‘SMALLNESS IS a REMARKABLE THING’
Pauline: A few weeks ago, Jim was over for lunch and we asked the rest of the community what would be good for you to address? What would you like to hear? Would you like to pick up on that?
Jim: Yes, they gave me very quick instruc@ons. They told me, “don’t talk about Incarna@on; don't use that word. It’s an abstract noun.” I was happy with that, really. I think it’s beUer to think of it as a verb, that God incarnates, becomes flesh, visible in all sorts of places in the world. But they also said to talk about the child, the significance of God becoming vulnerable. A child is completely vulnerable, depends in every way on other people for what he or she needs, and God was willing to empty out, to assume that pose of vulnerability to be close to us.
The thing I remember from some of the material you gave me to read about Cornelia was, when she came upon the name for her congrega@on, when she was sijng in the garden at Trinità dei Mon, in Rome – her young son, Frank, was playing there – and she saw the statue of Mary with the child in her arms, she knew in an instant that hers would be the Society of the Holy Child. And what I par@cularly like about that moment was that very few religious founders have their children, but Cornelia’s excep@onal, and she had her child there. Somehow from the presence visibly of her child in front of her, her mind was drawn from him to the image of Mary and Jesus, and through that image to what lies behind – the invisible God made visible in Jesus.
It @es together and I think it’s really beau@ful, so I said to you in a more informal sejng she was a mother and understood that image more than most. She understood the intensity of love that's there when a mother holds a child. Well, God knew that too and in choosing to become a child, to become that close to another human being and to all human beings in that way – that is something really mysterious; we’ll never understand it fully but it’s remarkable. Smallness is a remarkable thing – even the way things come into the world – you see a @ny squirrel, a liUle bird – immediately your heart is soVened when you see something small; smallness makes us go soV. Ratzinger said God didn't enter the world with a show of power to compel our love, but stole into the world with the vulnerability of a child to invite our love – that’s Incarna@on.
‘EYES OPENED by PRAYER’
Pauline: do you want to say a liHle bit more from a poe?c point of view?
Jim: Well, in the book I read about Cornelia I was struck by what a person of prayer she was. I’m always amazed at all these founders, whatever they had to deal with, there’s always somebody who says she spends long hours in chapel; she was there before God in silence. I’m really taken by this because I don’t do enough of that. But I say the reason they found the right path is because they were talking to the right person, and they were seeing with the right eyes. When you pray and pray and immerse yourself in Christ, well you begin to look at the world not with two eyes but with four, and that’s a way of seeing how you can go forward. And there was a phrase in the book I read – eyes opened by prayer to recognize Jesus in the divine presence. Cornelia was saying to her sisters, and also to her students in the school, “if you don’t pray, you won’t see; prayer gives sight.”
Recognizing the risen Jesus is not a maUer of taking courses. Recognizing him in the baby Jesus is a maUer of being close to him in prayer. So, if Incarna@on is at the heart of a community’s way of seeing
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things, it’s members will learn through prayer and contempla@on, through looking at the child, and they will recognize who is there. This is some@mes called sacramental thinking – seeing through the visible to the invisible. Leonardo Boff (Brazilian theologian) speaks of things as being transparent of God, created reali@es being windows to what cannot be seen, and yet they open you to another world. Many poets capture this – there’s an Irish poet, if I can be indulged for a minute, because many of you probably have not been to Ireland – it’s a small, insignificant, rainy, nothing island that I happen to come from and love greatly. But it’s full of light and shadows, rain and sun, so it’s almost easier in Ireland to believe in what you can’t see than in what you can see, and it’s quite a good natural sejng for seeing from the invisible to the visible. And a poet, Plunket, he managed to capture that in a poem. When I say “he” in the first line, it refers to Jesus:
“I See His Blood upon the Rose” Joseph
Mary PlunkeU
I see his blood upon the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes, His body gleams amid eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies. I see his face in every flower; The thunder and the singing of the birds Are but his voice and carven by his power Rocks are his wriUen words. All pathways by his feet are worn, His strong heart s@rs the ever-bea@ng sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree.”
It’s a beau@ful poem, but it’s an incredible mixture. Every line is Incarna@on; on the one hand you have a tree; on the other hand you have a cross. On the one hand you have a thorn; on the other you have Jesus’ crown of thorns. You have the rose that is red and the blood that is shed. It’s incredible how he mixes earthly with heavenly, and that’s sacramental thinking, and poets are really good at it. I think Holy Child sisters are probably very good at it. I think Cornelia was very good at it – seeing one baby and seeing the significance of another baby. That’s at the heart of your spirituality and it’s remarkable.
