Pastoral
THE EMPTINESS THAT ASKS ABOUT MEANING
You would imagine it should be impossible to be bored in the twenty-first century. Satellite and cable bring an ever-increasing number of television channels; new mobile and wireless technologies promise sound, text, pictures, video and email wherever we are; the endless possibilities of the Internet, now with a broadband connection, are becoming more and more available; music, news, information are constantly on tap. I-Pods and MP3s allow us to carry with us music to fill every silence. The strange thing is that, in the middle of so many options, people are as bored as they ever were.
The things that compete for our attention do not really involve us or fulfil us. Although they keep us occupied and busy, they distract us from ourselves. We live with a great deal of ‘buzz’ but not a lot of reflection. We live in a world which does not like silence, which deafens itself with noise. One reason for that is to ensure that we will not have to face the deeper questions. As Pope John Paul pointed out, we are “often unable to be silent for fear of meeting (ourselves), for fear of feeling the emptiness that asks itself about meaning” (1).
The question of meaning is rarely posed in the public arena, except in the context of major tragedies like the Asian tsunami and the Beslan siege. In the lives of individuals, of course, it arises all the time. Bereavement, serious illness, major anxieties and disappointments make us face the most fundamental questions. When we experience heartbreaking and troubling events we realise that the emptiness and the questioning have never really gone away. We meet ourselves and we feel an emptiness that frightens us.
The busy-ness and noise of modern life are all-pervasive. Prayer and liturgy move to a different rhythm. They call for reverence, silence, gratitude; they require us to stand back from the need to be doing things and acquiring things and achieving things.
A clear symptom of a lack of this reverent, thankful, attentive attitude is the complaint that ‘the Mass is boring’. It is boring only if we fail to understand that here we are at the heart of things. We are in the presence of the truth that we spend much of our time ignoring – the fundamental reality of who we are.
This Year of the Eucharist is an opportunity to awaken a fuller realisation that in the Mass we are in touch both with the emptiness that lies deep in our hearts and with the Risen Christ who alone can fill that emptiness.
The Eucharist is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed and source from which all its power flows” (2). Pope John Paul hopes that this year will be “a precious opportunity to grow in awareness of the incomparable treasure which Christ has entrusted to his Church” (3) .
On the first Easter Sunday, two disciples walked with downcast faces, burdened by questions and by a sense of emptiness. In this reflection, I want to share that journey with the disciples on the road to Emmaus as the Lord opened their hearts to ‘the incomparable treasure’ of his presence ‘in the breaking of the bread’ ( Lk 24:13-35 ). As we walk with them we may find, as they did, that we are in contact with what our frenetic activity and our endless agitation have always been seeking.
The Restless Heart
The Eucharist brings us face to face with the fundamental questions that we try so hard to avoid. In the Penitential Rite at the beginning of every Mass we thank the Lord who heals the wounds of sin and division, gathers the nations into peace, heals the sick, forgives sinners, brings light to those in darkness and leads us into everlasting life; we acknowledge that we are sinners; we recognise our need for the prayers of Mary, ever virgin, of the angels and saints and of one another. We are people with longings and hopes that seem too big to be realistic and with failures and weakness that our resources could never overcome.
Our presence at Mass is a recognition that we depend totally on God’s creative and merciful love. The meaning of our lives is to offer ourselves in union with Christ’s offering, journeying with him, together with all God’s people, through death and resurrection to the home of our Father. That is how our emptiness will, please God, one day be filled.
In spite of our best efforts, as we take part in the celebration of the Eucharist, our minds will often continue to be busy about many things. These are not mere distractions. Like the disappointment, the unhappiness and the bewilderment which the disciples expressed to the Stranger who walked with them, these are signs of our searching for happiness and fulfilment. The deepest source of the worries, hopes, desires, memories, grievances and irritations that fill our minds is the fact that we are restless beings. We are made for God and our hearts are restless until they rest in God (4) . All our longing is, in the end, a longing for God (5) .
We come to Mass as people who are sinful, mortal, restless and vulnerable. We live in a world where cruelty, injustice, suffering and poverty exist on a scale that makes us feel powerless. Our lives are filled with aspirations and longings, disappointments and fears and all too fragile happiness. Deeper than all the surface activity lies a restless turmoil, a permanent unease which sometimes expresses itself in superficial, distorted or even profoundly misguided ways. The longings of our heart, which God alone can satisfy, will never be stilled in this world.
