There's an excellent article by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (4/11) about Pope Benedict XVI and John Paul the Great. It's worth reading, and so I'm linking to it here. Here's an extract:
"John Paul made you burst into tears. Benedict makes you think. It is more pleasurable to weep, but at the moment, perhaps it is more important to think."
HT: Jeff Vehige
Apostle St Matthew
El Greco
1606
"In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery."
Upon reading an extract of John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists yesterday, I pulled up the document, printed it out, and have been thinking of it since. Here's more:
"Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves. Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but 'fully reveals man to man.' In Christ, God has reconciled the world to himself. All believers are called to bear witness to this; but it is up to you, men and women who have given your lives to art, to declare with all the wealth of your ingenuity that in Christ the world is redeemed: the human person is redeemed, the human body is redeemed, and the whole creation which, according to Saint Paul, 'awaits impatiently the revelation of the children of God' (Rom 8:19), is redeemed. The creation awaits the revelation of the children of God also through art and in art. This is your task. Humanity in every age, and even today, looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny.
...
"Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'.
...
"... may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal."
"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song."
My meditation this week is from Pope John Paul II. And I will not be changing it for a few days. My reasons are (1) the season we find ourselves in, and (2) the poetry of the meditation has gotten into my very soul. And I want to keep it there.
But I would like to begin to explore it.
Today is Palm/Passion Sunday. It begins Holy Week. And this week is the apex of the Church calendar, within it is the totality of our being. As Fr Stephen Freeman says: All is Pascha.
John Paul the Great often said, "Do not be afraid." And these words are the exposition and rising action of our lives, our two-act plays. O! The comfort these words bring. And they lead to the blessed climax and denouement: We are the Easter people. All is Pascha.
Our lives turn upon this week. They climax in the Triduum and resolve with a shout. And after, we live in the New Day, the day without an end - we live in Pascha.
So there is nothing to fear.
But, even still, I do.
I fear failure. I fear being dismissed and rejected. I fear the darkness within and without. I fear having to die that Christ might live in me. I fear that others will discover that I am a fraud. A hack. A poser. A sinner.
What is it you fear?
Do not be afraid. Do not abandon yourselves to despair.
We are the Community of Pardon. Our gospel is reconciliation. It is peace. We, each one of us, entered the kingdom through pardon. And each one of us remains in it by that same mercy so freely given.
We are loved. Therefore, brothers and sisters, do not abandon yourselves to despair.
Lent begins. It is a season of penance, of conversion.
I want to convert and convert and convert until I am converted. I want to be born again, again. Wash my feet, Lord. Make me fragile and light, incarnating hope and expectation and wonder. Jesus. To set aside myself for her and him and you and them. I want Christ to be delivered into the heart of my world, to pick up where I have left off, to do what I have failed to do, to be when I am not.
I want to want it.
Have mercy on me, God, in your goodness.
Lent is the time to come back to our self. It is a time of particular intimacy with God, in the secret of the heart and of the conscience. It is in this private intimacy with God that the essential work of Lent is accomplished: the work of conversion.
And in this inner secret, in this intimacy with God in the full truth of the heart and of the conscience, words like those of the psalms of today's liturgy resound as one of the most profound confessions that man has ever done to God: “Have mercy on me, God, in your goodness; in your abundant compassion blot out my offense. Wash away all my guilt; from my sin cleanse me. For I know my offense; my sin is always before me. Against you alone have I sinned; I have done such evil in your sight that you are just in your sentence, blameless when you condemn” (Ps 50,1-6).
These are words that purify, words that transform. They transform man from the inside. Let us recite them often during Lent. And above all, let us strive to renovate the spirit that leads them, the inspiration that has rightly so given these words a force of conversion. For Lent is essentially an invitation to conversion. The works of alms of which the Gospel speaks about today open the way to this conversion. Let us practice them as much as we can. But first of all, let us try to meet God interiorly in our whole life, in all it is made of, so as to reach this conversion in deepness, of which the penitential psalm of today's liturgy is filled.
– John Paul the Great, Homily for Ash Wednesday, 1983 (©Libreria Editrice Vaticana)
