May the Divine penetrate humanity as wine penetrates a piece of bread

The final essay in Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern is "A Life Between Two Fires: Chiara Lubich and Lay Sanctity," by Donald W. Mitchell. Mitchell identifies "three distinguishable dimensions" of the spirituality of Focolare, the movement Chiara founded:

1. Personal - union with God and unity with others through Christ
2. Communal - a collective sharing in the spiritual life of the Trinity
3. Participatory - partaking in the creative work of God and the redemptive work of Christ

 He explains the communal dimension of this spirituality in these words:

For Lubich, community not only has its traditional spiritual function as a place of formation, but, being an actual place of trinitarian life, it becomes a special means of communal sanctity.

What makes community "an actual place of trinitarian life" is the presence of Jesus wherever His disciples are -- "where two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I," and where Jesus is, so too is His Father and the Holy Spirit. This Trinitarian presence is found in every community of Christian disciples, but Focolare communities make a point of obtaining the fruit of this presence in the form of communal sanctification, not merely as the sum of the personal sanctification of the members of the community.

Echoing the words of St. John Chrysostom quoted in the book's introductory essay -- " it is [the married man's] duty to do all things equally with the solitary" -- Chiara describes what Mitchell calls "participatory sanctity" as "the journey of monasticism towards the world." But of course, non-professed laity aren't monks; she writes:

To become saints, you don't obey the bell of a superior calling you to prayer... You use the tools of your trade... the pen for a professor, the chisel for a sculptor -- that is your crucifix with which you go to sanctity.

And that, I think, is an excellent formula for lay sanctity in the 21st Century.

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Do your best today. Do God's best tomorrow.

Gertraud von Bullion was a co-founder of the Schoenstatt Women's Federation, and the subject of Ann W. Astell's essay, "Lay Apostolate and the Beruf of Getraud von Bullion." (Beruf is a German word meaning variously "profession," "vocation," or "calling.")

I know very little about either Schoenstatt or Gertraud, though I've heard vaguely good things about the former and Astell's essay makes of the latter an interesting and charismatic person. But the one passage the essay quotes from her writings that really struck a chord with me was this:

Should I throw everything away because I never bring anything to perfection? The choleric in me would like to do so... But is it not better that I retain my poverty, my incapacity for good, for anything more than mediocrity, and say, full of humility to my Mother, "See, I am not capable of serving and following your Son as I should. You, however, have called me here. Here I am.... Mother, help me that I at least attain to mediocrity, since I manage to do nothing better. And Mother, if you and my Savior expect more from me, give me the glowing flames of Love that overcome the obstacles of my pride and lead me to the cross. Give me each day anew the will to strive."

My own inclination, largely born of pride, is to not do at all a thing I can only do with mediocrity. Gertraud rightly saw her calling was to do her best, however poor her best might be, and to leave it in the hands of Him for Whom she worked to give her what she needed to do better.

She also saw that doing better would involve being led to the cross, which calls to mind Jesus' saying about calculating the cost before beginning construction on a new tower. Gertraud knew what the cost of discipleship was, she knew she was willing to pay it, and she knew Whom to ask for the funds to sustain her.

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The normal last thing

I've read Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism, and a few other scraps I've come across. Astrid O'Brien's essay, "Contemplation Along the Roads of the World: The Reflections of Raissa and Jacques Maritain," in Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern makes me think I should read a lot more of him -- and of Raissa as well. I hadn't realized they wrote as much as they did about living as lay Christians in the world.

Of the material quoted in the essay, my favorite passage is this, from Jacques's Notebooks:

What is normal for the Christian -- is to go straight to Paradise, to rejoin the Lord. Not only rejection to Hell, but even also passage through Purgatory... represents abnormal cases.

He means "normal," not in a statistical sense -- although he does reject the massa damnata opinion of Sts. Augustine and Thomas -- but in the sense that the graces available to the Christian who is a true disciple of Jesus, who loves Him and therefore keeps his Commandments, and is therefore united with the Church and a fruitful recipient of her Sacraments, ought to, as a matter of course, upon death go straight into the presence of God.

Hm. On second thought, until I read the Notebooks, I should probably say that's the meaning I derive from that brief quotation, in line with my other opinions.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that passage through Purgatory is abnormal with regard to himself. In conversation, I find two general cases:

1. Purgatory is not considered at all. Either Heaven is presumed ("when I get there the first thing I'll do is...") or the possibility of Heaven or Hell is acknowledged ("if I get to Heaven the first thing I'll do is..."). This case doesn't treat going straight to Heaven as normal so much as taken for granted. Often enough, it's only taken for granted for the purposes of the conversation; "the first thing I'll do when I get to Heaven" isn't a topic about the assurance of salvation.
2. Heaven is not considered at all.  Either Purgatory is presumed, or the possibility of Purgatory or Hell is acknowledged. Purgatory itself is almost always spoken of in one of two ways: how long one's stay will be; and how this or that bit of earthly suffering is reducing one's otherwise-sure-to-be lengthy stay in Purgatory.

