April 2007 Print

Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

 

Sallanches [say: Sal-lawnsh_´] is a town in France at the foot of the Alps.¹ The mountains determine the activities of the town. The inhabitants will spend 50, 60, or 70 years benefitting from the mountains by their commerce. The mountains gaze down, impassive, upon the bustling humanity making use of them. Yet very few inhabitants can be called mountain-climbers, though they possess the mountains by the commercial initiatives which they draw from it.

The mountain-climber himself, on the contrary, is possessed by the mountains through the particular behavior which they impose on him–equipment, health, vigor, enthusiasm, determination–until he leaves them with his heart full of memories and experience and an irresistible need to return.

This is to illustrate that the inhabitants of Sallanches make use of the Catholic Faith without having it. If they had it, they would all be mountain-climbers. They would step out of their shops and start using all the mountain gear themselves.

To believe is to realize that you cannot do otherwise than to commit yourself deliberately to a divine summit. The Faith has given us the privilege of piercing straight to the heart of it with our mind's eye, through the fog and the shadows, to seize there–in those moments of a blessed parting of the clouds–the splendors of the summit that is Jesus Christ. Can you imagine having the following conversation with our Lord?

Continue the ascent; stay a mountain-climber; you are approaching the summit. The proof is there! Look back over your shoulder. See how far away you are from all the noise, the absurdity of the valley and its futilities. Breathe in the fresh air of moral health and of good judgment. Savor the endurance acquired in surmounting the obstacles. Feel the satisfaction of the heights from which you understand so many things. And then understand what is meant by the expression: "Pugiles fidei"–the combatants of the Faith, the perseverance of the ascent, the inner vigor of doing the right thing.

Are you there? This is the liturgical calendar: The ascent of Martyrs are the streams of blood that flow from the mountain. The ascent of Virgins is the expanse of pure, white snow that covers the mountain. The ascent of Doctors is in the splendors of the atmosphere enveloping the mountain. The ascent of Confessors is the unshakable delight of the high ground.

Where is your place among them? Where is your name on the calendar?

"Me? Nowhere. That is a whole other world. I don't climb; I distribute. In Sallanches, people want to buy pickaxes, hiking boots, and ropes... Well, when I'm in the den with my children, I distribute the ready-made phrases of the Faith. I distribute catechetical comments. I distribute my own ideas about Sunday. I distribute my own ideas about morality. I'm a distributor."

And what about your children, how are they doing?

"What do you expect? They are doing what children do in a store."

Ah, yes, in a store where everything is pretty, everything is new. An easy childhood: prayer is new and exciting. A difficult adolescence: prayer gets stale. An impossible youth: glad finally to get out of the shop. The Faith is not proven. At least you can prove sports. At least you can prove the world. At least you can prove men and women.

At heart, all that these kids want is to become real mountain-climbers, to take mountain-climbing lessons with Mom and Dad. But Mom and Dad are behind their nice clean cash register of the conventions of the Faith. So they go and play sports some other way. If you get too tired climbing the mountains, then you can always slide down into the holes. There is a kind of sport in that, too, and the cave-explorers of the Faith dive down through the quicksands of doubt to see how it works, or into the pits of abdications and abasements to see who can hold out the longest. The only positive aspect of falsehood is the energy one expends to hold out and prove to himself that what he is doing is good.

The Faith is a climb. There are no mountain-climbers without the ascent. There are no believers without a climb. There is no climb without a free and sustained choice to reach the summit with the necessary equipment, health, and love.

Too many parents weep to see their children descend, and too many children suffer from not having seen their parents climb. We only follow what moves up above or down below. If nothing is moving up above him, the child will be drawn by what is down below. Children are not built for staying in the shop.

I've been told, "I have never seen the Faith!" Have you ever seen the electricity that propels 800 tons at 80 miles per hour on those two inches of metal known as rails?

"No," you say, "but I have seen the arrival of the train at the station."

Well, don't you think that maybe the Church's liturgical calendar is the arrival of men propelled by the irresistible current of the Catholic Faith?

 

Today, there are many smart people, but their intelligence is without value. Many are graduates, but without value. Many are powerful, but without value. They are without climb, without ascent, and without the Faith. To weep over the evils of the day is cowardice if overcoming them is not a way of life. And parents are overcome by the world, and the world has overcome the children. For the world is there when you exempt yourself from the climb toward God, where the movement of your life is not an ascent, but an agitation about the distractions of the valley. The world is there when nature is killed in its capacities for the climb and indulged in its capacities for the descent.