‘TAKE a MOMENT QUIETLY’
Pauline: I’m impressed that you knew that poem by heart, Jim! I think a poem oSen takes us to another level within ourselves. And, really, I’d like to invite our audience just to take a moment quietly. When did you last see something that reminded you of God in everything? We’ll just allow those words of Jim to drop down into our hearts. What you shared with us is very rich and we need a moment or two to digest that. So just take a moment for yourself, please.
‘GIVING OUT COMMUNION’
Jim: We’re just coming back aVer Pauline invited us maybe to reflect a liUle on how we experience Incarna@on, and it seems to me it must be the case that if you work with old people or young people, poor people, or if you work with students … you must at @mes in their faces have seen more than a mere face. There must have been moments when you saw, and saw more, or further. This comes up for me some@mes in a very ordinary ministry that I’m sure many of you also prac@ce. It’s not specifically a
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priestly ministry, in fact – giving out communion. I like giving out communion. I know first of all that what I’m giving is good; it’s not my thoughts that I’m giving out, but it’s something that’s definitely good. And as each person comes up, I look to see the face and hands – all the faces are different. It makes me wonder how can God make so many human beings who all look dis@nc@vely different – the lines, the shadows, the eyebrows, the hands that tell a story of lives lived by different people who come up in this way. I will never lose the joy of the experience of giving out communion.
But I think it has a deeper root in an experience I had the day I was ordained a priest. I wasn’t a very holy fellow then, and I’m not now either. And I didn’t have any high moments, you know. We were lying on the ground, praying the litany, and you should have been transported to divine realms, but I wasn’t. Even the first @me I said the words of consecra@on – nothing, really, I felt nothing. The Our Father, the sign of peace but somebody handed me a ciborium to give out communion, and I no@ced a man changing from one side of the aisle to the other to get in my line. Well, that man was in fact someone who had been my friend for 20 years already, and was my friend all my life un@l he died. But he jumped the line just to arrive at me. And when he arrived at me, and I said to him “the body of Christ,” I knew that he had been the body of Christ for me. Christ was present through him, in love and friendship, in laughter and support, and all the things that come through a good human friend, the friendship that l asted our whole life. I knew then that the body of Christ could be touched in the body of another person in whom Christ becomes alive.
Or when my father was old, he was dying, and it was Christmas @me; he was hooked up to machines, and it was only a maUer of @me. He was powerless, divested of all power, and he had been quite a powerful figure. He was lying there dependent for everything on help from other people. And we were just watching there, being with him, on that par@cular day, Christmas Day. Because we all took turns being with him, I couldn't go to Mass; I needed to be with the family, and I needed to be with him then. And we don’t penetrate to what gives them being, and holds them up, and infuses them with love … You know, created reali@es are very important, but they can be vehicles to the uncreated and I think that modern ways of thinking and living make that much harder to accept.
‘LOOK at the RESURRECTION to UNDERSTAND INCARNATION’
Pauline: And before, Jim, you said a lot about Cornelia – you said she spent a lot of ?me in prayer to enable her to see a different dimension, or to see the fullness of what was before her.
Jim: Yes, she knew it so she prayed; and she prayed so she knew it. You see, you can’t blame people if they don’t pray at all, but then if they don’t see what the eyes of faith see, you can’t really do anything about that … Think of the scenes aVer Jesus’ resurrec@on – Mary Magdalen, Peter, various people saw him. As Cornelia would say, very oVen they saw him in circumstances right in the middle of everyday life – at a meal, catching fish, in the garden, walking on the road. And what Jesus does – he re-entered their lives in places where they recognized him before. So what they did was, they re-cognized him; recognize is to know, and they re-knew him. When Jesus says to Mary (she was all over the place, and looking for a dead body), and he goes “Mary.” Can’t you imagine ….. just when somebody says your name and breaks through all the noise, and you re-cognize the presence of the person. Now that is again ….. there is the risen body, and what is the risen body opening a window on? Jesus has already entered into your existence and it’s an invita@on to others to see that, to have what only the eyes of faith can see. So you can look at the Resurrec@on actually to understand incarna@on.
