St. Basil’s Schola Cantorum, conducted by John Paul Farahat
LET YOURSELF BE LOVED: THE RECEPTIVE SPIRITUALITY OF ST. ELIZABETH OF THE TRINITY
Joanne Mosley
BOOKS OF INTEREST
John Dalla Costa
I have often pondered St. Paul’s quote about Jesus’ teaching that “It is more blessed to give than receive” (Cf. Acts 20:35) because, it seems to me, giving is the easier part of the generosity equation. To be able to receive is much harder. Mother Teresa understood this dilemma well. As she walked along a Calcutta street one day, a beggar beside the road noticed her coming, took the only coin that was lying in his bowl, leapt
to his feet and gave it to her. She hesitated receiving it as she pondered the situation. Here was a person who by having nothing had few opportunities to give anything. Rejecting his gift would be worse than accepting it. So she thanked him, and the wide grin on his face was confirmation that she had done the right thing. “If we don’t receive,” she said, “we deny the joy of the giver.” Perhaps the joy in giving is where blessedness begins, but undoubtedly it is completed by being received. Beyond a plain transaction of giving and receiving, respect and love unite the two as relationship.
In this issue we explore receptivity through a relationship of love with God as giver. In practicing the spiritual virtues of receptivity—openness and listening—we can, as Adrienne Corti invites, enable the birthing of a gentler way of hope and possibilities. An extract from Caryll Houselander’s book The Reed of God gives us a portrait of Mary’s fiat “let it be done to me.” Theologian Anne-Marie Pelletier once shared that “Mary helps us perceive what is specifically feminine: to live with the obscure and to resist being discouraged.”1 Following an overview of the apparitions of Mary received by ordinary people across the centuries, Joanne Mosley gives us a glimpse of the story and interior life of the Carmelite St. Elizabeth of the Trinity in “Let Yourself be Loved.”
German composer Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria sung by St. Basil’s Schola Cantorum offers an opportunity to receive a sacred prayer. And we conclude with a review of John Dear’s latest book on the nonviolence of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Lucinda M. Vardey Editor
“The Spirit was not made for noise but for taking things in.”
(St. Charles de Foucauld Selected Writings).
Adrienne Corti began her career as a teacher of French and Italian at both the elementary and high school levels. She was a Religion Consultant in the Catholic school system in Ontario participating on writing teams for the revision of Religion programs for the Canadian Bishops and was involved as a teacher and then Principal of Ministry of Education courses for Teacher certification in Religious Education. In retirement, Adrienne has directed retreats and has been a spiritual companion to people of various religious backgrounds seeking guidance and inner wisdom. She has enjoyed travel, leading seniors on Sacred journey and other tours with a broadening of religions, cultures, languages, and friendships. More recently Adrienne, a Loretto Associate, along with other companions, has invited friends to gather in homes at regular intervals for spiritual conversation and ritual. The group has been named “Open Hearts Open Minds,” reflecting the nature of receptivity to wherever Spirit is leading.
Receptivity as a Feminine Gift and Virtue
Adrienne Corti
In our conversations today we rarely hear people speak of virtues, especially those that we might identify as particularly feminine virtues, and yet this is what our wounded world needs the most. We humans all yearn for a deep peace in a turbulent, confused world. We hear urgent cries to bring softness and grace to places that have undergone inhuman violence, torture and multiple other sufferings.
We long for another way, to enter the caves of our hearts in order to imagine and dream new possibilities. The masculine hierarchical models have failed to bring us to places of respectful relationships born of authentic listening to one another. The very idea of receptivity denotes an openness to another. This presupposes a quiet interior, a prayerful silence that allows for the Divine Energy within and without to communicate with us.
