Passion Sunday and the Divine Reversal

Grace breaks in at the oddest times and in the oddest ways, but also in ways that are predictable, too.

Last evening I reviewed a volume my wife had given me for Christmas some years past. Entitled simply monk, it is not what you think. It’s a book about a Japanese cook on the outskirts of Kyoto who daily travels to a farming village called Ohara, where he buys the freshest and most perfect vegetables he can find, foraging on the way back and forth for herbs and other treasures he will prepare to perfection with the vegetables and other foods he cooks over an open, living wood fire. He sees his artistry as service, to the kami which in his view inhabit the ingredients, to the ingredients themselves, which convey life force to his diners, and to his diners, who he hopes will be touched by the experiences forming memories around them which sometime in the future will come to them and remind them of both the grandeur and simplicity of life. Service is too weak a word, though: he sees his work as worship, as religion such as he understands it.

Two virtues, gratitude and restraint, suffuse the entire presentation. Yoshihiro Imai is grateful to be alive. Animist that he is, he is grateful to see transcendent power at work sustaining the universe, and to perceive it in the small corner of the universe in which he lives. He is grateful to the ingredients, for the life force within them that sustains human life and endeavor. He is grateful to the fire. He is grateful to his guests, who travel from nearby and afar to partake of an experience available nowhere else on the planet. And because he is grateful, he is restrained. He seeks only those ingredients that best show forth the life force he wishes to impart to his diners. He prepares the foods as simply as he can, in a way meant to amplify all that they are and all that they contain. He seeks to present them in a way such that the soul is fed before the body is. All of this requires that he get out of the way, so that his diners receive from the food all that the food has to impart.

I contrast this with a genre of Catholic writing about virtue that is making the rounds in my own country at present, a genre that seeks to present the cultivation of the virtues as means by which we can attain what it is we seek. This attainment is not just success, though the attainment of success through the cultivation of virtue is a central theme of the genre. Another such theme is the attainment of happiness, which is rightly seen as more important than success. Pursuing wealth, status, fame, recognition in ways that make us miserable simply won’t do, and is, in fact, a demonstration of ingratitude to the Creator who has given us life and all of our capacities and talents. Rather, the cultivation of virtue creates the balance that allows us to develop our talents for our benefit, that of our families, and that of those we serve directly through them. It allows us to cultivate the restraint we need in order to develop and exercise the prudence necessary to assess rightly and act accordingly, It further allows us to develop the attentiveness to those who do without, that we may discern how to assist them in their distress.

As much as I admire the genre, I think it sometimes misses the mark, for it can suggest that heaven is nothing more than the perfection of the virtues and happinesses we have cultivated on the earth, the perfection of the just reward to which we are entitled by dint of our correspondence to grace while on earth. There is an element of truth to that proposition, let’s be fair. We know of Christian homes that feel like “heaven on earth,” as the saying goes, inhabited by couples who are deeply in love and deeply happy in their love. We know, too, of monasteries, convents, houses of religion that have this same feel, and retreat houses, too. In all of these places the virtues — but especially the theological virtues — are practiced at a high degree of perfection, as their inhabitants live lives of both penance and joyful worship. It seems likely that heaven is the explosion into bliss of the virtues sought for and lived with such love and joy.

But there is an element of Pelagianism, in the thought, too, and with the Pelagianism the pride that is fatal to the spiritual life. I am reminded of a phrase I used to hear much, “humility is truth.” The phrase was trotted out regularly, to remind the lesser of their lower status. Lost in the transmission is the recognition that everything we have and everything we are, is gift, grace. Lost to that statement was St. Paul’s command, “let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” It was St. Therese of Lisieux — a Doctor of the Church — who cheerfully said she planned on telling Jesus she had nothing, absolutely nothing to offer Him, so that she could be totally reliant upon His mercy and grace for admission to Paradise. That strikes me as rather the right note.

If one is conscious of one’s status within the Christian economy, it is a consciousness rooted in the understanding that to whom much is given, much is expected. For we have all been given much — very much. The French put it succinctly, in their elegant way: la noblesse oblige. Nobility — of birth, of attainment — obliges, much more than it entitles. It demands, in fact, greater humility. In its absence, arrogance reigns, but not just arrogance. What reigns instead is a sort of religious arrogance that disguises itself as religious humility, deceptive in the extreme, and disgusting to those whose instincts for detecting sanctimony are honed to a high degree. That number comprises most of the world, for the modern world has a heightened sensitivity to the gap between what Christians say we are and what we actually do. It is this gap that we are meant to fill, with first theological and then natural virtue, by bearing fruits that befit repentance. Our failure to do so may result in the loss of souls, our own first in that number.

