Читать книгу What Would Pope Francis Do? Bringing the Good News to People in Need - Sean Salai S.J. - Страница 9

Chapter One

Longing

The primary reason for evangelizing is the love of Jesus which we have received, the experience of salvation which urges us to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?

If we do not feel an intense desire to share this love, we need to pray insistently that he will once more touch our hearts. We need to implore his grace daily, asking him to open our cold hearts and shake up our lukewarm and superficial existence. (Evangelii Gaudium 264)

A few months after the election of Pope Francis, my Jesuit High School students and I went to sleep hungry on a Brazilian beach, surrounded by three million people as the icy surf washed toward us.

We were spending a chilly July night on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, waiting for Francis to celebrate Mass with us in the morning. It was the closing liturgy of World Youth Day and the Brazilian winter (June–August) was in full swing.

That night, July 27, we shivered in our sleeping bags. Earlier in the day, the sun had cooked us for hours with a withering heat. Florida felt very far away.

As temperatures fell steadily during the evening, it was tough to rest peacefully. Our students built little sand walls to block the wind and to keep the freezing ocean spray from blasting us. These walls also gave us an illusion of privacy: The entire 2.5-mile beach was crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with snoring pilgrims, tents, and camping gear.

Our sleep was marked by the taste of salt water, the sound of waves crashing rhythmically on the beach, and the feeling of cold sand digging into our backs. When we got hungry, we nibbled on a little canned tuna and dry snacks which organizers had handed out in boxes before police closed the beach.

To our dismay, the only thing less comfortable than the beach itself was the row of portable toilets lined up alongside it. With beach exits closed and nowhere else to go, organizers had vastly underestimated the number of pilgrims, and some of the facilities were overflowing. It wasn’t sheep we smelled that night.

Francis, whose motorcade passed our group after he arrived by helicopter in the morning, celebrated Mass from an enormous platform, visible to us only through giant television screens spread out along the beach. We were at least two miles away from him.

One of our students, staking out a spot right next to the beachside road, found himself at the front of a cheering crowd as Francis drove by that morning.

When the papal motorcade paused briefly for Francis to wave at some beachfront apartment windows, where people leaned out to greet him, our student snapped a crystal-clear photograph of the pope with his digital camera. He was on cloud nine.

The Mass itself turned out to be a lively mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin hymns — all set to joyful music that led the Brazilian pilgrims to dance.

While many of the guys in our group longed to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, or to at least be closer to Francis, the crowd was so big that most of us could not get anywhere near a communion station. Two of our students who hadn’t eaten a hot meal in twelve hours were so tired that they simply slept through half of the liturgy, curled up in a fetal position.

In his homily, delivered in Spanish over loudspeakers, Francis summarized the week’s festivities by asking us one last time to be missionaries of God’s love. “Go be missionaries,” he declared, echoing the World Youth Day 2013 theme song.

After Mass, a spontaneous beach party erupted. The sun had risen to its blistering midday height, blanketing the beach in a growing heat wave. In response, thousands of overheated pilgrims jumped into the ocean to refresh themselves with cold water. Others stayed on the beach and danced as Catholic musicians performed for us from the sanctuary platform.

Although we were still hungry, we felt joy and peace from the spiritual nourishment we shared at Mass. We also felt physical relief from being able to move around more freely as the beach gradually emptied.

For more than an hour, our students waded in the water with fellow pilgrims from around the world, cooling off and splashing each other happily. Meanwhile, a Jesuit priest and I did a live beachside interview for EWTN’s Life on the Rock television program, being rewarded with complimentary bottles of water. The water was the best part for me, as we had run out of liquids on the beach.

Copacabana felt like a fitting end to our long and grueling week. We had spent several days hauling ourselves around Rio, where the public transit system kept breaking down and running into delays. Rarely did we end up exactly where we wanted to be. Even our two attempts to visit the city’s iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer had been thwarted, once by fog and once by an excessive number of pilgrims that stretched the wait into several hours beyond our departure time for the flight home.

