Being Centred

Being centred is more important than being efficiently managing multiple tasks. Being centred is not being self-centred; it is not being dissipated in our multi-tasking. Being centred allows you to do many things, not just jumping from one activity to another but doing things effectively (as contrasted to mere efficiency). It means having a servant mentality, not just being service providers or service deliverers. It allows us to be open to persons, not just concentrate on principles. Sometimes I could bulldoze people, hurt them just for the sake of fulfilling the laws. Persons first, principles then. This is not the same as saying: “Toss your principles out of the window.” No. This means standing for your principles while you put others, the human persons at the centre of your attention. This is avoiding legalism. The sabbath for the person, not vice-versa. Henri Nouwen puts it beautifully: “You have so many options that you are constantly overwhelmed by the question ‘What should I do and what should I not do?’ You are asked to respond to many concrete needs. [...] But what of all this truly deserves your time? [...] You have to keep going back to the source: God’s love for you. [...] Try to give your agenda to God. [...] Give every part of your heart and your time to God and let God tell you what to do, where to go, when and how to respond.” (The Inner Voice of Love 121-122.) Being centred, ultimately, means being centred on God.

Pipes and Dirges

To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children who sit in the market place and call to one another, and they say, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, 'He has a demon!' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' But wisdom is proved right by all her children. (Luke 7:31-35)

Never be childish, but always be childlike in your faith. As I see, Jesus asks us to grow and mature in our faith, to be able to read the signs of the times. God reveals himself in various ways: surprising and shocking ways. Gallagher writes: “Balthasar and Sequeri insist particularly on the shocking differentness of Christian revelation. It is interruption, rupture, excess. Its climax in Cross and Resurrection takes us beyond all human logic.” (Faith Maps 154.) Some Pharisees and leaders at the time of Jesus were not able to understand or see God’s hand in the extremities of a John the Baptist or a Jesus of Nazareth. God reveals to us and speaks to us in strange ways. Whether in a drunkard or a glutton or a person out of his mind. God’s ways are unfathomable. To conclude, as Sathish writes in his gospeltoons (reflections-cum-cartoons on the day’s gospel passage): “Don’t be arrogant or ignorant,” unless we are open to the divine strangeness around us, we may land up being arrogant or proud or childishly ignorant, or just plainly immature.

Letter of a pregnant nun who was raped

Here is an extraordinary letter written by a young nun, Sister Lucy Vertrusc, to her mother superior. Sister Vertrusc became pregnant after she was raped in 1995 during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The letter appeared in an Italian newspaper at the behest of her Mother Superior. (After a long search I was able to lay hands on this beautiful and moving letter... thanks to iamproudtobecatholic.com.)

I am Lucy, one of the young nuns raped by the Serbian soldiers. I am writing to you, Mother, after what happened to my sisters Tatiana, Sandria, and me.

Allow me not to go into the details of the act. There are some experiences in life so atrocious that you cannot tell them to anyone but God, in whose service I had consecrated my life nearly a year ago.

My drama is not so much the humiliation that I suffered as a woman, not the incurable offense committed against my vocation as a religious, but the difficulty of having to incorporate into my faith an event that certainly forms part of the mysterious will of Him whom I have always considered my Divine Spouse.

Only a few days before, I had read “Dialogues of Carmelites” and spontaneously I asked our Lord to grant me the grace of joining the ranks of those who died a martyr of Him. God took me at my word, but in such a horrid way! Now I find myself lost in the anguish of internal darkness. He has destroyed the plans of my life, which I considered definitive and uplifting for me, and He has set me all of a sudden in this design of His that I feel incapable of grasping.

When I was a teenager, I wrote in my Diary: Nothing is mine, I belong to no one, and no one belongs to me. Someone, instead grabbed me one night, a night I wish never to remember, tore me off from myself, and tried to make me his own . . .

It was already daytime when I awoke and my first thought was the agony of Christ in the Garden. Inside of me a terrible battle unleashed. I asked myself why God had permitted me to be rent, destroyed precisely in what had been the meaning of my life, but also I asked to what new vocation He was calling me.

I strained to get up, and helped by Sister Josefina, I managed to straighten myself out. Then the sound of the bell of the Augustinian convent, which was right next to ours, reached my ears. It was time for nine o’clock matins.

I made the sign of the cross and began reciting in my head the liturgical hymn. At this hour upon Golgotha’s heights,/ Christ, the true Paschal Lamb,/ paid the price of our salvation.

