Order and Wonder in June
As I go around taking a few pictures for my post, I have to overcome the urge to just forget about it, due to every room, every view, and every item needing a complete overhaul, cleaning, and weeding.
But I am resisting, because we can’t go on forever not really talking!
I wanted to show you this boot rack that I got at Homegoods (for 20% off because it needed some gluing up, which the Chief was happy to do). I probably need four or fifteen of them, but it does help to give the impression that I’m trying in here.
And there’s the garden, which as soon as I’m done here I will go mow, and mulch, and all sorts of other things that will render it much more photogenic and much less pathetic! But things are growing! And I have some new beds!
Of course, the best plants are the compost volunteers. I’m hedging my bets and leaving some here.
I went to Milwaukee last week to speak to a great collection of wonderful folks out there, and then on to Chicago on the spur of the moment to hang out in the back yard of a friend and chitchat with around 30 lovely ladies (and one or two gents!) as well. (I took the train, the “Hiawatha,” from Milwaukee to Chicago, and I highly recommend it.)
The topic was “Developing the Moral Imagination of Your Children” and Dear Reader, I kept coming back to something I find takes quite the skill to convey — skill perhaps that I don’t have, so if you think you are getting it, let me know!
It’s what I called, long ago, Order and Wonder, as a way to answer the question of how to homeschool — but that leads to, simply, how to live — but I didn’t make it up, you know. It’s just my odd way of saying that what we long for is already there, given to us — we simply have to conform to it, this river that pours out of heaven and is free for all to come and drink. The trees planted by this water flourish… If we love and follow God’s holy Law, and live the Liturgical Year, we will be able to teach our children what they need to know, without any stress at all.
(I was also told by some dear readers that they don’t mind longer posts, so here goes… )
After we linked to this article a bit after the feast day of St. Joan of Arc, I had to have this book. *
*The selections in it are free online, as they were Pope Benedict’s Wednesday addresses for a while, but it’s a beautifully produced volume and makes great spiritual reading.
At the end, he has a little talk on holiness, and he says something very consoling, I thought — and germane to the topic of my talk, which proved so hard for me to wrestle into shape (I have highlighted the bits that struck me as they relate to my topic):
However, the question remains: how can we take the path to holiness, in order to respond to this call? [This could also be the question for us: “How can my children take this path?] Can I do this on my own initiative? The answer is clear. A holy life is not primarily the result of our efforts, of our actions, because it is God, the three times Holy (cf. Is 6:3) who sanctifies us, it is the Holy Spirit’s action that enlivens us from within, it is the very life of the Risen Christ that is communicated to us and that transforms us.
It’s our baptism that gives us this life. He goes on to quote some deep teachings about all this and then says,
… perhaps we should say things even more simply. What is the essential? The essential means never leaving a Sunday without an encounter with the Risen Christ in the Eucharist; this is not an additional burden but is light for the whole week. It means never beginning and never ending a day without at least a brief contact with God. And, on the path of our life it means following the “signposts” that God has communicated to us in the Ten Commandments, interpreted with Christ, which are merely the explanation of what love is in specific situations. It seems to me that this is the true simplicity and greatness of a life of holiness: the encounter with the Risen One on Sunday; contact with God at the beginning and at the end of the day; following, in decisions, the “signposts” that God has communicated to us, which are but forms of charity.
“Hence the true disciple of Christ is marked by love both of God and of neighbour” (Lumen Gentium, n. 42). This is the true simplicity, greatness and depth of Christian life, of being holy. This is why St Augustine, in commenting on the fourth chapter of the First Letter of St John, could make a bold statement: “Dilige et fac quod vis [Love and do what you will]” And he continued: “If you keep silent, keep silent by love: if you speak, speak by love; if you correct, correct by love; if you pardon, pardon by love; let love be rooted in you, and from the root nothing but good can grow” (7,8 pl 35). Those who are guided by love, who live charity to the full, are guided by God, because God is love. Hence these important words apply: “Dilige et fac quod vis”, “Love and do what you will”.