Because the number of World Youth Day pilgrims overwhelmed the city, our group of fifty students and chaperones had also been bumped from the nice parish gym where we were supposed to sleep during our first six nights in the city. Instead we ended up bunking down on the dirty floors of a public elementary school in one of Rio’s slums — a favela where nightly sirens and gunshots obliged us to keep the front doors locked. There were bars on the windows.

Throughout the week, I took photographs and wrote a daily blog for our students’ parents on the school website, giving them updates of our adventures. Wi-Fi service was almost nonexistent.

We went to Copacabana Beach several times for evening liturgies, including a welcome Mass with the local archbishop and a live Stations of the Cross with Pope Francis. At the latter, a flatbed trailer carried the actors and actresses dramatizing the last hours of Christ’s life to different points along the beach, working up to a finale on the sanctuary platform where Francis awaited it.

In some ways, our frequent trips to Copacabana for liturgies were a nice change of pace from the slum where we stayed. Each morning that week, we took ice-cold showers in a rusty bathroom at the school. We celebrated Mass in a dingy gathering area, squatting in chairs designed for little children.

Some of our students got sick from gorging on junk food and catching germs in the streets. Our first aid kit soon yielded up most of its antibiotics, digestive medications, and salves for insect bites.

Yet in spite of these challenges, nobody wanted to quit. Every day we toured a different part of the city, visiting World Youth Day events and sites wherever we found them. Spontaneous encounters with youth groups from other countries, even from other Jesuit high schools in various parts of the world, marked our wanderings.

We ate whatever food we could find, from whoever was selling it. We stopped to pray or rest at whatever Catholic parishes we stumbled across. Every parish in the city was open to us.

One morning, as we rode the train from our slum to the city center, we saw the pope’s police escort parked at a favela he was visiting near ours. Since the city’s poor couldn’t come to Francis, he had gone to them. He also visited a Franciscan ministry to drug addicts.

Despite spotty news and Internet service, we later learned Francis had exhorted Catholics in a speech that day to “flip the tortilla,” asking us to shake things up and make a joyful noise.

A real tortilla would have delighted our students, who spent most of the trip alternating between fatigue and hunger as we fought our way through endless crowds on the public transit system. For our students, it was an exciting life experience outside the comfortable routine of home. For the Jesuits and young adult chaperones, all veterans of high school trips, it was a new threshold of exhaustion.

We certainly felt like we were on the margins that week, whether we wanted to be there or not. Tired and hungry, we shared the life of the city and its pilgrims for seven days, but we also shared the life of the slums in a small way. Each morning brought fresh adventures and new encounters with the needy.

From Paraguay to the Slums of Rio

By heading into Rio’s slums to visit the poor that week, it appeared to us that Francis was living out his message: Go to the margins and see whom you find there. Don’t give advice or try to interpret the suffering of others, but place yourself with them in solidarity. Talk and pray with them.

After a weeklong pilgrimage to ruined Jesuit missionary sites in Paraguay, including the magnificent Iguazu Falls and other places depicted in the film The Mission, our little group already felt a bit on the margins by the time we arrived in Rio for World Youth Day.

During the week in Paraguay, daily prayer and faith sharing accompanied our interactions with people. We even prayed before the exposed heart of St. Roque González, a Jesuit missionary known as the “apostle of Paraguay,” in its glass reliquary at a Jesuit high school in the capital of Asunción. In 1628, an Indian witch doctor, jealous of González’s influence over the natives, conspired successfully to kill the priest with an axe.

In Paraguay, the unexpected became routine. At one point, our bus broke down, and we went on a five-mile hike through the subtropical fields and forests, meeting more farm animals than people along the way. Another day, we celebrated Mass in the grassy ruins of an ancient Jesuit mission church.

We met indigenous peoples. Coming to a Guarani Indian village, accessible only by foot paths and bridges through the forest some distance from the nearest active Jesuit mission in San Ingacio Guazu, we spent a day bartering with the chief as our boys kicked a soccer ball around with the village kids. The village consisted of a few dirt paths and thatched-roof huts; the chief wore a soccer jersey.