We can turn to the scriptures to find rich images that invite us to delve deep into the feminine spirit. One such passage is “The Woman at the Well” in John 4:1-42. Though without a name, the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus was most significant. We know the familiar story and we see in it elements of acceptance; dialogue that invites truth and a receiving of grace and new life. The deep well quenches a thirst that is universal, the thirst to be seen, to be recognized as belonging,
to be worthy of being addressed in a society where the woman did not feel she had a place in her environment and to be thus loved. Jesus creates an opening for her to express her curiosity in who he was and what he had to offer regardless of her gender, race or marital status. In turn, she responded by having a conversation with him as an equal partner. We see Jesus here being open and receptive to the challenge of this woman. This image captures for me one of the key elements of receptivity: openness and boundless depth to draw from another’s experiences the richness of their nature.
In Ireland there are at least 15 wells dedicated to St. Brigid and the one in Kildare is best known for having healing qualities with the soothing sound of running water that brings a calm to one’s spirit. Brigid is celebrated as the saint of higher ground, higher learning and higher consciousness. Her life inspires us to new ways of thinking, new ways of being Church. Receptive energy flows inward as openness and outward as flexibility and adaptability as it is drawn from the depths.
PREGNANT WITH HOPE
Another image that speaks to me of the feminine virtue of receptivity is that of a ploughed field or a garden ready to be planted or of a womb ready to receive the beginning of new life. As the earth or womb waits in stillness for the seed to be planted, so are we before the Divine, waiting in silence and stillness, attentive to what is to be given, alert and ready. We are called to be pregnant with hope for what is to be born. Like the earth needing nutrients, sun and water to allow growth once the seed has been planted, so we need relationships that are supportive, people with whom we can exchange new ideas and have an openness to differing opinions. If we could spend a month watching an amaryllis grow out of a seemingly dry bulb we might imagine the growth that is possible in our own beings. To observe the daily growth as the plant is watered with the tender stalk gaining strength and blushing as it grows tall, we observe the passion growing within us to embrace a new reality. As the flowers emerge from one stalk and then another there is great excitement at the extreme beauty that emerges, truly a miracle!
What if we were to recognize each day that invitation to be open and receptive to the mystery unfolding? What if we did not fear or resist the unknown but rather entered into it with an open heart and an open mind? How would our lives and the lives of those we encounter be different?
We learn from the mystics what it means to be receptive, not only they who have taught us so much through the centuries, but to those we encounter each day who live through struggles and joys about which we know little. Receiving the gifts that others extend, being attentive to the givers, offering empathy and compassion especially when others express difficulties in life, formed the work of the mystics and is also our call to be of service. We can look to Julian of Norwich who lived simply and inspired countless people from her recording the insights received in her Revelations of Divine Love. Like so many, she lived during times of upheaval yet the Divine within her flowed out in joy and compassion to those she encountered, offering them wisdom that sustained them. Other mystics like Hildegard of Bingen were receptive to their creative powers. After much interior suffering,
she surrendered to the Divine Energy that yearned to take form in her writings, her art, her music, her healing medicines and remedies. She encourages us ever more in our present reality to steward our gifts, to be open to graces so freely given to us. In her wisdom and intuition she challenges us to remain green and verdant, pregnant with life. She wrote, “The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry up, just the like the rain which soaks into the earth.”
Stepping beyond the metaphoric and poetic, the question remains “How do we do this in a practical way?” One way is to be attentive listeners to voices that are so vital for us in our modern world: women theologians who speak in a different voice; scripture scholars who continue to break open the Word with new understandings; spiritual writers whose passion touches our hearts; social justice activists who move us to action for those who are oppressed. We each can find ways to discern our path that will transform our interior life and bring fruitfulness to our surroundings.
Through deep contemplation, receptive to the feminine spirit, we may come to a new commitment, vision, dream, or discover the awakening of a dormant passion born from a receptive heart.
Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) was an artist, writer, poet, mystic and spiritual counsellor. She wrote for religious magazines and her many books for the British publisher Sheed and Ward. Among her more well-known titles are “The War is the Passion” (1941); “The Flowering Tree” (1945); “The Comforting of Christ” (1954) and her autobiography entitled “A Rocking-Horse Catholic.” This extract is taken from a chapter entitled “Fiat” from “The Reed of God” (pages 10-13) published originally in 1944 and used with permission from Rowman & Littlefield (London UK & Lanham US).