We might ask ourselves: can we, with our limitations, with our weaknesses, aim so high? During the Liturgical Year, the Church invites us to commemorate a host of saints, the ones, that is, who lived charity to the full, who knew how to love and follow Christ in their daily lives. They tell us that it is possible for everyone to take this road. In every epoch of the Church’s history, on every latitude of the world map, the saints belong to all the ages and to every state of life, they are actual faces of every people, language and nation. And they have very different characters.
Actually I must say that also for my personal faith many saints, not all, are true stars in the firmament of history. And I would like to add that for me not only a few great saints whom I love and whom I know well are “signposts”, but precisely also the simple saints, that is, the good people I see in my life who will never be canonized. They are ordinary people, so to speak, without visible heroism but in their everyday goodness I see the truth of faith. This goodness, which they have developed in the faith of the Church, is for me the most reliable apology of Christianity and the sign of where the truth lies.
In the Communion of Saints, canonized and not canonized, which the Church lives thanks to Christ in all her members, we enjoy their presence and their company and cultivate the firm hope that we shall be able to imitate their journey and share one day in the same blessed life, eternal life.
Dear friends, how great and beautiful, as well as simple is the Christian vocation seen in this light! We are all called to holiness: it is the very measure of Christian living. Once again St Paul expresses it with great intensity when he writes: “grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift…. His gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:7, 11-13).
I would like to ask all to open themselves to the action of the Holy Spirit, who transforms our life, to be, we too, as small pieces in the great mosaic of holiness that God continues to create in history, so that the face of Christ may shine out in the fullness of its splendour. Let us not be afraid to aim high, for God’s heights; let us not be afraid that God will ask too much of us, but let ourselves be guided by his Word in every daily action, even when we feel poor, inadequate, sinners. It will be he who transforms us in accordance with his love. Many thanks.
Well, to be concrete about all this, there are a few feast days coming up this month that would be ideal for putting into action this great resolution that we can feel forming, to live the life of the Church, the order that gives rise to the wonder.
Each feast is in itself a gift, each saint one of those “signposts” along our journey that will help us. But as you live the Liturgical Year, many subtle and gentle lessons emerge when we notice the placement of the feasts, their relations to each other. These June days (and I’m just picking three out of the many beautiful feasts this month) are a good example of the hidden treasure we find when we approach the gift of the Liturgical Year with a humble receptivity (and of course, I don’t pretend to have plumbed all the depths!).
June 22: The Feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More.
Here begins the “June Triduum” (or three feasts of June that I have, in the past few years, become more in love with for the particular times we live in). Would you die to uphold a Commandment of God? Would you be a martyr, for instance, for what marriage says about human nature? But this is what these two saints did — they went to their deaths because they would not sign a statement ratifying the King’s wishes.
There are actually two Commandments involved here. Yes, there is the one that prohibits adultery. There is also the one that so interestingly does not flatly state (although it does comprehend) “Do not lie.” It says, rather, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” To sign a paper, to swear an oath (“for what is an oath but words we say to God,” admonishes Thomas More in the great play, A Man for All Seasons), to say what you know to be false — these are ways that we make ourselves a false witness when we ought to be honoring the truth.
Do they seem little things? Why not sign, and live another day to defend God’s rules? But as Fr. James Schall says,
[Thomas] More was a scholar who saw the intimate connection between mind and reality. He saw that the function of the Successor to Peter is to uphold clearly, wisely, and compassionately, the truths handed down to be explained and affirmed in every age. He saw that he must “witness” to this “abstract truth,” even if he must stand alone, and lonely, in an obscure cell to do so. Had his “witness” not been so firm, Henry might well have laid claim to rule, not only the city, but the mind.
