Monthly Archives: June 2014

I have been finishing up a number of projects on my desk, always satisfying, and looking ahead to preparing materials for our Sunday Summers in the Church School at our local parish. This year the theme is “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” We’ll plant flowers (and water them too), sing the hymn, hear stories about God’s creation, and do simple crafts. My favorite is always the singing.

So just now I sent to the printer the final draft of Raymond Raynes’ Darkness No Darkness, a series of retreat meditations that our American Church Union is republishing this summer. Father Raynes, late Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, England has planted many seeds in many souls with his remarkable words. Now, his words fill my thoughts, banning the darkness, shining bright light into newly discovered rooms in my own heart:

I am to be the home of Christ; Christ is to be the life of my soul.  I am to be an agent because Christ dwells in me, and I am in his hands, I am to be an agent of eternal charity. The moment we realize this, the tension begins – the pressure on our conscience.

It is as though the many strands of our faith are woven together in these pages to make them more concrete, more visible, more… useful. I find when I understand the economy of heaven and earth, the will and plan of God, my life becomes more sane. In this case, to be the home of Christ and Christ to be my life (not just in my life) is an image and idea that has bordered my thoughts the last few days. On other pages in this short book Father Raynes speaks of our hearts uniting with Christ’s heart, so that the Christian burns with the fire of God, the fire of love.

And so this morning as we celebrated the Feast Days of St. Peter and St. Paul, I could see how Christ took over that big fisherman’s heart and moved right in. St. Peter must have felt that tension the moment he left his fishing nets behind, and the pressure grew, not making him perfect but pulling him toward perfection, to be an agent of eternal charity, a bold conduit for the love of God on earth. And St. Paul’s transformation on the way to Damascus was equally dramatic, turning this brilliant Pharisee into the world’s greatest theologian, one who would explain in stunningly poetic passages the charity of God, the movement of the holy into the earthly, Christ into us and we into him.

It’s a simple idea, really, being the home of Christ, to be always listening for the nudge of the Holy Spirit, to truly see those around us. It is a truth, a reality, that grows when watered by worship and prayer and sacraments. Slowly, the tension, the pressure on the conscience, is eased if not resolved, and we sense more and more that Christ is indeed dwelling within us and we in him. The light shines in the darkness. We see.

We surely can’t do this alone, but only through his Body on earth, the Church. This is good news, joyful news. For through the Church I can enjoy Christ’s movement toward me, his making his home in my heart with each prayer, each Eucharist, each confession and absolution. We need only say yes and the drama begins in each of us.

It is when the created creature, man, welcomes the Creator and their hearts become one that all makes sense. All things are bright and beautiful, wise and wonderful… It is when Love enters our world again and again on every altar and into every soul that life becomes true-ly de-light-full. For then we know, as the Psalmist wrote, darkness is no darkness:

Indeed, time shall fly on the wings of the morning, but all the while God’s hand shall lead me; he shall hold me in his palm. For I am cradled, always, in the bright love of God.

We have been meandering through Venice, following the tiny lines on the map to campos (squares), along calles (alleys), over ponti (bridges). The crowds are dense around Piazza San Marco, but lessen in the neighborhoods. 

So today we headed away from the shoving crowds toward one of my favorite churches in Venice, San Zaccaria. The walls are covered in dark masterpieces and many visit this church for the famous art. But I was  more interested in the bodies rather than the paintings, for here likes Zaccaria, father of John the Baptist. He was where I recalled, in the south aisle. His sarcophagus seemed to have been cleaned and restored, now with better lighting. And there above him, in his own tomb, lay a second great saint, the fourth century Doctor of the Church, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria.

The close proximity of the two saints made me smile: the man of no words, struck dumb by the angel when he doubted Elizabeth’s pregnancy, lying near the man who whose words defended the Trinity against Arius’s heresy. Zaccaria was speechless; Athanasius spoke the truth that led to the formation of the Nicene Creed.

