Fr William Fennelly OSB
Today’s gospel has always struck me as having a message that is somewhat odd. Be as humble as you can be in order to get a reward it seems to say. This is not really a teaching that fits in the management and self-improvement manuals of our times, which urge us to practice discipline to become bigger, faster, stronger, more successful and of course richer. The contrast with the teaching of today’s gospel is put pithily by St Bernard of Clairvaux who said that “Love is its own
payment, its own reward”. Christ gives the most profound teaching of this kind of love in the self-emptying love of the Cross where he holds absolutely nothing back. This powerful and almost excessive love is called kenosis in the tradition.
And the great French philosopher and mystic of the 1930’s Simone Weil was particularly drawn by it’s power. God in this version of the Christian event is wholly transcendent, wholly other and anything we say about him will be inadequate to the task. And yet this is not a remote God because it is in the absolute otherness that love gets its greatest power for her and she clung dearly to the church’s teaching in the Catechism that ‘Sustained by divine grace, we respond to God with the obedience of faith, which means the full surrender of ourselves to God and the acceptance of his truth insofar as it is guaranteed by the
One who is Truth itself.’ The phrase “full surrender” stuck with her and led her to pursue her goal with an austere singularity of purpose.
For this admirable and deeply intelligent woman her proof text was that Christ ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.’ For her this is: suffering without consolation, which nevertheless doesn’t degrade the soul. In an essay ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, she writes, ‘at the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul.’ Affliction is her theodicy, her vindication of God in the face of evil and of course this was a question of considerable moment her as a Jew in the late 30’s and 40’s in France. The deeply troubling enigma that God
should have apparently given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord’ sits ill with most us today I suspect. Affliction for her she said is not merely the distance from God, but absence: ‘the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final.’ For God Himself to experience this absence, and to go on loving, to become the void
which is filled by God, is redemption. This really powerful and has something of Ignatius of Loyola’s prayer about it, “to give and not to count the cost to labour and to look for no reward”. And yes love should be without condition but to forsake conditions to this extent seems like a form of unhinged madness that’s compelling and perhaps just too far from our more mundane reality. And yet it does rings with a truth however much we might struggle with its demand. In mortals, to go on loving in affliction is inconceivable without grace, without
the gift of God’s love. The crucifixion is unique as a moment of self-gift without reserve which is totally unconditional: it is simply a pure gift of love. Rather than fleeing the messiness of human community, Christ’s self-emptying on the cross allows for the fullness of life to be realised. the purpose of individual life fulfilled in the resurrected body; communal life in the New Jerusalem. Christ’s sacrifice is also the model for an affirmative mysticism, a way of positive affirmation of God’s presence in Creation, from this perspective we deny ourselves in service of others. If the self-annihilation spoken of by Simone Weil turns our attention inwards, exalting the self, then if we turn our attention outwards, towards others, also reduces the focus on ourselves. Surrender, then, looks more like Christ washing the feet of his disciples. As it says in John’s gospel (13:12-14) “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one
another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you”.
This spiritual tradition involves fewer fireworks and ecstasies. Rather than the ascent and descent of Weil’s theology, it moves outwards and inwards: mission, hospitality, prayer. ‘Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you shall find’ (Matt 7:7). It encompasses the works of mercy, the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation, the frustration and irritation of sticking with people we struggle to like. It is the Little Way of St Thérèse of Lisieux, devoting oneself to the ordinary business of loving other people and recognising the beauty and value in each of them. Rather than locking the mystic to God in an insular union, it
embeds her in a web of relationships and communities. Common life necessitates a mature understanding of one’s responsibility towards others, whereas self-annihilation makes personal responsibility much more difficult. It follows that a cataphatic mysticism would reject the hatred of the body common to the negative way I tried to describe at first, rather it works by recognising the body as a gift which enables us to live a common or shared life with all the risk it entails — eating, drinking, loving. Christ’s surrender on the cross is completed
with His resurrection and the promise of transformed, perfected, embodied life.
The promise of the new creation is not that risk will be averted, sadly that’s just not possible, but the promise that finally we will be able to see each other face to face. God reveals himself in the face of those around us. Our lives and how we live with each other really matter. This kingdom of God is coming will be shared by us all.