February 2007 Print

Rev. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré

 

The Thirst for an Absolute

It is a fact: as soon as man's reason is awakened, it aims to achieve. Achieve what? The most complete result possible: a life of conscience, a life of knowledge, an economic life, a social life, a material life. Our mind seeks to possess completion in everything: enjoyment or work, pleasure or effort, thought or action.

 

There is always a rose more beautiful than this rose;

There is always a heart more loving than this heart...

 

Our superficialities, our inconstancies, our hatreds, our brutalities, arise from a need of our nature, bent on perfecting us and perfecting the life of society. There is a need for an absolute in the realm of justice, of brotherhood, of happiness, of peace. This explains work, politics, effort, and progress. We are driven by an absolute which is inside of us; we are drawn by an absolute which we seek outside of ourselves.

We are aware that this world is full of things relative, that is to say, of things which are and which ought not to be: slums and war; of things which are and which could be better: health; of things which are and which ought to be general: happiness. These relative social states leave us ill at ease, with our instinct for total truth.

Hence our constant need to organize, our unhealthy need to criticize, our poisonous need to doubt. We are disgusted with the world and we are disgusted with our own selves.

Our relativity (by that I mean: our deficient health, our limited intelligence, our uncertain heart) spends its time trying to become the absolute of its dreams. "I am well but I could be better. I have begun to exist, and if only I just could manage to exist even more by a perfect health and a life as long as possible..."

These are intelligent symptoms, that prove we are capable of envisioning either a being who would begin and who would have no end or a being without any beginning but who would end; or a being without beginning and without end.

The mason who sets about building something seeks to ensure the longevity of the house. The doctor who sets about healing seeks to ensure the longevity of health. We look for every opportunity for increasing our chances at life.

Who Can Succeed and How?

There are two alternatives:

1) Man esteems himself capable of organizing the earth absolutely, here and now, without the least reference to a future life.

2) Man decides to cultivate to the utmost his desire for an absolute, by attaching himself, by clinging to the utmost to the absolute of God, with a view to bringing down to earth the absolute good of everybody's dreams.

 

If the first alternative is chosen, man falls into an essential fallacy: he mistakes his desires for his means. He desires an absolute in the realm of justice, of virtue, of truth, which reveals the mark of God upon him, meaning–in his logic–that he also possesses the means he is dreaming of to become absolutely happy. However, he lacks these means and I will prove it: To organize an absolutely just world, man would have to know everything about all men; about their material needs, which vary from one to another; about their intellectual needs, which are infinitely varied; about their moral needs, which are different every day. What is more, man refuses thereby to recognize the spiritual and religious needs that torment a man: the need for the love of God, the need for eternity.

Not only that, for all he may know by means of science, the police, medical research, and surveillance cameras, there are a great many questions to which the most well-intentioned cannot respond and in general these are the most important questions of all. Illness, suffering, death, trials, sacrifice, the origin of the world, the future, evil, virtue: things that never make their way onto campaign posters for social reform. You only approach man from the outside: his mouth, his wallet, his pleasure. In other words, all of those things of which true men have deprived themselves: the heroes, the saints, the great benefactors of humanity.

And you say you have the means! You have the desires, but less than anyone do you have the means. The proof: your doctrines are so incomplete, so inhuman, that they have to make up for their absence of humanity–and hence of perfection–by the use of force and violence which impose upon man that towards which he feels no attraction the minute he learns how to distinguish between appearance of absolute and the absolute itself.

An individual or social doctrine may be perfect or true on several points but if, as a whole, it has to be imposed by the dictatorship of force, of police, of the government, by that very fact it admits to a profound weakness, for it admits that there are a great many solutions which escape it, either by ignorance or by a willful misunderstanding of man's nature such as he is: flesh, blood, and soul, and that the situation can only be saved by constraint (Nazism, Marxism).

The characteristic of matter is its tendency to destruction as soon as an idea is not there to sustain it (the house in ruins as soon as the idea of conservation is absent). Men spend their time fending off destruction (in architecture, health, commerce) or accelerating it by voluntary destruction (war, plunder). In both cases, the idea dominates matter.

"But ideas are themselves material!" as if they were some kind of electric or atomic force, some unknown energy, but material. If it is unknown, why do you class it with matter, which is known? Your affirmation is unscientific. If it is known to be material, where are your proofs and demonstrations of its materiality? If it is material, to cultivate matter would be to cultivate idea and virtue. Licentiousness and sensuality would give rise to intelligence and purity.

If it is material, then in those cases most worthy of man, the idea proves itself the enemy of matter by calling for sacrifice in the effort of virtue, for suffering in expiation, for death in heroism. Finally, if the idea is material, why the disharmony of a material idea producing fruits that it disavows and that form man's most noble arsenal: religion, purity, virtue, sanctity–all considered as enemies of that very materialism supposedly producing them?

Where there is identity there is harmony. If thought, light and spirit are identical to cell, atom and reactions, why is there no harmony between them?

