AVS Seminar

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A. The Prison of Measurement

Work forces man to use measurements. He works eight hours a day, and for this work a certain average result is expected from him. The number of a certain kind of item a worker is able to make in a day, week, or year is fixed. Also fixed is the amount he needs to support himself and his family (if a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs cost such and such . . . ) and the amount he needs for pleasure (the cost of a ticket to the movies or to a soccer match). His entire existence is saturated with numbers, and each presents a certain measure. When something in the mechanism breaks down, he stands there helpless….

If a man gets completely accustomed to the idea that everything can be measured, then he loses any sense for eternity. His horizon does not reach farther than the measurable, passing time, and mortal existence. Everything he measures constantly brings him to limits: there lies the point where what he has planned comes to an end; beyond it begins something else to measure. The life of an individual passes away between such ends and new beginnings … as though behind bars.

Man Before God, pp. 109-10

B. Adventure Breaks Through

However, if he meets someone who lives from faith, he encounters in him God himself. Something adventurous breaks into his limited existence. He does not know whether he is thereby weighed and measured. One thing, however, is certain: his measurements do not suffice to determine these dimensions. His conventional categories, time schedules, and simplifications cannot cope with the phenomenon. He had arranged a plan for himself that would allow him to advance in his job in order to be able to afford certain things when he reached the age of fifty or sixty. If the Christian truth is valid, God could frustrate all his plans; he could perhaps even require him to give up his position. In any event, God could demand from him his advance calculations and small arrangements, which now appear to him as countless reservations against God. Who could place conditions on God?

 Man Before God, pp. 110-11

C.  A Tree in a Flowerpot

Interiorly, … everything has completely changed: time is now something in which eternity wants to find a place; and measure is now something in which the unmeasurable must be sheltered. Thus everything becomes quite uncomfortable. That which until now was correct is no longer correct, and it is not clear what can serve as a substitute. In many parables Christ speaks about things that are familiar to us: for example, about a heavenly meal, about the true shepherd and his sheepfold, about the lost coin, and about the fig tree that bears no fruit out of season. These [familiar] things … acquire in the Lord’s mouth a new and disconcerting taste. Human understanding is brought to an unusual place and bent down before the eternal so that the eternal can become graspable to mortal men…. If man discovers himself in a word of God and notices how the measures slip from his hands, he becomes dizzy…. The standard of his reason no longer provides a valid measure; instead, it is provided by the immensity of God that wants to find precisely in this small human life a place and foothold in the world. A tree in a flowerpot. The hardest thing required of the believer is to place himself at the disposal of something incomprehensible, something that begins to make sense only through love…. [N]ow he is meant to open himself in such a way that the hands he holds out to collect have to remain apart…. He must keep himself as vessel, and he cannot guarantee what this vessel will contain. He no longer knows it because he must allow what he had once well protected and thought through many times over simply to flow into the infinite, according to a rhythm that God alone determines.

Man Before God, pp. 112-13

D.  Mary, Joseph, and the Flight into Egypt

 When Mary flees to Egypt with the infant, she follows a directive from Joseph, who himself had been ordered to flee. The perfectly supernatural character of this flight opens heaven: if Joseph had to explain why he undertook this flight, he could only say that it had become clear to him that God wants it this way. However, he has no measurement by which to examine this certainty. Mary follows without questioning…. However, she does not follow him on the basis of natural reasons alone; she also follows because this is included in the Yes she gave to the angel. The fact that everything she will have to do is always already included in her Yes takes away the measuring of her days…. She lives a hidden life on earth that constantly unfolds in the public openness of heaven. She knows that she is watched from heaven and that her Yes is perpetual.

Man Before God, pp. 113-14

E.  The One Measure Left

[To say Yes to God authentically, man] must, in order to know what he is doing, hold on to that aspect of the Lord’s life that reminds him of a measure. As Saint Ignatius shows in his spiritual exercises, he always chooses a greater disgrace and humiliation. If it is pleasing to the Lord so to lead him, man chooses a path marked by the Lord’s Cross. He chooses the path of the flight to Egypt, or wherever it may be …. But he does so in the first place on the basis of a certain measure, which is revealed in the Lord’s life. He knows that behind this life the entire unmeasurable triune life of God lies hidden. He knows that God lowered himself … in order to present [man] with things characterized by measure so that man would not lose his bearings but could accept in obedience that which God shows him.

