [Luke 24: 21].” In other words, we hoped that he would vindicate the one true, transcendent God and the devotion to the true God shown by His chosen people Israel–which He has by His resurrection in our nature.

My brothers, what is it that we desire? How has our Lord Jesus Christ offered us fulfillment or purification of this desire in His Incarnation? How has he invited us to be patient in awaiting this fulfillment by learning to be his Cross-carrying disciples? In this moment of anxiety, how can we follow the prophets in pointing to Jesus and away from the danger of choosing scapegoats for our suffering? Let us, like Mary and her Son, begin by saying to our common Father, “Thy will be done.”