Franciscan at Home

In this issue's "Inspired through Art" department, Jem Sullivan introduces a method of teaching with art that follows the contours of the ancient practice of lectio divina. In addition to offering a synopsis of this promising approach, she then shows how to use it to reflect upon a masterpiece from the Italian Renaissance. We live in a visual culture. From our waking moments to the day’s end, our senses are accessing the natural world and the visual culture that surrounds us. As catechists, we know this visual culture well from our daily experience of print, electronic and social media, mass communication, and entertainment; and the dominant visual culture also shapes those we are privileged to catechize. In a culture of images, how might the rich heritage of Christian art serve catechesis and evangelization? What catechetical methods might we employ to lead those we catechize to deeper faith in Christ through reflection on masterpieces of Christian art? In this article, we will consider the ancient spiritual practice of lectio divina and its adaptation today for reflection upon works of art. To gain a good sense for how lectio divina could be employed in this way, this method will be used to reflect in a catechetical manner upon a masterpiece painting of the Annunciation by Giovanni di Paolo. Why Attend to Beauty in Christian Art? Christian art speaks the language of the Incarnation. In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI drew attention to the theological basis of Christian art when he noted that, “the complete absence of images is incompatible with faith in the Incarnation of God.”[1] Both Saint John Paul II and Pope Francis urge catechists to attend to the vast Christian artistic tradition as a means of evangelization and catechesis. Pope John Paul II observed that, “in the history of human culture…believers have gained from art in their experience of prayer and Christian living…[I]n times when few could read or write, [artistic] representations of the bible were a concrete mode of catechesis…[since] every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.”[2] Pope Francis highlights the evangelizing role of art when he wrote, “every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus…So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith.”[3]

Silence is an invitation to receive a gift. Our part is to receive, respond, and then collaborate more fully with the work of the Holy Spirit. By learning to appreciate silence, we make the time and space needed to allow our desire for God to grow. As our desire for God grows, we in turn, respond more readily to his next invitation to silence. An Ecosystem for Active Reflection God doesn’t impose silence on us, nor does he coerce it from us; instead he waits in silence for us to turn toward him. When we attempt to force silence on ourselves or others as a penance or punishment, or out of our own need for control, we risk associating silence with emptiness or privation. Granted, there is a self-emptying which accompanies our entry into silence, but privation is not silence’s end. The sole purpose of a self-emptying silence is to make room for God’s fullness. Consider the full active silence that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI encourages: “In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth... Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected... For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘ecosystem’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence and words, images and sounds.”

The Car, the Barn, and the Woods

The goal of the catechist is to lead others to an encounter with the living God, leading them to conversion.

My father, Pat Brueggen, was my CCD instructor, youth minister, sports coach, but most importantly my role model for the faith. The man I got to see after the cleanup from our lock-ins and football games was a person whose faith was intertwined in the way he lived his life. Catholicism was not merely an 8-5 job, but it was what drove every facet of his life. The barn, the woods, and the car may not seem like primary places of catechesis, but this is where I learned my faith and grew closer to Jesus. My dad would listen to Scott Hahn cassette tapes while milking the cows and would always take time to pass that knowledge on to us. I would watch my father in the tree stand dressed in his blaze orange, shivering with a rosary in his hand because of the freezing temperatures. In the car, every time we would pass a Church, he would reverently make a sign of the cross to remind himself and those in the car that Jesus was present there. God was continually working through my father in a way that prompted me to want to have a relationship with God myself.

Over the course of my life, I have seen the Holy Spirit working in my dad, which drew me to want the same Spirit to live and be seen in me.

