The Gaze of the Baptist

We have all experienced a time, speaking to a friend or acquaintance, when our fellow converser takes his eyes off ours for a moment, glancing over our shoulder. The reason is usually nothing more than another person walking into the room or a slight disturbance calling their attention. Yet trifling as it may be, when they look, we look. It is instinctual. We follow their gaze.

This Sunday—Gaudete Sunday—we remember as we do frequently this time of year the “patron saint of Advent,” John the Baptist. Donning rose instead of camelhair we nevertheless rejoice together with the Baptist, for the Messiah is coming soon. Our hearts heed his ever pertinent proclamation to prepare the way of the Lord through penance and impatience. This Sunday, we gaze upon the Baptist, but seek him not. Our gaze awaits the Lord.  

When the Lord comes, however, there is neither tension nor confusion. As John the Evangelist writes, “The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples and he looked at Jesus as he walked and said ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus” (Jn. 1:35). John exits the stage just moments after he enters—He must increase, I must decrease.

The disciples, gazing upon the Baptist, see his eyes dart from their own. Instinctually, they look. “Behold the Lamb of God!” John transfers their gaze as a window transfers light; we do not marvel at the window, only at the object illumined. Just like that the disciples follow Our Lord, and the Baptist departs—well done, good and faithful servant.

That is all it takes: a captivating gaze upon the Beloved. As French theologian Jean Corban writes:

The starting point is the gaze which John the Baptist directs at Jesus… It is at this point that two of John’s disciples begin to follow Jesus. Who will ever grasp the depth of this gaze of the bridegroom’s friend, a gaze so purified by expectation and so communicative of divine love that his two disciples leave him, ‘drawn’ by this man before whom their master retires into the background?

We wait for the Lord, and when he comes, we place our steadfast gaze upon him. That is all he asks. With such a gaze John the Baptist fulfilled his entire mission, the woman at the well thirsted no more, and Peter walked upon water. The Christian mission, heavy laden with crosses, is rather simple: gaze upon the Lord. Only thus will our task be easy and our burden light.

John Vianney recalled frequently witnessing a humble parishioner sitting in the pews, gazing upon the Blessed Sacrament. He uttered no words, read no devotionals. The cure of Ars inquired one day “What do you say to Our Lord in prayer?” “Nothing,” the man responded, “I look at him, and he looks at me.”

As we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Messiah, may we not grow weary or anxious with so much to do in so little time. Let us instead grow impatient for Christmas like children—like the Baptist. For our only task is to behold.

 +JMJ+

On the Feast of Blessed John Paul: Memory and Identity

In June of 1979, John Paul II made his first papal pilgrimage back to his homeland, Poland, then governed by a Soviet-controlled puppet regime. The “Polish” authorities found themselves perplexed by the dilemma. Obviously, to refuse the pope entrance to his own country would prove catastrophic for international public relations. Simultaneously, however, no one lacked knowledge of the new pontiff’s charisma with the masses and opposition to communist regimes, least of all the Polish people. In a correspondence between Edward Gierek, the Polish Party Leader, and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet party chieftain, the latter cautioned, “Take my advice, don’t give him any reception. It will only cause trouble… Tell the pope—he’s a wise man—he can declare publicly he can’t come due to illness.” Yet after Gierek expressed the impossibility of either proposal, Brezhnev conceded, “Do as you wish. But be careful you don’t regret it later.”[1]

            Thus began John Paul’s pilgrimage to Poland—a pilgrimage in which he set the stage for a quarter-century papacy. People saw for the first time on an international stage who this man was, and how he would lead the Church into the third millennium. Volumes have been written on his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, his emphasis on the dignity of human life, and his monumental efforts toward ecumenism. Yet it was less his deeds and more his manner which moved the hearts of so many—least of all the young. He neither scolded nor scoffed, neither romanticized nor despised. Rather, he reminded people who they are.