Now, if the nature of spirit is so certain, why is God, the spirit par excellence, so contested? Precisely because He is spirit par excellence and we are only spirit by a stroke of divine whimsy, drowning in animality.

We fall into the modern anthropomorphism: we want to confine God to the measures of our human science, which are steeped in material conditions.

God is the absolute and because of that He cannot be seen. God is incomprehensible, fortunately, just as a mathematical formula is for a child. God is not something we meet, fortunately, otherwise He would be on the level of our humanity.

Now if the second alternative is chosen, man clings to God, the only absolute, in order, by bringing Him to earth, to organize the earth absolutely. Contrary to the first alternative, the only value of a doctrine comes from the free consent which it proposes as its principal line of conduct. Instinctively, man responds to the absolute complement or completion that Christ brings to him by proposing himself freely to Christ and in turn freely yielding to His proposition.

This free proposition on the part of Christ, without an army, without police, without a political party, without a country, is itself the sign that He is certain of its divine value and of the security which He brings to the world. He knows that it is enough simply to choose Him and the problem is solved.

For He has exercised His power over all of creation: over the water of the waves and over the wine of Cana, over the vegetable world, the loaves and the cursed fig-tree, over the mineral world such as the coin found in the mouth of the fish, over the animal world with the miraculous catch, over the human body with the cures, over the human heart with the pardons, over the human soul with the resurrections, over the social question with the Beatitudes and over authority: "Render to Caesar...."

He touched on every domain so marvelously and in so absolute a way that no one since has ever improved on His words. He foretold the future Himself, warning that it would have its share of counterfeits (false prophets) and that men would prefer their doctrines of error over the absolute of His truth.

Why? Because the other doctrines, as handmaids of our own point of view, appear to us to be absolutely marvelous from that point of view, perhaps. But a point of view is not the absolute of all humanity. It is perhaps an imperious impetus, but not an absolute.

We have to have the courage to implicate the whole of ourselves if we want to understand anything at all. Everything is confusion in the modern world because the whole of man has been compromised by philosophies and doctrines which have exalted certain material aspects of man.

However, serving the cause of certain aspects of man, legitimate though they be, means working directly against the need of each one of us to take and organize man in his entirety.

Once, during a conversation with a communist, I started to realize the misunderstanding. He began to speak bits of truth, the kind we all put in the service of our own personal sectarianism. Pagan that he was, he said to me: "What we need is saints, and we don't have the means to make any; but you..." (What a responsibility!) He said this as he gave his sack lunch to a poor woman (we, the spiritual bourgeoisie). He is a step away from God.

We are all very close to one another and our divisions arise more from our eternal similarities of nature, than from our differences–similarities which our passions interpret differently. We, the believers, are people who have reached the goal and do nothing to help the others benefit from it, and the others wrongly attribute to God all the deficiencies that they notice in those who serve Him, which is for them a way of dispensing themselves from serving Him and loving Him.

Yet, a man who refuses God does not escape the thirst for absolute which God put in him to draw him to Himself. That thirst is what he turns around and uses, without God, in favor of the very relative things that are in him.

The absolute, put in the service of instinct brings brutality. The absolute, put in the service of interest procures lies. The absolute, put in the service of passion produces bestiality. The absolute, put in the service of society brings Marxism, which uses man for the destruction of his own personality, cultivating certain aspects of his personality in the service of the State, then, once it has served, snatching it away by drowning it in the collectivism of a commune. "Now that you have been useful to me in reaching my goals, you may disappear."

A man who refuses the liberating absolute of God will one day fall victim to the absolute of error which he has served. Not himself only, but his family, his friends, and all of society as well.

Preliminary Conclusion

We all have in us the same superior tendencies. Some have not yet found the goal adapted to these tendencies. God asks them to search for that goal with honesty. Others have given to these tendencies an inadequate goal, one which does not correspond to the totality or the truth of those tendencies, God asks them to rethink the problem without prejudice.

"Amen I say to you, ask and you shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you."

Others have found the solution, but God reminds them of the parable of the talents: do not bury the solution under bourgeois comfort, inaction, or disdain for your fellow man. We are all brothers by our honorable and beautiful human tendencies. We must unite ourselves in the truth. We all have things to change about ourselves. All of us have something to renounce, something to admit.

We all need to rethink the problem of God for the benefit of the world....

Situate the Problem of Christ, for Better or for Worse

For worse, He is a myth. So He never existed? So He was invented? By whom? We have yet to discover what writer constructed the idea of Jesus Christ in presenting us a mind running contrary to the dispositions of humanity, a writer seeing beyond his failure in constructing Christ, knowing in advance the coalition of scholars gathered to prove the problems in his construction, proposing the Son of man to the enemies of that Son. What could be more absurd than inventing what you know is contrary to the reason for being of an invention? Its success.

If the idea of Jesus Christ persists in spite of the cries of protest met by the supposed inventor, it is because the inventor composed the historical presentation of Jesus Christ with super-human, super-scientific elements which, in point of fact, could not have been invented by a mere man.