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There’s a nice story, and I think I told you this once. There was a Dutch theologian, and he had a very large family, and a bossy older brother. It was at Christmas and they had a crèche, and there was a baby in it. And the older person in the family said, “Eddy, that baby is God.” Now there’s a wam of Incarna@on right there – that baby is God! But this guy grew up, became a Dominican, studied theology, and he said “I spent my life trying to figure out what that meant – that baby is God. It was Edward Schillebeecz …
‘DETECTIVES of GRACE’
Pauline: Another phrase for which you’ve become well known beyond Caravita is that we’re all invited to be detec?ves of grace.
Jim: Yes, I liked the phrase; I used it once casually and people picked up on it, and liked it too … where that phrase comes from in me is … I was going to call him my nephew but he’s not, he’s my God-child –he’s the son of that friend I men@oned earlier. I was living in America where they lived at the @me he was born, and I became his God-father. But he was born with a tumor wrapped around where two op@c nerves meet and it impaired his sight quite badly. We didn’t figure this out at first, but gradually we no@ced that he wasn’t seeing right, there was something wrong. And then we no@ced something par@cularly endearing. He would use his fingers to travel my face. In other words he was seeing my face through his fingers because his eyes weren’t very good. And he knew the geography – I’d seen him do it with his mother, and other people he was close to.
I suddenly realized maybe that’s what Chris@ans are called to do in the world, use the @ps of your fingers. If you’re really mo@vated to see, as he was, you want to know the faces of the people you love, you want to know the face of Jesus, hidden, buried, incarnate in the world – you’re tracing him with the @ps of your fingers to try and bring forward the face that you love and want to show to other people.
And I thought of him as a detec@ve. He was detec@ng, and then I realized maybe we’re detec@ves too, detec@ves of grace. Grace is a holy word we use but what it means is the presence of God, always in tandem with something created. Grace never turns up on its own. You can’t say “there’s grace over there.” But you can tell a story about something and say “there’s grace in that.” And people will see it through the created things, that the uncreated presence of God was also there. Ronan was his name; he’s s@ll alive. He survived with lots of prayer and good medical treatment.
‘ACTIONS NOT WORDS’
Pauline: Jim in the rule that Cornelia created for the Society she said very specifically that Jesus was our model, and we know that’s something deeper than saying “what would Jesus do?” Can you say a liHle bit more what you think she was invi?ng us to when she said Jesus is our model?
Jim: One of the things I became intrigued about quite a lot in reading the material about Cornelia was that she was a mother. I think that made a huge difference. And when I read about the fact that she cradled her son for 43 hours aVer he had fallen in the boiling sugar or syrup or something – anyway he died, and she walked that journey with him. Whom do you think of when you hear that? Another mother who walked a journey with her son, that led to a cross. Cornelia’s ability to move between her own motherhood and the motherhood of the holy child …..
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A child can’t really be a model; a child does nothing so how can you model your behavior on him? Well actually he has done something because he is God and has poured himself out completely and made himself vulnerable, so in that sense you can model that. But there’s more there somehow, there’s more there. It means self-emptying, it means pujng others first, it means looking out. Perhaps it means … you Holy Child sisters emphasize a lot “ac@ons not words” – oh, I hear that and some@mes I feel guilty when I’m blathering on – it’s ac@ons not words, Jim, ac@ons not words. You put a strong emphasis on that. She did too. What mother doesn’t hasten, doesn’t rush to do what is necessary for her child, and so on? I think it’s back to prayer again. You can’t make him your model unless you know the model you’re seeking to follow. You might know more than I do there about how she meant that.
‘JESUS—A BEING of EXODUS, of GOING OUT’
Pauline: I think a lot of what she meant by that came through her great familiarity with the Spiritual Exercises of St. Igna?us, especially the mystery of the Incarna?on. Again, if you’d like to unpack that a bit, which is not the easiest thing to unpack – I’m aware of that.
Jim: All of you that we’re talking to, all of you probably have experience of the medita@on on the Incarna@on – the Trinity looking at the world – today’s a good day to remember that. And you kind of feel the nudge to the son, “you’d beUer go.” And because we’re all in such a terrible state the Trinity decide and the ac@on that is taken to carry out the decision is that the son goes – it’s an ac@on, a really strong ac@on, coming forth from love; it’s not God sijng idly by; it’s God gejng strongly involved. And so the son comes and the salva@on of the human race is brought about in this way. I think of the medita@on on the Incarna@on in the Exercises has brought all sorts of thoughts from people about it.