Briefly, the Arian heresy stated that God the Father and God the Son were not of the same substance, that the Father created the Son. Athanasius defended the One God in Three Persons, the Trinity, saying that Christ had always existed, was the Word himself from the beginning. Most Christian Churches espouse this Trinitarian doctrine, and the Nicene Creed, the statement compiled by the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, added certain phrases to the simpler Apostles’ Creed to specifically counter this Arian heresy. In essence, the Arian heresy is held by those today who claim Christ was a good man, a moral teacher, but not God. A big difference.

So I like to pay my respects and give thanks for St. Athanasius who, because of his great faith, was given the words to mold our beliefs into the shape of the Nicene Creed. And St. Zaccaria reminds me of the curse of doubt, reminds me that words are withheld when faith is weak. In the end, I must wait silently for the action of God in my life; I must trust each day that his spirit will not leave me, but will guide my thoughts, actions, and words. I must pray for this to happen. I must say yes to God.

There is a time for silence, for only in silence can we listen, can we hear the voice of God. So we retreated from the shoving crowds of San Marco’s piazza, the screams and the loudspeakers, the boat horns and the hawkers shoving goods at us, barring our path. We retreated to the alleys and waters and bridges of the old neighborhoods, getting lost of course, but finding our way back eventually.

It is easy to lose one’s way here in Venice. It is easy to take a wrong turn and then another wrong turn and end up at a dead end, all the while certain of the route. So, too, in life it is easy to lose one’s way, easy to be tripped and sidetracked by the hawkers of all kinds of wares. Without the lesson of Zaccaria and the words of Athanasius we would have less of a map to follow, if any. Others contributed to our map of faith, the path through life to heaven. The many saints, those who we meet in our daily lives and those who we honor with calendar feasts draw and have drawn the lines on our map. But it is the baptized faithful who form the Body of Christ, the Church, that makes sense of what God is telling us, prompting us. It is the Church that preserves and protects the truth, handing us the map.

A few bridges away we visited St. John the Baptist’s church, probably built over an earlier chapel dedicated to this son of Zaccaria and Elizabeth. Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), the Baroque composer, was baptized here and was a member of the parish. I admired the colorful and balanced high altar painting of Christ’s baptism by John, but my thoughts kept returning to Vivaldi, particularly since his music played in the background. A north aisle chapel had artifacts dealing with Vivaldi’s baptism. A Catholic priest, he worked in an orphanage; many of his compositions were written for a female ensemble there. Although influential throughout Europe (Bach admired him), he died in poverty. The last century has witnessed a Vivaldi revival.

Vivaldi spoke with music just as Athanasius used words. And Zaccaria, after his time of silence, waiting for the birth of his son, spoke out the name John when asked what the child’s name would be. He had learned to wait and wonder and trust. Just so, we all must wait for the Holy Spirit to produce good within us, we must listen to the music of faith, following the Church’s teachings protected by the words of men like Athanasius.

In this way we shall map our route to heaven, and even, God willing, add a few signs along the way, composing for the world whatever God desires.

Yesterday we disembarked from the train and rolled our luggage to a water taxi. Soon we were motoring up the Grand Canal, gaping at palaces that tilted into the waters. Venice is like a dowager queen, with lacy white stone and red tile roofs, the blues of the sea at her feet and the blues of the sky her crown. Everywhere the domes of her churches proclaim her Christian past and hopeful present, and on Ascension Sunday the bells ring with great glee. She is on the historic borderland of East and West, and she remains a lighthouse to Christendom, calling the faithful to remember, to repent, to come home, to return to God.

Venice still celebrates her marriage to the sea on Ascension Day with a regatta of gondolas, a band, flags, all heading out to the Lido Island, where the mayor casts a wedding ring into the sea. This year they celebrated on Sunday and we watched from our attic window the flotilla of boats pass by.

But the true celebration was at the Basilica of Saint Mark, San Marco, to give thanks to God for the Ascension of Christ to Heaven. And this gilded Byzantine church, to my mind, is one of the most beautiful in the world.