We are led to wonder if Jesus Christ is not His own inventor, whose elements of thought originate in a quality of existence which is inaccessible and inexplicable to our human quality of thinking. "Ecce venio"–I present Myself, inventor of Myself, "Ego sum"–I am He who is, acting only in reference to Myself. And from this "Myself" do I draw capacities of material power over illnesses and over corpses, the power of definitive perspectives on the future of the world, on the destiny of every man. The power of moral and virtuous explanation touching the spiritual possibilities of every man, powers of imperturbable dominion over death: truth, love, virtue, eternity. "My words will not pass away." All of these forms of power harass the insecurity of philosophers, the curiosity of novelists, the rivalry of university professors, the ill-humor of pleasure-seekers, but to the wise they tell that the mind can only go as far as tangible facts the secrets of which are still a mystery to human science.

Now here is a fact of significant proportions, beyond the weights and measures of your reasoning. It is a fact that throws a wrench into everyone's works, precisely because it imposes upon our measures with an excess of precision and solidity. The fact "Jesus Christ" still remains, inspiring panic in your newspapers, your laboratories and your parliaments.

His existence is an inexplicable fact. His teaching is an unexplained fact. His power is an inaccessible fact. His resurrection is an inadmissible fact, according to you, for the sole recourse of your powerless capacities is to oppose to Him the fact of your raging, sickly-sweet, cotton-wool, scholarly hostility, but hostility to a fact which it cannot make disappear only highlights the value and prestige of that fact, and for the twenty centuries that you have been raging against Him, He has so increased that you have run out of ammunition to criticize Him; He alone remains before you, so imposing by His silence that you repeat the scene of His silence before Pilate: "Take Him away and crucify Him" once again, and you all abandon Him.

Yet, faced with the evidence of His indisputable fact, the better men still seek Him; the professionals of His love seek Him, or they depart from Him and turn toward another (Luther and his band), or they turn away from what wounds their pride (Judas turned away from Him after the absolute absence of pride: the Eucharist); and yet, thousands maintain their attachment to Him in the most intact, the most courageous, and the most tender way possible. What do they possess that places them above the others, their adversaries, their torturers, or simply their friends of yesterday, become the "twisted" of today?

You are going to understand the mystery of fidelity in these men who stand with Him by first understanding the mystery of infidelity in those who let go of Him.

Those who let go include those who no longer question Him, like Judas. He always responds when He am questioned. Judas was afraid of His explanations (the jar of ointment) so he interrogated the others: "What will you give me and I will deliver Him to you?"

It also includes those attached to His Old Testament, who considered themselves dispensed from having to recognize Him as being the Omega drawing it to an end and the Alpha developing it far beyond their rabbinical science. They constantly seek to trap Him with the very texts that foretell Him. Discussion remains possible, but they refuse the facts that prove who He is without discussion. After His unprecedented, imperative sign which brought Lazarus out of his grave, which proved Him indisputably the Master of death, and therefore God, source of life, Judas ceased to question Him. He organized his vengeance and his spite to have Him questioned by the guardians of the Law and by the civil power. That allowed him to distance himself from Him, reassured by the competent authorities of the time.

The others remain with Him, near Him, in Him: they never cease to question Him (by prayer), and thus He can continue to answer them through states of soul of certitude and confidence in His affirmations and His promises. They question Him about His grace (His own life) by their faith in His sacraments. He answers them by consolations, by new courage, by new hope, pardon, intimacy whose quality separates them from their animality, from their temporal cares. He establish them in His own thought. With Him their desire is filled by the word Always: always ready to respond at the least sign, given from the heart, always ready to respond to the plea for help, full of confidence. With Him remain those who believe in Him, not platonically but vitally: "To whom would we go, if not to You?" Go...Follow me–To whom could we take ourselves with our burden of wretchedness, our burden of carnal materialism, our burden of a heart tormented to love so little or to love so wrongly?

The movement of faith, the movement of reflection, of decision, of consent. The movement of virtuous imitation: absence of sin. The movement of generous imitation: presence of sacrifice.

Such are those who remain; the only ones who remain, without being swept away in the whirlwind of wicked eloquence believing itself so persuasive, or in the gyration of venomous consultations. For a faith that is lived holds a weight of persuasion which renders it immovable when blows the tempest. You can uproot a tree; you cannot uproot a rock: "O God, You are my rock."

You hold your fate in your own hands. Novelties or extravagance or falsifications are not what will decide your fate. It is solely your fidelity, lived, proven, reflected, and willed, which will preserve you from being the least bit shaken by modernist arguments or by the sneers of the chattering class. Your fidelity will be the sole spiritual value incapable of compromising you, since it is made up of the unceasing proof that Jesus does not change. He is the only one who comes always identical to Himself, when fidelity hears Him, understands Him and follows Him as carefully as the Apostles who stayed always close around Him.