Suppose, though, it's true that passage through Purgatory is an abnormal case. What would that mean about the common Catholic presumption of a lengthy passage?

First, I should say that such a presumption is often made in preference to the alternative. Given the dogma of Purgatory, it is a far stronger claim of my own sanctity to assert that I won't pass through it than the mere claim that, eventually, I will enter Heaven. The longer the passage takes, the weaker my claim of personal holiness. One thing Catholics don't do in ordinary conversation is claim to be saints. Naming and claiming a long time in Purgatory is the Catholic way of being less-holy-than-thou.

Then, too, I suspect quite often there's a somewhat honest assessment of one's own distance from God. If my life as a Christian has been abnormal to date -- if I'm not an altogether true disciple of Jesus, if I only love Him to a point and therefore only keep his Commandments to a middling degree, and am therefore not a particularly fruitful recipient of the Church's Sacraments -- then, sure, my path after death might be expected to be abnormal as well.

All that granted, and apart from how we express our thoughts to others, the question remains: Is the expectation of the need for purgation after death a cop-out? Is it settling for being good enough, despite Jesus' teaching that we are to be perfect? Worse, is it a denial of the power of God's grace to perfect us in this life?

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Servant of God's Elisabeth Leseur's characteristics of lay sanctity

In her essay, "Elisabeth Leseur: A Strangely Forgotten Modern Saint," Janet K. Ruffing, R.S.M., proposes seven characteristics of this Servant of God's lay sanctity.

The essay's sub-title notwithstanding, I've come across frequent references to the Leseurs -- Elisabeth's husband Felix converted from atheism after her death, due largely to reading her journal that revealed her hidden spiritual life.

Here are the seven characteristics identified by Ruffing, along with my clumsy descriptions. The interested reader is referred to the original essay, linked above, for fuller details.

1. An apostolic strategy in a hostile, secular milieu. From the sound of it, today's New Atheists would have been right at home in the pre-World War I French society the Leseurs lived in. Outnumbered everybody:1, Elisabeth chose the path of non-confrontation, despite the frequent wounds inflicted by the conversation of her vocally anti-Catholic friends.
   
   This wasn't a purely passive approach. She saw her role as trying "always to understand everyone and everything. Not to argue, to work through contact and example; to dissipate prejudice, to show God and make Him felt without speaking of him; to strengthen one's intelligence, enlarge one's soul; to love without tiring, in spite of disappointment and indifference... to open wide one's soul to show the light in it and the truth that lives there, and let that truth create and transform, without merit of ours but simply by the fact of its presence in us."
   
2. A redemptive and transformative use of her physical and emotional suffering. Hepatitis, cancer, and other illnesses added to Elisabeth's suffering over her husband's and friends' anti-clerical atheism. Ruffing cites St. Catherine of Siena's "mysticism of suffering," devotion to the Sacred Heart, and Jesus' own life-giving passion and death as the principal sources of her own approach to redemptive suffering.
3. A mature sense of agency and surrender. Elisabeth understood a woman's life as one of duties: "to bear children ... to develop unceasingly one's intelligence, to strengthen one's character, to become a creature of thought and will... to view life with joy and to face it with energy... to be able to understand one's time and not despair of the future." These duties in turn were ordered to the Christian duty of bringing Christ to those who suffer and to those who do not know Him.
4. An active intellectual life. Even before her re-conversion, Elisabeth cultivated her mind. After she returned to regular practice of the Faith, she studied theology and philosophy -- the latter because it "throws light on many things and puts the mind in order."
5. Devotion to her husband and [extended] family. This she saw as her principal duty, as a woman and as a Christian, notwithstanding her husband's hostility to her faith.
6. A lay pattern of devotional and ascetical life. She developed her own rule of life, combining the discipline of daily prayer with an active home and social presence.According to Ruffing, her home-grown asceticism was "based on silence [with respect to discussing religion with her husband], self-giving, and austerity."
7. A relationship of mutuality and support in her friendship with Souer Gaby. Souer Gaby was a nun with whom Elisabeth shared "a profound spiritual friendship," mostly through a series of letters written in the three years prior to Elisabeth's death in 1914. After years of being essentially alone on her walk of faith, she finally found someone to walk with her.

