June 2007 Print

Thirty Minutes with Fr. de Chivré

Penetrating your own faith by distributing yourself to others

I would like to speak to you about the way of distributing your faith. It is such a beautiful part to play: Distributing yourself, communicating something from inside of you, as personal to you; when you complain, when you distribute or spread the latest news, you are not really "distributing" them, you are letting them flow out of your memory, the way water flows out of a tap and spills out on the ground.

The act of distributing involves a kind of teaching; it involves a knowledge of the usefulness and the significance of what you are teaching (as opposed to news); you feel yourself invested with a mission with regard to what you know, to the point of considering yourself bound to making it known.

Here is a beautiful concept for you to remember, from a philosophical point of view: the more an idea strikes your judgment as being of a quality beyond dispute, the more it bears within it the law of communication. An idea of quality cannot do otherwise than express itself. Just look at artists: as soon as they see the quality of an artistic inspiration, the first thing they do is smack it onto a canvas. In the same way, the first thing an idea of quality does is express itself; and since it is quality, it will not let us remain selfish proprietors of it, because selfishness and quality are incompatible. Quality obliges us to pass from the state of proprietor to the state of depositary: one who keeps in reserve in order to distribute in due time, with full awareness of the spiritual and moral qualities of the one who is going to receive; giving in such a way as to make himself understood, by choosing the best circumstances of time and place to foster the welcome of the distribution.

Who realizes anymore that he is responsible for his faith enough to appreciate it as a quality of existence obliging him to communicate himself during the course of the day, all around him–not just in some unexpected opportunity created by someone else, but in an activity expected by his conscience, by his heart, even by his sentiments, and created by him?

We come to the problem of salvation, and the handsome expression of Holy Scripture: "The deposit of the Faith." It is also the theological expression adopted by all of the Councils, fixing in our mind the doubly solemn nature of a deposit: it was received without the slightest permission to meddle with it, under any pretext; it is received in order to be distributed in season and out of season; and the modern silences that envelope it–either formally by failing to speak of it, or else hypocritically by interpreting it in such a way as to make it appear such as it is not–fall under the judgment of God as a sinfulness infinitely more grave than drinking a glass too many.

And we are all on board the adventure. The word fits: when Jesus miraculously filled up Peter's boat, what was Peter's first reaction? Quickly to get back to shore in order to distribute the catch. What would you have said if St. Peter had stayed in his boat for eight days without distributing the fish?

A Christian soul is always a boat built to receive miraculous certainties, miraculous convictions, miraculous understandings capable of nourishing a human life, of awakening new hope and of resurrecting the dead. If instead of staying egotistically out at sea, the boat came back to the place of daily duty to which God has anchored you in order to distribute the miraculous catch that you have gathered in your morning prayer, thanksgiving, Communion, reading and reflection; and if you came back to your own shore, the shore of your office, family, business affairs, teaching post, or social function and if you considered yourself to be anchored there to distribute the catch. And you have no idea how many are waiting for you on the shore. You know very well that those poor people confide to you their temporal worries, but their temporal confidences are only a smokescreen in front of their moral and spiritual anxieties. They do not know how to say it; they are waiting for you to guess. They are trying to make themselves understood in drawing close to the truth, and they say: "If only the tone of my voice could awaken in him in some way the deposit which he has received." Then you see the disappointment of so many people who approach you and go away again saying to themselves: "He did not speak to me any differently than anyone else, he spoke to me just like everyone else: pleasure, vacation, cost of living, the progress of science. I was expecting so much else! What did he distribute to me? Nothing; he gave me news." That is how we manage to separate ourselves from one another, to dissociate ourselves from one another.

The deposit of the good news: That's exactly what it is! The deposit of the good news of the Faith. It's not something you find in the papers. The deposit of the good news you find in a heart and a mind hungry for God.

The handsome expression employed by St. John, "That which we have seen, which we have heard, which our hands have touched of the Word of Life, we have come to tell you," is true, it is absolutely true, and we tell you in order that you might share our joy, because joy is the reward of the good news. While we leave the deposit of the good news dozing in a corner of our heart, with a total unawareness that in so doing we are preventing vast numbers of those around us from giving that timeless cry of the man who realizes that his boat is on the point of capsizing: "Domine, salva nos, perimus!" "Please, I am capsizing in the darkness of selfishness, of error–but save me, you have the deposit of the faith!" "Save you? My poor fellow! I am awfully sorry, but I don't even think of saving myself; I am busy living..."