Man Before God, pp. 115

F.  The Rule and the Unmeasurable

To live in the unmeasurable and from the unmeasurable does not mean living in disorder. It means receiving today’s order as an order—as an order, however, that lies beyond our understanding completely in God …. [A]s order, it is a knowable measure for us. The one who gives to God his entire future with its promises and entrusts to God the order of his life through the choice of the evangelical counsels binds himself to an ecclesial rule. As a form of life through which the Holy Spirit blows, the rule mediates between the measure of ordinary Christians in the world and the unmeasurable reality that lies in a pure Yes. This mediation is not a compromise; rather, it is a way that heaven draws close to earth.

Man Before God, pp. 117

G. The Layman and the Unmeasurable

The Christian in the world and in a parish who does not live according to such a rule should by all means know something of the unmeasurableness of life bound to a rule…. This knowledge should not paralyze him, because he should be able to gain from this image certain insights for his own life…. He cannot limit his self-gift and love of neighbor to his family. That would be a form of egoism. He himself would thereby determine the measure of Christian love and thus refuse its unmeasurableness. [He also has to include his broader surroundings, his work as well as society.] In the same way, he cannot do the contrary and seek to meet his neighbor only in the outside world. In not having the measure at his command, although it nevertheless still obliges him, he experiences something of the unmeasurableness of God.

Man Before God, pp. 118-19

H.  Lively Exchange Between Different Ways of Life

If a Christian in the world encounters a true member of a religious order and comes to understand his rule, his way of thinking, and his way of life, a breeze of eternal life blows over him from here. He will understand something of the unmeasurableness of Christian life, and this knowledge will confer new dimensions to his measured life. A lively exchange of Christian ways of life is fruitful. Indeed, this exchange could be understood as an image of the inner divine exchange of love. The religious did not enter his order to escape from the world but in order to serve the world in God. But also the layman in the world is called to perform a divine service that is entrusted to him. He can only recognize the extent of this service if he knows what occurs in religious life. Moreover, he must always submit anew his measure to the unmeasurable and allow himself to be determined and transformed by it…. This exchange is important for both of them. Something that takes place in the triune exchange should also be present on earth among the Christian forms of life. These two not only communicate in Christ’s Church, but they are also animated by the thought that creation as a whole is created for Christ.

Man Before God, pp. 119-20.

I.  Prayer in the Holy Spirit

The Christian who becomes aware of his limits faces them from two points of view, one practical and the other theoretical. Practically speaking, he is called upon to overcome his own limits in the sense of believing in the unlimitedness of God. Of course, there exists a realm beyond our capabilities, a realm to which we no longer have access. But as Christians we must not mark out our field of activity with the boundary stones of what seems ‘‘possible’’. This means, however, that our ‘‘self-knowledge’’ cannot be the decisive factor. We have to act as if we were speculatively gifted; we have to consider the impossible alongside the possible and the limitless next to the limited. If we had to rely solely on ourselves and our self-knowledge, we would, when facing a task, prudently and anxiously fix the boundaries more closely. We would prefer the smaller job that is easy to oversee and that we can guarantee to get done. But if we are believers who are aware of the power of prayer, the Church, substitution, and the communion of saints, then we push the boundaries of our assigned task a bit farther. We place more trust, not in ourselves, but in grace and in the Church that accompanies us. First we have to acknowledge the measure meted out to us; then we have to forget it. For we can no longer trust ourselves to measure our own capacities. This does not mean, of course, that we should devise wild plans and put them into action. But we can plan in conjunction with prayer in the Holy Spirit, without fixing him or us. What is important is our direction, commitment, and attitude. Looking toward God, we attempt to perform the tasks that have been set before us in the attitude of believers. What subsequently results, how much we accomplish on our own power, how much the Holy Spirit does in us, how far the boundaries of nature have been moved—these are things that we do not need to know. It is enough for us to know that they have been moved in the direction of God. No one could accept any apostolic mission in the Church, no one could so much as dispense the sacraments, if he did not know that he performed only a fraction of the act and that it is the Holy Spirit who, in the realm of the Lord’s Church, does all that can be expected in faith. This consideration and its application can be taken as a maxim for action whenever there is some practical work to be done.