Why did God become human? Some people say it was to save us from our sins. Other people say there’s more involved. Rosemary Haughton says it’s because his passion couldn’t keep him at home. Scotus says the same thing, you know, the Franciscan theologian way back. John of the Cross says the same thing –love impels unity. Love makes you act. In that sense you can see that the love of the child sends the Holy Child sister out. She can’t sit s@ll. People who know the good news of the Incarna@on and the Resurrec@on are not homebirds. They have places to go, people to see, things to do. Incarna@on is a motor – maybe that’s the model ques@on looked at in a different way.
I asked somebody once to read Mark’s gospel, who’s not a believer, but who’s very good at literature and all that. And she did, so I said aVerwards, “what did you think?” She said, “this Jesus – he goes out, he goes to, he goes up, he goes down. And what she was describing was … what she had picked up was that Jesus is a being of Exodus, of going out, as I say, not a stay-at-home. Incarna@on meant incarna@ng in the lives, sufferings, the needs, the places, even the sinful places – not that God is sin, but God doesn’t shy away from the plight of sinners. God isn’t afraid to be dirty and in that sense Incarna@on is amazing, too. Something shocking – you know people used to be shocked by Caravaggio’s pain@ngs because his people had dirty feet, Mary, for example, on the road, and so on. People thought he was making the holy persons too human. But you can’t make Jesus too human because he was fully human.
‘BE YOURSELF …’
Pauline: I think one of the phrases that, par?cularly, our students pick up on is “be yourself, but make that self what God wants it to be.” And I think that’s something linking with what you’re talking about there.
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Jim: Yes, I liked that line when I read it from Cornelia, and I think there’s great depth there. Some@mes educators don’t tell you to be yourself. They tell you to be somebody else. You know, they’re quite cri@cal, judgmental; the first thing is “stop doing what you’re doing; that’s not right; that’s wrong.” I don’t think that’s the Holy Child philosophy of educa@on, and I don’t think it’s Cornelia’s either. She says you begin with the giVs that God has given you. Sure, you have faults, but begin with the giVs. And of these giVs she says concentrate on those and draw those out. And then she says if there are rough edges they can be dealt with. So, the thing about “become what God wants you to be” is not a rejec@on of the self that God made you; it’s a perfec@on of the self that God made you to be. So, I can imagine her in a classroom, or in a convent. She recognizes well the lumpy, human reality before her but she sees the poten@al, that’s what she sees. She also sees the points that need to be changed, which encourages the person to be the person s/he was made to be
I think it’s like the parable of the wheat and the weeds. She’s not afraid to let the two grow together. Another spiritual approach is afraid of that, thinks the weeds will strangle the growth, and pull them out immediately. But what did Jesus say about that? He said be careful about doing that because you might pull up the good seed as well. She had a very posi@ve approach to people, and I think that also came from ….. a mother doesn’t look at her child and say “do you know what’s wrong with him?” She knows well what’s wrong with him but that’s not her first look. Her first look is this miracle that is my child. The second look is how can we help him to be all that God calls him or her to be. I like that a lot as a philosophy of educa@on and my own experience as a teacher is that when you cri@cize students and beat them down, and make them feel bad about themselves, their performance goes way below what it could be. But if you praise, and raise, and hope, and pray that they’ll be beUer tomorrow, they will be.
‘I’M SAYING YOU NEED BOTH’
Pauline: Jim, I’m just keeping an eye on the ?me because there are some ques?ons I think in the CHAT. But maybe before we move into that you can just go right back to the ini?al spark for this conversa?on: the difference between a theology of the cross and a theology of the Incarna?on, please.
Jim: I wasn’t sure about pujng this in when Pauline and I were talking about it because this can get quite complicated. You know, theologians can make everything that’s interes@ng complexified and impossible to understand. Nobody is saying that the cross should be removed from the picture and nobody is saying that the Incarna@on isn’t important. In fact they go together. He who became incarnate eventually died on the cross. Well, everybody has a way of summarizing their Chris@anity with different emphases. A person like Cornelia can’t get away from Incarna@on; she loves it, and it has captured her imagina@on. But she has room for suffering, and sin, and the cross, but it has its due place.