In our day, the enemies of the natural and supernatural order do wish to rule the mind, to interpose themselves between us and the truth, which is to say between us and God. Devotion to these two saints will give us the courage to imitate their virtue.
June 23: The Sacred Heart of Jesus.
What is this feast even about? It’s about nothing less than what we read in 2 John 7: “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.”
To convince a weary world that had gone over to abstraction, forgetting that God came to live with us with two natures, one divine, and one fully human, this devotion to the Sacred Heart came to be. David Clayton has an appendix chapter about it in our book, The Little Oratory, in which he quotes Fr. John Hardon:
In my forty-two years in the priesthood I have dealt with many souls and have been involved in many problems. I believe the hardest mystery we are called on to believe, when everything is against it, is that God does love us.”
Fr. Hardon goes on to say:
Margaret Mary was chosen by God to provide the Church and through the Church all mankind with a deep and clear understanding of God’s love for us and the love we should have for Him. In spite of the trial and tribulation, including the reputation in her community for being out of her mind, she never wavered in her loving trust in God.
Love is mainly proved by suffering. No wonder Margaret Mary could ask in one of her letters, “What can keep us from loving God and becoming saints, since we have a body that can suffer and a heart that can love?” Margaret Mary became the catalyst whose mission was to restore to the Catholic Church what some had lost and to strengthen what was so weakened _ the mystery of human freedom in responding to the merciful love of God.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart can be pathetically cheapened by treating it as just another devotion. On the contrary, it contains in its doctrinal foundation what the popes have reminded us are the seven cardinal mysteries of our Faith, which the world denies but we accept.
You can read about these seven cardinal mysteries in the rest of Fr. Hardon’s essay.
June 24: The Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist.
This feast rounds out all our themes, helping us to meditate on God’s Law, which He so graciously gave on Mount Sinai, and the Incarnation, the “becoming flesh” which overcomes man’s inability to reach the heights God has in store for us. John is the prophet who connects the Old and the New Testaments, and his birth is called “the summer Christmas.” At the furthest possible point in the year from Jesus’ birth, we who follow the Church’s year receive a beautiful renewal of our love for the piercing event that saves the world. On our own we wouldn’t be thinking of the crèche with Mary* and Joseph and the baby Jesus in it, but now it is brought to mind.
*This is also the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and it’s not only a gridlock of feasts that piles her on top of the Baptist’s Nativity, but, I believe, a little reminder of motherhood, so intimately connected to babies and their births, and the great Mother of all, Our Lady, with her heart that was preserved from sin from all eternity.
John’s birth comes just after the summer solstice, as the days begin to grow shorter. Do you see how the heavens declare the truth of the Gospel, that “I must decrease, that he may increase”? The old ways wane as the New Adam arrives (at the winter solstice, the point where the days begin to get longer!).
Of course, St. John too was martyred for the faith, specifically for the truth about marriage. When we think about someone’s birth, we also think about their death, so even here we have another reminder about God’s Law and its goodness.
We could tediously try to explain a lot of abstractions to our children; we could read a lot of boring books. Or we could celebrate the feasts and suddenly just know ever more deeply what God is showing us!
And this is what I mean by Order and Wonder, by “living the Liturgical Year.” These upcoming feasts will get you started if you are wondering how you ever will.
Certainly bake a cake (just make it your favorite, really enjoying it, and don’t worry about a theme) — but most importantly, try if you are able to go to Mass on these days; at least tell the stories of each commemoration, that they not be lost. Watching A Man for All Seasons (the Chief’s favorite movie) would be a fantastic thing to do on the 22nd!
Praying each day’s Vespers will put you on the right path. Afterwards, and especially for St. John, I recommend a bonfire if you can manage it, or some other festive party — traditionally this would be held on the 23rd, after the Vespers which anticipate the feast.
I’m giving you a week to prepare! Let’s reclaim the culture for our own, with Order and Wonder!
{This post has more on these feasts.}
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