You can see that we are in the middle of a kind of general dislocation, with everyone in a mad rush toward the laboratories, or toward society, or toward politics, or toward the economy; everyone is glutted on curiosity, their nerves on end. And I can understand why: there is no more good news.

The Christian today bears a very heavy responsibility indeed: to know what you have received in deposit in order to make it known around you, by your social positions, through your qualities, through your knowledge, yes, of course; through your education, yes, of course. But realize: the sower who keeps the seed in his pouch leaves behind him acres of thought which will never be cultivated–not by the teacher, nor by the family, nor by the mother... He has in his pouch an extraordinary seed, a tiny little seed, but whose nature is to burst forth once sown in the ground: a mustard seed.

And instead you respect the sterility of the soil–because today we respect everything!–instead you respect the miserable state of the soil!

For days, months, years perhaps, we crisscross the field where God has cast us; we have crisscrossed it holding in the pouch of our understanding the treasures of our baptism, the convictions of our confirmation, the nourishment of the Eucharist, the reparations of our absolutions. We have all of that, we know it, we believe it, we live it, we expect it–and we distribute nothing. The social field which we have passed through, once again crisscrossing the land, remains a field deprived (by our fault) of the springtime and the harvest for which it was created.

It makes me think of the expression in Holy Scripture: "Terra desolata est..." The desolate land of Sion. And yet, the Jews were a rich people. "Terra desolata est..." They were no longer anxious for the good news.

God is borne irresistibly toward Himself, with such a violence of existence that it results in three Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And God's magnificent appreciation of Himself is so irresistibly beautiful that it cannot help but communicate itself in Creation by His power, and in the Redemption by His love. As soon as He thinks of Himself, He thinks of others, and as soon as He thinks of others, He draws them back to Himself. As soon as He communicates to us the grace of believing in His intimate life, His secret life, we in turn are thrown into motion by a longing to imitate His manner of existing; it is so sweet and so strong to "copy" God's movement, to imitate the affirmations of Jesus, by means of our faith: Jesus affirmed, and His affirmation healed; He affirmed and His authority brought back to life; He affirmed and the beatitudes appeared. He possessed the self-evidence, we have the shadow of self-evidence which is called faith.

To be touched by the Faith necessarily means being thrown into motion by an interior movement which makes us bring God into the banality of our day to day and into the apparent indifference of events. If you live your faith intensely and if anyone at all approaches to you, you cannot help but be thrown into motion, within you, in order to try to raise the problem of his worries to a higher level, in order draw him out of the materialistic and temporal monotony of his anxiety and which arises in fact from infinitely more serious problems; and you will feel a longing, by the light which you possess, and which warms you, to draw gently near to that man's parched and thirsty heart and pass over it the unction of your belief. At that moment you will realize that when you wake up in the morning, everything prepares you for the Faith. The Faith teaches us to read the secret design inscribed in every single page of our calendar: naturally you read a date, a name, and event. Today: one more day, but also a day which brings us closer to the last. A name: a complete Christian; what is your size, next to his colossal stature? The event: the inexplicable and unexplained, whatever may be the historical or scientific renderings, underlining to what extent someone called Providence walks indeed before us in the humblest of realities. The Faith is not a psychological imbecility plastering a superstition over the unexpected or the unknown; it is a constant, indisputable language spoken within us, by a judgment nourished on truths coming from above but applied by us to the truths of here below, to yield a complete language of the day, the day of those around us as much as our own.

And here is where our responsibility to believe comes into play: we need to help others to translate the meaning of their day. What an incredible good you could do if you only allowed the grace of the Faith to drive home to you once and for all that you have there a whole alphabet ready to be taught to those who hear you speaking. It begins with the alpha and the omega: Christ and Christ, God and God, the Spirit and the Spirit. And you will see that what you have there goes beyond the latest novel, and the bulletin board announcements, and the scientific documentaries; it goes beyond all the value of the world, because you will have finally introduced them to the value of God.