 

For better, consider What His voice alone was able to do: draw a dead man from his death, instruct Nicodemus about his destiny, console a mother who was leading her son to the cemetery, pronounce a program of social life overwhelming in its peace and its truth, assuage for ever the conscience of the guilty.

In a word, He constantly addressed Himself to what is destroyed, threatened, crushing, irremediable, and always managed to reconstruct, to heal, to redeem and to resurrect, achieving a recovered existence, in all its forms–such is the efficacy of Christ in a life of thought, of will, of conscience, of profession: the life of a man.

 

For better, give Him back His place, before all other concerns. Like the Apostles, saddened at knowing Him about to leave, for once we have seen and understood Him, we can think of nothing else but seeing Him again and finding Him again.

The beautiful, insistent evocation of St. John: "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have contemplated and what we have touched of the Word of Life, we announce to you, in order that you might be in communion with us."

"For Life was made manifest–and we announce to you eternal life."

What is best is also what is most immediate. For eternal life begins the moment there is love of Jesus Christ, imitation of Jesus Christ, and fidelity of mind and heart to Jesus Christ.

Situate Your Personal Attitude to Christ

The triumph of secularism is incontestable. It did not suppress Catholicism; the reaction would have been too decisive. It subtly hindered its existence. It wore it away. It rarefied its atmosphere.

Only a small number will remain Catholic: those who decide to be Catholic by recreating the atmosphere. The law hinders the Catholic from being free by education. The press hinders the Catholic from being free through an exclusively secular press. Instruction hinders the Catholic from being free by an overload of programs. Catholic society is hindered from being free in its Sundays and in its entertainment by the mass media.

No one disposes freely of his own thought. Everything is enslaved. When Catholicism is allowed to express itself, the answer is standing ready to cancel it out. Reviews, stories and pictures are at the service of the discrediting of Catholicism. And when Catholicism is taught, it is carried out in strange contradiction to the Church of all time.

From without, from within, by the elite or by the masses, Catholicism has permission to exist in a climate of powers and propaganda which hinder it from being. We are living through a euthanasia of the Faith. They have made it breathe deeply so it would sleep. They watch at its bedside so that it never wakes up, in order to assure to one and all their liberty to experience materialism.

In the phantasmagoria of its constant solicitation, in the invasion of every minute, polarizing all our thoughts around money-making, stealing from Sunday its time for divine occupations of an order infinitely more grave, blaring out the noise of pleasures to capture our curiosity and awaken our sensuality, man has been admirably domesticated and secularized. He is free to walk as a Catholic like the Jews during the occupation: with a sign on his chest, singling him out for public distrust. He walks amid memories of Catholicism: churches, conferences, films, but he is de-Catholicized. He wears the uniform of his baptism, of his confirmation, of his marriage in the Church, but he is demobilized. He has disengaged himself from the intellectual and moral priorities of the Gospel. He has engaged himself otherwise in purely lucrative or worldly concerns.

It follows that, no longer suffering from this anesthesia, the Catholic no longer chokes with indignation before the religious situation. No longer suffering from the rarefaction of the spiritual atmosphere, it does not even occur to him to suffer from the paganized situation of the family, of education or of society. The passivity of his faith in his own life maintains him ultra-passive toward those around him.

St. Paul already sensed the danger coming and, to his young collaborator–nonetheless well-meaning–he wrote with urgency: "Sleeper, awake!"

For which cause I admonish thee, that thou stir up the grace of God which is in thee...Thou, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace which is in Christ Jesus...Be mindful that the Lord Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, according to my Gospel, wherein I labour even unto bands, as an evildoer....Of these things put them in mind, charging them before the Lord. Contend not in words, for it is to no profit, but to the subversion of the hearers.But shun profane and vain babbling: for they grow much toward ungodliness, and their speech spreadeth like a canker. Flee thou youthful desires, and pursue justice, faith, charity, and peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times. Now as Jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith. (II Tim. 1:6; 2:1,8,14,16-17,22; 3:1,8)

This draws us to the edge of a deeper awareness. To believe is to let the grace of faith establish itself in our judgment, in our capacity for decision, before all other preferences, and, thus armor-plated with certitude, to engage in the combat in us and around us, of bearing witness by our conscience and our life in society that Jesus Christ is alive in us and through us.

The duty which falls to us is to reorganize the atmosphere and wake up the slumbering, the sleepers. Reorganize ourselves, realizing that outside of Catholicism preserved as Catholic there exists no valid solution for the recovery of mankind. All you have to do is read the papers.

This recovery demands an active choosing of the truths of Faith, whose unshakable character comes from their unshakable origin: the divinity of Jesus Christ. Truths which are not merely received but actualized by choices that are interior or exterior but always sincere, in a supernatural honesty with our natural life. Obsessed with bringing our share of active testimony as ammunition to the battle against the falsehood gnawing away at the doctrine of Christ like a canker, our share of courage and love, permitting the grace of faith to purify our human intentions of what is too natural and what prolongs the official anesthesia by the secret anesthesia of our human respect. To think and to will something other than rivalries, pleasure, success, and money, but to will uprightness, courage, and decision.