There is also the theoretical side: In what do the task and the efficaciousness of prayer consist? Such things are much harder to determine. A Carmelite nun enters the convent in order to make atonement for the sin of the world. If she thinks about it realistically, she realizes how unbelievably small her contribution will be. She prays distractedly; here and there she oversteps the rule in trivial matters. She feels herself to be a sinner and knows that her sin impedes the working of grace. In spite of that, she prays the prescribed amount every day, does various works of penance, helps where she can—and all the while sees the futility of her action and the nullity of her endeavors. If before her death she looks back at her life, she recognizes that despite everything the main thing was right, because at bottom she wanted to give herself to God. She recognizes that she has been sustained by many, by the prayer of her sisters (those of today and of yesterday), and by the founders of the order. She recognizes that she owes her life in the order to the prayers of all the saints, to the intercession of the Mother of God, to the grace of the Lord and the triune God, indeed, even to the many sinners for whom she supposed she had sacrificed herself and given herself up. What has proved to be the theme of her life ultimately stems, not from her, but from others. She has been carried along and sustained beyond the limits of her own nullity.

Only in extremely rare cases can a Christian see the fruits of his prayer so as to be able to say, for example, ‘‘Thanks to my prayer or to yours this was prevented and that granted; this or that ‘mountain’ was moved.’’ Nevertheless, from time to time we experience a miracle; something for which we had begged is granted, or the propitious turn of events for which we had hardly hoped actually occurs. Because in every prayer ‘‘futility’’ is overcome; because our limits vanish, and eternity manifests itself in time. And one who prays simultaneously experiences the invisibility of divine action, which weaves itself into and enlivens our prayer from within. Thus the futility and nullity of our today stands in the midst of the unshakableness and infinity of eternity, without our being aware of what is happening to us.

Man Before God, ch. 1c

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A. The Christian Meaning of Work

God imposed work as a punishment when he expelled man from paradise. By the sweat of his face shall he till the earth, which brings forth thorns and thistles. Only in the context of this alienation of man as well as nature from God does the character of work as punishment become clear. Even in the Old Covenant, work (even, for example, priestly work) was marked by this distance from God. Work receives a new meaning only through the Incarnation of God in Christ; man’s distance from God changes. Insofar as the Son becomes God’s worker, both man’s work and the objects of man’s work (and this includes intellectual work) immediately move toward God. Everything that came from the Father was included by the Son in his plan of salvation, and from here it is given a new meaning: the meaning of redemption.

The life of the Lord is a unified whole: from the manual work of his youth, to the difficult work of his public ministry, to the still more difficult way of the Cross that leads to Resurrection and Ascension. Everything is a single, visible return of man to God, in which the Son of Man brings us human beings to his own divinity, to the Father and the Holy Spirit. Nothing of what Christ accomplishes is separated from us; he carries us along, and so we go with him. Christian work attempts consciously to bring this movement to completion. Whatever work man does, he can do it for God. With every endeavor, with the most insignificant efforts, man can be certain that God receives the work of his hands and his spirit. Work is never in vain, because no movement toward God was ever for nothing. Work has an eternal meaning conferred by the Resurrection and Ascension.

When Christ died, he left behind few Christians. He planted a seed in the earth whose yield remained practically invisible. If we compare the divinity of his being, words, and deeds with what he achieved on earth, it would seem most appropriate to speak of futility. And yet he loved all unto death on the Cross to atone for our sins. This love remains inseparable from the love that leads him back to the Father. He loved all in the unity of divine love, the greatest that exists. The few disciples are like a visible pledge given to him by the Father. In this the Son knows that the Father has given him all. Every one of these is a worker, and, ultimately, each works in his own way, patiently or impatiently following the directions of the Father, who assigns work to man.

From the perspective of the world, man cannot say whether work has essentially changed the condition of the earth or whether above all it has become a threat for him. However, it certainly has fulfilled its meaning as punishment and as a way to go together with the suffering Son to the Father. What becomes visible does so in faith: it is a way that offers a promise to be fulfilled; it is also a punishment that leads to absolution as the sign of an infinite confession received in grace. Through work man confesses his distance from God,his first sin (which is never simply left behind him), and also every actual sin. However, human work will never attain that radiant character that is possessed and conferred by the sacrament of reconciliation. Human work remains at the highest level fragmentary. It might seem daring to compare work to a sacrament. A sacrament is a pure invention of divine love and its eternal, mysterious fullness. By contrast, behind every work lurks sin. This is seen in the fact that the worker remains a sinner even when the meaning of his work is directed toward grace. All of man’s failures pass through the middle of his work. It is seldom that one allows something of grace to shine through one’s work: for example, in a painting or a piece of music in which we see or hear only the rejoicing of joy, instead of sighs of exhaustion, doubts, and troubles.