In the history of Chris@anity, somebody like Luther, living at a @me when there was a great deal of Chris@an imperfec@on around ….. Luther felt that you couldn’t arrive at a knowledge of God through contempla@ng naturally created things. And he appeals to 1 Corinthians where Paul speaks about the cross as apparently foolish, being wiser than the wisdom of men. Luther had a dialec@cal, contrary type of approach – the thing that you think is all wrong is in fact the thing that’s all right. And he wanted people to see that their vision could only be corrected – because it had been so distorted by sin – by being confounded by the wisdom of the cross that is wiser than the foolishness of human beings. He, then, wouldn’t have been too keen on an incarna@onal perspec@ve, a perspec@ve that could see from analogies in the world, analogies to likeness with God. He was nervous of that.
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Well, this could be exaggerated in the opposite direc@on and forget that our analogies immediately need the correc@ve that we are human and very limited, and we miss the point. Nevertheless I think that the two emphases, which should never be lost sight of completely – you find them in Va@can II – in Lumen Gen,um, influenced a lot by the French theologians – there was great op@mism about what God and human beings could do together. But it was almost as if we could save ourselves, in a version of that document. The Germans got nervous about that, not only Ratzinger but also Rahner, who’s an incarna@onal theologian, and they said we need a liUle bit more of the theology of the cross here because human beings don’t see straight. So, I’m saying you need both, and I’m saying it’s ok for people to have a synthesis that’s more incarna@onal, while others may balance it nicely by having a synthesis that’s more focused on the cross. De Lubac said the way of grace is over the cross. That is true; we all know it; to love God you will suffer too, and you will find out your own need for conversion and all. But the focus doesn’t necessarily have to be sharply on
Pauline: but I know you’ll say that Francis is in the camp of Incarna@on
Jim: Yes, I mean the man is on the street; he’s out there; he spent his whole life on the bus, in the tube what do you call it? in the metro, and so on, going to the poorest areas, being with people in all sorts of irregular situa@ons. Francis doesn’t expect anybody to be living a perfect life and, to be true, nobody is ….. So ….. “and wears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell” – that’s what Christ seemed to want to do, and I relate that to Francis’ “smell of the sheep” as well. He’s not upset by rubbing shoulders with human beings who don’t get it all right, and I think that’s Chris@anity. You know, “I did not come to call the virtuous,” Jesus said, “but sinners.”
Pauline: Well, on that note we’ll turn to some ques?ons from the CHAT.
A QUESTION from CHAT
Ogochukwu Manu: The invisible God made visible … smallness is a remarkable thing … God didn’t enter the world to command power – Could you talk a bit about divestment of God as Incarna?on?
Jim: I think it’s a very good ques@on, especially in the word “dives@ng” following the word “power.” What it made me think about (obviously I’m thinking about what God does in Incarna@on, what is God doing) and it seems to me that God is doing the opposite of what many people do in our world, and if I may be a liUle reversely sexist if you like, I’d say this happens par@cularly in men. Many men think they become somebody by means of acquisi@on. I accumulate, I make money, I build buildings; or worse, I conquer people, I shoot people, I destroy, and I show my capaci@es ….. I think this is true of European society, and American, also African – I’ve been to Africa a few @mes but I know it less. I use the expression “the self-made man.” I don’t say “the self-made woman” and indeed many women would have that tendency too, I’m sure. But the self-made man is looked up to.
I think that’s a disaster, because the self-made man thinks of himself in terms of: I can stand on my own two-feet. I don’t need anybody; I have health insurance for when I’m sick; I have all the possessions I need to, etc. etc. etc. I’ve made myself really self-sufficient. And if that’s supposed to be the height of human achievement, Incarna@on is showing it’s the height of human disaster. The person who gets him/herself into a situa@on where they need nothing, nor anyone is rela@on-less, boss over everyone, close to nobody.
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So God enters the world, God who could have power over all, enters the world by dives@ng himself of every facet of power that God has and renders himself completely vulnerable as a baby. I used to teach adolescents some@mes about Jesus and they used to get quite upset when I spoke of him, for example, as not only needing to be fed, but needing to be changed, to have bathroom reali@es taken care of for him, bathed, and fed with a spoon. And then I used to get them to come along with him and watch him grow up. Did he ever kick a football, or whatever was a football in those @mes, against a clean sheet hanging on a line? Did he always go to bed when his parents told him? You know, he was an intelligent child who asked a lot of awkward ques@ons. And the students would say, “Father, stop that. You’re making him too human.” And I would say, “That’s the point!” Then I would push it even further and I would say, “then, of course, he became a teen-ager – did he ever stay five minutes extra in front of the mirror wondering, did he look okay? Did he find himself no@cing occasionally the girl down the street?”
