A Reflection for Holy Week

This year, I was able to come back to New York to spend Holy Week and Easter in my home diocese!

Since I have been busy traveling, attending the Holy Week services, visiting close friends and mentors, praying with the wonderful nuns who graciously invited me to stay at their New York City monastery--and not to mention finishing my thesis!--here is a reprint of my Good Friday post from last year. I actually wrote this when I was a senior in college (in 2008), for an evening of reflection on the “Seven Last Words” at Seton Hall.

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“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” —Mark 15:34

In my mind at least, these words are the very essence of the entire Passion. Even while Jesus’ physical and emotional torments were truly horrible, they are nothing when compared with this, Christ’s spiritual suffering.

God is truly the source and sustainer of everything good. Without Him, even things which we would consider good for their own sake—things like friendship and human sympathy, or natural beauty or artistic accomplishment—are empty and valueless. God is incalculably greater than all that He has made, and He is, ultimately, the only source of all joy.

This is why we are called to love God “with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength” (cf. Deuteronomy 6:5), because as we grow in our faith God should become everything to us. I believe this is also why thousands of martyrs were able to relinquish all the things they held most dear in their earthly life; they understood that they were trading a small puddle for the ocean.

Of course Christians are still human, and we will feel pain when painful things happen to us. If we were to become seriously ill or lose someone close to us, it would be completely normal and healthy for us to grieve. Still, our faith could help us bear our grief with peace and hope.

But what if God Himself were to abandon us? Theologically, we know that God would never forsake any of us, His children. But in some sense, the question is not irrelevant.

For example, we now know that Bl. Mother Theresa of Calcutta, like many other great saints, spent most of her life under the subjective impression that God had rejected her, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Even if we ourselves never have a similar experience, we may still find it troubling that God would seem to behave this way towards someone who loved Him so much.

On a corporate level, the people of Israel—the nation whom God had chosen to be His own in a special way—seemed to have felt that God abandoned them during the period of the Babylonian captivity. Their experience is recorded in some of the psalms, as well as in the haunting lyrics of the book of Lamentations:

He has broken my teeth with gravel,
pressed my face in the dust;
My soul is deprived of peace,
I have forgotten what happiness is;
I tell myself my future is lost,
all that I hoped from the Lord.

The thought of my homeless poverty
is wormwood and gall;
Remembering it over and over
leaves my soul downcast within me.

(Lamentations 3:16-20)

In some ways, many of the crises plaguing the Church today can evoke similar reactions from contemporary Catholics. While issues such as the “culture of death,” the breakdown of the traditional family, scandal within the Church, and the increasing secularity of our society may not seem quite as dramatic as the Babylonian exile, they are nevertheless able to shake many people’s faith and prompt them to question Providence.

And yet even apart from all of this, this question is important simply because it was a part of Jesus’ Passion. By virtue of our baptism, we are all called to be with Christ in His Passion to at least some degree. As Jesus said, “Whoever wishes to be my disciple must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24) and “Can you drink to cup that I am to drink?” (Matthew 20:22)

We don’t stay with Jesus in His Passion because we like suffering, but rather because we love Jesus. I think probably most of us can wrap our minds around the idea of staying with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane—we probably feel that we could keep watch for an hour.
Perhaps with great difficulty, we can even manage to stay with Jesus at the scourging, along the Via Dolorosa, and at the crucifixion. But how could we possibly manage to be with Jesus during the moment he uttered this cry of complete desolation? It would almost seem akin to finding ourselves in Hell!

I honestly don’t know exactly how it is that we can remain with Jesus even here. The only thing I can say is that if God calls us to it, then He must give us the strength that we would need.

But here in the deepest darkness it’s important to remember some other words from the book of Lamentations, found even here in the midst of arguably the most anguished verses in all of Scripture:

The favors of the Lord are not exhausted
His mercies are not spent;
They are renewed every morning,
so great is His faithfulness.
My portion is the Lord, says my soul;
therefore I will hope in Him.

Good is the Lord to the one who waits for Him,
to the soul that seeks Him;
It is good to hope in silence
for the saving help of the Lord.
It is good for a man to bear
the yolk from his youth.

Let him sit alone and in silence,
when it is laid upon him.
Let him put his mouth to the dust;
there may yet be hope.

(Lamentations 3:22-29)

If, with the help of grace, we choose to continue to love God through darkness, He will use it as an opportunity to configure us more closely to Christ. Our faith will be strengthened, our hope will be increased, and our love will be purified.