The Church, too, works as an institution. Confession occurs in the Church, which is ‘‘work’’ for both the sinner who confesses and the presiding priest. Work occurs throughout the entire structure of the Church where the word is proclaimed and the sacraments are distributed. Also the work of keeping God’s commandments occurs in the Church. We should love God and neighbor, and this love is work. It is work sanctioned by the triune God in such a way that its character as punishment is constantly overshadowed by its character as grace. In countless places the seeds of work are sown, and their fruit is divine love. Work is practically only a form, and the content is a love that is always given by God. When a priest or anyone genuinely builds up the Church or works on her foundations, he does not see the work of his hands, for the fruit opens up beyond the visible world in the kingdom of heaven. He works for the kingdom, whose seed he attempts to sink into the earth with his last strength. Of course, not everyone who works on earth can know the final meaning of his endeavors. But the Church knows it, because she, who is so close to God, hears something of his secret. As institution, she knows the final meaning of work: the individuals who live in the Church know this within the heavenly communion of saints; while those in the earthly Church still suffer it. One who works on earth and who, through the sacraments, hiddenly shares in the fulfillment is only seldom struck by a ray of grace that would illuminate something of the meaning of his work. It is as if a wanderer were to step for a moment out of the shadows into the sun in order then to continue on his way in the shadows. Work is the shadow, but in a place where at any moment a warm ray from the sun can break in—and here and there it does break through.

Whoever chooses a vocation (even if it were the vocation of perfect discipleship) and is qualified and resolved to pronounce his Yes can do so only to the extent that he submits to the basic law of having to work. Therein he can experience the joy of achievement; he can make the exhilarating discovery that all worldly things are created as ordered to the Son. Still, he cannot escape the drudgery of original sin. He must walk toward the Cross and thankfully gather all of the pieces of the Cross given to him by the Lord.

Faith in God and love for him are such sublime things that man is never done with them. Whenever he thinks he has walked through a room, a new door opens up and shows that he was only in an entryway. There is no end. This endlessness should not weigh man down. It is meant to be an honor, because God himself, who is ever greater, unveils himself to man. And man, who is led into this mystery, must always understand what is shown to him in order to be able to see the ever-greater God beyond it. God wants to pull man after him, and, indeed, he wants to include as well everything that occupies him, his greatest as well as his smallest work.

When someone plans to do something truly great, he knows that his life will not be long enough to fulfill this task. However, if he plans something smaller, something that appears to him more reasonable, the work will permanently carry his measure, and, because of his limitations, it will not satisfy. The limits that he sets himself will fall back on him as a burden. Only when he goes beyond his intention to accomplish something satisfying in an earthly way and opens himself to God can the meaning of his work open up for him. It is work within the ever-greater God, and its measure and goal, as well as its limits, are determined by God. And if God himself cares for human work, then he does this as God. In his infinity he lowers himself to encounter man; and thus man, with his plans and work, is raised up into the divine love. What appeared to man in his earthly work to have a certain greatness only now becomes something truly great. For it rests in God, and God bestows his attention on human work, a gift that work, in its transitoriness, could never have expected.

This hesitation means respect. One without respect lays out his own measures and traverses them with his own proud step. However, the one who is respectful and loving bows before the mystery of God and entrusts his plans and their realization to him. And God brings everything into a unity, into the harmony between the harvest of the world and his divine being that only God can establish. When God the Father sends forth his Son so that the Son can accomplish a work with his own hands, the Father does not cast him out of the unity; rather, he sends him from the unity of the triune God back into this unity. Jesus’ carpentry belongs to God. When Jesus resolves that he will finish shaping this beam today and tomorrow fix this tool, then this occurs within the divine order. He knows that the Father counts on it and needs it for his plans. The Father knows the worker as well as he knows the wood. That is why everyone can carry out his work following after the Son, indeed, alongside the Son, in order to let the Son incorporate him into the work of the triune God. The final meaning rests in God, and the greatness of human activity rests in its being directed toward God. Because man is the image of God, he may do all of his work for Christ’s sake and together with him. Thus he confers on his work the radiance of eternity that comes from faith. The trivial work of the day, endlessly fragmented and never finished, receives a complete and unified meaning in God. The beginning and the end lie therein. In this way, time will be gathered into God, and the transitory time of work will be gathered into the meaning of eternal time. Everything that counts and is counted, and everything that measures and is measured, has some share in the imperishable. If someone fundamentally does not want to work, he loses an essential access to eternity. He refuses a form of following Christ and unification with God. If he works as a believer, as someone who submits himself to God by allowing God finally to dispose of his achievements, then his work becomes an expression of his faith and love, and God will not disappoint his hope.