Across enemy lines, they are only strong of our own indifference to the problem of our salvation and the salvation of others. Turn back into men who breathe an atmosphere of prayer, of voluntary dwelling of the intelligence with the Our Father–"Teach us to pray."..."Hallowed be Thy name": the place we guarantee to God in our profession and our action. "Thy kingdom come": the gift of our activity in the service of His reign, at home, on vacation, everywhere. "Thy will be done": active engagement in the secret battles within us and the defense of the faith around us.

Rome has lately said that it is the laity who will save the Church. You bear on your shoulders something much heavier than a debt to pay or an expense to underwrite. You bear the weight of the Church, guardian of truth and eternity, and must lift it up, by your word, your example, your action, to the level of your neighbor, your subordinates, your family, and your town.

To believe is to implicate your entire self, with your conscience and your very life, in de-anesthetizing the atmosphere of a secularism which has made its way into the hearts even of Catholics. We have not examined the close connection between our secret indifference to giving sufficient audience to the voice of our conscience, and the effect of our insufficiency as Catholics on the official secularism whose advance we have strangely facilitated.

Gentlemen, you are men, and men who are baptized. Without knowing it, you detain magnificent possibilities capable of raising you above everyone else, would you only allow God to help you not to be like everyone else. The day you finally taste the reality, the realism of the Faith sought after with love, your judgment will be invaded by a blessed catastrophe of awareness. "I understand; now I understand!"–and the colonel left behind his snobbery and his pleasure to shake up his department by the organization of adult catechism. A devastating vision of what we thought we were and of what we realize we ought to be.

Reorient men on their secret relation to God, and then set them in the modern whirlwind of wicked minds circling around them, watching to accuse their slightest movements of Catholicism. Strong of an irresistible awareness that they have what it takes to wield the sword of a lived truth in this modern clash of forces sending off the sparks that awaken the others and rally the sleepers round their examples and their decisions. That is your primary duty and your primary mission.

Here is the oasis where you come from time to time to renew your strength. Out there is where God awaits you and sets you the task of proving yourselves men of a lived faith.

 

Now I would like to give you some consolation by entering into the mystery of your lives as men, to show you how the exigencies I have been discussing with you for the last two days can only be fulfilled if you manage to stabilize yourselves in a very simple but very faithful understanding of a balanced spirituality. Understanding is everything; beyond that there is no spirituality. To help you discover the manner in which God molds your understanding is to help you enter into a universal, individual, irresistible spirituality.

We are in the middle of Lent. We priests sing at Compline the following hymn full of melancholy:

 

Behold, already we are in the middle of life and we are nearly in death.

To whom can we turn for help if not to You, Lord, justly angered by our weakness, but who remains the God of Strength, the God of Mercy, the most kind Savior.

Do not abandon us in the time of our old age, as our energy grows weak.

Do not abandon us, because you are the Holy God, the God of Strength, the God of Mercy. You who save us out of Love.

 

It brings us back to what I have already told you about Christ. It is time to stop talking, to keep silence before the agitation of theological ideas which are always the same, in order to love Him, by the continuity of a gaze nourished by these ideas as a river by its source, without even knowing it.

The middle of our life has a melancholy all its own, made up of the gravity of the past and the gravity of the future, the one and the other inviting us toward a present of recollection and love. Why should we fear You, when You came on purpose to prove that we had nothing to fear?

 

God is love as the wind is tempest. He constantly displaces us only to immobilize us in the sole certitude that His love is everywhere, as the atmosphere giving rise to the wind is universal. "Christ": one syllable giving rise to a whole alphabet of love. A word uprooting whole lives from their most ingrained routine, to transplant them into solitudes more beloved than the closest-knit families. Christ: the respiration of the moral life, until the day He finally becomes the reason for us to experience the reality that the more certain and precise our knowledge of God, the less do we have need of words, formulas, or even thoughts by which to express Him, so exquisitely simple does He appear at last to an understanding passed into a state of soul that is already a foretaste of vision. Eternity begins when we enter into Him.

To every light of the spiritual life, God joins a descent into hell with Him, with Him as a companion, to discover there the heavenly reasons to rise toward God. In the spiritual life, there is no such thing as suicide by despair. There is always the admirable mystery of discovering in your wretchedness a sweetness that it does not contain by its nature: the sweetness of feeling it touched by another. Mary Magdalen is an exquisite example of this: from the moment she felt herself touched by Christ, all of her turpitudes became reasons to prove.

Therein lies the mystery of evil. When it is illumined by grace, when it is accompanied by prayer, by calm, by abandon, by adoration, all of a sudden we discover what it does not seem to contain all alone: reasons to prove that we love. From that moment on, there is never a defeat; there are falls, there are times of discouragement–how normal; there are frailties–how human; but there remains throughout our existence an intelligent continuity to be maintained, a sincerity toward our first duties of fidelity and love.