         Memory (anamnesis) lies at the heart of the Church. Pope Francis’ most recent encyclical calls our present culture one of “massive amnesia.” “The question of truth,” he adds, “is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness.”[2] Man possesses a primal knowledge of and orientation toward the true and the good. This is the foundation of natural law, of Paul’s indictment of the pagan Romans (Rom. 1:20), and of the Church’s (new) evangelization. Joseph Ratzinger wrote:

            This anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical with the foundations of our existence, is the reason that mission is both possible and justified. The Gospel may and indeed must be proclaimed to the pagans, because this is what they are waiting for, even if they do not know this themselves.[3]

Man is fundamentally oriented toward truth because at the dawn of his being stands Truth himself. God’s free act of creation and his subsequent announcement that “it is good” renders all creation ordered to Himself—the Good and the True. Consequently, man’s existence is neither a diminution toward nothingness nor an idealism toward the perfection of history. Man’s existence is a reditus, a return to the Creator. Man finds himself naturally oriented to turn back, to conversion, which is a turn to the depths of being, to that which is prior to himself.

        Thus, never can the philosopher or theologian posit that we live in a “post-Christian” era. “Every age is a Christian age,” the French Dominican A.G. Sertillanges wrote. Christ dwells in every age in the sacraments—Mother Church’s treasury of memory. Each Sunday we hear “Do this in memory of me,” and we remember not some distant past, but a reality present in our time. Only through memory can we rediscover our true identity and that authenticity for which all our subcultures long. Memory breeds authenticity.

         When John Paul stood before the crowds in Poland, he proclaimed in so many words, “You are not who they say you are. Let me remind you who you are!” Only through memory would the Polish people realize that they could not be defined by a recent history of political and social distress. “It is impossible to understand this city,” John Paul spoke in his famous homily in Victory Square, Warsaw:

… that undertook in 1944 an unequal battle against the aggressor, a battle in which it was abandoned by the allied powers, a battle in which it was buried under its own ruins—if it is not remembered that under those same ruins there was also the statue of Christ the Saviour with his cross that is in front of the church at Krakowskie Przedmiescie. It is impossible to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaus in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oswiecim unless we apply to them that same single fundamental criterion that is called Jesus Christ.”

To remember who we are is to remember Christ, for “The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man.” Memory always reaches for that constant, Christ, who stands at the apex of history while the world turns (Stat crux dum volvitur orbis). In the Incarnation, God remembered his people, and thus his people remembered their God. The whole of their history leapt to the fore as they looked upon the face of their long awaited hope—“he has remembered his holy covenant.” The person of Christ refreshes anamnesis—the person of Truth persists from “generation to generation.”

        Brezhnev was right after all. John Paul did "only cause trouble"—or in the words of our current pope, “a mess.” Poland was never the same. Her son had returned, and he brought not only Peter but Christ. And when he concluded his Victory Square ho

mily with the words “Let your spirit descend and renew the face of this earth,” even the memory of the Soviet block stirred.

       John Paul II—the Great Liberator, the Great Evangelist, simply the Great? On this his feast day, I would like to posit another title to his list: The Great Reminder. John Paul understood the heart of evangelization to be the habitus of memory. He reminded the Church who she was in the tumultuous decades of the late twentieth century. He reminded her through his sermons, his travels, his forgiveness, his love. Most importantly, however, he reminded her for two hours every morning when he knelt in front of the tabernacle. “Here is your hope,” he proclaimed in silence, “Here is He for whom your hearts long.” This was how he responded to the chants of the Polish people—“We want God!”—in June of 1979. May we likewise respond to the chants of our countrymen today.

           

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[1] George Weigel, Witness to Hope (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), 301.

[2] Francis, Lumen Fidei, ch. 2, n. 25.

[3] Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 92. 

The Greatest Truth of Youth Ministry

Perhaps a more proper conclusion to my recent series “The Five Lies of Youth Ministry” would be to conclude in hope, a hope the Church constantly calls us to renew in ourselves and in our parishes.