Mary’s Fiat
Caryll Houselander
Christ’s insistence on the power of children is very striking. Almost more than anything else in the Gospel it proves that in God’s eyes being something comes before doing something. He sets a little child among his apostles as an example of what He loves. He says that heaven is full of children. Indeed, the Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, he goes in on his knees.
How consistent it is with the incredible tenderness of God that His Christ, the Immortal Child, should be conceived by the power of the Spirit in the body of a child. That a child should bear a Child, to redeem the world. Our Lady was at the most fourteen when the angel came to her; perhaps she was younger, the whole world trembled on the word of a child, on a child’s consent. To what was she asked to consent? First of all, to the descent of the Holy Spirit, to surrender her littleness to the Infinite Love, and as a result to become the Mother of Christ. It was so tremendous, yet so passive. She was not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She was not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift. She was not asked to lead a special kind of life, to retire to the temple and live as a nun, to cultivate suitable virtues or claim special privileges. She was simply to remain in the world, to go forward with her marriage to Joseph, to live the life of an artisan’s wife, just what she had planned to do when she
had no idea that anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to her. It almost seemed as if God’s becoming man and being born of a woman were ordinary.
The whole thing was to happen secretly. There was to be no announcement. The psalmists had hymned Christ’s coming on harps of gold. The prophets had foretold it with burning tongues. But now the loudest telling of His presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child. It was to be a secret and God was so jealous of His secret that He even guarded it at the cost of His little bride’s seeming dishonour.
He allowed Joseph to misjudge her, at least for a time. This proved that God knew Our Lady’s trust in Him was absolutely without limit. Everything that He did to her in the future emphasized the same thing. His trust in her trust in Him. The one thing that He did ask of her was the gift of her humanity. She
was to give Him her body and soul unconditionally, and—what in this new light would have seemed absurdly trivial to anyone but the Child Bride of Wisdom—she was to give Him her daily life. And outwardly it would not differ from the life she would have led if she had not been chosen to be the Bride of the Spirit and the Mother of God at all! She was not even asked to live it alone with this God who was her own Being and Whose Being was to be hers. No, He asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child. On the contrary, the hands and feet, the heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form Him in service to Joseph.
Yes, it certainly seemed that God wanted to give the world the impression that it is ordinary for Him to be born of a human creature. Well, that is a fact. God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it is His will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the human love that people give to one another.
Our Lady said yes. She said yes for us all. It was as if the human race were a little dark house, without light or air, locked and latched. The wind of the Spirit had beaten on the door, rattled the windows, tapped on the dark glass with the tiny hands of flowers, flung golden seed against it, even, in hours of storm, lashed it with the boughs of a great tree—the prophecy of the Cross—and yet the Spirit was outside. But one day a girl opened the door, and the little house was swept pure and sweet by the wind. Seas of light swept through it, and the light remained in it; and in that little house a Child was born and the Child was God.
Our Lady said yes for the human race. Each one of us must echo that yes for our own lives. We are all asked if we will surrender what we are, our humanity, our flesh and blood, to the Holy Spirit and allow Christ to fill the emptiness formed by the particular shape of our life. The surrender that is asked of us includes complete and absolute trust; it must be like Our Lady’s surrender, without condition and without reservation. We shall not be asked to do more than the Mother of God; we shall not be asked to become extraordinary or set apart or to make a hard and fast rule of life or to compile a manual of mortifications or heroic resolutions; we shall not be asked to cultivate our souls like rare hothouse flowers; we shall not, most of us, even be allowed to do that. What we shall be asked to give is our flesh and blood, our daily life—our thoughts, our service to one another, our affections and loves, our words, our intellect, our waking, working, and sleeping, our ordinary human joys and sorrows— to God. To surrender all that we are, as we are, to the Spirit of Love in order that our lives may bear Christ into the world—that is what we shall be asked.