B.  Work as Atonement in Christ

God’s creating the world as ordered to the Son opens two aspects: first, that the world is created, which means it is a work of God. Secondly, it is created with a purpose, namely, to give all things to the Son. Naturally, God’s activity is undivided, but our praying contemplation is allowed to distinguish these two aspects: the action and the action’s direction toward something. Furthermore, it is essential for us that God did this work before he imposed work as a punishment. Even in resting on the seventh day, his work is clearly characterized as such. It is meaningful as action and even more as purpose.

After the fall, when man again attempts to order his work to God, he can gain courage and strength from God’s creation of the world—God is his model —and perhaps still more from the Father’s intention to give away his work. The Father does not harvest the fruit for himself; rather, he leaves it for the Son. Likewise, man creates a work that goes beyond him and that is finally destined, not for him, but for the kingdom of God.

From the beginning, work describes a curve, and it passes through a cycle whose measure lies in eternity. When God placed man in the world, he already gave him a relation to eternity insofar as he created man with a view to the Son. Human work that is insignificant or that is limited to a purely earthly aim, and thus withdrawn from the great circulation of the divine purpose, would have to be characterized, not as atonement, but as sin. It would be activity in disobedience that, estranged as it is from its final purpose, is thus robbed of its fulfillment and final meaning.

When God the Father expelled the first humans from paradise, he already had his eyes on the future redemption in the Son. From God’s perspective, the yoke of work that was laid upon the sinners was already a way to the Son. A way of repentance. It was also, of course, a way to confession, because the Son will institute confession at the destination of the path, but also because work in itself contains an automatic confession of the sinner. He must accept the consequences of his original sin in order to attain what God has destined for him. However imperfect this confession may be, it contains traces of the insight that God wants to discover in us: as we carry out our work, he sees that we have accepted our punishment, and thus we are somehow on the way back to him.

And because work has an absolute meaning, everything man does can be brought into relation with this work. His conversation with God in prayer and everything done in the spirit of prayer are finally also a submission to the law of punishment and thus an opening to the law of grace. A monk in a contemplative order experiences in a very distinct way how the hours of prayer, for example, the Divine Office, fall under the law of work. In the same way, a pastor understands how the hours spent in the confessional or spiritual direction are hard work. Prayer tires out the one who prays; he carries its burden. It is clear to him that this work means atonement. In this way, every believer, no matter what work he does, shares in the obedience of a monk or pastor by carrying the burden of work in the spirit of prayer. In faith, each form of work is pertinent to and fits with every other form. In the first place, this applies to work of the same occupation or trade, then to all of the groups among themselves. They all belong to the same circulation of work, and they carry perhaps more than appears to be the case when they are considered individually. And because spoken prayer also belongs to work, some dimension of unspoken prayer lies in every work undertaken in faith. Taken together, the whole forms the work of atonement for guilty mankind, who is on the way to the Son and who has already been redeemed by the Son.

Man Before God, ch. 8

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To Surrender What We Do Not Possess

Lord, so often I have given you what I possessed in abundance; let me now offer you everything that I do not have, that has always been denied me, that I have sought half-suspecting it was unattainable: peace, rest, shelter. And if I know now that all this belongs to you, that it remains in your safekeeping and is your possession, I will no longer clamor for it. The constant, vain running of my restlessness no longer troubles me: rest is in you, you have taken possession of it, even for me; you can dispense it again without loss; in you is shelter—who else would have it?—you can deal out this gift. Be praised: what we seek is found in you, and what we fancied we were giving you generously was in you from the beginning. And yet we thank you that in spite of this you accept it from us as well. Lord, do not just take what we do not have: keep it. Planting is the Lord’s alone, to us he might leave the gathering of a few ears of his sprouting seed; that which was already his is what we bring before him. A living fire does not cease to burn until all is consumed and reduced to ash; no one regards the ash; strewn and lifeless on the ground, it cannot fructify, hidden as it is, but it can be trampled completely into the earth, serving a task of which it knows nothing. Lord, burn us to ash, and scatter us according to your will. If I should ever say again what I will, do no grant that prayer: believe, even against every appearance, that from now on I am yours alone and know no other will than yours.

Amen.

With St. Ignatius of Loyola we pray:

(The Suscipe Prayer)

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory be.

Father, we ask that through the intercession of Adrienne von Speyr those called to live Christian discipleship might do so with ever-greater fidelity. Grant that, day-by-day, your love might burn and your Spirit might blow more intensely within us. In the presence of the Mother of your Son, your angels and saints, and the whole heavenly court, we beg this grace in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.