To achieve this state, we need to understand that we all have our descent into hell, in those moments when the light shines perhaps more cruelly on a given weakness, a given refusal, a given superficiality, a given mistake in judgment. At that moment, our state of soul is flooded with darkness and we understand that we are alone. When we do evil we are always alone. The great grace of the Faith, of the virtue of faith–"Lord, to whom would we go?"–is to determine a movement of ascension out of our descent into hell, to join Him who awaits us above and who indeed is the one that sent the Faith down to us to accompany our ascent.

In simpler words, always have the faith to believe that your wretchedness exists in order to prove that you have better things than wretchedness for determining your life. You should never leave a man focused on the problem of his falls. You always have to show him that, in his falls, he tasted solitude and that, in his ascensions, he will taste the companionship of the Faith.

Let us go all the way. There are two types of shame in evil actions: There is a shame that is discouraging, that is created by self-love: "You are wasting your time, you will just start all over again, it's always the same story, you can try all you want, you won't get anywhere. So sit down in the ditch and stop walking." There is an affectionate shame: gazing at someone who is gazing at us, wretched as we are, and who draws out of our gaze the desire to be with Him: the good thief. You have to admit, it is amazing to think that the first of the elect to enter into heaven–Jesus is the one who said it–was a crook! But a good crook, a crook capable of loving. "This very day you will be with Me in Paradise."

The minute a man sees his wretchedness in the light of the Faith, this very day he is in Paradise. He enters into the movement of faith. He enters into the movement of love. Then what happens? What happens is a fabulous reversal, a reversal of the classic conceptions about life. We have a classic conception about life which I call a technical conception: the parts of an engine are all lined up, everything is in place, so let's go turn the key and it will start to run. And we do not accept that there might be failures. We do not accept that there might be a part that is worn out or does not match or is too big. For us, life is only worthwhile when it runs like an engine, automatically humming along. Beware of that conception. There is no automatic perfection. There is no automatic progress, otherwise you would never get to heaven.

Automation is an absence of responsibility. To get to heaven you need the utmost responsibility of love; it is sometimes conditioned by the utmost weakness, because your true, total, fabulously productive responsibility sometimes has to be drawn out by fabulous catastrophes. And if Mary Magdalene climbed so high, it is because she knew some fabulous catastrophes.

Look at how much the problem of the spiritual life turns around the understanding. By that I mean that there is no dividing into categories between those who cannot and those who can, between those who are lost and those who are saved. All that is foolishness.

To be saved, you have to live in the intelligent mystery of your capacities for love, even if you are a poor miserable wretch. To be lost, it suffices to live with a great deal of self-love, even if you are perfect in every way. For self love is the opposite of pure love.

Having said all this, I would like to give you a few details. What I just told you shows you this: that in each one of you, everything occurs in a succession of movements of existence; movements of existence carrying us toward the earth, carrying us toward the Faith, carrying us toward ourselves, carrying us toward others. These are movements of existence. Where do they come from? That is how we are made; there is no escaping it.

They come from two words in the liturgy which contain all of man's plenitude and all of his abandon. Namely, on the one hand the liturgy speaks of a mystery of iniquity, on the other hand, the mystery of faith. We are trapped between the mystery of iniquity that is in us and the mystery of faith. That is what we need to explain.

It is a mystery so there is no use trying to explain the origin of iniquity and the origin of faith.

The mystery of iniquity is what arises from nature, from heredity, from acquired habits and from inexplicable deficiencies. You will tell me that we have psychoanalysis now, that we have medical science. I answer that trying to relieve the illness is not the same thing as curing it. The psychiatrist cannot heal our nature; he can remedy certain things under certain rare conditions. But you will carry with you, because of your personal state, your own mystery of iniquity with its particular form of attraction to evil, with its form of tendency to a given failing, with its personal form of anger. In those moments, you feel a tornado within you in which everything you ever heard about the Faith no longer has any relation to anything. You have descended into the abyss of the interior hell.

Why is this mystery of iniquity left to you? Obviously, there are always naïve people to tell you: "It would be so much simpler if God would just take away your mystery of iniquity." The answer to give them is very beautiful: "That is all God ever does, but not the way you think."

Remember that God cannot, theologically speaking, suppress an evil which is a part of our nature, given that the evil in our nature was deliberately willed by the first man to whom God had given absolute liberty. As He said to St. Catherine of Siena, who asked Him why certain souls were damned even though she had pleaded with Him to save them: "Alas, I am forced to respect the liberty which I gave them." As a result, we should not be insulting God for not suppressing an evil within us; we should be overwhelmed with admiration at seeing Him descend into the evil to help us freely leave it behind.

To leave an evil behind is pure philosophy. You must not deny its existence, you must not judge it to be irremediable–nothing is ever irremediable! You must join it to its contrary by using your own liberty. We have to join our wretchedness, by using our liberty, to the contrary of wretchedness: to a call toward something higher, to a movement of ascent. Here we enter into the mysterium fidei. When I pronounce this phrase before the chalice, I am always invaded by a sort of interior trembling, to say to Him: “Yes, my God, it is indeed a mystery of faith, this bewildering movement of Yours toward total sacrifice, total generosity, absolute perseverance, boundless mercy.” What a mystery of faith, to see Christ inexhaustibly willing to enter into our mystery of iniquity and infuse the energy of an ascent.