As Madeleine says in my first novel, Pilgrimage, when she visits San Marco with her husband Jack on Ascension Day:

We entered Saint Mark’s through the north door. The service was beginning, and we found seats toward the front, then looked about, having fallen into a world of golden vaults.

They say Venice was founded on March 25, 491 AD, the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Goths drove the Venets offshore. By the eighth century, the settlement of marshy islands was taking shape, and Venice, protected by the sea, grew into a flourishing port, surviving attacks from both east and west. A crossroads of the Crusades, Venice collected treasure from eastern capitals: San Marco’s bronze horses came from Byzantium as well as icons, sculptures, and relics. In the thirteenth century the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, returning from China, opened trade routes of goods and ideas that placed Venice in the center of a new era of discovery. The city gloried in its wealth, stunning the world with art and music.

Venice’s original patron saint, the eastern martyr Theodorus, was replaced by the Western evangelist Saint Mark, who traveled with Paul and assisted Peter in Rome; his Gospel is thought to be based on Peter’s sermons. After Peter’s death, he became Bishop of Alexandria, where he was martyred.

When Venice “rescued” Mark’s relics from Alexandria and entombed them in the doge’s chapel, the city adopted the saint’s lion symbol, the winged lion. The lion was derived from Mark’s identification as the first of “the four living creatures” in the Book of Revelation, Saint John’s vision of the Apocalypse. As John relates in this last book of the New Testament, an Angel of the Lord appeared to him on the island of Patmos off the coast of Turkey and showed him a lion, a calf, a man, and an eagle, images thought to represent the four Evangelists.

The doge’s chapel evolved into the Basilica di San Marco, its walls covered with precious stones from the East… San Marco fused the East with the West, the Byzantine with the Romanesque. Three naves formed the three arms of the Greek-cross plan, and the chancel and high altar, partially hidden by an iconostasis, became the fourth arm. Five domes vaulted the three naves, the chancel, and the transept midpoint, all glittering with golden mosaics…

The mosaics covering the domes told the ancient stories of salvation, and here, in these glittering tiles, suffering was made beautiful. Poverty and hunger, trial, torture, and brutal death—physical defeats redeemed by God—were transfigured into grace and victory. Across one dome, Christ, in vivid robes, rode a white donkey; the saints glowed in jeweled tones.

We sat on canvas chairs over sinking paving stones, riding the Venetian waters in an ancient ark protecting centuries of the faithful, the Communion of Saints. We sang Alleluia and I prayed that I too could ascend into God’s glory, that I with my silly sufferings, my earthy darkness, my mysterious demons, I could emerge from the watery world of earth and sea and fly with the angels, that I could be forgiven my sins, trapped as I was in my prison of self…

from Pilgrimage (OakTara, 2007)

Today we entered San Marco and sat on canvas chairs and stared at the golden domes dancing over us. Once again I was struck by the church as an ark, particularly in Venice where the waters are indeed rising. But the ark of the Church sails on, touching heaven with its golden domes, carrying its precious cargo, the faithful, Christ’s body, kneeling before the tabernacle holding Christ’s body. Today, as the choir sang Alleluia from a chancel balcony and incense billowed over the high altar, I was grateful for this moment of exquisite beauty, looking beyond the suspended sanctus lamp to the crucifix with the crosses at the end of each arm, to the apsidal fresco of Christ the King. For we follow the light in the lamp for good reason. We follow it to the Cross of Christ Crucified, and through the Cross arrive at the foot of Christ the King of Glory.

The celebration of the Ascension of Our Lord announces the glorious certainty that we, as members of Christ’s body, ascend with him. Through humility and suffering, Almighty God has made this possible by becoming one of us, one with us. We make this possible by partaking of his sacraments, so that we become one with him. Ascension bridges Heaven and earth, God and man, completing the great arcing act of salvation begun when Noah rode the rising flood waters so long ago.

On the way out, we paused in a side chapel and said a short Angelus, Hail Mary…, contemplating the haunting medieval Madonna of Nicopeia and giving thanks that Mary said yes to God, allowing all this to happen.