A young couple, she a singer/songwriter/speaker on a worldwide Catholic circuit and he a campus minister and high school theology teacher, have put their professional and personal expertise together in providing a small, accessible version of (sound the trumpets!) Theology of the Body in Forever: A Catholic Devotional for Your Marriage(release date September 1).
This slim volume offers couples (engaged or young-marrieds) six weeks' worth of daily devotions based on Pope John Paul's incredibly beautiful insights. The introduction sets the stage for any who are not quite sure just what Theology of the Body is or would look like in real life. The major content of the book is divided into six units, each addressing a single question that will be explored day by day through that week. This little book by Jackie Francois Angel and Bobby Angel would be a lovely something extra for a newly-engaged couple who are approaching their sacramental union with faith (and for whom a standard “pre-Cana” program might offer too little in the way of spiritual formation).
“So many couples...ask us
'Wherewas this teaching 20 years ago!'”
Jackie Francois Angel and Bobby Angel are extremely knowledgeable about Theology of the Body (they first met at a TOB retreat!), but the book came out of their engaged experience: “We read several [TOB-related] books as an engaged couple that helped us to grow together intellectually and spiritually.... This is why we believe in the power of doing spiritual reading together as a couple.” (The introduction alone deserves to be covered in every Catholic marriage prep program in the country.) One take-away line: "What we do to our bodies, we do to our souls."
Jackie and Bobby invite the couple to read the material prayerfully (together or each one on their own) but urge them, “be sure to talk about it afterward.... Communicate with one another about what moved or challenged you—it will be time well spent.” They also admit that, given the subject matter, it is possible for painful memories of failures or deep wounds to surface. These, too, can be content for prayer and for receiving God's tender mercy and ever-deeper healing.
They start with “Why Am I Here?” in Week One, praying through the week about our being created by the God of love for love, a love that expresses itself as a gift of self. This is followed by Week Two, “What Is Love?”; Week Three, “What Is Marriage?” (here Pope John Paul's “language/speech of the body” has much to communicate about the nature and characteristics of married love); Week Four, “How Can Our Love Last?”; Week Five, “What Endangers Our Love?” and Week Six, “What Is God's Plan for Our Family?”
Two short pages per day cover key areas of Theology of the Body as they relate to a young couple. The “Daily Challenge” suggests a practical way to deepen or apply the day's content. A short Prayer closes the devotions—and opens the day for those who make this book part of their morning routine.
The book closes with an encouraging Afterword on married holiness. There are two Appendices: the first a booklist of recommended reading, and the second a short explanation of Natural Family Planning (NFP) and the most reliable NFP models (based on an ever-growing body of scientific research into fertility).
I spent the last ten days at our retreat house near Lexington and Concord; it's a place with a lot of history of its own, originally a Colonial-era farm (the original house is still there, and still occupied), then a farm for the Boston seminary, then the novitiate and training ground for the Maryknoll missionaries and finally...our own place to "come apart with Me and rest a while." I have lots of memories of the place, since I made a weekend retreat here as part of my discernment many decades ago, when the retreat house properties were virtually unchanged from its days as a farm. The cattle and horse stalls had been converted into (very bare-bones) "cells" that provided a bit of privacy, but also the company of many, many of the Lord's crawling creatures. (That did nothing to foster my spirit of recollection.)
As novices, we made our first eight-day silent retreat in that setting, if you can imagine that, and when a shipment of peaches came in from donors in the New Jersey farmland, we were the ones called upon to prepare the fruits for canning. In silence (well, we prayed a couple of rosaries out loud). After an hour or two, my hands began to swell and smart from the acid in the peaches, and the whole situation struck me as preposterous. I tried to hold back my giggle (no, really I did!), but Sister Christine caught the smirk and it was all over.
Yes, precious memories.
After the retreat ended and we novices (joined by the incoming group of pre-novices) gathered around a bonfire for an evening of pious recreation, I composed a song in honor of the soon-to-be demolished retreat house, using the melody of our community's "Hymn to St Thecla."
We have a retreat house
in Billerica.
It's called St Thecla's,
We love it so-o-o-o.
We've had it for many years.
It's about
to
GO-O-O!
Refrain:
Good old St Thecla's
--bugs and dead trees--
We'll be glad
when you get rid
of some of these...
Somehow they still let me make my vows two weeks later.
Anyway, this year I brought the drone over, to see if I could reproduce in some way the iconic photograph we have from about 1966. There was a bit too much glare for me to really see what was on the screen, but I got a video clip that almost gets it right:
This was the setting for the retreat reflections I offered on a Pauline theme, "Qualities of a Penitent Heart." (If you've ever been in a Pauline chapel, you've seen the words that so inspired our Founder, "Do not fear; I am with you; from here I want to enlighten; live with a penitent heart.") Here's something from the concluding talk, to give you an idea of what the sisters prayed with for eight silent days. Something must have clicked, because one of the sisters wrote me a little note: "In a strange way, I'm somehow looking forward to a penitent year ahead!"
Going Home with a Penitent Heart
From T.S. Eliot's "The Family Reunion"
Harry:
I feel happy for a moment, as if I had come home.
It is quite irrational, but now
I feel quite happy, as if happiness
Did not consist in getting what one wanted
Or in getting rid of what can't be got rid of
But in a different vision. This is like an end.
Gratitude, receptivity, virginity of heart (living from what Merton called “the virgin point”): these are the qualities that make a penitent heart possible; they are pre-requisites. Without this foundation, we cannot risk being "convicted." There's not enough foundation beneath our feet.