To love is to decide in company with Christ. Then you have nothing to fear. The only thing you have to fear is not to ask for help: that is the tragedy of evil. No longer daring, just waiting, letting yourself be intimidated, making matters worse. In other words (I will give you the characteristics of evil): inertia, absence of movement toward the Good, helplessness, and, sometimes, the beginnings of revolt. What is revolt? It is deciding to remain in the evil. It is the attitude of Satan. It is a refusal. It is pushing away the One who comes into our wretchedness to ascend back up with us to heaven.

As long as a man’s intelligence is not voluntarily stabilized in helplessness, inertia, and refusal, it has nothing to fear; it will always pull out of it. We need to take our reasoning even further.

You might say to me: “But why do I sometimes fall so low?” Christ will answer you: “Do you know why I let you fall so low? So that you can finally make up your mind to give your preference to Me rather than giving it to your evil. I am trying to provoke in you a disgust for yourself, so that you will finally start to have a taste for God!”

And we come to the word which describes the spiritual life in full activity. It is not to do your duty—far be it from me to discredit duty!—it is to do your duty with so much love that the duty produces more than just duty. It produces a need for a supplementary movement toward God: generosity.

As long as a man nourishes in the secret of his heart this need for the generosity of a prolongation of love, that is to say, as long as he steps beyond the problem of pure duty, counting out what he owes to God, as long as he has understood that, by doing his duty with love, he makes it produce more than duty, then he is forever delivered from his wretchedness. Even if he returns to it, he is delivered from it in his intentions. He is delivered from it psychologically. And all he has to do now is to walk with the awareness that Our Lord has left him his wretchedness to maintain him in humility, that it is He who will come to find him and take him up to heaven.

I am trying to show you that, ultimately, as long as a spiritual life is capable of preserving the need for movement, for the movement of ascent, your weaknesses do not matter. They are always a principle of resurrection. And you begin to ask what is going to come out of this hodgepodge—because, we have to admit, our personal life is a hodgepodge in which the most sublime of secrets rub shoulders with the basest of tendencies, in a mix of “for” and “against,” of options and refusals. What is going to come out of it? A heaven or a hell? It is the moment to call on Christ to intervene. We are always in the middle of our life, a little bit closer to death. “To whom would we go, if not to You, who lead us out of the abyss of death, toward the beauties of life?”

You have to draw from all this some very stabilizing lessons. You will not escape from your wretchedness by voluntarism—do not fool yourself. You will use your will to resolve yourself to the struggle. You will struggle, but you will not rid yourself of the enemy. He will always be hiding behind the wall, waiting in ambush. The only reality before which the enemy runs away is when he realizes that you are intelligent to the point of meeting him with a personality become love. To become love... then the enemy will flee for a very simple reason: he is hatred. Hatred cannot endure the steady gaze of love. That is what explains, in the lives of the saints, extraordinary feats of serenity—in the Curé of Ars, among others—in the face of atrocious temptations. They were so entirely love that the enemy was obliged to go away.Here is a story from the life of St. Catherine of Siena, that young girl who was all purity. She was harassed for a full month by the most horrible secret temptations. Nothing did any good. She inflicted on herself the most severe penances, she fasted, she deprived herself, she prayed; nothing did any good. But she did not suspect that she had remained in love. Our Lord appeared to her, and boldly St. Catherine said to Him: “Where were You, Lord, during those temptations?”

And Jesus answered her very simply: “Catherine, did you consent?”

“No.”

“Well then, why are you complaining? Now, to reward you, you are going to be immunized.”

It is not voluntarism, it is a supernaturalized understanding of the situation which determines us to adopt an attitude of love, and then Christ cannot resist our plea for help. You may have to weep, to cry out, what does it matter! That is when you are victorious; the enemy has no more hold over you.

I am telling you this because the danger of wretchedness is that it creates, even in the best, an obsession which paralyzes their freedom of spirit to do anything else. It fixes them in fear, in anxiety, in an interior torture from which they cannot escape. They can no longer do anything. Form their conscience. It is a word that we can only pronounce once we have delivered them from themselves by delivering them from their wretchedness so that they might deliver it up to God. Then we give a man back his liberty of mind. God has need today of your liberty of mind. He needs it for you to understand the situation you are in. He also needs it for you to realize right away how to comport yourself positively, in the Christian sense of the word: lovably (the etymology is very beautiful: to be capable of love). And God is always waiting for us to be lovable with Him, whatever the circumstances. He is waiting for you to be in this state of soul: “Yes, I admit it, there are two currents in me: movements of wretchedness and movements of ascent.”

