I probably don’t have to tell most of you that early summer is a busy time of year. If you own property, there are gardens to plant and maintain, grass and brush to cut, houses to paint, even wood to cut and begin drying for the next winter (why did I go there?). For everyone else, there are graduation parties, weddings, and plain old backyard, or terrace barbecues to hoist a beer and catch up on neighborhood happenings. There are vacations large and small, from day trip outings to the beach, to that really important, gotta-do trip at last to Yosemite, or Bryce Canyon. So many things, in fact, that most of us choose to have light reading, the kind you can pick up and leave on a moment’s notice, where the sleuth or warrior or the love-struck can fit right back into your busy schedule.
Sometimes, though, we start a really heavy-duty project that traps us for week after week: the new tool shed, for instance, or in my case, the book Faustina (The Mystic and Her Message) by Ewa Czaczkowska. Picked up at the Milwaukee Diocese church in Milwaukee, which was built and paid for by Polish immigrants, it is the painstaking biography of a Polish peasant girl born in 1905, who lived only until 1938, dying right about the time that Poland was cynically divided up in treaty (and then fought over in war) by Hitler and Stalin. Painstaking, in that the author is writing to true enthusiasts of her life who really, really want to know exactly what she was doing on, say, Sept 7, 1922.
That is not me. I had never heard of her before, and was surprised to find that she was officially proclaimed a saint by Pope John Paul in 2000. The lives of saints are generally spectacular, and so I bought the book. Her life was spectacular, and the new Feast of Divine Mercy was proclaimed from her work, but one would hardly know it from the first two thirds of this book. Slog, slog and more slog, with little interspersions of divine revelation thrown in, just enough to keep readers such as myself going, on and on. But it builds; and somehow, in the slog, something is created. Is it as sense of how God works or may work? Is it a subliminal spiritual lesson that is learned somehow, somewhere beyond the normal thought processes?
I think so. Three quarters of the way through, we are now moving with greater speed, with Jesus directing Faustina to have a portrait done, to start a new congregation, to have the Church proclaim the message that Mercy is at the very heart of Jesus. And more so, we are seeing her commune directly with God over long periods of time – so long that it is becoming her life, her only life.
Fascinating stuff. Interestingly, and now so common that I come to expect it, church service this last Sunday was exactly about the path of Sister – now Saint – Faustina. I am not a hard-core religious observer, only understanding bits of what I supposedly profess, and I largely have no idea what’s happening in liturgical time, so it came as no surprise to me that I did not know it was the Sunday of Pentecost – or the 50 day mark after the resurrection of Christ. It’s big news in the Church, taking place on the same day of the year that the Torah was proclaimed to Mosses, making it a magical number, and Pentecost is magic indeed. For Christians, it is the time when the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, was breathed into the disciples, and made available to all followers of the spirit of Christ. It gives magical powers, so that one may be understood in all languages, so that one may heal or cast out demons or prophesize. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to have any abilities that God sees fit, and that might include anything.
St. Faustina was given the gift of prophecy (as well as some others, like bi-locality, or being in two places at once) after struggling through a fairly short Dark Night of the Soul, where God seemed to abandon her. Here we learn that the Dark Night is not an abandonment, but a purification of the very concept of God and self, without which God cannot be embraced. We find afterwards that St Faustina’s other earthly faults are finally combed through until only God’s will is to be done through her. It is the ultimate objective for the mystic, and she found it in a relatively short time.
That is where the Pentecost and my readings of Faustina came together: the will of God being done as if it is one’s own will – which, if properly purified, it is. It is, we find from Pentecost, the way of life of the mythical first humans, Adam and Eve, whose every actions came from the will of God even as their own will welcomed it. And then, at one point, their own wills didn’t. And then humankind lost the Holy Spirit. And then it was returned to us, as it is believed, through the coming of Jesus Christ and the great and final epiphany of his life and death, the Pentecost.
The will of God, for Faustina, for Adam and Eve, for the Disciples: one thing, one meaning out of all the other stories. And it came to me then somehow, as Pentecost and Faustina came together, that the truth of Christianity is not important for the facts of history, that which makes so many skeptical; but rather in the myth itself, quite apart from history. Whether Jesus really rose from the dead, or even really existed, while important, is not the nut of the issue; it is, rather, the idea of separation from God, and the possibility of closing that gap. We see through the book on Faustina’s life, slowly but surely, how it is done, and then to what it leads: a bliss without comparison, so strong that only the force that comes itself can keep the mortal flesh alive when it is present. We see that it leads to a direct and never-ending conversation with God that moves beyond the verbal; and we see all manner of powers arisen, for what can by denied from God?
We see, in a way that still mystifies me, that the Christian myth is true, not from factual history, but in and of itself (to reiterate as I always do, this might well be true for many other religions. I speak here only of what I experienced). We see it enacted in the life of a saint just as we hear of it among the now-ancient apostles, and once, among the first humans in a time unknown. The movement of God, of the Paraclete, of sin and redemption, of burning and remaking the bridge, all of it true, regardless, only waiting for the breathe of the Holy Spirit to breath it alive in one and then another; only waiting for the repetition of Pentecost, which is possible now, regardless of time or of place. Dependent only on the soul, which we see only because mercy is given us, for that, as St Faustina learned, is the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit. Mercy: defined by Pope John Paul as the pulling of the divine soul out from darkness, from error and confusion and blindness, by a power, a spirit, which one does not deserve but gets anyway. Mercy, the Pentecost, Saint Faustina, all together in a living, breathing myth.