Andrew Brueggen
Holmen, Wisconsin

The Spirituality of the Catechist
What is the most important element in the catechetical process? Is it the doctrine to be passed on? Is it the method one employs? Is it the catechist’s preparation or the ability to adapt to the age and culture of the students? These are all essential, as the General Directory for Catechesis reminds us. These elements, however, depend on one indispensable and often overlooked factor: the spirituality of the catechist. Why is this so? Unlike subjects in the arts and sciences, the Christian faith cannot be adequately passed on unless the catechist lives that faith—unless it has penetrated his very being and transformed him from within. When this happens, he is no longer merely a teacher, but a living witness to something beyond himself. Like John the Baptist, he points to another, to the Lamb of God. The Guide for Catechists, a wonderful document about catechesis in mission territories, puts it this way: “The work of catechists involves their whole being. Before they preach the Word they must make it their own and live by it. The world…needs evangelizers who speak of a God they know and who is familiar to them, as if they saw the Invisible.”[i] The catechist, in fact, invites those he catechizes to share in the communion he himself has with Christ as a member of his body, the Church. Echoing St. John’s words in his first epistle, catechists can say: what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you, “that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1:1-3).

A catechist does not merely impart a body of knowledge, therefore; his catechesis “form[s] the personality of the believer.”[ii] The catechist offers his students an “apprenticeship of the entire Christian life.”[iii] The students will acquire from him a way of being, an attitude, a way of relating to the world. Those who have children know that they are deeply affected not only by the content of the words we speak, but by how we speak those words, by how we act, and by our attitudes, in a word, by how we live. Who am I? What gives me joy? What do I love? How do I respond to weakness, to poverty, to sickness, to sin? How do I look at other people in the world? All these fundamental attitudes are conveyed when we catechize. Do our students learn from us what it means to be a Christian?

Every new year brings new hopes, dreams, promises, and possibilities, as does the Year of Mercy! The Holy Father asks us to respond wholeheartedly to the call for a widespread and generous outpouring of mercy, despite the fact that this emphasis on mercy might appear to minimize the demands of justice and the law. Some may be surprised at this, as were the pharisees and scribes at the time of Jesus. At the same time, though, millions of Catholics and non-Catholics are delighted as they observe Pope Francis and his announcement of this Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. How Does This Document About Mercy Affect Us? During this Year of Mercy—Annus Misericordiae—we will contemplate and reflect the Face of Mercy, Christ’s Face, or the Misericordiae Vultus. We plunge into this contemplation in order to understand and become that which we contemplate, so all might find a path to conversion, a path home to our Father. The Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy outlines Pope Francis’ pastoral focus for the New Evangelization. In it, he stresses mercy as the core of a life-altering Gospel that can lead to deep metanoia, thus transforming our hearts into the meek and humble heart of Jesus, full of mercy and compassion. The pope believes, prophetically perhaps, that contemplating the face of mercy and allowing ourselves to be inwardly transformed by it will enable us to “be merciful like the Father” (cf. Lk 6:36), as the motto for the Jubilee Year pronounces. Thus transformed, we will become instruments of conversion and transformation among “insiders” and “outsiders” alike, and thereby change the world. The bull, Misericordiae Vultus, states: "Jesus speaks several times of the importance of faith over and above the observance of the law. It is in this sense that we must understand his words when, reclining at table with Matthew and other tax collectors and sinners, he says to the pharisees raising objections to him, “Go and learn the meaning of ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’ I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:13). Faced with a vision of justice as the mere observance of the law that judges people simply by dividing them into two groups – the just and sinners – Jesus is bent on revealing the great gift of mercy that searches out sinners and offers them pardon and salvation."[i]