Our Lady has made this possible. Her fiat was for herself and for us, but if we want God’s will to be completed in us as it is in her, we must echo her fiat.
Receiving Apparitions of Mary
Lucinda M. Vardey
Lucinda M. Vardey is the editor of With One Accord and the author of 10 books. For more on her background please visit our website.
My grandmother gave me a book for my ninth birthday about St. Bernadette and Our Lady of Lourdes which awakened a desire in my heart. Would Mary during her celebrated month of May, greet me in the garden while I played among the daisies, primroses, buttercups and cowslips? My youthful innocence made me incapable of understanding that Marian apparitions do not engage a child who seeks the mystery and marvels of such things for themselves. Instead Mary appears when not expected —certainly she chooses children in many cases, but from poor families—and with messages that require urgent and faithfilled responses. Besides, she was inclined to favour those who were already close to her through their devotion to praying the rosary.
As most apparitions were initially received with skepticism by the community and the Church, this may be the reason that children were usually chosen to be messengers and participants in Mary’s mission. And perhaps too, as the apparitions reveal the Holy Mother’s love and desire to be in close relationship with people and their needs, children are more naturally able to receive this kind of love. Yet many of the apparitions throughout history have revealed that those made vulnerable by poverty, illness, plagues, Christian persecution and the threats of invasion, are also included in her maternal protection and healing.
Beyond being viewed as a supernatural phenomena, the Church has officially recognized fifty-one Marian apparitions. Joan Carroll Cruz’s book See How She Loves Us is an inspiring resource for anyone interested in delving further into the details of each one.
Many apparitions share similarities in Mary’s appearance, her age being between 16-18 years, her face of “incomparable beauty” with a pale and silk-like complexion, and her smiles were always of an “ineffable sweetness.” Her arrivals have been heralded by an angel and shrouds of light or she comes carried on a white cloud surrounded by roses and doves. Accompanied by a heavenly fragrance, once described in a 1426 apparition in Italy as that of “a thousand scents,” she is usually dressed in a long white gown and veil. Her sashes are pale or dark blue in colour, although on a Wisconsin farm in 1859 her sash was yellow. In some apparitions her white dress is trimmed with gold, and in France in 1871 she wore a long blue cloak studded with stars. She is usually barefoot; at Lourdes in 1858 a gold rose was on each foot. Roses are the flowers she wears or with which she appears. Rays of light surround her, and some shoot out of a crown on her head; others from her heart portrayed in gold (in Belgium, 1932). A goldchained rosary is frequently seen hanging over her right arm. There have been a few times when she has been holding the child Jesus.
She smiles, speaks and prays and sometimes cries. She extends her hands; she is seen by one person or by many, appears and disappears, sometimes regularly, at
other times in varying intervals, and in frequent cases, years apart. She usually requests a response—to inform Church authorities, to erect a chapel and to pray the rosary for conversion of sinners. Her prophetic warnings have a particularity to them, and the springs of water she lets gush forth in many of the places she has appeared, have cured thousands.
When asked to identify herself, she has answered that she is the “Mother of all” (at Guadalupe, Mexico in 1531) the “Immaculate Conception” (at Lourdes and in Poland in 1877), the “Queen of Heaven” (Wisconsin 1859 and Belgium 1932); “Mother of Jesus” (Nicaragua 1980) and “Mother of the World” (Rwanda 198183).
WHAT TO DO
Action and change are called for by those who receive her appearances and subsequently converse with her. Not only are their lives transformed as a result, but so too millions of others. The prominent focus in the many messages is the imperative to pray to Mary for the graces she gives from the heart of her Son. These graces are received through believing in her as she believes in us. She advises reciting the rosary daily and singing the Litany of Loreto and the Magnificat. She had warned of church closures, famine and religious persecutions that actually happened in France in the 19 th century, and she told children “to pray for France” in 1947. In 1976 in Venezuala she asked for prayers “for the reconciliations of peoples and nations” to a married farm woman, who later received the stigmata. This farm where Our Lady appeared 31 times on top of a tree, is now a pilgrimage centre.