“Oh! Shock! Shock! Shock! That couldn’t possibly have been the case.”
But there’s a refusal of Incarna@on at every level, and of vulnerability, and of rela@onship, and of human need. The self-made man (to go back to that awful caricature that I’ve created) would never divest himself of a frac@on of power, and you can think of poli@cians when I’m talking, and they’re mostly men, but they think they’ve made it, because they don’t need anyone, or anything and, in fact, they exploit the needs of others. So God shows God’s way of being is a way of dives@ng. We think of God as powerful; God says, “I’m powerless, and by choice.” Those things are amazing and you can think about them for ages, but it’s the fact that they’re so contrary to what is normally praised – we praise achievement all the @me, achievement, achievement, achievement.
If I were God, you’d know, and I would arrive, very nicely, and proclaim to everybody that there would be a free day. The planes would fly overhead emijng divine smoke. There’d be trumpets, and I’d be in a place above everyone so that they could see me. But a baby in a manger? God didn’t enter the world that way, and that’s what I meant when I said smallness is amazing. God has brought it about that all things that live come into the world and grow to their full maturity by means of being smaller originally. How many people walking down the street, when they see a liUle animal, or a liUle baby go “Ahhhh” –yes, exactly! God isn’t a fool; God realizes that people need to say, “Ahhhh” and become soV, and drop their bossiness, and drop their bigness. God will do anything to get close to us, even if people think that makes a fool out of him. He doesn’t mind, just wants to get close.
‘IF YOU WANT to SEE the FACE of CHRIST, HE’LL MAKE IT VISIBLE to YOU’
Pauline: Ogo, thank you for that ques?on. It elicited quite a statement. Thank you, Jim. So, for whatever reason, we haven’t got more ques?ons from the CHAT, but is there anything now, as we draw to an end, that you want to use to wrap up this session, even how has your own development in your understanding of the Incarna?on happened over the years – as you’re older now.
Jim: I’ll be re@ring next year. I’m a Jesuit so that doesn’t mean I’ll be stopping working, but I have to re@re according to the rules and ….. All right, when I was a small boy, I was curious about religious things. There were big ques@ons that you couldn’t answer, and I like ques@ons you can’t answer that give rise to more ques@ons. And of course ques@ons about God and the things of God and all that, they aUracted me even as a young person. So, I read, and I men@oned people like Rosemary Haughton, Elizabeth Johnson, Karl Rahner, and many others who have wriUen about these things ….. and many other theologians. They have helped me. So, my head has been nourished and that has been one way in which I have grown but, it’s funny, it hasn’t made me become an abstract thinker about Incarna@on, because
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other experiences have also happened – like what I men@oned with regard to my father, or my friend coming to communion, or the people who come to communion on a daily basis.
We were talking outside the door today, and you said the thing about how a person you know says you should fall in love once a day. I don’t think that’s a foolish statement. The world is there to be loved, for all its evil and roUenness, and if your heart can be drawn out of preoccupa@on with yourself into loving something you see in the world – a child on the street, music, a sunset, whatever… and you leave yourself and somehow you go to unite yourself with the thing. That’s a movement of incarna@ng, too; it’s becoming alive in something else other than yourself. So for me, in my life, it’s been a combina@on; I always say I’m a books and people person, I mean I say that’s all I can do – I can’t play football, I can’t dance … or anything … but I get nourishment through reading and also by the kind of contempla@on of the world that recognizes its beauty, and that needs prayer. I told you earlier I’m not a great man for long hours of prayer but maybe that’s something I’ll have more @me for when I re@re, and it is necessary; it feeds the soul, and gives you something that the world needs, and doesn’t know it needs. But it’s a way also to give more life to the life of Incarna@on.
