Homily thoughts, 28OT-Thursday: Tout est Grâce!

   Three overlapping images appear in today's liturgy.

   First, October 17 is the memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch.  He is a most notable martyr of the first generation after the Apostolic age.  Perhaps a disciple of St. John the Apostle, and a contemporary of St. Polycarp, St. Ignatius produced seven notable letters to early Christian communities, and is best remembered for his Letter to the Romans, which he wrote (chapter 4) on his way to Rome for execution as a Christian martyr.  In this letter he begs the community, "I am writing to all the Churches and enjoin all, that I am dying willingly for God's sake, if only you do not prevent it.  I beg you, do not do me an untimely kindness.  Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching God.  I am God's wheat, and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure bread of Christ."  The Eucharistic reference shows Ignatius' understanding of his suffering and sacrifice as a reflection of the Lord's own offering hidden under the signs of bread and wine.  It is an offering circumscribed by time and place and circumstance, that nonetheless transcends this world, sanctifying the Church by courageous witness, and leading Ignatius, himself, into the hands of the Eternal Father.

   The Gospel (Luke 11: 47-54) finds Jesus hounding the pharisees and scribes about their complicity in the dishonor, persecution, and death of the prophets... from their own time back to the foundation of the world.  "You have taken away the key of knowledge.  You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter."   The religious leaders Jesus addresses are not only guilty of the blood of a man of God, but they also find themselves and the entire nation blinded to God's intentions and glory revealed in their midst.

   Finally, St. Paul writes (Romans 3: 23-26): "... all have sinned and are deprived of the  glory of God.  [All who believe] are justified by his grace through the redemption of Christ Jesus, through faith, by his Blood, to prove his righteousness, because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed, through the forbearance of God--to prove his righteousness in the present time, that he might be righteous and justify the one who has faith in Jesus..."

   Blood.  Suffering.  Faith.  Grace.  All of these images coalesce in the person of the suffering Christ: the Victim walking the the Way of the Cross to Calvary for the salvation of the world and the redemption of sinners.  An image that is to be taken up by us--we who have been called to take up our crosses and follow him.

   Reflecting on these images, I was drawn to the fictional, but all-too-real, story of the  young, suffering, unnamed priest in Georges Bernano's most famous novel, Diary of a Country Priest (1937), which is remembered even more fondly as a 1951 movie from France, directed by Robert Bresson and starring Claude Laydu.  Appointed to his first pastorate as the Cure of Ambricourt, the unnamed priest finds a sleepy little town that is not particularly welcoming to him or to the faith he proclaims as their parish priest. He laments that his parish "is bored stiff... like so many others!  We can see them being eaten up by boredom and we can't do anything about it.  Some day, perhaps, we will catch it ourselves--become aware of the cancerous growth within us.  You can keep going a long time with that in you."

   And so the story shows the young priest struggling to make a go of it... but he is beaten down by his duties: taunted by the catechism students, lectured by the parishioners and townspeople about how he is to do his job and how he is to fit into their society, celebrating daily Mass alone--save one malefactor whose gaze is intended to challenge and intimidate him.  His diet is most austere; he walks or rides a bike from call to call.  He must travel to the next town to see a brother priest, and farther to see the dean.  In time, we find that he is dealing with some kind of physical ailment, which is later diagnosed to be stomach cancer.

   So his challenges are not only spiritual and pastoral, but also physical.  In the midst of all of this gloom and doom, ambivalence and condescension, hostility and death, the 'spiritual heart' of the book is the probing modern question: "is faith enough"?  This is a serious question that does not have simple, pat answers.  Indeed, it goes to the heart of what many moderns would call 'existential angst': this young priest was failed by his parish, failed by his Church, failed even by his own bodily strength and health.  Would faith be enough to help him persevere... as a pastor ...as a priest ...as a man?  While the book is outstanding in setting up this tension, the power of the movie version, I think, is carried even farther by the director, who, reportedly 'grew up Catholic' and embued his movies with many Catholic themes, but found himself, after his experiences as a prisoner of war a "Christian atheist"... a man struggling with his own faith.

   He has a profound answer, "Faith is not a thing which one 'loses,' we merely cease to  shape our lives by it."  In choosing not only to stay faithful, but in chosing to persevere, the priest cooperates a grace that neither the most hardened sinner nor the lapsed, unconscious church-goer can resist.  For God's love and grace permeates the world, drawing all things to himself, and demanding a response in faith--be it affirming or negating.  The little priest faces down temptation and the devil--evil itself--not unlike our Lord who went into the desert for forty days and forty nights to be tested.  Like the Lord, this little priest will not be alientated from the Father in the midst of trial and tribulation, rather, he is strengthened by an understanding of his weakness, and his reliance upon God's grace in all things.  This is how the wrenching challenge of faith forms him, and keeps him centered in God, rather than drawing him away in the midst of the disasters that would claim his life and livlihood.

   And so, this priest does nothing less than courageously taking on the cross of Christ, and preaching from that cross.  He avoids cynicism and bitterness as he marches the lonely road that can only result in his own demise, choosing to love deeply in the midst of existential angst, to sacrifice greatly for the ignorant and unmoved, and to accept his lot as a sign of God's grace.

   Even when when his health becomes too compromised to go on, he seeks the fraternal consolation of a fallen-away priest friend, inviting this former cleric into the drama of his struggle with faith.  It is this man from the past--from better days--who absolves his dying friend, who provides hospice in the final hours, and who finally writes the dean of Torcy when the struggle is over.  While we do not know the circumstances of why this priest-friend left ministry (although we do see him cohabiting with a woman), we can sense that his response was another, perhaps less hopeful, response to the ultimate priestly wound which is a deep participation in the grace of the cross.  "Tout est Grâce!" (translated, "all is grace," or perhaps, "grace is everywhere!"), says the young priest in his dying breath.  Faith did not abandon him in his suffering, but his faith helped him to be formed by that suffering into an even more perfect alter Christus, drawing the world and its pain, its doubt, its alienation into his own passion, yet pointing to the grace of God in it all.

   Indeed, all is grace.  It is what binds the martyr, the sinner, and the Lord, drawing us into our own response in faith.