Dear Friends,
This week we embark on our Lenten journey to deepen our friendship with Christ, to experience, as Pope Francis has said, the richness of grace through the poverty of Christ. That concept may sound confusing to some of us. How can the poverty of Christ make us rich in grace? How does this Paschal Mystery happen?
The church proclaims that it is a mystery, so we may never be able to grasp fully how Christ’s journey from heaven to earth moves us from earth to heaven, but embrace it we must. I recently read a review by Joshua Gibbs of a couple of movies. In the review, he meditated on how the movies revealed truth through the veil of the story and how that appealed to the human heart. He did not think we enjoyed movies that had no revelation and that we naturally search for the deeper meaning of things. Here is some of what he said:
“The mind always seeks the essence of a thing. The mind always looks beyond the façade, beyond the appearance, and seeks out the enlivening principle of a thing. When a man sees his face in a mirror, he is amazed that a tumultuous city thrives beneath a tranquil visage. He knows the noise and song of thought, suspicion, rumination, regret, anticipation, and hope which undulate through his spirit, though all of this is only hinted at in his eyes. Just as the soul of a man is the “inner man,” so a painting has an “inner painting,” a book has an “inner book.” When a man is shown a photograph, a painting, or a poem, he is not satisfied with the literal, historical, material value of the thing. He intuits the noise and song in the photograph. He deals fairly with the object, he delights in the object, but he wants to meet the thing as an equal— as a bit of matter which borrows its being from an invisible, unapproachable God. Physical things are good. Bodies are good. Bodies are significant, but they are significant of spirits. God conceals a matter, children of Adam search out the matter. Like God, the good writer is a concealer, one who shrouds, masks, disguises, and veils. The good writer knows the glory of his readers hangs on revealing what he has hidden.”
He goes on to say that, such is how the truth is conveyed in scripture – in its hiddenness: “No one ever gets “saved” in the parables of Jesus, but they are saved nonetheless. In our world, men are baptized; in stories, they fall off boats. In our world, men are chrismated; in stories, they get their daddy’s ring. Christ hid the glory of the Kingdom in farmers, unjust servants, noisy neighbors, broken fishing nets. This is simply Who Jesus is. Jesus is God “veiled in flesh,” as we sing every Christmas. How could Jesus not veil everything? The Son is the Veil. The Father is Veiled. The Spirit is the Unveiler. Veiling and unveiling are not some accident of human ignorance, uncertainty, and guesswork. The dynamics of veiling and unveiling are the Triune relationship.”
Lent, then, is our annual attempt to explore the deeper meanings, to look into our own lives and remove the masks that keep us from knowing the truth; to try new disciplines that will free our bodies and our spirits to encounter the divine; to take the time to discover the presence of Christ in each person we meet – no matter how veiled that might be. We are invited to look deep and encounter our richness in the poverty of Christ. We meditate on the cross and discover in its unveiling our hope of eternal life.
Join us Wednesday as we place ashes on our foreheads and get a glimpse of who we are.
Peace,
Fr. Damian