Feast of Christ the King of the Universe: The Holiness of Ordinary People
Just a few moments of reflection about the state of the world in 1925 compels us to stop.
And think very hard about the inspiration which led Pope Pius Xl to proclaim the Sunday ending the liturgical year in the Christian liturgy as the feast of Christ the King of the Universe.
Imagine:
- Four years of the “war to end all wars,”
- A war that resulted in the deaths world-wide of 16 million people.
- Followed by a global plague of epic proportions, infecting one out of every three people and killing at least 50 million.
- And then a deflationary global depression, which would lead to an even more terrible economic crisis in a few short years.
Those facts put left-right, woke politics, and just about everything else into perspective.
Don’t they?
Exactly 100 years ago, in 1925, Pope Pius XI wrote Quas Primas (In the First.) Concerned about the growing domination of communism and its axiomatic atheism, the Pope introduced his 1925 encyclical by recalling the theme of his papacy written three years earlier[The Peace of Christ is the Kingdom of Christ]:
- “..manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives;
- that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics:
- and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.
- Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ…”
As always, the work of researching and writing articles like this one brings me more than a little consolation and infusion of Hope.
In his timeless encyclical, Pope Pius Xl exhorts us:
“…if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.”
Contemplating the Lord of the universe on the cross
.makes our gaze drop away in shame and horror. Those hands that fixed the number of the stars, that mind that calls each one by its name, allowed themselves to be affixed to the cross for love of you and for me. In doing so, we cannot escape from the immensity of our sin, its incomprehensible effects, not just on each one of us, but on all of creation. In no way can any of my words describe the mystery. For the proper words, I must turn to the first theologian:
….He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.
For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.
He is the head of the body, the church.
He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,
that in all things he himself might be preeminent.
For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell,
and through him to reconcile all things for him,
making peace by the blood of his cross
through him, whether those on earth or those in heaven.Colossians 1:12-20
In Him all things hold together
Rereading Janet Klasson’s intriguing post on Words, Time, and Food gives me pause. Again. It’s Janet’s first section that I ponder anew: Words. I have written and published my entire adult life. When asked why I write, the answer’s simple.
“It’s how I know what I think. ”
“The act of writing and publishing forces me to take great care with my words.”
Is this true?
Am I clearly describing my subject?
Enough that anyone can understand what I’m describing?
When in passionate conversation, emotion can take over, making me impulsive and thoughtless. Therefore, plunging myself into detraction and calumny, hence my love for writing and taking great care with each word.
But until I spent more time with this three-year-old piece of Janet’s, I’d not considered words as belonging to Him.
I remember reading once that whenever Francis of Assisi saw a paper on the ground with words written on it, he would pick it up and preserve it because the letters on it could be re-arranged to spell God’s name.
This week’s readings describe the ease with which King Antiochus persuaded most of Israel to spurn their God and adopt the pagan Greeks’ wicked practices. The reading serves as a mirror to each one of us whose hearts can be turned to a man or a woman for our salvation.
All of which brings me to The Holiness of Ordinary People
The Holiness of Ordinary People
is a collection of brief meditations and thoughts of Venerable Madeleine Delbrel. Although my friend Almita sent the book to me last Lent, I have still not finished it. I keep reading and rereading the first third of this map to holiness for you and me.
Debrel was born at the turn of the last century to wealthy and irreligious parents; she became an atheist at 15. Two years later, she wrote a tract called “God is dead—Long live!” In her treatise, she wrote that ‘death is the only certainty in life.” To the young teenager, life was absurd and meaningless. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne during the day and entertained her “parents’ agnostic friends with her reading of her writings during the evenings.”
Perhaps she assimilated the existential despair that ran rampant in the Parisian universities of 100 years ago. And today holds many of its American counterparts in its demonic grasp. Five years later, however, upon the decision of her “tall, handsome” fiancé to join the Dominican priesthood and her parents’ sudden separation, she began to pray. In that process, she found God.
Debrel spent the rest of her life writing and working as a friend of Jesus Christ, whom she knew is a Person, alive and interacting with her and his creation. Upon her profound conversion, Debrel did not leave her former radically atheistic Communist friends. Rather, she continued working with them to improve the lives of the poor. Her Christ-like fearlessness, love, and respect for her fellow humans recall Pope Francis’s Fiducia Supplicans. The former pope’s efforts to dismantle the walls between many Christians and homosexuals were met with calumny by many of us. Debrel’s decision to remain reveals supernatural courage, because the walls of hatred are always built on fear.
We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is, for us, the site of our holiness.
The Holiness of Ordinary People
We believe that we lack nothing necessary, because if any necessity were missing, God would have already given it to us.
Happy Thanksgiving
“Each tiny act is an extraordinary event, in which
heaven is given to us, in which we are able to give
heaven to others.”
There are many places where the Spirit blows,
but there is one Spirit that blows in all places.
There are some people whom God takes and sets apart.
There are others he leaves among the crowd, people he
does not “withdraw from the world.”
These are the people who have an ordinary job, an ordinary household, or an ordinary celibacy. People with ordinary
sicknesses, and ordinary times of grieving. People with an ordinary house, and ordinary clothes. These are the people of ordinary life. The people we might meet on any street.
They love the door that opens onto the street, just as
their brothers who are hidden from the world love the door that
shuts behind them forever.
We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all
our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us,
is our place of holiness.We believe that we lack nothing here that we need. If we
needed something else, God would already have given it to us.
SILENCE
We do not need to find silence; we already have it. The day we
lack silence is the day we have not learned how to keep it.
All the noises around us cause much less disturbance
than we ourselves do.
The real noise is the echo things make within us. It is not
necessarily talking that breaks silence. Silence is the place where
the Word of God dwells; if we limit ourselves to repeating this
word, then we can speak without ceasing to be silent.
Monasteries appear to be the place of praise and the place
of the silence that praise requires.
In the street, crushed by the crowd, we make our souls
into so many caves of silence wherein the word of God can dwell
and resound.
In those crowds marked by the sins of hatred, lust, and
drunkenness, we find a desert of silence, and we recollect ourselves here with great ease, so that God can ring out his name:
“Vox clamans in deserto.”
1 thought on “Feast of Christ the King of the Universe: The Holiness of Ordinary People”
AMEN!!!