Remember Ronan, with the fingers, tracing the hidden face of God? It was the interest in his hands that most convinced me. He wanted to see. If you want to see the face of Christ, he’ll make it visible to you. You’ll never be forced, but if you want to see it, it’s there for being seen, I think. Now for me, it’s through books and people a lot because I’m a books and people person, but you might be a garden person, you might be an educator. I think educa@on’s a great place. It’s impossible not to see Christ in students, at least occasionally. There’s family, community – some@mes community can be terrible because they don’t put petrol in the car; they don’t wash their cup; they put their cup under the bed, then take a second one, and aVer five days there are five mugs gone. Community is all those things, and yet I can say, looking back on 50 years being a Jesuit, I liked the Jesuits in school; I liked them when I joined; and now, knowing them from every side, I s@ll like them, find God in them, the people I live with. Incarna@on’s an ac@vity, not a theory.
3 MORE QUESTIONS from CHAT
Mary Ann Buckley: I loved what you said about sacramental thinking, seeing through the visible to the invisible. Can you say a further word about seeing the environmental plight of our planet, connec?ng Incarna?on and ecology?
Jim: That’s a great ques@on. I’m glad you asked it. I’ll tell you a story – I’ll be humble here. I recognized a long @me ago that we s@fle voices in the world, the voices of women, the voices of the poor, the voices of people who live in less opulent places, the voices of people from other religions … But another voice that we’ve been strangling for ages without even no@cing is the voice of the earth that we have trampled, and harmed and failed to appreciate. And we have failed to recognize that we’re in deep rela@onship with the earth. The earth can survive without us, but we can’t survive without the earth.
So I think, into the incarna@onal picture (this is a challenge to me… This year for the first @me I taught a course in integral ecology and I’m just beginning to see how it can be linked to Incarna@on. If God is present in all the things of nature that we men@oned, somehow a viola@on of those things is a trampling of the hidden face of God in created reali@es, par@cularly living reali@es. The destruc@on of eco-systems, the exploita@on of resources, the endangering of life – human life and other. I’m speaking now in very
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strong pessimis@c terms in a sense, because I’m very concerned about things like rising sea levels and mel@ng ice, and all that.
We have a serious … especially those of us in this northern hemisphere – we have a serious debt to people in other parts of the world and to genera@ons as yet unborn. Okay, this puts quite a moral angle on what goes on in rela@on to Incarna@on, but it might be more mo@va@ng, a more loving or beau@ful way to go to think of all living things as bearers of the traces of divinity, and as meri@ng therefore the kind of aUen@on that we’ve been talking about. We really need to open out to that kind of vision. I need that very much, and I hope in 3 or 4 year’s @me ….. Just at the end of the course that I taught we looked at all the papal documents – Pope Francis, Benedict, the ones before that, and we looked at some theologians. We no@ced that the theologians are beginning to get the ecological crisis to align with Incarna@on, Trinity, Christology, Sacraments, Grace. So my answer to your ques@on really is a humble one – the work hasn’t been done yet, but at least it’s on the horizon.
Celes?na Onyia: Thank you so much, Father Jim, for the inspiring reflec?on. Incarna?on: finding God in all things! How can one s?ll find God even in the face of injus?ce?
Jim: Yes, and I realize one thing about an incarna@onal perspec@ve, that it can seem to posi@ve. Where is God, for example, when women are treated with violence, when people are killed, when jus@ce is withheld from people who have a right, and so on to the goods and the opportuni@es of this earth? Perhaps one’s thinking needs to be less harmonious and beau@ful than when thinking about God in good created things here. I think in protest, in indigna@on, in excoria@on … for example when I was growing up a big mistake was that we were taught about gentle Jesus meek and mild. My mother gave that line quite oVen because I wasn’t gentle Jim meek and mild, and she was seeking to get me to correct.
But later I found out that Jesus was prophe@c, disturbing, denouncing; he got into a lot of trouble with the authori@es, not only the religious authori@es but others too. I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were blazing already. I have come to set father-in-law against daughter-in-law, against mother-in-law, etc. etc. And one could maybe begin to see the presence of grace. Grace is Incarna@on in the sense that it is the presence of God @ed to something created, and it can be seen in protest; it can be seen in demonstra@on; it can be seen in solidarity. Does that make any sense?
I think when you’re going along that line of thinking the first grace is awareness. You know when the prophet Nathan went to David, and he said there’s this guy and he did all these things, and David says, “I’m sure this man shall die,” and Nathan said, “You’re the guy.” The first grace is awareness, and the second grace is one the Holy Child sisters would relate to quite naturally, because it's that you move to ac@on. The awareness gives birth to the ac@on, so the religious world, and the religious world view, and the contempla@ve way of seeing the world isn’t always comfortable; it’s some@mes indignant, some@mes challenging, some@mes denunciatory, some@mes prophe@c.