What is my suffering, Mother, and the offense I received compared to the suffering and the offense of the One for whom I had a thousand times sworn to give my life. I spoke these words slowly, very slowly: May your will be done, above all now that I have nowhere to go and that I can only be sure of one thing: You are with me.

Mother, I am writing not in search of consolation, but so that you can help me give thanks to God for having associated me with the thousands of my fellow compatriots whose honour has been violated, and who are compelled to accept a maternity not wanted. My humiliation is added to theirs, and since I have nothing else to offer in expiation for the sin committed by those unnamed violators and for the reconciliation of the two embittered peoples, I accept this dishonour that I suffered and I entrust it to the mercy of God.

Do not be surprised, Mother, when I ask you to share with me my “thank you” that can seem absurd.

In these last months I have been crying a sea of tears for my two brothers who were assassinated by the same aggressors who go around terrorizing our towns, and I was thinking that it was not possible for me to suffer anything worse, so far from my imagination had been what was about to take place.

Every day hundreds of hungering creatures used to knock at the doors of our convent, shivering from the cold, with despair in their eyes. Some weeks ago, a young boy about eighteen years old said to me: How lucky you are to have chosen a refuge where no evil can reach you. The boy carried in his hands a rosary of praises for the Prophet. Then he added: You will never know what it means to be dishonoured.

I pondered his words at length and convinced myself that there had been a hidden element to the sufferings of my people that had escaped me as I was almost ashamed to be so excluded. Now I am one of them, one of the many unknown women of my people, whose bodies have been devastated and hearts seared. The Lord had admitted me into his mystery of shame. What is more, for me, a religious, He has accorded me the privilege of being acquainted with evil in the depths of its diabolical force.

I know that from now on the words of encouragement and consolation that I can offer from my poor heart will be all the more credible, because my story is their story, and my resignation, sustained in faith, at least a reference, if not example for their moral and emotional responses.

All it takes is a sign, a little voice, a fraternal gesture to set in motion the hopes of so many undiscovered creatures.

God has chosen me—may He forgive my presumption—to guide the most humble of my people towards the dawn of redemption and freedom. They can no longer doubt the sincerity of my words, because I come, as they do, from the outskirts of revilement and profanation.

I remember the time when I used to attend the university at Rome in order to get my masters in Literature, an ancient Slavic woman, the professor of Literature, used to recite to me these verses from the poet Alexej Mislovic: You must not die/ because you have been chosen/ to be a part of the day.

That night, in which I was terrorized by the Serbs for hours and hours, I repeated to myself these verses, which I felt as balm for my soul, nearly mad with despair.

And now, with everything having passed and looking back, I get the impression of having been made to swallow a terrible pill.

Everything has passed, Mother, but everything begins. In your telephone call, after your words of encouragement, for which I am grateful with all my life, you posed me a very direct question: What will you do with the life that has been forced into your womb? I heard your voice tremble as you asked me the question, a question I felt needed no immediate response; not because I had not yet considered the road I would have to follow, but so as not to disturb the plans you would eventually have to unveil before me. I had already decided. I will be a mother. The child will be mine and no one else’s. I know that I could entrust him to other people, but he—though I neither asked for him nor expected him—he has a right to my love as his mother. A plant should never be torn from its roots. The grain of wheat fallen in the furrow has to grow there, where the mysterious, though iniquitous sower threw it.

I will fulfill my religious vocation in another way. I will ask nothing of my congregation, which has already given me everything. I am very grateful for the fraternal solidarity of the Sisters, who in these times have treated me with the utmost delicacy and kindness, especially for never having asked any uncareful questions.

I will go with my child. I do not know where, but God, who broke all of a sudden my greatest joy, will indicate the path I must tread in order to do His will.

I will be poor again, I will return to the old aprons and the wooden shoes that the women in the country use for working, and I will accompany my mother into the forest to collect the resin from the slits in the trees.

Someone has to begin to break the chain of hatred that has always destroyed our countries. And so, I will teach my child only one thing: love. This child, born of violence, will be a witness along with me that the only greatness that gives honour to a human being is forgiveness.

Through the Kingdom of Christ for the Glory of God.

(Slightly edited.)

Suffering

For the world: Death, illness, human brokenness, ugliness, failures, sinfulness,... all have to be hidden from our sight because they keep us from the happiness for which we strive. They are obstructions on our way to the goal of life.

Eugenics strives towards a better life, a better quality of life, but by eliminating undesirable traits in our genes. Disorders and disabilities, aging, and all are seen as undesirable. Eugenics and more broadly genetic engineering strives to do away with suffering.