With the three shepherd children in Fatima in 1917 she requested devotion to her immaculate heart which she said is wounded by human sin, and emphasizes the importance of performing daily sacrifices. In Nicaragua in 1980, where she appeared to a male sacristan, first through a statue, and subsequently among a group of rocks, she warned that without people’s conversion and change of heart, “there will be grave danger that will hasten the arrival of the Third World War.” But perhaps the most profound of all warnings and advice was in the Rwanda apparition in the early 1980s to a 17-year-old female student and her friends. The message was that the world’s revolt against God is “on the verge of catastrophe” because we do not love. Conversion is called for “through a life of prayer and repentance, renewed by the Word of God and by works of charity and justice.” The young women also received visions of massive and brutal killings, that actually came to pass 10 years later in the 1994 Genocide.
Those who received apparitions and messages were usually obedient in conveying the Holy Mother’s wishes especially regarding the building of churches on the site. These sites are now shrines where millions visit each year. The recorded miracles are too numerous to mention; the most well-known being the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe painted on Juan Diego’s tilma (which scientists have declared “miraculous”); healings of grave illnesses and afflictions in the waters of Lourdes and the graces received from wearing the miraculous medal, a directive given in 1830 to a French postulant, Catherine Labouré in the chapel of her convent in Paris.
THE SPREAD
Of the fifty-one recognized apparitions dating from 39 to 2009 it is interesting to note that as evangelization began to spread outside of Europe so did Marian apparitions. In the mid-18th century Our Lady appeared in Colombia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. In the 20 th century she appeared in Dong Lu, China, now the home of the largest Church in the country. Japan and Argentina both have pilgrimage sites resulting from apparitions to two women, one a Buddhist nun who converted and was healed from deafness. But more recently the coptic Church in Egypt has experienced four apparitions in the places where the Holy Family in their flight from persecution are believed to have rested. Two churches in Cairo reported her luminous body seen walking on the roof and dome, and many Muslim onlookers were present. In the most recent apparition in 2009 the people of Egypt saw a new star travelling across the sky.
Apparitions have nearly always met with resistance because they challenge rationality and demand belief in the mystical and unexplainable. But the fact that they have indeed occurred help us recover the joys of transcendent encounter, along with the realization that the heavens are closer than we think.
“We desire to give rather than receive and thus do not purely seek God’s will.”
(St. Elizabeth Seton).
Although he was a choral conductor, church music director, and university instructor, German composer Franz Biebl (1906-2001) is perhaps best remembered for his Ave Maria. So successful was the piece that after composing the original choir version, he went on to arrange it for two more entirely different mixed voice configurations.
The text is a stunning quotation from the Angelus prayer. The antiphonalstyle treatment of the Ave Maria between the soprano/alto and tenor/bass creates a natural dialogue between the voices: with each statement by the lower voices, we receive an echo from the upper voices. The piece reaches a high point in the Sancta Maria, brought to a brilliant, soaring conclusion in the Amen, as the voices of the singers reach heavenward.
John Paul Farahat
Joanne Mosley is an editor, speaker and writer, specializing in Carmelite spirituality. She is a linguist by training and after her degree in French and German she obtained a doctorate in the area of French biography specializing in the period of the Wars of Religion. She initially taught university students but changed career in 2001, from which time she has been associated with the Carmelites. She has edited numerous articles and books and has given a number of lectures on the Carmelite saints, especially for the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality in Oxford, England. She is the author of “Edith Stein: Woman of Prayer”, published by Gracewing in 2004 (also by Paulist Press in 2006 as “Edith Stein: Modern Saint and Martyr”), which has been translated into four languages; and the two-volume biography “Elizabeth of the Trinity: The Unfolding of her Message” (2012, Teresian Press, Oxford).