At the end of his announcement of the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis invoked the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy: “Let us henceforth entrust this Year to the Mother of Mercy, that she turn her gaze upon us and watch over our journey: our penitential journey, our year-long journey with an open heart …”[1] This invocation of Mary, Mother of Mercy was underscored by the announcement that the Holy Year will begin on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Let’s think about these two titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary together and ask ourselves how they are related. Mary is the Immaculate Conception. This is how she identified herself to St. Bernadette. That she was immaculately conceived does not mean that she existed outside the economy of redemption, on her own independent track, but rather that she, by the merits of her Son, was redeemed in a unique way, preserved immune from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception.[2] The “stain” of original sin is, of course, not a physical stain, but rather it refers to the impairment of freedom and therefore of the ability to love. This is the legacy of original sin. For this reason, either we are afraid of the consequences of choosing the good, or some other alternative seems more attractive. We can even choose the right alternative but for the wrong reasons or for mixed motives. Consider the power disparity that exists between Mary, a creature, and her Creator! Although it would not have been a sin to say “no,” Mary could have said “yes” to her vocation out of fear of God’s power or out of attraction to the status God could provide her! In a case like this, “in order for Mary to be able to give the free assent of her faith … it was necessary that she be wholly borne by God’s grace.”[3] God’s grace is God’s mercy, and therefore Mary had to be wholly borne by God’s mercy. God’s mercy elected her for this vocation, and in and by God’s mercy she was able to assent with perfect freedom to God’s request. Because she is the Immaculate Conception, her whole being is defined by God’s mercy, and her “yes” is a completely unhindered act of assent to all of God’s merciful plans towards humankind that come to their fruition in the Incarnation. She is the “Mother of Mercy” in the sense that her motherhood is a gift of God’s mercy, and also in the sense that she is literally the Mother of the Incarnate Word, who is God’s mercy extended to us. Devotion to Mary, Mother of Mercy, helps us realize that the Incarnation, as God’s greatest work of mercy, is not an abstract concept but is a Person. “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2.6-7). Devotion to Mary deepens our awareness of how far that “self-emptying” mercy went, namely, to the point where the “Almighty became weak for us,”[4] in other words, to the point where he became the direct opposite of almighty, a helpless baby who “uttered crying noises like all other children”[5] and was completely dependent upon his mother. The divine compassion is concrete, not abstract, and the more devoted to Mary we are, the more a vista of the depth of this compassion, or mercy, dawns on our spiritual vision and we cry out: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven!” (Gen 28:17) The mercy of God is the gate of heaven, and in contemplating its awesomeness we stand on heaven’s threshold! There is nothing more powerful than the contemplation of God’s self-emptying mercy to prompt conversion.

This article is the final in a series on the spiritual life commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of St. Teresa of Avila. From the moment of her conversion, a wellspring of joy sprang up in Teresa’s heart from its most inner “dwelling place,” and she wanted to share this wellspring with others. She proposes the image of two large basins of water in a garden to explain the essential feature in her new life of prayer, source of this wellspring: With one, the water comes from far away through many aqueducts and the use of much ingenuity; with the other the source of the water is right there, and the trough fills without any noise (…). There is no need of any skill, nor does the building of aqueducts have to continue; but water is always flowing from the spring.[i] For our Doctor of the Church, the first basin symbolizes the work of the Spirit in meditation. It produces joy, but it is a human joy, the joy produced by a work well done. The second basin symbolizes contemplation, which invites God’s pure gift, which is so abundant that the capacity of the basin is too small to receive all the water. Never mind that, says Teresa: the Lord himself will enlarge the basin,[ii] according to this Psalm verse: I run the way of your commandments, for you enlarge my understanding [literally: my heart] (Ps 119:32).[iii] Thus the basin will grow as it is filled by water. This dilation of the heart filled by love and joy cannot be the fruit of human work. “There is no need of any skill,” only a loving faith is necessary.

Personally, I must admit that my mind often wanders during Mass, especially at daily Mass. Usually, I plop down in a pew thirty seconds before or after the priest has entered. My mind is racing and I’m distracted by a thousand little preoccupations.

At the beginning of her consecrated life, St. Teresa experienced a “surprising” joy: “I was filled with a joy so great, that it has never failed me to this day…I was filled with a new joy that surprised me, nor could I understand whence it came.”[i] At the same time, though, she was also attracted by worldly vanities, which tempted her even in the cloister.[ii] How did she become able to sacrifice immediate “vain” joys for lasting joy? She needed to experience a true conversion, a kind of liberation. Like Mary Magdalene, she reached joy through the experience of tears.
Fidelity to prayer was, for Teresa, the path of her conversion and the way to reach true joy.