He was not made flesh to indulge the flesh (the descent of lechery) but to appease it by proofs of the absolute values (the ascent of Calvary). He was not made man to eclipse the divine nature but to nourish human nature with the power of re-establishing nature supernaturalized by the Divine.

 

For parents, to believe is to know what the supernatural summits are so that they can be allowed to command and determine the movement of everyone up the paths of light. Standing at the end of the climb we see the Leader to Whom we adhere before all else because of the attraction which He exerts on us (the Faith). He moves us along our climb by affirmations of the spirit of faith lived by the Creed, affirmations of the heart lived by the sacraments, and affirmations of the soul lived by prayer.

I say "affirmations," that is, personal acts in harmony with the Faith, never surprised at having to keep one's distance from the spirit of the world–that is to say, from a world without spirit. The law of the spirit is to choose. The law of choice is to hold it fast.

The world holds to nothing because it samples everything. To hold fast to health is to enter the pharmacy to select a remedy which will be cause of health. To hold to nothing is to enter the pharmacy to taste all of the remedies, which become the cause of death. For if there is a pre-established harmony between aspirin and a fever, there is a pre-established suicide between all of the remedies together and a fever.

The Faith is a movement of life–a life consented to, understood, and willed in pre-established agreement between your life and the best that is in man. The distaste of parents for the life of faith in the home causes in the children pre-established suicide between their secret fevers and the infinite varieties of earthly experiences destined to satisfy them and put within their easy reach.

 

"Abyss calls unto abyss.–Abyssus abyssum invocat" (Ps. 41:8). The deep yearning of a child for marvelous expectations calls out to the abyss of marvelous realizations within the Catholic Faith. To believe is to arm your thinking with the admonitions of Jesus. To believe is to fortify your health with the nourishment of the Gospel. To believe is to drink deeply from the chalices of the light of the Beatitudes. To believe is to anoint your weakness with the oil of the Creed and, so equipped, undertake the ascent of example, of moral dignity, of shining virtue, of meritorious, courageous, heroic charitable activities and to look back and see your children following you.

Do your children have a distaste for God? Did you have a taste for Him?...Dad made a deal with the offers of the world, Mom made a deal with the offers of the world, and education made a deal with the offers of the world. Parents say: "We can't do otherwise; our deals are drowning us; the diploma is at stake." The mother of the seven boy-martyrs encouraged the youngest to hold fast in his sufferings rather than make a deal with Caesar. Descending into the arena–children, women, old men–on their way to be tortured, they were asked by Caesar; "Tell me your name." All of them, animated by the Faith, responded: "Caesar, my name is Christian."

You are not the president of such and such a company, nor the lady in charge of parish works, nor the father with such and such a medal, nor the mother known for her entertaining. "I am a Christian." You are Christians, my children.

Blanche of Castille once said to her child, the future King St. Louis: "I would prefer to see you dead at my feet rather than guilty of a single mortal sin." The Faith is an irresistible climb which follows the law of the climb. The horizons deepen. You perceive Providence from afar and, because of it, you keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the personal cost. Consider the reply of unit commander and French Minister of State Marshal Pétain when he was asked during a government persecution the names of his officers who attended Mass: "Impossible, Sir, since I always sit in the front row, and I am polite and never turn around."

 

How is the Faith a movement nourished by God alone and lived-out in our freedom? God is pure act. When He touches our mind He makes it see and warms it. Clarity and warmth are inseparable as elements of light.

God makes us understand, and then God makes us verify what has been understood by "realizations" that would be beyond our strength had we not the Faith. These realizations are the way for the Faith to be an evidence in the world without putting itself forward as an evidence. Let me explain: When the Angel Gabriel proposed the Incarnation, the Virgin asked for a proof. The angel refused to give her one. He needed her faith, but he replied with a certainty: "The Holy Spirit will overshadow thee." The Virgin said yes without any evidence to the affirmation of the angel. And the shadow of the Holy Spirit in which she had believed responded with the immediate evidence of the Incarnation.