“Let Yourself Be Loved”: The Receptive Spirituality of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
Joanne Mosley
At Elizabeth’s beatification, Pope John Paul II described her as having a “perfect openness” to the word of God. Indeed, this openness characterized the whole spirituality of this young woman and Carmelite nun from Dijon (1880-1906) who was canonized in 2016 and has enriched the Church with the example of her life and her deep contemplative writings.
Elizabeth’s receptivity to God was formed to a great degree by the sacraments. As a young child, she was self-willed and tempestuous, readily losing her temper. But this began to change when, aged seven, she made her first confession. Elizabeth would call this her “conversion.” Already, as she was being prepared for it, she became aware of her many faults and resolved to try to change. This is very important, as it shows us the necessary elements of character underpinning receptivity: the humility to listen to advice; the uprightness of heart to own one’s faults; and the flexibility to change. All of which would have been strengthened by the grace of the sacrament itself.1
The next major landmark was Elizabeth’s First Communion at the age of ten. There is something very physical about receiving the host; and a great grace on the day made Elizabeth overwhelmingly aware of receiving Jesus into herself – of his making his dwelling within her.
OPENNESS TO GOD
Significantly, Elizabeth used the language of “sacrament” (with echoes of French Jesuit priest and writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade) to describe receiving God through all things. “Each incident, each event, each suffering, as well as each joy, is a sacrament which gives
God to [the soul],” she wrote, on the third “Day” of Heaven in Faith.
Elizabeth had a constant disposition of receiving God, because she knew viscerally that all is pure gift. This informed how she experienced the love of God. More than just loving God—like a movement from herself towards God—she let herself be loved, she received God’s love. “Let yourself be loved,” she would repeatedly invite her prioress, in a letter of that title, a gift to be opened and read after Elizabeth’s death.
She especially loved to listen to Jesus in the silence of her heart, and she would ask Christ, in her Prayer to the Trinity, to make her “wholly teachable that I may learn all from You.” Remarkably, she remained just as open to God’s action during the “dark night” of painful purification, not trying to shield herself in any way; the sub-prioress would say that God had been able to work so freely in Elizabeth that God’s work could be carried out in her swiftly and fully.
Elizabeth also found God in nature: the wind in the tall trees, the beautiful blue sky –everything spoke to her of the Divine.2 A gifted pianist, she likewise found God in music, which flowed seamlessly into prayer. “When I can no longer pray, I play,” she once said.3 Even when performing in public, she forgot her audience and played for Jesus, for whom she brought out the piano’s richest and fullest sounds.
‘I
AM MADE FOR THE INTERIOR LIFE’
One day, a religious suggested that Elizabeth would make a fine active sister, using her piano for youth work. Elizabeth surprised her by replying: “I feel I am made for the interior life.”4 Indeed, she would be able to sacrifice the piano in Carmel, because this loss would be for a greater gain: for the interior life meant living with God in the innermost depths of her soul.
From the day of her First Communion, when a nun had told her that “Elizabeth” meant “house of God,”5 she had been sensitized to her soul as a place where God dwells. She knew herself to be a “temple of God” (cf. 1 Cor 3:16); she wanted her heart to be a “little Bethany” for Jesus to rest in; and she also thrilled to think of the Trinity as a “Spacious place”6 in which she could live with God.
Elizabeth’s famous Prayer to the Trinity is characterized by receptivity. Inspired by the Annunciation when Mary received the incarnate Jesus within her, it is built around Elizabeth’s desire for “a kind of incarnation of the Word” in her soul. She prays for the Holy Spirit to “come upon” her, and for Christ to live in her to such an extent that the Father will see in her only the “Beloved in whom You are well pleased.”