Then, to be poor, apostolic and confident: these qualities flow from the experience of being convicted--which holds a central position as "the" act of repentance, the "hinge" of conversion, so to speak.
"Cor poenitens tenete" ("Live with a penitent heart") is an abiding disposition, a readiness or alertness to make use of everything to turn more fully to God; ongoing readiness and availability for conversion. One thing is for sure: "Heavenward there are no limits" (Von Balthasar). Henri Nouwen wrote to Jim Forrest (but I'm sure he'd write the same to each of us), "Your heart is very deep and wide, and it cannot be just yours." I think that is a terrific way of saying, "Live with a penitent heart."
What is the "act" proper to the heart? It is love.
What is the act proper to a penitent heart? It is a particular kind of love. Repentance recognizes sin and the roots of sin and wills to renounce it all for the sake of love. And each of the qualities of the penitent heart can be seen as a different expression of love, and also as a different aspect of the love of Jesus. Jesus lived all these qualities, even taking our sins upon himself--"becoming sin"--so that they could be fully and knowingly repented of.
Oscar Wilde ("Letter from Prison"?) writes about the penitent heart in a different way; a way I call the "transubstantiation of the past":
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. ... "Even the gods cannot alter the past." Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he be asked, would have said--I feel quite certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept he really made his having wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
Continual conversion, ongoing repentance means not being stuck, not locked in or frozen in time. Hopefully in these past eight days each of us has felt a loosening of that one "stuck" area that keeps all our interior gears from moving freely and smoothly.
The penitent heart is unafraid:
of its own poverty, when it finds itself without the resources to succeed in life, because God is its one and supreme good: "I am confident and unafraid; my strength and my courage is the Lord" (Is 12).
of its failures or sin: because "God is greater than our hearts" (1 Jn 3:20)
of the future: because "all time belongs to him." The penitent heart has entrusted its whole past to the Lord's mercy, so it follows that the future is also held in God's mercy, his Providence.
The penitent heart is a disciple's heart: open, docile, available, flexible, responsive: not a fortress, steeled against any intrusion of grace.
The penitent heart is a mystic heart. Nouwen contrasts "mystic" with "moralism" in the sense of "what we can do humanly, by force of will, resolution, etc." And there seems to be a constant temptation to replace the fruits of the Spirit with some one or other "works of the law" whatever that law may be. Mystic means the "not I who live, but Christ"; the penitent heart knows deeply that "by myself, I can do nothing..."
The penitent heart is a "salty" heart: flavorful, pungent, penetrated with that certain something that alters the chemistry of whatever it touches--not "conformed to this world," then. When my actions, premises, choices, perspectives, interpretations, criteria of value or of esteem are indistinguishable from those of society (or of an offshoot of society), this is not salty. If I love, seek, admire and work toward the same things that the most worldly love, seek and strive form, I am failing to give society a new and Christian flavor, a new "imprint" as Alberione put it.
Bl. Columba Marmion said:
"People are to be met with who...lose themselves in a multiplicity of details and often weary themselves in a joyless labor. ...
"... For years, their lives have been as it were cramped, they have been often depressed, hardly ever contented, for ever finding new difficulties in the spiritual life. Then one day God gives them the grace of understanding that Christ is our All, that he is the Alpha and Omega, that out of him we have nothing, that in him we have everything, for everything is summed up in him. From that moment all is, as it were, changed for these souls: their difficulties vanish like the shades of night before the rising sun. As soon as Our Lord...fully illumine these souls, they unfold, mount upward, and bear much fruit of holiness."
It is not too late for any of us. "Even if our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." The Founder, in a year-end retreat in 1950 told the community: "Be sorry for sin: this must not only be written on the wall, but must be written in the heart." That same year, he exhorted the Paulines of then and maybe even more of now:
It is time that we aim for heroism, because we do not know what the times ahead of us hold in store for us.
Today's feast of St Thomas the Apostle (first celebrated in Syria circa 250 AD!) brings us the fabulous story of "Doubting Thomas." Not that Thomas was ever called that by his fellow apostles. No, the Gospel of John tells us (twice) that Thomas was called "Didymus," "the Twin."
Until fairly recently I assumed that meant he was one of a pair; that somewhere in first century Palestine there was a brother or sister with whom Thomas had come into the world. Strange that he or she didn't get a mention in the Bible: was it that only Thomas was a disciple of Jesus and that he who would one day evangelize India had failed to win over his closest family member?
Or could it be that "Twin" was one of those nicknames that stick to someone like glue, especially in a close-knit group like that of Jesus and his disciples? Jesus himself bestowed nicknames, and at least in Peter's case that nickname effectively replaced his given name (which was, you will recall, "Simon"). I read a book about a year ago that suggested that Mary Magdalen was not Mary "of Magdala," but Mary, "the Tower" (migdal); perhaps a hint at the out-sized personality that made her such an effective "Apostle to the Apostles."
What if the disciples called Thomas "Twin" because he bore a striking physical resemblance to Jesus himself? What if Thomas was Jesus' look-alike, so close to the Lord in height and build and facial structure that it had taken a while before the others could tell them apart unless they were close enough for eye contact?
What if we're all called to become so much like Jesus that people who know us only from our words and deeds could "mistake" us for the Lord? I suspect that this is what our Baptism is meant to accomplish!
A young couple, she a singer/songwriter/speaker on a worldwide Catholic circuit and he a campus minister and high school theology teacher, have put their professional and personal expertise together in providing a small, accessible version of (sound the trumpets!) Theology of the Body in Forever: A Catholic Devotional for Your Marriage (release date September 1).