Recently in his World Youth Day remarks, Pope Francis declared to the young people, “What is it I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!... I want to see the Church get closer to the people!”

            Powerful words from the pontiff, those—words that should trouble the bureaucracy and planned programming of diocesan directors. They are words which call forth not a stagnant institution, but a living, breathing being. They call forth a being with a freedom, a freedom which makes the sureties of the world merely contingent. Those words of Francis renounce what his predecessor referred to negatively as “a certain euphoric, post-conciliar solidarity.” They call forth a generation not of reformers or restorers who look to the past with nostalgia or to the future with undue optimism. Rather, they call forth a generation of saints who “remains faithful to the today of the Church” yet “moves forward toward the consummation of history, [who] looks ahead to the Lord who is coming “ (Benedict, 1985).

            And in these years and those ahead, while we never deny the temptations and threats ever present to the Church, we see that perhaps the true fruits of Vatican II are finally beginning to shine. And that is one of the greatest truths of youth ministry today. For it has become apparent that these fruits are not even rightly attributed to the council, but to the Spirit. We all too easily forget that in the bleak decades of the sixties and seventies and eighties, the Spirit still moved, still worked within the Church. Though sometimes the Spirit shouts, this time it grew in silence. And this silent growth was among the young people. And it grew like any other organism—sporadically, unpredictably, and vibrantly.

This evening, I read the following excerpt from an interview with Pope Benedict (then Joseph Ratzinger) in 1985. My prayer remains that these words, and the words of his successor, continue to call forth a generation of martyrs for the Church. The pontiff-emeritus explains:

What is hopeful at the level of the universal Church is the rise of new movements which nobody had planned and which nobody has called into being, but which have sprung spontaneously from the inner vitality of the faith itself. What is manifested in them—albeit subdued—is something like a pentecostal season in the Church… I am now, to an increasing degree, meeting young people in whom there is a wholehearted adhesion to the whole faith of the Church, young people who want to live this faith fully and who bear in themselves a great missionary élan. The intense life of prayer present in these movements does not imply a flight into interiority or a withdrawal into the private sphere, but simply a full and undivided catholicity. The joy of the faith that one senses here has something contagious about it. Here new vocations to the priesthood and to the religious orders are now growing spontaneously.

            What is striking is that all this fervor was not elaborated by any office of pastoral planning, but somehow it sprang forth by itself. As a consequence of this fact, the planning offices—just when they want to be very progressive—don’t know just what to do with them. They don’t fit into their plan. Thus while tensions rise in connection with their incorporation into the present forms of institutions, there is absolutely no tension with the hierarchical Church as such.

            What is emerging here is a new generation of the Church which I am watching with great hope. I find it marvelous that the Spirit is once more stronger than our programs and brings himself into play in an altogether different way than we had imagined. In this sense the renewal, in a subdued but effective way, is afoot. Old forms that had run aground in self-contradiction and in the taste for negations are leaving the stage, and the new is making headway. Naturally it does not yet have its full voice in the great debate of dominant ideas. It grows in silence. Our task—the task of the officeholders in the Church and of theologians—is to keep the door open to them, to prepare room for them.”

Yes the Church is alive, and it is alive in her young people. Rise up, young Church. The Lord goes with you. Remember that the opposite of “conservative” in the Church is not “progressive,” but, as Benedict explains, “the opposite of conservative is missionary.” And this missionary spirit we see in our young people. Thus the greatest truth of youth ministry: that young people, more than any other age or generation, have a pilgrim spirit. While children and adults are tempted to complacency in established ways, young people are always on the journey, always in via. And until youth ministry joins them on this pilgrimage, it will continue to be left behind as simply another outdated and unresponsive program. The young people have grown in silence for decades now. And now they have grown too many, and are beginning to make a mess of things. And what a glorious mess it is.