The article of the month

This Month… by Teresa Caldecott Cialini

June is brimming with major Solemnities. Isn’t that word so evocative? Our cup is overflowing with causes for joy and reflection. Pentecost falls on the 8th, with the Holy Trinity and the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ following on the next two Sundays, and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus coming to us on Friday 27th. These feasts of the Lord flow from, and into, one another: all are pieces of what we Christians mean when we proclaim that God is love (1 Jn 4:8). If that wasn’t enough to be getting on with, we also celebrate birth of the Herald of that Love Incarnate in the second person of the Trinity—Saint John the Baptist—on the 24th. Not to mention the receivers (and lead evangelisers!) of that same Love, known to them in Christ and internalised in them by the third person of the Holy Trinity. I speak, of course, of Saints Peter and Paul on 29th June.

“Overflowing” is an image that is essential to understanding why we say that the One God, author and end of all creation, is a Trinity. On the face of it, this doctrine can seem obscure, but in fact it underpins absolutely everything else about the Christian vision of reality. Wiser people than I have said that the root of our failure to live out any aspect of Christian ethics lies in a failure to grapple with and embody the Trinitarian dynamic. This applies whether we are talking about marriage or celibacy, social teaching or Church hierarchy.

True Love

We know God loves us: he showed us that by suffering and dying for us, and rising again to redeem us from our sins. We turned from him, but he created a path back to his Heart, along which he calls and coaxes us like a lover (cf. the Song of Songs). But to say not just that God loves, but IS Love: that is another kettle of fish. If we can take that on board, we will be able to figure out what true love is. It has something to do with being willing to suffer for the beloved, yes, but also has a natural need to leap beyond the binary, closed sphere of the Lover and Beloved.

The feast of feasts this month speaks to us of how we can pursue fruitfulness in the spiritual life and our earthly relationships. The art chosen for our essay at the back of the issue this month depicts a Last Supper that foreshadows both the sacrifice of the Passion and the joy of the heavenly banquet when the redeemed creation is caught up into the Divine life: both aspects of the Eucharist that we honour on Corpus Christi and unpack at every Mass.

At the close of the Easter season, Christ tells his Apostles that while he has shown them the Father, the Spirit of truth will come to them to glorify the Son and draw them into the love between the Father and Son. As we see at Pentecost, that love is immediately dynamic and fruitful: it is what creates the Church. In Peter, Paul, our Lady, the Apostles—all creative collaborators with the Holy Spirit—we see what is possible when a heart is fully open to this gift: the gift overflows into the world. So we pray, “Light immortal, light divine,/ visit thou these hearts of thine,/ and our inmost being fill….” (See pp. 123-124 and the colourful depiction of Pentecost on our cover.)

Given, but not Broken

If we are called to follow Christ’s way of loving—his way of giving—we need to invite the Holy Spirit in so that, though we give our all, we may be ultimately given back to ourselves. Christ gives us his Body, and though it is broken in the form of bread in every Mass we must remember not one of his bones were broken, and his garment remained indivisible (see John 19:23-37). As the Sequence for Corpus Christi puts it (pp. 337-339): “Form of bread not Christ is broken,/ not of Christ, but of his token,/ is state or stature altered.”

In England and Wales, we meditate upon the nature of the priesthood, rooted in the Eternal Priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ on 12th June, close on the heels of the Memorial of our Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church on the 9th. The priest, like Saint John in the Book of Revelation, looks to the Eschaton and hears the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and says “Here am I! Send me.” The mother looks to the imminent needs of her children and says likewise.

Both the vocation of parenthood and that of priesthood show just how literal and physical the call to give oneself up in love and be broken can be. Consider, for example, a Priest’s call to celibacy, or his submission to getting called on at any hour of the day or night to attend to the sick or the dying. Consider a parent’s physical strain holding a needy child for hours at a time when they have barely slept themselves, or a mother’s body breaking itself down to create milk to feed her child. All Christian vocations, however, call for a physical assent, not just an intellectual one, if we are to live with integrity. Any vocation will be essentially sterile if not open to the Comforter’s renewal, refreshment, and creativity. God has promised that he will fall like dew on his people and they shall bloom like the lily,/ and thrust out roots like the poplar,/ [their] shoots will spread far (Hosea 14:5): an image the priest echoes in Eucharistic Prayer II when he calls down the Holy Spirit to bless the gifts on the altar “like the dewfall,/ so that they may become for us/ the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

The Prophet Ezekiel (37:1-14) witnessed to the fact that, though our bones are scattered and our all hope appears lost, God can knit us back together and breathe his life into us. Hopelessness is described as dryness in this vision of Ezekiel’s, but we have to keep asking “Heal our wounds, our strength renew;/ on our dryness pour thy dew” until the journey of life reaches its close.