Invited by God
The Church teaches us that, in the first moment of each human life, God directly creates our spiritual and immortal soul (6) . To put it another way, in the very act of creating us, God speaks an invitation to each of us to know and love him, to be sons and daughters of our eternal Father. We are the only creatures on earth with the capacity to know and love our Creator. “The invitation to converse with God is addressed to men and women from their origin. For if people exist it is because God has created them through love, and through love continues to keep them in existence” (7) . We discover signs of that creative love in the beauty of creation, and especially in the dignity and longings of the human person.
But God’s invitation was expressed most clearly when he spoke “at many times and in various ways” to the chosen people. Above all it is expressed when ”in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” ( Heb 1:1 ). “He sent his Son, the eternal Word, who enlightens all humankind, to live among them and to tell them about the inner life of God” (8) .
“The desire for God is written in the human heart” (9) . That is the most basic truth about us. God speaks to us and calls us; the entire meaning of our lives is to respond to that loving call.
The Eucharist expresses the invitation of God, by which and for which we were brought into being. The Eucharist celebrates the fact that we were made for something infinitely greater than anything the tumult of our experiences, hopes, anxieties and imagination could ever yield.
The truth is that in the depths of our hearts we are a longing for God. The name that our Patron St. Ita gave herself – her original name was Deirdre – means ‘thirst’, thirst for God. This was the core of her life.
God, you are my God, I pine for you;
my heart thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
as a land parched, dreary and waterless. ( Ps 63:1 )
We pine for God because we are created in order to respond to his word. God spoke individually to each of us as we were brought into existence. The Word of God became flesh and lived among us. The Word of God walked, unrecognised, with the disciples on the road to Emmaus and caused their hearts to burn within them as he opened up the Scriptures for them ( Lk 24:32 ).
Christ speaks to our hearts
That same Word speaks to us in the Eucharistic liturgy. “(Christ) is present in his word since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in Church” (10). We sometimes like to imagine the rapt attention that we would have given, the way our hearts would have burned within us, if we had been privileged, like the first disciples, to hear Jesus speaking to us. But, ‘it is he himself who speaks’ in our churches. Those who read in church and those who listen should be conscious that Jesus is among us, speaking as truly as he did on the Mount of Beatitudes.
If our hearts do not burn within us, it is not because the Lord is not speaking; it is not because the particular passage of scripture does not appeal to us; it is not because the Old Testament reading belongs to an unfamiliar culture; it is not because the words of the Gospel are too familiar. It is because, although the Lord is speaking to us in the depths of our being, we remain on the surface.
The Second Vatican Council tells us that when people look deeper than the superficial and “are drawn to think about their real selves, they turn to those deep recesses of their being where God who probes the heart awaits them”. There, “in their most secret core and sanctuary… they are alone with God whose voice echoes in their depths” (11)
St Augustine tells us that God is “higher than my highest and more inward than my inmost self”. The trouble is that, “He is within the inmost heart, yet the heart has wandered away from him”. Augustine laments that he sought God’s beauty in a superficial way among the beautiful things of creation. He had been searching for God outside himself and all the time, God was within his heart: “ You were with me”, he says to God, “but I was not with you” (12) .
The words that Jesus speaks to us in the readings are not just letters and sounds. They speak to our hearts. The heart is our ‘hidden centre’, “beyond the grasp of our reason”; “only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully” (13). God is ‘more inward than my inmost self’. God’s word speaks to the depth of our hearts, and God, the Holy Spirit, responds: “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” ( Rom 8:26 ); “It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” ( Rom 8:15 ).
In that exchange deep in our hearts there is a love without limit, a love infinite and eternal, whose demands we fear because, in words attributed to Brother Roger of Taizé, “It does not ask too much of us, but it does ask for everything!”
For our hearts are divided. This heart of ours has layer upon layer of desire, some light, some dark, some translucent with honesty and integrity, others opaque with self-love, resentment and despair. Desire is entangled in a forest of ambiguity, of willing and partly willing, of mixed motive and feeling… Here… we cannot be fully happy: all the complaint of our unhappiness lies in this dividedness and in our attachment to it, in our unwillingness to live in that land of the self where the love of God already dwells within us, unrecognized and unbefriended. We actually prefer the half-light of ambiguous desire, frightened by too much love (14).