Even while we will seem to have lost all of our joy, we will be given newer, deeper joys that we would not have understood before. We will understand Christ in a new way when he said, “Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.” (Revelation 1:18)

And this is the Pascal mystery—the center of our faith and the gift we in inherited at Baptism.

1 Corinthians 7:25-31

I was pleasantly surprised at Mass this afternoon to see that two of the three readings—1 Corinthians 7:25-31; and Psalm 45:11-12, 14-15, 16-17—are among those listed as options for a Mass of Consecration to a Life of Virginity. (The Beatitudes are also listed for a Consecration Mass, but those are taken from Matthew and not from today’s Gospel, Luke 6:20-26.) It would take more space and time than I have here to reflect on both readings, but I can at least begin the discussion by reprinting the selection of the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians:

Brothers and sisters: In regard to virgins, I have no commandment from the
Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. So
this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good
thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a
separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife. If you marry,
however, you do not sin, nor does an unmarried woman sin if she marries; but
such people will experience affliction in their earthly life, and I would like
to spare you that.

I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those
having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those
rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as
not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.

This is one of the most frequently cited texts in the New Testament in defense of Christian virginity as a permanent state in life. In it, St. Paul gives us an unambiguous endorsement of celibacy, even while clearly explaining that this recommendation does not now render marriage sinful. (You can see this passage echoed in part of the Consecratory prayer in the Rite of Consecration which states: Among your many gifts you give to some the grace of virginity. Yet the honor of marriage is in no way lessened. As it was in the beginning, your first blessing still remains upon this holy union. Yet your loving wisdom chooses those who make sacrifice of marriage for the sake of the love of which it is the sign.)

I have to admit that I although I have always had respect for this section of Corinthians as the inspired word of God, I never used to find it particularly interesting. From my very subjective perspective as one raised Catholic, it seemed to be stating the obvious. Of course, I was glad that the practice of consecrated celibacy was in Scripture, but it seemed as perfunctory to me as “You shall not kill”—i.e., in the Bible, yet at the same time sort of a theological no-brainer.

But hearing this reading at Mass today, I was struck by the profundity of this epistle. Virginity as a permanent commitment represented a major paradigm shift for the faithful in the ancient world. As Pope Benedict mentioned in his address to consecrated virgins last spring, Christian celibacy was completely novel. In the Judaism of the time, barrenness was seen as a tremendous curse.

Likewise, there were no precedents for a life of virginity in the pagan world. Although the Vestal virgins and the Stoic philosophers are often held to be early precursors to Christian celibacy, these are not truly good comparisons. For the Vestal virgins, virginity was a temporary state, and the Stoic philosophers were celibate in order to maximize their receptivity to natural pleasures—hardly a motivation approximating that of Christianity. My understanding is that even in contemporary Protestantism, life-long celibate chastity is seen as something one endures if Providence does not provide a spouse, as opposed to a way of life which one would freely embrace.

Then and now, consecrated virginity is shocking to natural sensibilities because it strikes at the heart of the deepest and most enduring source of human joy and fulfillment, namely, human love and the family. By presenting virginity as a recommended option, St. Paul was teaching his listeners that they could live for something altogether greater than anything in the created world. Even today this remains an awesome concept, but imagine being among those who were hearing it for the first time in history!

St. Paul elaborates on the eschatological dimension of consecrated life in the famous passage which ends by telling us that “the world in its present form is passing away.” Like the original recipients of this letter, we live in an age which is not prone to rumination on the “last things.”

Yet this is at the core of any consecrated vocation, though perhaps I could say that it finds a particularly striking manifestation in consecrated virginity lived in the world. To use a translation different from what we have here in the Lectionary, saying that “the world as we know it is passing away” serves as a very good explanation of why the consecrated life exits.

The world, as created by God, is not evil—far from it!—but it is temporary and fleeting. We can come to know and love God through the created order, but everything good in the world is there for the purpose of bringing us to the ultimate Good. We come to love created things in order to look beyond them, and we become attached to people only in order that we might one day love them disinterestedly in God.

To put it in broad terms, consecrated people “skip” a lot of the passing beauty and goodness of human life (that is, they are “…using the world as not using it fully…”) because they are already starting to love the Eternal. This is obviously a marvelous thing for consecrated people themselves, but it is not only for them. The presence of consecrated celibate people in our midst should be a chance for all of the faithful to come to a better (albeit never perfect in this life) understanding of what it means to love in heaven.