That’s a very good ques@on the more I think about it, because you’re invi@ng me, when I’m talking about Jesus becoming incarnate, you’re invi@ng me to talk about everything in rela@on to Jesus. We all have our innocent Jesuses. He wasn’t just a baby, just a good boy, and he wasn’t just a person who would give you a sense of warmth and well-being. He could also challenge you. He could look at the rich young man, love him, but say, “go sell everything, you lack one thing.” That ques@on is an excellent ques@on because there’s a danger … it’s a mistaken understanding of sacramental thinking, but there’s a danger that it could lead to too much affirma@on about things as they are …
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There was a theologian, Leonardo Boff – s@ll alive, Brazilian in the United States – but he, a Franciscan who is a huge sacramental thinker, balanced his sacramental thinking very well with socio-analy@c thinking and he brought the two together. He said everything is grace at the level of crea@on, of God’s making it and its being good, and through all that you can see through to the divine. But he said all is not grace at the level of history; at the level of history we have commiUed some colossal, colossal errors and atroci@es. So the sacramental thinking with the help of Boff is placed in dialec@c rela@onship with the socio-analy@c thinking, and that brings jus@ce more into the picture.
Veronica Ufomba: Father what could be the similarity between the spirituality of Incarna?on with Igna?an spirituality. Could you relate the spirituality of Incarna?on and the use of the five senses?
Jim: That’s good – the first bit is kind of easy for me in the sense that I think Igna@an spirituality is first of all a theology of God, and it’s not a theolog of God sijng in an armchair watching the world go by. Igna@us’ God is at work, working in the world. Think of the contempla@on to achieve love. It’s not just dreamy love. It’s ac@ve love. God is at work in the world, in all places, in the dearest, deep-down things, and, I think, in sinful situa@ons trying to bring good out of them. So Igna@an spirituality is focused on finding God in all things, and maybe one could say bringing God facilita@ng God’s entry into all things. Finding God there, and bringing God to – that’s our mission. So, you can say that that’s quite incarnate, God present in things. But the senses – that’s quite interes@ng because I know you’re done the Exercises and you’re thinking of the applica@on of the senses ….. For example Paul speaks of Christ, or is it Chris@ans, being the aroma of Christ? We have to think more smell, taste, touch. I have used too much the metaphor of seeing, but nobody would know the word unless it had been heard. Hearing is also a sacramental because it refers to going through the word “heard” to the one speaking. You men@oned in your ques@on “from the visible to the invisible.” That’s an old adage of the fathers of the church. It’s in Chris@anity since Chris@anity began, but it means from the visible to the invisible, from the heard to the one speaking, and perhaps also if you catch the aroma of God it brings you to the invisible face of God. You can take all the senses perhaps and do something similar with them. The sacraments use things, oVen that you can see, but some@mes that you can smell, and touch, and swallow. So yours is another great ques@on and what I’d say about it is it just opens a line of reflec@on, because I do think a problem can be, when you think about sacramental thinking that you ….. remember Ronan – it was touching that was his way from the visible to the invisible ….. so I think you’re right; all the senses could be employed in that way
WHAT DO YOU WANT to TAKE AWAY?
Pauline: Well unfortunately we’ve come to the end of our ?me, but I would invite people just to think: what do I need to think about or talk about more with somebody else in the community or a friend, or whatever. So, just take a moment: what do you want to take from this hour and a half? What may be a key phrase, or an idea, or something that has confirmed your belief, or stretched your belief, your understanding. Just take half a minute and trust that God’s Spirit will prompt us to think about that.
It remains to me to thank you profoundly, Jim. You’ve given us a great deal this aVernoon. I’ve enjoyed being with you in exploring this theme, this reality. I’d also like to thank – you can’t see Robert behind here, but he has shepherded us, us technophobes, through this hour and a half. Another thank you to Mary Ann whose work on RE-SOURCE was really important in culmina@ng in this conversa@on. I’m delighted that you’ve all had a chance to come, and it will be recorded so we’ll send out informa@on about how that can be accessed, but Jim, again, many, many thanks for sharing not only your knowledge
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which is extensive, but also what it means for you personally. That’s been a tremendous giV to us, so thank you very much indeed. Thank you to all of you. Enjoy your evening.
THANK YOU!
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