That perception is the first inkling of what I like to call the Divine Reversal. The scandal of the Gospel is that it turns upside down all of our thinking — about the nature and purpose of life; about the role of achievement in human flourishing; about the purpose of the cultivation of the virtues; about which virtues are truly the most important. St. Paul tells us that “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The Cross — that instrument of torture designed to torment and humiliate, to expose the crucified not just to the elements but to the scorn and jeering of the onlookers — becomes the way that God redeems the world, pouring out his love even upon those who despise him, conquering death and all that death brings. This makes no sense to us; the stupendous truth of the Cross first strikes us as stupefying. God, to whom absolute obedience, gratitude, and worship is due, abased himself to the lowest of the low so that they, and everyone else, might be raised to the heights of glory in heaven.

Ruthenian Catholic hieromonk Fr. Charbel Abernethy has written very recently of this, in a short piece entitled “The Upside Down World,” available on Substack. I take the liberty of quoting from his commentary on the extract of the book he cites in the piece,

God will turn our world upside down if it means our sanctification. The monk actively seeks to live his life from this perspective. In this he makes himself and monasticism a peculiar phenomenon. In making himself the lowest of creatures, humbling himself by letting go of all that the world clings to as valuable, meaningful, and purposeful, the monk becomes the pillar of the earth. Hidden and immersed in a life of constant prayer his very existence keeps the world from collapsing into nothingness. Obedience, repentance, and crucified love is the very bedrock of existence - revealing the essence of the life of the Kingdom.

The monk, then, is nothing more, and nothing less, than a simple Christian. The monk lives to completion the way of life to which all Christians are called, which is the Way of the Cross. This is the way that embraces suffering not only as the perfect means of glorifying the Father: it glorifies the Father because it is suffering embraced for the salvation of others. Jesus didn’t need salvation. Everyone else, including Mary, did. It was “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.” Our life, then, is meant to be an imitation of his, a lowering of ourselves for the salvation of others. This is the bedrock meaning of the works of mercy. We are meant to be men and women for others.

I suggest that our Japanese cook with his restaurant simply called monk has apprehended something of this truth on a natural level, and I suggest that this apprehension is the basis for the Church’s hope of salvation for those who through no fault of their own do not come to apprehend the truth of the Gospel. He sees himself not as a creator of a cuisine — and he says in his book that “creator” is a term reserved for “god,” as he puts it — as much as a servant of the elements, and diners, that give his life force, meaning, and purpose. I am reminded, too, of Gandhi’s famous quip that India will become Christian when Christians become who they are supposed to be. Is not Mother Teresa of Kolkata, with her searching out of the most destitute, despised, and abhorred, dying in torment alone on the streets, the shining example of what we are meant to be, each within the particular circumstances of his or her own life?

Here, too, I have in mind another Japanese man, the great philosopher and theologian Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko. I cannot cite my source, for the paper afforded me about him is not yet for citation. I can cite something I wrote its author, as follows:

Yoshimitsu is no jingoist, no chauvinist. His embrace of the Crucified One allows him to embrace the whole world, even those who sought to destroy everything he loved. In this he transcends and perfects his own culture to become one who is simply Catholic, able to love the particularity of his own and other cultures while loving them all, because he loves the One who loves us all and loved us to the point of laying down His life for us. This is, I believe, what enabled Yoshimitsu to continue his work in the midst of his illness. He knew that he loved; he knew that the God who is Love had given him something to say; and he knew that this love would give him the power to say it in the best possible way.” — and here I add, despite his illness.

God has given each of us something to do. Cardinal Newman tells us we may not know what it is until the next life, but we can be sure of this: God has called us to love, and this love requires us to lower ourselves to the point of service not just to the elements or to those who can pay for it but for those without any means at all, who merit such service not so much by their stations in life as by their absence of them: they merit service because they are created in the image of God, to whom alone, in an absolute sense, love and service are owed. We can claim no merit for this service; in this we are doing only what we have been told to do, what has been given us to do. The particularity of the service is for each of us to discover: not all of us are called to be Missionaries of Charity, or Dominicans, or Carmelites, or whatever else. We are all, however, called to be Christians, “to seek and to save the lost,” with Him. Preposterous, we might say, or even blasphemous, to suggest that we can do what only He can do.

Yet He continues to seek and save the lost, through us, if we let him — and our giving him the permission to do so is the beginning of our salvation. This requires in turn that we rid ourselves of all that stands in the way of this divine project. Our contemplation of Holy Week, which traditionally begins today, Passion Sunday, opens us to the action of grace that allows us to pick up our Cross, whatever it be, and follow it in faithful, loving imitation of Him who lived for the Father’s glory alone. It allows him to sweep away and dislodge all that we cannot. Out of our contemplation, action arises: His, in, with and through us as we live and act in, with, and through Him. Then our gratitude knows no end and we live with the temperance that leads to joy, our natural apprehension of the goodness of life having been elevated to a place that defies description and calls forth nothing but love and praise.