There is no limit to the extent that Elizabeth found her fulfilment—as both a nun and a woman—as she let the divine life flow into her. She was a daughter of the Father who bent lovingly over her; a bride for the heart of Christ; a soul consumed by the Spirit’s fire, and surrendered to the Trinity’s creative action.7
FULL TO OVERFLOWING
Elizabeth knew that the Trinity already dwells within us through our baptism, but she longed for the Trinity to come into her with ever greater fullness. “I feel my God invade my whole soul,” she wrote to a priest on 2nd August 1902, her first anniversary in Carmel. And in that same letter, she expressed the desire to be “so filled with Him that I can give Him through prayer” to others.
Elizabeth knew that prayer is apostolic. When writing to a missionary on 22nd June 1902, she expressed this with the image of ever-flowing water that cannot be contained within us but overflows through us to others: “Oh, how powerful over souls is the apostle who remains always at the Spring of living waters; then he can overflow without his soul ever becoming empty.”
Through baptism, this call to be both disciple and apostle— to receive and to give God—is enshrined in each of us. It is to have a heart as still and open as the banks of a stream, through which flow passionately the torrents of God’s own overflowing love.
Joanne Mosley discusses the life and spirituality of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity in 4 podcasts that can be viewed on the Carmelite website.
Books of Interest
John Dalla Costa
During the Nativity and Easter seasons, Christians sing hymns praising and proclaiming Jesus as the King of Peace. Many who are not Christians, as well as many who are, or were, are confounded by the fact that so little peace has flowed from the followers of Jesus. All too often the cross of Christ has been raised as a flag for war, and—as the historical record clearly shows—as a banner for enslaving and brutally colonizing others. Even if many of us are far removed from such overt viciousness, few in the West can escape the culture of accommodating violence, which these contradictions between discipleship and practice have bequeathed.
John Dear is a priest, theologian, scholar of nonviolence, activist and writer who has spent decades exposing Jesus’ urgent, farreaching and counter-cultural message of peace. In his new and timely book, The Gospel of Peace, Dear examines each of the synoptic gospels on their own—and as a whole of interconnected works— through the interpretive lens of nonviolence. He starts with an important distinction, borrowed from peace activist, Kazu Haga, that radically changes our code of interpretation. The insight to ponder and learn is that spelling “non-violence” with a hyphen relates to the absence of brutality, while the word “nonviolence” without the hyphen bespeaks “the power and Spirit of God’s love and truth within us and among us.”
In this non-hyphenated sense, nonviolence emerges as an actual aspect of God’s nature, and a tangible sign in the world for perceiving God’s grace. Dear is not so much reading the Gospels in a new way as recovering the true and original intent of what Jesus embodied and taught. Verse by verse, gospel by gospel, Dear exposes nonviolence as the leitmotif unifying the whole of Jesus’ ministry.
Dear fuses scholarship with spirituality, exposing the deeper meaning of the texts while agitating for conversion. For example, in Mark’s Gospel, when James and John connive to secure special places for themselves in God’s kingdom, Dear explains their incomprehension as rooted in social privilege which does the violence of depreciating others, or assuming superiority over them. Even the attitudes of what we see in our culture as competition are premised on the violence of separation and seeking advantage for oneself. Jesus is the antithesis of even these subtle or soft forms of violence. Dear explains, “The Holy One has placed himself at the service of humanity, and though he is really first, he acts as a slave for all.” The service of Jesus would have its apogee on the cross, where kenosis most fully expressed the grace of nonviolence and rendered all violence immoral. As “the Holy One is perfect nonviolence through and through,” it follows that for disciples, “nonviolence requires giving our lives” to that same grace, learning and practicing “the art of suffering and dying” to resist and transform “the world’s way of inflicting suffering and killing.”