You can understand that in order to translate this sense of beauty and truth, you need to nourish yourself deliberately on reasons to believe. Do you know the reasons why you believe? Have you ever weighed the meaning of the verb to believe? Have you ever tried to form a real idea of all the martyrdoms, generosities, penances, self-oblations and heroisms to which it has given rise? Have you ever felt the weight of the word to believe?

We have to lose the habit of reducing social exchanges to the blah-blah-blah of conventional conversations: "What a rain we're having; what a heat wave; what is the world coming to; did you read in the papers this morning..." And life goes on, horrifically empty and banal, because there is no longer that superior vibration of discovering the first causes in the secondary events we are all complaining about.

To believe: to know how to seize the opportunity of drawing to the forefront the intelligent designs of God, in order, by the argument of the facts, to bring people toward other conceptions of reality than those which never go beyond the level of human astonishments, calculations, complaints, deceptions, and sensations. The duty to speak: it is not a question of pretending to be a Bossuet or Lacordaire, whose duty was to speak the vital truths from the pulpit within the Church; but you have your own accent, your accent as a secret contemplative, your accent as an adorer mysteriously hidden behind a pillar five minutes a day, your accent of love timidly expressed to God, with that kind of interior torture of wondering how you are going to manage to communicate with Him, instead of staying there stalled within a force of inertia, lulling to sleep the great problems beneath the multiplicity of little problems. So many have so lost this habit of seeing and acting, that they turn their faith away from its mission to speak on a level higher than the simply human, and they use their consecration vaporously to drown the most noble realities under social presentations far more pagan than Christian. What a handsome social comportment to reinvent: becoming a preacher of the Faith in your human conversation, in order to shake awake your neighbor, or the man in the street, or your relative; expressing that authority of an idea come from above, from very far away, and settled in your heart–overwhelmed at feeling that Someone else is speaking in you because He has indeed taken up His dwelling in you, and with it His manner of thinking.

We have to find again that piercing gaze able to pass through the superficiality of a conversation and draw to the surface all its meaning for God and for the one involved; that veritable prolongation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, that exquisite tact of our Lord leading that woman–not a believer by any means–by bringing her progressively closer to the true sense of her need to draw water, using the conjugal facts of that woman to awaken her to the problem of the Prophet standing before her, silent, imperious, and good. If the conversation had stagnated on the level of social conventions, that woman would have gone away ready to get married a sixth time–had she not been told inexplicably that she was already at her fifth husband.

We are all responsible for one another by a silence or by a word, by a tone of voice or by a correcting detail: "In truth, you will give an account of every word, even to the last iota." What food for thought on the use of our words and of our silences in a single day! Who can say whether a single statement of the Faith, expressed or kept silent, may not tip the balance in the salvation or the damnation of another before whom we spend our entire day? Before this one, intelligent but misinformed, or before the other, sincerely ignorant? Before this one, struggling to stay afloat, or before the other, with the world around his finger? Before this one, filled with despair and smiling by reflex, or before the other, in revolt, obsessed by his suffering?

What are you going to say to him? Are you going to churn out the administrative answers? Are you going to dazzle him with your encyclopedic knowledge? Are you going to listen to him mechanically and give him back a mechanical answer? Or else are you going to open to him, without his even hearing the sound of the key in the lock, the secret treasure box where we keep our certitudes, grandiose affections and unselfish decisions, and draw out of it some untranslatable expression he will carry away with him like a sunrise, to dawn when the moment comes, with its particular light, full of warmth and full of life: "And they felt their heart burning within them," St. John tells us in the story of the pilgrims of Emmaus returning home weary after their day. "Stay with us, night is coming on our energies, night is coming on our reflections, night is coming on our indecisions. Stay with us"–the beatitude of the Faith.

As long as you have not understood that every time you approach a human being, you approach an adventurer of eternity, it is not human respect, or superficiality, or sarcasm that are ever going to give you the solution: they do not address the question asked. Once you have understood that you approach an adventurer of eternity, you will speak in a different way than usual. We all bear the weight of the day and the heat, but we also bear the weight of the Faith, along with the mission to use it for lightening the weight of the day for the one in difficulty before us.