What are the signs of generosity? People always say that man is selfish. It is certain that the tragedy of selfishness is to keep man centered around a love they call self-love, the love of self, and thereby to remain centered around an individualization of his existence to the point of not allowing love to use it for better than the self. That is self-love. You will recognize generosity at your need not to individualize yourself in your existence but to allow your attitudes, by your personality, to prolong the love of God by the intermediary of your own. To be generous is to authorize God to mobilize in us our initiatives, our desires, our sentiments, our intentions, to put them at the service of something that goes beyond us. In all generosity there is a going beyond. When you begin to go beyond yourself, you have entered the region of love. There is no more danger. When you have to start over again every morning, and you have to take up the same love along with the same duty, and you have to bring to it the same will and the same affection, do you think that is not generosity?

You cannot let yourself waste away by focusing on your wretchedness. You do not have the right. There are more and better things to do, God knows. When they say that God would do better to deliver us from our evil, it is admirable to realize that our whole life He pursues us, asking us to deliver ourselves up to the good, which is deliverance; to deliver ourselves up to our graces, not just grace. Each one, in his own way, is drawn by God. The way of one will be more contemplation, of another more penance, for another more of an apostolate or more meditation or more adoration. You have to give yourself over to your graces and know how to espouse them. Be faithful to them, allow them to become your grace.

Then you will realize that life is worth living, that you are not alone. You will see that the supernatural life is made up of a whole series of continual movements. Enter into a movement of intelligence. You will then be feared by the enemy, for when Satan sees that he is faced with an intelligent soul, he is lost. He only “has” us to the extent that we have lost the knowledge of God. That is why I invite you always to put the accent on what revives the knowledge of God: recollection, prayer, interiority, intention.

If you are willing to understand that, you will understand the expression of Jesus: “The kingdom of God is within you.” He did not say, “will be within you,” but “The kingdom of God is within you.” Do not destroy being–the being of your graces, the being of your higher dreams. I beg of you, never destroy anything that is. You would be destroying God who is in you. Believe in love.

 The Cross Crushes and Raises Up

The cross crushes you in your movements of wretchedness, but in crushing you in your movements of wretchedness, it acts like the wine press that draws the juice from the fruit: it raises you up in movements of courage. The cross never ends in the negative. It is always a prelude to a resurrection, on the condition that you are willing to be raised up. That is why we cannot carry it alone: our shoulders are not shaped for that. We always need to carry it with Someone else.

And I do not think I could do better, approaching the subject from this angle, than to advise you to ask for help from her who carried her cross in such an extraordinary way, from Christmas to the Ascension of the Lord: the Virgin Mary. Do not forget that the Ascension was for the Blessed Virgin a little recurrence of Calvary. The Ascension was the second separation, to such an extent that theologians claim the Virgin died—more exactly, fell asleep—under the pressure of a love which could no longer bear to be without her Son. We could say that the Ascension is what provoked the Assumption. Understand to what point the Virgin was consumed by an interior movement never to separate herself from Him, even if it was on Calvary and to what extent she lived her unbelievable adventure in the serenity of a soul which knew it was crushed by the Cross and raised up by Calvary. Always invite her into your life, if only by a decade of the rosary every day. When the Virgin Mary enters into a life, everything changes. It is the same existence but it is not the same vision of existence. There are the same struggles, but there is not the same way of struggling. The Blessed Virgin has a certain mission which she is responsible for fulfilling and she always fulfills it in detail when we ask for her help.

Do not be astonished by the fact that the kingdom of God is within you, and that the progressive deliverance from your evil will be carried out inside you. I mean to say that a time will come when your evil will be anesthetized in its first movements. You will carry it to your death. It is a part of your nature. But you will endure it with confidence, because God will be part of your battle.

And because you have to maintain your liberty of mind with a maximum of acuity in all the social activity that you undertake, you have to approach that social activity with a liberty of mind which is the result of what I have described, in regards to the secret contradictions that exist in each one of you. Contradictions are a part of our existence. The solutions are a part of our love and our confidence. There is never any reason to be troubled. If you understand that, you will understand that your duty to combat is more and more obligatory. To combat within so you will have the courage to wage the combat without. You understand very well that your duty is not to accept ourself such as you are, but to allow your human alternation to produce a result worthy of the Faith. Never believe that there is such a thing as a sanctity that never had a mystery of iniquity. It is not a sanctity but a more or less unbalanced, sugar-coated piety. Sanctity is a state of fidelity which is woven out of just as many black threads as golden threads over the course of a life. And it is because the black threads cross over the golden threads and the golden threads break through into the black threads that they end up by producing a tapestry in which we discern that the black threads and the golden threads have traced out the face of Jesus Christ. That is sanctity; that is balance.

Leave with these few notions and reflect on what I have told you, which ought to fill you with hope. If you knew how, in the spiritual life, years of waiting and helplessness can be recovered by a simple light that all of a sudden enters your soul like a headlight shining into a hole. We see the tree we can plant there. Keep your hope founded on the promises and the merits of Jesus Christ: I await from Your hands that life eternal which You are going to extract with the co-operation—the co-operation—of my freedom and my intelligence.