However, we humans suffer a lot. Much, if not most, of our deep suffering comes from our relationships with those who love us. Not from the terrible events I read about in the newspapers or those that I see on television, but from the relationships with the people with whom I share my daily life.

Community life can be painful. Besides the joys, there can be many pains and demands attached to our day to day living out of our common life.

Our pain, deep as it is, is connected with specific circumstances. We do not suffer in the abstract. We suffer because someone hurts us at a specific time and in a specific place. Our feelings of rejection, abandonment, and uselessness are rooted in the most concrete events.

Still, as long as we keep pointing to the specifics, we will miss the full meaning of our pain. We will deceive ourselves into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been different, our pain would not exist. “My suffering would have been less, if there were a different catechist, a different prefect, a different staff member, different companions, and so on.” This might be partly true, but the deeper truth is that the situation which brought about our pain was simply the form in which we came in touch with the human condition of suffering. Our pain is the concrete way in which we participate in the pain of humanity.

Paradoxically, therefore, healing means moving from our pain to the pain. When we keep focusing on the specific circumstances of our pain, we easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive – even seek revenge. We can learn from Mary: healing means moving from our pain to the pain. She stands at the foot of the cross, she stands in communion with Jesus’ suffering. But she is not alone, she stands along with Mary Magdalene, other women, also the beloved disciple of Jesus. She stands in communion with other humans too. She takes her suffering out of isolation, and places it in the context of the cross, Jesus’ cross. She takes her pain out of isolation, and shares it with her fellow-sufferers, fellow-believers.

May we too have the same courage and wisdom like Mary, let us imitate her and find new strength and hope in our suffering, because suffering is salvific. I repeat, suffering is salvific.

References: Henri Nouwen, Here and Now, and Inner Voice of Love.

(Homily of 15 September, Memoria of Our Lady of Sorrows)

Proverbs to Verbs

Every culture has its own set of proverbs, pithy sayings, catchy idioms, maxims and words of wisdom. The Gospel too offers us varied statements, beautiful verses exactly like proverbs in a culture. Love your enemies, be compassionate, treat others as you would like others to treat you, and many such beautiful verses. The danger is that these sayings can remain as beautiful decorations on our walls and in our living rooms rather than inspirations for our actions. May we remove these mere decorative verses and proverbs from our walls and put them into the centre of our living, into our actions. May the proverbs become verbs. (Inspired by a reflection from the CD material, Entering the Lectionary on today's gospel reading.)

Chebath's Surgeries

When I was young I always wanted to do medicine, that desire of mine was fulfilled a bit especially the last two weeks. Chebath, one of our students here at Divyadaan, underwent a major surgery on 8th September. He had a tumour on his neck – but it needs to be called a brain tumor because he had a vagal schwannoma. “Vagal Schwannomas are considered a Brain Tumour.  They are ‘usually’ rare, slow-growing tumours and reported to occur in patients between 30 and 50 years of age.  VAGAL refers to the vagus nerve which is the 10th cranial nerve.  This nerve is the only nerve that runs from the brain all the way down through the body. The vagus nerve controls the working order of all the organs of our bodies and how the skeletal muscles work.  Also controls the heart, espophagus and pulmonary functions.  The ability to swallow and the affected vagus nerve side will affect the vocal cord on that side.” (http://www.vagalschwannoma.com/what-is-it.html)

Chebath’s tumour was discovered during what was thought to be or supposed to be a minor surgical procedure of removing a lymph node on the operation table. Then the doctors asked us to go for an immediate MRI, which confirmed that it was a vagal schwannoma. Chebath agreed to undergo the surgery, knowing fully well that he will lose his voice. Perhaps, two months later he will have to undergo another surgery to correct his voice – to make the vocal chords vibrate again. That was what was planned. But miraculously, the surgeon said that the tumour had not affected the vagus nerve, and he will be able to have his voice, though not as before. It was the 8th September, the feast of Our Lady of Health, and it is her intercession that Chebath had a miraculous intervention. Though his ability to swallow as well as his vocal cords are weakened, he may not have to undergo a voice correction surgery. I thank God for his miraculous intervention through Mother Mary. I admire Chebath’s calm and tranquility, and his strength to undergo this suffering; and I also appreciate his mature decision of undergoing the surgery and accepting the consequences of a major surgery like this. This too is grace.

Incidentally, he has to undergo another operation to repair one of his damaged ear drums. He needs our support and prayers. May God give him strength and endurance.