Hearing God’s word, like all prayer, is not, in the first place, the product of our effort, our determination or our skill. It is a question of opening ourselves to what God is doing and saying in us. We will never fully understand what the Lord is saying, but, because it is God’s word, we listen prayerfully and attentively. The silence in which the Father converses with the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit always lies beyond us, in unapproachable light, and yet it is at work in our hidden centre. Through the coming of the Word, that light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overpower it ( Jn 1:5 ). The light shines in us when we recognise the Word as the source of our dignity and hope; we are addressed by Christ the Word and invited to share in the eternal life of God. The Second Vatican Council told us that, “a new impulse of spiritual life may be expected from increased veneration of the word of God which ‘stands forever’ (15).
The gifts of faith, hope and love entrust us to, and involve us in, that conversation of infinite love. Believing in, hoping in and loving the creative and redeeming love, the unlimited power and the unshakeable promise of God can bring deep peace. Jesus promised that those who come to him will not hunger and those who believe in him will never thirst ( Jn 6:35 ).
Satisfying and intensifying our thirst
But even God’s word as we hear it in this life can never fully satisfy our thirst. “We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith and not by sight” ( 2 Cor 5:6,7 ). So it is also true that, as God says in the Book of Sirach, “Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more” ( Sir 24:21 ).
An old story from India tells that a young man approached a wise teacher to ask how he would find God. The teacher led the enquirer into the middle of the river, suddenly pulled his head under the water and held it there until he had almost drowned. When the shocked young man had recovered the teacher asked, ‘What were you thinking while you were under water?’ He replied, ‘I was thinking, I want air, I need air more than anything else in the world’. ‘Well, when you want God as much as you wanted air’, the teacher said, ‘then you will find him’. Moses teaches the same lesson when he warns the people that their lack of faithfulness to God will result in being driven into exile from the Promised Land: “From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul” ( Dt 4:29 ).
The Word of God does not cooperate with the self-deception that occurs when we try to escape from our restless hunger. On the contrary by speaking to our hunger it intensifies it, for that hunger is our longing for God, the deepest truth of our being. The more fully we hear the Word of God the greater becomes our unsatisfied longing for the fulfilment it promises, the more we begin to see that we need God more than anything else in the world: “God has placed in human hearts a “hunger” for his word ( cf. Am 8:11 ), a hunger which will be satisfied only by full union with him”(16).
Learning to listen
Christ speaks to us in the Liturgy of the Word. We need to prepare ourselves to hear him. It is our responsibility to try to be present to our own hearts and to the hunger which the Word awakens, addresses and intensifies. It is our responsibility to try to hear what Jesus says to us.
A readiness to listen is the attitude which a person ought to seek and to adopt, but it depends on the Holy Spirit in a synergy between the human will and the action of the Spirit… This is essential if one does not wish to be simply listening to a dead word, or at most, listening in a purely intellectual and speculative way (17).
It is important to prepare ourselves to listen well by praying before Mass, asking that our hearts be open to the Word. An old Irish prayer, traditionally said before the Gospel, goes:
A Íosa, glan mo chroíse go gléglan gach lá;
A Íosa, cuir m’intinn faoi léirsmacht do ghrá.
Déan mo smaointe go fíorghlan agus briathra mo bhéil
Is, a Thiarna, a Dhé dhílis, stiúrigh choíche mo shaol (18).
It would be good to reflect on the Sunday readings, or at least on the Gospel, during the preceding week. We can do so especially by lectio divina or by the seven-step method. We might return to the readings when the liturgy is over to reflect on what they have said to us.
How often do even the most committed Christians and families talk to one another about how God’s word may have spoken to them in their Sunday Eucharist? Did it enlighten us? Did it reveal something about our need for God and for one another? Did it point to the need to respond more generously or more creatively to people who are marginalized in some way? We hear the word together; in fact it is the word that calls us to be God’s People. It challenges us not just as individuals but as a community, as families, as parishes, as a diocese, as the people God has called. If we never talk about that challenge to one another, how can we respond as a community?
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