How to explain this disastrous silence, except by the lack of personal application to fostering in ourselves the light of the Faith? When a soul gets in the habit of nourishing his intentions with the intentions God has on his day, he slowly gains a strength of spontaneous awareness of others, a magnificent fear of letting slip the opportunity to stir up in them a Christian echo, an anxiety never to be absent or indifferent to their destiny. I have said the word: to look with faith upon someone, whether it be your husband, your child, your servant, your friend, your enemy, is to realize you are addressing a destiny. Not a position, not a cut and dry future, not a title, not a scholar or a drop-out; you are addressing a destiny: a life capable of the definitive encounter with God, a life necessarily coupled with its Creator and its Redeemer, necessarily akin to the calls, helps, secret warnings and graces with which we need to facilitate his relations or his renewal of relations. Before playing out in the sacristy, in the parish hall, or in the confessional, a destiny plays out between voyagers of eternity filling the role of an echo crying out its plaintive call like an owl in the night to awaken our neighbor to the silence of his own secret nights. But in order to do so, we have to possess a faith that renders us anxious for our own destiny all the way down to the detail of that liberating anxiety, in the form of love of God proven, actualized in the course of our day.

It is the first question inseparable from the Faith taken seriously: the question of salvation, "propter nostram salutem," because of our salvation. Not because of our inhuman taxes, or our slave labor, or our planned vacations; not because of politics, or socialism, or monarchism, or Christian democracy: because of salvation, the salvation of each one us.

He came to mingle with others, in their conversations, sufferings, and family celebrations, purely in view of the salvation of each one of them. The Faith acts and reacts according to its incomparable givens, purely in the service of salvation, of which it alone possesses the understanding. As for Him, in the manger, on the lake shores, on Calvary, He had a mind only for salvation, and since many had no idea or thought or conviction of it, He absorbed a torrent of criticisms and insults and blows, to such a point that, condemned to death "propter nostram salutem," He still found the means to rise in order to drive home the significance of the word salvation, to show that it really is true: He had come for our salvation: the word by which one plays out his entire existence, the definitive reality of his existence. Compare that word with the general indifference surrounding the beds of the dying in our hospitals, the prudence invoked in suppression of the last Sacraments, the willful application to teaching children the temporality of existence without the ultimate meaning of that temporality. You will understand why we are living in the middle of a horrific absence of concern for the salvation of our neighbor, even the healthy ones.

"To save our soul," the mission of the Faith; "de profundis": pull others from the depth of their ignorance and their sin up to the level of horizons with panoramas on the infinite, heralding those other sublime depths of inalterable existence. Help others to climb back up to the level of those panoramas, distribute the light come from the level at which your personal fidelity places you, and so oblige their gaze to rise up to Him: "Ad Te levavi oculos meos": toward You, I have finally lifted up my eyes. But at least I finally did look toward You, and I have never been the same; something happened in my reflection ever since I started looking at You on the cross, in the manger; ever since I started looking at You in the tabernacle, something has changed in my way of thinking.

No doubt, we have to accept being worked ourselves, to the point of crying out without a word, by divine penetrations setting us in order, unmoved by excuses and doubts feeding on our disloyal explanations. The man who is ignorant of his own death will never be anxious about the spiritual death of his neighbor.

Experiencing the life of God means no longer being able to do otherwise than bear in oneself the imperious duty of opening others to the same experience.

It is vital that you be deeply sincere with the life of God: all of the other means have turned out to be weak substitutes that have failed, whatever their nature, processes, sources, or tyrannies. You cannot replace God; you cannot replace faith in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God; You cannot replace the Church founded by Jesus Christ; you cannot replace the sacraments given by Jesus Christ; you cannot change the doctrine of Jesus Christ; you cannot psychoanalyze the grace coming from Jesus Christ; you cannot improve on the civilization brought by Jesus Christ; you cannot cheat with a man's life by preventing his participating in the life of Jesus Christ.

"I am the God of the living..." It is no small thing to draw near to the God of the living, when one is dead to the truth; it is no small thing to bring to your neighbor the words of life, just as it is no small thing to deprive one's family and one's children of the words of life.