A long slog. And worth it, as it is that the longer the journey, often the more its memory might last. FK
Sometimes, though, we start a really heavy-duty project that traps us for week after week: the new tool shed, for instance, or in my case, the book Faustina (The Mystic and Her Message) by Ewa Czaczkowska. Picked up at the Milwaukee Diocese church in Milwaukee, which was built and paid for by Polish immigrants, it is the painstaking biography of a Polish peasant girl born in 1905, who lived only until 1938, dying right about the time that Poland was cynically divided up in treaty (and then fought over in war) by Hitler and Stalin. Painstaking, in that the author is writing to true enthusiasts of her life who really, really want to know exactly what she was doing on, say, Sept 7, 1922.
That is not me. I had never heard of her before, and was surprised to find that she was officially proclaimed a saint by Pope John Paul in 2000. The lives of saints are generally spectacular, and so I bought the book. Her life was spectacular, and the new Feast of Divine Mercy was proclaimed from her work, but one would hardly know it from the first two thirds of this book. Slog, slog and more slog, with little interspersions of divine revelation thrown in, just enough to keep readers such as myself going, on and on. But it builds; and somehow, in the slog, something is created. Is it as sense of how God works or may work? Is it a subliminal spiritual lesson that is learned somehow, somewhere beyond the normal thought processes?
I think so. Three quarters of the way through, we are now moving with greater speed, with Jesus directing Faustina to have a portrait done, to start a new congregation, to have the Church proclaim the message that Mercy is at the very heart of Jesus. And more so, we are seeing her commune directly with God over long periods of time – so long that it is becoming her life, her only life.
Fascinating stuff. Interestingly, and now so common that I come to expect it, church service this last Sunday was exactly about the path of Sister – now Saint – Faustina. I am not a hard-core religious observer, only understanding bits of what I supposedly profess, and I largely have no idea what’s happening in liturgical time, so it came as no surprise to me that I did not know it was the Sunday of Pentecost – or the 50 day mark after the resurrection of Christ. It’s big news in the Church, taking place on the same day of the year that the Torah was proclaimed to Mosses, making it a magical number, and Pentecost is magic indeed. For Christians, it is the time when the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, was breathed into the disciples, and made available to all followers of the spirit of Christ. It gives magical powers, so that one may be understood in all languages, so that one may heal or cast out demons or prophesize. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to have any abilities that God sees fit, and that might include anything.
St. Faustina was given the gift of prophecy (as well as some others, like bi-locality, or being in two places at once) after struggling through a fairly short Dark Night of the Soul, where God seemed to abandon her. Here we learn that the Dark Night is not an abandonment, but a purification of the very concept of God and self, without which God cannot be embraced. We find afterwards that St Faustina’s other earthly faults are finally combed through until only God’s will is to be done through her. It is the ultimate objective for the mystic, and she found it in a relatively short time.
That is where the Pentecost and my readings of Faustina came together: the will of God being done as if it is one’s own will – which, if properly purified, it is. It is, we find from Pentecost, the way of life of the mythical first humans, Adam and Eve, whose every actions came from the will of God even as their own will welcomed it. And then, at one point, their own wills didn’t. And then humankind lost the Holy Spirit. And then it was returned to us, as it is believed, through the coming of Jesus Christ and the great and final epiphany of his life and death, the Pentecost.
The will of God, for Faustina, for Adam and Eve, for the Disciples: one thing, one meaning out of all the other stories. And it came to me then somehow, as Pentecost and Faustina came together, that the truth of Christianity is not important for the facts of history, that which makes so many skeptical; but rather in the myth itself, quite apart from history. Whether Jesus really rose from the dead, or even really existed, while important, is not the nut of the issue; it is, rather, the idea of separation from God, and the possibility of closing that gap. We see through the book on Faustina’s life, slowly but surely, how it is done, and then to what it leads: a bliss without comparison, so strong that only the force that comes itself can keep the mortal flesh alive when it is present. We see that it leads to a direct and never-ending conversation with God that moves beyond the verbal; and we see all manner of powers arisen, for what can by denied from God?
We see, in a way that still mystifies me, that the Christian myth is true, not from factual history, but in and of itself (to reiterate as I always do, this might well be true for many other religions. I speak here only of what I experienced). We see it enacted in the life of a saint just as we hear of it among the now-ancient apostles, and once, among the first humans in a time unknown. The movement of God, of the Paraclete, of sin and redemption, of burning and remaking the bridge, all of it true, regardless, only waiting for the breathe of the Holy Spirit to breath it alive in one and then another; only waiting for the repetition of Pentecost, which is possible now, regardless of time or of place. Dependent only on the soul, which we see only because mercy is given us, for that, as St Faustina learned, is the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit. Mercy: defined by Pope John Paul as the pulling of the divine soul out from darkness, from error and confusion and blindness, by a power, a spirit, which one does not deserve but gets anyway. Mercy, the Pentecost, Saint Faustina, all together in a living, breathing myth.
A long slog. And worth it, as it is that the longer the journey, often the more its memory might last. FK
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