The Fellowship of the Unlikely
As the month of June begins, and the post-Pentecost festivals unfold, it’s hard for me not to see in the Church an abundance of supernatural vitality, and she revels in it in her Liturgy. We hold up the Sacred Heart of Our Savior as the emblem of how greatly, inconceivably we are loved in spite of ourselves. We honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary who also, even though we are the reason her Son died, loves us which such tenderness and devotion. Corpus Christi is another festival like this, which, as Pope Benedict XVI taught us, is a Thursday intimately related with that Thursday In Cena Domini, the Holy Thursday of the Last Supper. All these feasts after Pentecost remind us that Our Lord walks with us in the Sacraments and in his Church until the end of the age, and it exactly in that confidence that we brave any wind and storm.
An image which I often return to in meditating on these ancient feasts is one taken from the 2nd century patristic work Shepherd of Hermas. In it, the visionary seems an image of the Church as an aged woman, laden down with sins. Later, after performing penance, she looks younger, but with white hair. Finally, he sees her as a youthful maiden. Hermas’ Guardian Angel, the eponymous ‘shepherd’, explains that this is an image of the Church on earth, as well as a portrait of his own spiritual evolution, as he grows in repentance and in love of God.
The Feasts of June place this youthful vitality of the Church on full display, and I always marvel at how the month ends on the feast of the two ‘Princes of the Apostles’, Sts. Peter and Paul. These men in many respects could not have been more different. They differed in temperament and vision, and even social class. Yet if the famous words of St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians are any indication, their relationship was marked by a great deal of mutual respect, even when they disagreed. Their influence upon the Roman Church in particular, and Christianity as a whole, can almost never be underestimated. There are some secular scholars out there who have even said they could envision a Christianity without Christ (an absurd notion to we who believe in the historical Christ), but they say that Christianity as we know it would not have existed without St. Paul. That sort of talk was a backhanded tribute to the power of apostolicity, and how our Lord providentially has constituted the Church from her beginnings.
In an age of faux unity among our Bishops, with perhaps many holding opinions and teachings contrary to the faith, the exchange of the two Apostles can show us something of how necessary is unity of faith, while at the same time having the boldness of fraternal correction. The Apostles took special pains to test and to authenticate their teachings. Hence Paul, even after years of receiving special revelation in Arabia, sought after the original “college” of Apostles to have his own insights confirmed by those directly chosen by Christ. He shows us henceforth a mark of a truly apostolic man or woman: no matter how aloft they may be carried in their religious enthusiasm, the person who takes apostolicity seriously always compares his or her beliefs with that of Christ and his chosen witnesses. This takes no small amount of humility, but it is exactly that humility which grounds us in what is most authentic and clear.
The prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours and the Mass for Sts. Peter and Paul make one more element emphatic for us in our assessment of them as true Apostles: their courage. How easy it is for us to lack courage today! Yet our ancestors, fortified by their example, gave themselves over to death for the sake of Christ and the Gospel. Even the hymn found in the Breviary for the Feast, O Decora Lux, pauses to speak of the two purpurati:
O felix Roma, quae tantorum Principum, es purpurata pretioso sanguine!
O Happy [Fortunate] Rome, which is made purple by the precious blood of such great Princes!
There are numerous ironies in this, mostly in that it is through blood and self-sacrifice that Rome was truly made ‘purple’. In other words, it was not through the temporal power and self-aggrandizement of the Emperors of Rome that the city because great, but through their martyrdom. Whereas the Empire shed other people’s blood, and as Whore Babylon, was drunk on the slaughter, the Virgin Church in her most outstanding members cover the Imperial City with their preaching and their ultimate act of love: martyrdom. In this, they participate intimately in Christ’s redemptive act, which redeems the whole world. From Christ’s Ascension until the end of the world, we will always need apostolic men and women willing to lay down their blood to redeem every nation, tribe and tongue on earth.
Every Apostle of Christ in the Scriptures was quite ‘unlikely’ in the sense that they were probably not the ones who would emerge from a feasibility or launch committee. Most of the Apostles, in one way or another, could be said in a way to have failed. Although legends abound, one rarely hears of the achievements of St. Jude Thaddeus or St. Bartholomew, much less achievements which we can fully authenticate. This should remind us that apostolic work is, to use the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Apocalypse of John, ‘foundational’. The only place where these foundations are made of precious stones is in the City of God. In this-earthly terms, they are ground bones and crushed flesh. Yet our Christian ancestors cherished such trophies. In terms of the world, the willingness to be an apostle means a willingness to be obscure. All involve a call to lay down new foundations, each one based upon the cornerstone, who is Christ Jesus, Our Lord.
This should not make us think of the work of the Apostles as “fragments shored against my ruins”, in the splendid imagery of T.S. Eliot’s classic poem. To return again to the Shepherd of Hermas, the Church is also presented as a tower being fitted with various types of stones until the end of the world. We do not know what unique, indispensable shape we possess in order to be set into this building of living stones. What we do know is that if we have been baptized, we have a proximate call to be built into that temple, unlikely and strange as we are.
Sts. Peter and Paul, along with the Memorial of the Roman Martyrs the following day, show us the fruits in human hearts of the one Sacred Heart, and their common nourishment at the Eucharistic Feast. Is it coincidence that one such martyr in Rome, although himself not from Rome, St. Ignatius, should call himself “the wheat of God…ground by the teeth of the wild beasts…the pure bread of Christ” (Letter to the Romans)? As a Church Father and Martyr, he knew that to be a follower of Christ is to be ground into the one loaf, for “our blessing cup is a communion with the blood of Christ” (Psalm of Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper). Even if we are not as dramatically used as St. Peter, St. Paul, or St. Ignatius, we all are ground flour, and pressed grapes, and our destiny as such is to be a pure offering for the Eternal Liturgy which we image imperfectly here.
When, I pray, we all reach heaven, I think part of our ‘accidental’ beatitude will be the wonder and joy with which we will behold so many different people taking their place among the blessed. An everlasting day will come, when we will be misfits no longer, but perfectly fitted, in the New and Eternal Jerusalem. Until then, we build on The Rock.