To believe is to allow God, for the benefit of our ascent, to propose to us a particular attitude and ask us to cling to it because of the certainty (for our virtue of faith) that results from Jesus soliciting that attitude, and to know how the shadow of certitude announces the evidence of results.

"Lord, make me see!"

"Do you believe in Me?" ("Do you wish to enter into the shadow of confidence?")

"Yes, I do believe."

"I will it; see."

Too many believers, obsessed by the need for scientific verification, doubt those convictions which they would like to verify like evidence, whereas in fact those same convictions proclaim the evidence of the result the way the shadow proclaims the sun. Consider that the shadow announces the sun, and the more it is dense, thick, precise, the more surely it proceeds from an absolute light. There you are in the summertime, in the morning, opening the door of your house and seeing its shadow on the ground, so thick, precise, defined, and you whisper, "What beautiful sunshine!" The shadow proves to you the existence of the sunshine. Certainty proves to you the existence of the evidence. The evidence revealed by your cry "What beautiful sunshine!" flows from your understanding of the shadow. The evidence of the result follows from your understanding of the conviction.

Today, when there is less and less conviction anymore in the expressions of the Faith, any understanding at all of convictions has become "one never knows for sure." The evidence of results has deserted family life, the education of children, the stability of the home, the joy of being alive. Everything is reduced to the attitudes of a consumer: we weigh our chances, we measure our whims, we wrap up our reasoning with the multicolored ribbons of points of view, we make our choice of what is easiest, we calculate our selfish needs, we walk through the check-out of temporal conditions endured or accepted. We are short-sighted, short-thinking, short-deciding. We are all more or less the shopkeepers of the Faith under the banners of social propaganda. We can almost hear the commercial:

Ladies and gentlemen, come in, come in. Experience an all new way of understanding the manger. Profit from new insights on the virgin birth. Come, come; empower yourself. After 20 centuries, the Gospel is finally made understandable to you. New thinking for a new humankind. Are you still stuck on the 20 centuries of ignoramuses who came before us? Seek with us a new God, a brighter Faith, and never-before-experienced confidence that you are Love's child. Quickly open your hymnals to page whatever...The Lord is my Shepherd.

And from off in the distance of history there come to us the cries of the Martyrs, the Virgins, the Confessors, and the Doctors. If we only knew what the Faith presupposes in fidelity to the unalterable meaning of unaltered words pronounced by the unchanged Word: "Not one iota of what I have said will ever pass away...." Be careful. These words defy in advance all of your explanations: "Before Abraham was, I AM."

"I am the Way." I am not a four-lane expressway. I am a path climbing so high that no yardstick can measure it. Do not contrive any measurements or you will lose the path.

"I am the Truth." What you add disfigures It; what you cut away destroys It. Watch out that you aren't following the example of Martin Luther. Each time, you are more small-minded than clever. You explain according to your own views and claim that your light is Mine.

"I am the Life." That is, I am not your life which is subject to death. My Life is irreplaceable, commanding over death if you acknowledge its specialty as being divine. I am the Alpha before all time, the Omega beyond all time.

Bursting forth from the inexhaustible divinity, the Faith changes life into eternal vitality. The bonds of secular narrow-mindedness fall of themselves. The handcuffs of snobbery, of worldliness, open again to free the spirit into strong and peaceful independences. You are yourself. You are at home.

"Thomas, blessed are they who have believed and who have not seen." What has changed in our lives, in what we ask of a Catholic education, of catechism and its doctrine? How parents have lost the game, by the materialization of education, by its technocracy and its worldliness. What a crumbling of the Faith, brought about by a distorted view of the value of a diploma without reference to genuine value. How much an exception, a rarity, a shock, has become the life fully mobilized by the Catholic Faith.

What a beautiful ascent, to re-begin above all else. What a beautiful re-ascent to will boldly. What a beautiful preference to be audacious in our generosity. And what a staggering responsibility for each one of us if we renounce what God is capable of doing in us.

 

 

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press from Carnets Spirituels: L'Éducation, No.7, Jan. 2006, pp.14-23. Edited for improved clarity by Fr. Kenneth Novak. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.

 

¹ Sallanches is a small town in the French Alps famous as the gateway to the Mont-Blanc Massif. http://www.mytravelguide.com/hotels/nearbycitiesandtowns-75334705-France_Sallanches_nearbycitiesandtowns.html.