This seems to me like a complete program for sanctity according to her state in life. The private devotional part sustains and is given focus by the interpersonal and public part, which in turn is shaped by the knowledge and direction obtained through study, prayer, and contemplation. The consolations and fruitfulness of communion with a close friend in Christ may be undervalued today, particularly by those who work out their own rule of life principally through reading and self-study.

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'Twas ever thus

I've now finished reading Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern: A Search for Models, edited by Ann W. Astell (which you can still order for $5, through August 15, using the checkout code "NDEOVR13"). I found the essays on the modern models far stronger, as a group, than the essays on the medieval models. Partly because the latter group took a more academic approach (even skeptical, in the case of Patricia Healy Wasyliw's "The Pious Infant: Developments in Popular Piety during the High Middle Ages"), and partly because, since the models themselves weren't particularly trying to model anything, the essayists tended to try harder to draw a lesson or make a point or link the material to a theme, whereas the essays on 20th Century models -- Elisabeth Leseur, Gertraud von Bullion, the Maritains, Dorothy Day, and Chiara Lubich -- could allow the models themselves to speak their own lessons.

While her essay on medieval children whose deaths at a young age produced religious cults was by far my least favorite, Patricia Healy Wasyliw did write what is by far my favorite sentence of the collection -- in fact, one of my favorite sentences ever. In reference to the short but storied life of St. Nicholas the Pilgrim, she states:

Throughout his career, popular opinion was divided on the question of whether he was holy or insane.

To-may-to, to-mah-to.

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A charismatic lay woman

In her essay, "Catherine of Siena and Lay Sanctity in Fourteenth-Century Italy," in Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern, Karen Scott makes a suggestion I haven't come across before in my limited reading on St. Catherine:

Within fifteen years of her death, when Raymond of Capua, her former confessor and disciple, finished composing the Legenda Major, he expressed a relatively cautious evaluation of her lay activity... his narrative deemphasizes her lay status in a number of important ways.... He did not draw attention to the private nature of these three religious commitments [St. Catherine cut off her hair to avoid marriage; she made a private vow of virginity; she experienced a mystical marriage to Jesus], which in fact were not ecclesiastically sanctioned, but rather he stressed the mystical character of her experiences to give them a very special legitimacy...

...Raymond's account of Catherine's life reflects a certain uneasiness about her apostolic activities that is not present in her own writings... Raymond attributes Catherine's ability to convert sinners and exhort churchmen successfully not to her ordinary words and example, as she did, but to an extraordinary intervention of God's supernatural power... Raymond's portrait of Catherine actually emphasizes her extraordinary and charismatic character and champions an almost monastic and contemplative model of sanctity. [emphasis added]

 According to Professor Scott, this deemphasis of St. Catherine's lay status is reflected in her iconography:

Just how successful Raymond was in deemphasizing Catherine's lay status and involvement in public affairs is evident in the development of early modern iconography based on his hagiographical masterpiece. While the earliest visual representations of Catherine show her dressed in the late-medieval lay tertiary's habit -- white tunic and veil, black cape -- in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the iconography evolved significantly to give her the semblance of a nun. Artists added scapular, rosary, and black veil, and they represented her almost exclusively in moments of visionary trance.

Taking the last point first, I doubt Bl. Raymond (d. 1399) bears much responsibility for Sixteenth Century tastes in iconography -- or, for that matter, for Sixteenth Century knowledge of Fourteenth Century lay Dominican habits.

As to the rest, my own inexpert opinion is that we don't need to infer an intention of deemphasizing St. Catherine's lay status to explain the Legenda Major. Bl. Raymond was her spiritual director and student, not her administrative assistant, so her spirituality would naturally be of primary importance to him. He freely admits that a lot of what she tells him of her spiritual experiences and infused knowledge goes over his head -- I have this advantage over Bl. Raymond, that I can read about these things from a distance of hundreds of years, with a canonization and a Doctorate of the Church to add context, while he had to wrestle with them from across the table -- so trying to fit them to familiar patterns makes sense apart from a specific desire to downplay her lay status.

And I'll suggest that, to Bl. Raymond and his contemporaries, St. Catherine's lay status was absolutely evident. In Fourteenth Century Italy, Religious Women = Nuns = Cloistered; the Third Orders, meanwhile, were flourishing and well-known. That people today are confused over St. Catherine's canonical status doesn't mean people of her own time and place were, so we shouldn't expect Bl. Raymond to write with an eye to avoiding confusion he never encountered. In this light, the mystical character of her experiences is precisely what gives them a very special legitimacy. Either she was responding to God, or she was just making stuff up; I can't see how it helps the argument that the laity have a unique contribution to make to the Church to suggest that that contribution be discerned apart from God's will.