I found Dear’s book equally jarring and helpful. It challenged me to examine whether my own words, actions and biases skewed to the holding back for “non-violence,” or risked, as Jesus did, the active self-giving to extend God’s grace of “nonviolence.” It was
also unsettling to consider how much of my lifestyle, with its security, consumption and conveniences, sits on a mountain of hard and soft violence—wars fought for oil; children labouring in far-away mines for the precious metals that construct my iPhone; Amazon personnel who are harried to fill my orders on salaries below subsistence level. Dear especially challenges the American abuses of race, gun-violence, and nuclear-armed military imperialism. But the indictment ensnares even those of us who eschew guns or nuclear weapons, because we both live in the shadow of their benefits, and fail to risk the sacrifice of challenging systems and assumptions that contradict Jesus’ teachings. Indeed, perhaps the most haunting implication of reading Dear’s book is how easily most of us do violence to the Word of God, cherry-picking what gives us consolation or justification, while disarming or ignoring the Beatitudes, the injunction to turn the other cheek, forgive seventy times seven, and love even those who are enemies.
Dear admits that in reading his commentary of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke with this hermeneutic (mode of interpretation) of peace cannot but involve repetitions. My sense is that this is actually helpful, for two reasons. One is that we need to see the recurrence of nonviolence throughout Christ’s ministry to rekindle respect for the practicality of the Beatitudes, especially the mourning, mercy, meekness and justice for true peacemaking. The other is that The Gospel of Peace is (as a commentary should be) a perfect companion for reflecting on the daily scripture readings of the liturgical year.
As we prepare for and enter the Jubilee of Hope in 2025, I’d suggest using Dear’s text to mine the substructure of nonviolence that connects and infiltrates the daily Gospel readings. Receiving such peace, and
becoming it, is, in fact, the hope we hold and can realize as disciples.
The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke From the Perspective of Nonviolence
By John Dear Large format paperback 440 pages. US $27.66 Published in 2023 by Orbis Books.
With One Accord
O God, our Creator, You, who made us in Your image, give us the grace of inclusion in the heart of Your Church.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Jesus, our Saviour, You, who received the love of women and men, heal what divides us, and bless what unites us.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Holy Spirit, our Comforter, You, who guides this work, provide for us as we hold in hope Your will for the good of all.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Mary, mother of God, pray for us. St. Joseph, stay close to us.
Divine Wisdom, enlighten us.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Amen.
Lucinda M. Vardey: Editorial
1 Ref. Heart, Tears, Fruits: The Search for a Feminine Theology ed. Lucinda M, Vardey (Mahwah NJ, Paulist Press 2024) p. 9.
Joanne Mosley: “Let Yourself Be Loved”: The Receptive Spirituality of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
1 Elizabeth would describe this in a poem of 19th April 1898, the seventh anniversary of her First Communion.
2 As described in a letter of 11th or 12th August 1905.
3 Conrad De Meester, Élisabeth de la Trinité: Biographie (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2006), p. 287.
4 Ibid., p. 318.
5 Perhaps a providential interpretation! It is suggested that “Elizabeth” means, in Hebrew: “My God is plenitude” (ibid., p. 84).
6 From Ps 17:20 (Elizabeth quotes: “lieu spacieux”). These three expressions of places can be found in, respectively: a letter of 24th August 1903; a “personal note” of c. 23rd January 1900; and Last Retreat 44.
7 Descriptions drawn from the Prayer to the Trinity.
Quotations from Elizabeth’s writings are from: Complete Works of Elizabeth of the Trinity, critical edition by Conrad De Meester, OCD, vols. 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1984 and 1995); and Œuvres complètes d’Élisabeth de la Trinité, édition critique réalisée par le Père Conrad De Meester, OCD (Paris: Cerf, 2023).
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With One Accord journal is published in English, Italian and French. To access the other language editions please visit our website.
With One Accord signature music for the Magdala interview composed by Dr. John Paul Farahat and performed by Emily VanBerkum and John Paul Farahat.
Images used in this edition:
Cover: “The Annuncation” by Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625).
Page 2 Detail from the above painting.
Page 3 “Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well” by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865).
Page 6 “The Holy Family with a Little Bird” (c.1650) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
Pages 9 “The 9th apparition at Lourdes” by Virgilio Tojetti (1851-1901).
Page 11 “The Luna Mountain, Tuscany” photo by John Dalla Costa.
Page 12 “Madonna with Child” by Filippo Lippi (1406-1469).