Yet, to believe means to live, and it means to live with the realities received from the Living: from God Himself. "My words are life," declared Jesus; and Nietzche grumbled morosely: "If only His friends acted a little more resurrected..." Resurrected: definitively living of Him, by Him, for Him. Stepping out of your luxurious tomb of spiritual self-centeredness and standing there smack in the middle of the existence of others with a style of life continuing the Presence of His life, wherever we are speaking, thinking, deciding, willing. That considerable mass of believers whom no one approaches with the thought in the back of their mind of drawing some spiritual benefit, and who approach no one with the corresponding thought in the back of their mind of eliciting a spiritual reaction... A general juxtaposition of materialized men, who no longer distribute salvation or the idea of salvation with that blessed torment pushing them to distribute their manner of thinking existence as Christians.

There remains the famous objection of a schedule, to which people always say we owe in conscience a certain practical, material, economic, scientific attention. They have a point; yet what they say lacks an essential element that can shed light on the answer. What is it that allows a man to live an all-consuming schedule? Breathing: always indispensable, always the same; we put it to use without thinking about it–I was going to say without believing in it–so much do we know its necessity. And if you were to breathe your Faith throughout your schedule? To breathe the way of using that schedule... To breathe the "I believe in God"; to breathe the act of faith with all your heart... You don't think it would penetrate your schedule, and that instead of an objection the Faith would become a solution, a source of continuity? A solution of thought and mentality, a solution of union, a solution of adoration? And you would bring with you everywhere an impression of health that no one else has anymore, thanks to the continuity of your breathing.

That is the way missionaries wrote out their schedules, and those extraordinary mothers of families, like Blanche of Castille, and young girls, as well, like Joan of Arc (and Joan of Arc was busy!), and like the great Christian businessmen: Leo Harmel; like the tireless apostles: St. Dominic, St. Benedict, St. Francis: They breathed God. The whole "schedule" of the Church is filled up with this single respiration, that of the "I believe in God, the Father Almighty." If you had faith like a mustard seed...the power to move mountains, the mountains of doubt, objections, and discouragements, in you and around you.

Like all breathing, there is no going into detail: it is impalpable and indispensable, it is personal and unconditional. You breathe: you are alive; you don't breathe: you are dead. There is no in-between. Let the secret light of the Faith filter through to others to revivify them, to prepare them for new respirations that are going to set free their mind, their heart and their destiny.

It is absolutely certain that the theological virtue of faith radically elevates our judgments on our day-to-day realities, and that we are to bear witness to that elevation all around us by our way of expressing ourselves, with the humbly proud confidence that there is nothing better on earth, and that no one has the right to minimize that elevation by reducing it to mediocrities of reflection, as disastrous for the temporal order as they are for eternal salvation. Everything that happens inside of us, between God and us, is going to determine what happens in our day, around us, by us.

If we only knew who we are, in relation to God, in relation to others, in relation to grace! We have to believe in love, because when there is no love, nothing is going to happen around us. And if nothing happens inside of us? That is the starting point of our responsibility as one baptized in the name of the Father and in the name of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost. In the name of the three Persons without whom nothing happens; what condemns Them to silence within us, and why? For the following reason, no doubt: we no longer know what we are, we no longer know of what nation we are a member, said St. Paul to the Hebrews. Of that royal nation, of that privileged nation chosen to step forward in this poor world with attitudes that oblige those around us to consider other problems than the problems of the world, but that oblige us at the same time to remain in the world, in order to draw the world higher than itself.

And I conclude with this reflection of the poor man who begged Jesus to heal his son: "Do you believe?" "I do believe, Lord, but increase my faith!" Ask Him to increase your faith, and Jesus will do for you what He did for the child: "I will it! He is healed. Arise and walk."

For we are all responsible for healing others; we do not suspect the influence of our actions, the importance of the struggle, the gravity of the assistance we distribute around us; we no longer realize that our days condemn or save, and the passing time finds us just as impervious to the love of the living God in whom we are nonetheless happy to believe, without giving Him deeply enough our consent.

We need to make every one of our days the opportunity to help others travel a little farther on their path toward God.

 

Originally published in Carnets Spirituels: La Foi, No.11, December 2006, entitled "La Foi et le Don de Soi (Se distribuer aux autres pour prendre conscience de sa Foi)," pp.29-42. 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.