Finally, on the point that Bl. Raymond attributed St. Catherine's successes to God's power working through her, while St. Catherine regarded it as her ordinary words and example, I see this as another example of those around a holy person being better able to gauge her holiness than she is (the closer you are to God, I'm told, the more you focus on the remaining distance). More precisely, it sounds like Bl. Raymond recognized the charisms that St. Catherine exercised -- Pope Paul VI famously referred to her "charism of exhortation" -- while she simply exercised them in a way that was, for her, perfectly natural. Isn't that how charisms work?

The essay concludes with this suggestion:

Perhaps it will be the responsibility of another era to reevaluate the significance of St. Catherine's lay contribution to the church and to learn new lessons from it.

I agree that there's plenty St. Catherine can teach the laity about their contributions to the Church, though I suspect the generations of and immediately following Vatican II may be too close to the fire ignited by its declaration of the universal call to holiness to do the job adequately. At the folk level, at least, St. Catherine seems merely to be the model for writing stern public smackdowns of bishops and popes.

Maybe I've fallen into an uncritical acceptance of Bl. Raymond's deemphasis of St. Catherine's lay status, but I have to say that the lessons of St. Catherine's involvement in public affairs cannot be learned apart from the lessons of her involvement in mystical contemplation of that mad lover, the crucified Jesus. I would find the exhortations I see around me a lot more charismatic if they were more evidently the product, as they were with St. Catherine, of God calling an unwilling exhorter out of her cell of self-knowledge and divine union.

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The laicization of the laity

I've started reading Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern: A Search for Models, edited by Ann W. Astell. (which you can order for $5 through August 15 using the checkout code "NDEOVR13"). The idea of the book is to look at how holiness among the laity was recognized in the centuries before the Counter-Reformation and in the 20th Century, as potential models for those trying to answer the universal call to holiness following Vatican II. ("Models" not in the sense of abstractions that represent behavior, but in the sense of persons who model the behavior.)

The editor's introductory essay points out that the concept of lay sanctity depends, not just on the concept of sanctity in general, but also on the concept of laity. The technical distinction is between lay Christians and sacramentally ordained Christians, but the practical distinction is more between non-ordained/non-professed Christians and ordained-and/or-professed. And now that religious sisters have left the cloister (among other reasons), medieval lay, non-ordained, non-professed saints like St. Catherine of Siena look a whole lot more like ordained-and/or-professed saints to us than they did to their contemporaries.

The essay made good use of a passage in a homily of St. John Chrysostom (I quote the on-line translation, for ease of cutting and pasting). After recommending work, study, vigils, and fasts to young men to overcome unchaste desires, he says:

What then are these things to us (one says) who are not monastics? Do you say this to me? Say it to Paul, when he says, "Watching with all perseverance and supplication,"  when he says, "Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof." For surely he wrote not these things to solitaries [monks] only, but to all that are in cities. For ought the man who lives in the world to have any advantage over the solitary, save only the living with a wife? In this point he has allowance, but in others none, but it is his duty to do all things equally with the solitary.

Moreover the Beatitudes pronounced by Christ, were not addressed to solitaries only: since in that case the whole world would have perished, and we should be accusing God of cruelty. And if these beatitudes were spoken to solitaries only, and the secular person cannot fulfill them, yet He permitted marriage, then He has destroyed all men. For if it be not possible, with marriage, to perform the duties of solitaries, all things have perished and are destroyed, and the functions of virtue are shut up in a strait.

If it is the non-professed layman's duty to do all things equally with the monk, then the monastic ideal is the lay ideal.And since, for the most part, monks are much better than non-professed laymen at being monks, if we take St. John literally, then lay sanctity is merely, and inherently, an inferior version of monastic sanctity (although a particular layman may out-holy a particular monk).

I'm not sure we should take St. John quite that literally; I suspect he wasn't trying to put layfolk into the monastic mold so much as putting both layfolk and monks into the same, Christian mold, to live all the virtues according to the Beatitudes.

But "perform the duties of solitaries" does seem to have been the nub or crux of much of the spirituality proposed to the laity over the centuries. The virtues acted on in the world are cultivated in contemplation -- an excellent plan indeed. And yet, given that the laity "exercise the apostolate in fact by their activity directed to the evangelization and sanctification of men and to the penetrating and perfecting of the temporal order through the spirit of the Gospel," might there not be something in the activity of perfecting the temporal order -- something characteristically lay -- that serves to sanctify them? Might it not be natural to the laity to cultivate virtues in action?

To put it another way: the mission of the laity is to bring, not the cloister, but Christ to the world.

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