As a freshman at
Georgetown University, I often wondered to myself: why do the bells of the
clock tower sound a distinct peal at noon and again at six in the evening? (Being
a college student, I had no idea that an identical clanging occurred at 6 A.M.
too). Despite my Catholic upbringing, it
was not until a priest explained to me sometime during my sophomore year that
the joyful dancing of those bells was a call to prayer, a reminder of God’s
real presence among us, that is, the Incarnation. The bells draw us into the life rhythm of the
Church and remind us to say a prayer called the Angelus. Most Catholics of my generation respond in
unison, “the what?” After over two years serving in a foreign mission, I can
now propose that the Angelus, a kind of reliving of the joy of the
Annunciation, is the most apt explanation of the missionary experience. Hold on; I’ll explain.
Jump ahead a few
years to the coastal tropics of Honduras at six in the morning. The whole community of the Finca del Niño
shuffles into the chapel in various states of consciousness to prepare for
Morning Prayer. About 35 children, a
dozen foster parents, three Franciscan sisters, and twelve foreign missionaries
find their way to their usual spots in the pews as if seats were assigned. The prayer, the Angelus, begins:
The Angel of the Lord
declared to Mary; And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
We learn from Mary,
the disciple par excellence, that the first step on the missionary journey is
to receive God’s call. Although we may
not be blessed by visits from heavenly beings, we can certainly take the time
to listen to God in prayer, hear what our trusted friends and family members
are urging us to do, and come to know our own gifts and desires, which God can
put to use. We welcome the Holy Spirit
into our lives. This is called
discernment, and it is the beginning of our mission.
We must become
aware that God has selected each one of us for a mission and that God chooses
us out of an immense and personal love.
God has loved us first. The
mission statement of the Finca del Niño begins with the words, “In gratitude
for the great love that Jesus Christ gives us…” and only then follows the
commitment to share that love with the children in our care. Pope Francis tells us that only in a renewed
encounter with God’s love and friendship do “we find the source and inspiration
of all our efforts at evangelization.
For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives,
how can we fail to share that love with others?” (Evangeleii Gaudium, 8) Therefore, God’s call to mission is not
merely listening, but also receiving God’s love with a joy that overflows into
the world.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word.
God calls; we
receive God’s Word. Perhaps at first we
say with Mary, “How can this be?”
(Lk. 1:34) Are you sure, God? But, God has heard all of the excuses. I am inarticulate; Moses tried that one (Ex.4:10-17). I am too young; Sorry,
Jeremiah (Jer. 1:4-9). I’m weak and
afraid; oh, do you mean like Saint Paul? (1 Cor. 2:3). In perfect freedom we hand ourselves over to
the Master Builder to be the imperfect tools in his impeccable hands. God is well aware that we are human. He made us that way, but he made us free, too. God asks us to use that freedom to say “yes”
with humility and faith to the project of bringing the Incarnate Word into the
world each day; therefore, we come before God as humble servants.
Like Mary, we are
called not for our own prestige, success, and reputation, but for the glory of
God. This is God’s project not just
another line on a résumé; thus, we abandon ourselves completely to God’s will
trusting that he will bring forth the fruits that he desires. So many times during my mission, I looked to
God and said, “I am too weak. I can’t go
on. I don’t know what to do.” In those moments God said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. 12:9) So with the boldness of our Blessed Mother, we go forth to evangelize asking God to take all that we are—tired, weak, stressed, confused, too old, too young--and to give us only his love and his grace; those will be enough.
And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us.
Here is the truly miraculous
and mysterious part: when we say “yes” to God in perfect freedom, we give flesh
to the Word of God. We believe that we,
the members of the Christian community, are the Body of Christ, and when we
freely embrace this mystery, it becomes a reality. When we daily affirm our
missionary call to exemplify the truth through words and actions, Christ, the
living God, comes into the world again and again. As St. John writes in his first letter, “No
one has ever seen God. Yet if we love
one another God dwells in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.” (1John 4:12) In this way Jesus, the living
sacrament of God’s love for us, continues to become flesh and dwell among
us.
As we search the
Sacred Scriptures, we continue to see that the Incarnation and the missionary
call are intimately intertwined.
Receiving the good news of a God who seeks nearness with us sends us
forth to that message. We are reminded
that it is the joy of the Incarnation that propels Mary on her journey to share
that good news with her cousin Elizabeth.
As Jesus directs us in the final words of Matthew’s gospel, “Go,
therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all
that I have commanded you. And behold, I
am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Mt. 28: 19-20) Jesus remains with us and provides the spark
for a renewed missionary spirit.
As Pope Francis
tells us, recognizing the potency of the Incarnation changes everything: “The
Son of God, by becoming flesh summons us to the revolution of tenderness.” (EG,88) God does not seek to be distant from
us; rather, in Jesus, God comes as close to us as he possibly can. He gives us his very flesh and blood. Jesus humbles himself to share in our weakness,
even to the point of death. In order to
be Christ incarnate, we too are called to diminish ourselves and meet those who
are on the periphery. The Holy Father
has guided us toward this truth saying, “I see clearly that the thing that the
Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of
the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.” (America, 24) As true Christians, we cannot remove ourselves from
earthly reality, even in the face of suffering; rather, the Incarnation calls
us to the kind of solidarity God himself has demonstrated for us and with us.
This “revolution of
tenderness” is not a materialistic revolution; that is, it does not in any way
suggest that we ought to be attached to material things, power, or prestige. This certainly can be a temptation of one who
dwells in the world. The temptations that Christ battled in the desert are the
same ones that confront the missionary today: the temptations to satisfy only
the material needs of those we serve, to attempt to eliminate all suffering by
one’s own power, to be esteemed for one’s impressive deeds, and to be able to
influence others. We are called instead
to recognize that the things of this life are transient, and they are gifts
from God to be used for God’s glory. St.
Peter tells us, “As generous distributors of God’s manifold grace, put your
gifts at the service of one another, each in the measure he has received. The one who speaks is to deliver God’s
message. The one who serves is to do it
with the strength provided by God. Thus,
in all of you God is to be glorified through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 4:8-11) We
ask to be gifted with a holy indifference to the material world, which allows
us to be in the world while keeping our eyes fixed on Christ.
Although we
continually look to God in heaven, the example of Jesus calls us to live out a
worldly existence here and now with all who are suffering, alienated, and in
need of mercy; that is where we will find Jesus Christ living today. In our daily pilgrimage towards God, we are
called to closeness with and compassion for each member of the human family. As poet Madeleine Delbrêl paints it, “Christ
does not provide his followers with a set of wings to flee into heaven, but
with a weight to drag them into the deepest corners of the earth. What may seem
to be the specifically missionary vocation is in fact simply what it means to
be embraced by Christ.” We must find
Christ in the least among us and allow ourselves to be embraced by him; therefore,
the missionary call touches all of us who seek to know Jesus Christ, who is
“God with us.”
The next time that
you hear the bells, take heed and listen to what they say. As Thomas Merton observed, the bells are
calling out to us:
We have spoken for centuries from the towers of the great
churches. We have spoken to the saints, your fathers, in their land. We called
them, as we call you, to sanctity. What is the word with which we called them?
We did not merely say, ‘Be good, come to Church.’ We did not
merely say, ‘Keep the commandments’, but above all ‘Christ is risen, Christ is
risen!’ And we said: ‘Come with us, God is good, salvation is not hard, his
love has made it easy!’ (Merton, Thoughts
in Solitude)
Let the bells announce “a revolution
of tenderness.”
Beautiful, Kevin!
ReplyDelete