Our students loved the first week in Paraguay perhaps even more than the second week in Rio. Like Francis, they seemed to enjoy visiting with people more than attending the big public events.

And the parents supported our students. Rather than spending money on a summer vacation to Disney or Cancún, the families of our students paid to send them on a religious pilgrimage to visit Jesuit missions and pray with the Holy Father in South America.

Instead of playing video games and sitting on the couch all summer, our students spent two weeks living in a foreign-language environment, sleeping on trains, and singing songs with young people from other countries. They loved it.

But Pope Francis, then seventy-six years old, seemed to be outpacing all of us.

Using his police escort to full advantage, Francis traveled all over Rio during the week of World Youth Day, appearing to us in fleeting glimpses on news broadcasts and at the beach each night as we crowded to attend the various liturgies he led there.

Despite an exhausting schedule, the Holy Father took his time with each person he met. On the day his plane landed in Rio, admirers mobbed Francis’s car when it took a wrong turn after leaving the airport, alarming security personnel. Smiling, Francis simply rolled down his window and started chatting with people who rushed up to the car. He was in no hurry.

Large crowds greeted him everywhere with a musical chant, delivered in a cadence familiar to World Youth Day veterans: “Papa Francisco!”

In the open motorcade that took Francis to the sanctuary platform at Copacabana Beach each day, he frequently stopped to bless babies and talk with onlookers.

One night, our group watched in surprise as pilgrims scrambled up trees along the beach to get a better look at Francis. Like Zacchaeus the tax collector, a short man who climbed a tree to see Jesus in Luke 19, they were rewarded by frequent stops from the papal motorcade as they waved from the branches.

We could feel the excitement in the air. When Francis stopped unexpectedly right in front of us that night, the screaming crowd around us surged forward with a groan, causing a screaming woman at the front to pass out from excitement. Paramedics loaded her onto a nearby ambulance.

The pope gave several public talks every bit as electrifying as his personal interactions, delivering the exhortations in a form of Spanish so clear that almost anyone could understand him just by listening to the tone of his words and watching his body language.

Go to the margins, Francis kept saying in Spanish, repeating it in his talks and in the closing Mass homily. See whom you find and hear what they have to say. Share the joy of your faith, using words if necessary.

Who was on the margins in Rio? What did they have to say to our group? And what could we possibly offer them in return?

Even as our South American pilgrimage was ending, our journey to God was only beginning.

Waking Up to Poverty

But back to Copacabana Beach, where we slept before the papal Mass. When I awoke on the beach that morning, shivering in my black Jesuit cassock and poncho in the winds of Brazil’s summery winter, something felt wrong. The sky above my head was still dark. I wasn’t supposed to be up yet.

Forcing myself into a sitting position, I suddenly realized the freezing tide of the ocean had washed over half of our group. Another Jesuit was shouting for everyone to wake up and move.

It turned out that our group — like hundreds of others along the shoreline — was sleeping too close to the water’s edge for high tide.

That tide washed away some personal items and all of our boxes of food, but it failed to sweep away any freshmen, despite jokes to that effect from a few upperclassmen. It was sometime after 3:00 a.m., and most of our fellow pilgrims remained fast asleep.

After taking stock of our losses, we moved to the roadside sidewalk at the edge of the beach to dry out and close our eyes for the last few hours of darkness before Pope Francis came for Mass.

Clark Bulleit, a football player who eventually became valedictorian of his class, later described this day as the happiest moment of his life. In his valedictory address at graduation in May 2015, Bulleit said:

So what does make me happy? Long walks on the beach and beautiful sunsets? No. Actually, the time in my life where I was most happy, I was sleeping on the sidewalk, dehydrated and malnourished during my trip to Brazil for World Youth Day. I was happy because, there, I was completely unconcerned with myself, and in full communion with my fellow people and God himself.

Pushed to the edge of his personal limits, Bulleit had somehow realized his longing for God in this moment, and he woke up on the sidewalk in a deep state of consolation.

Not all of us slumbered so peacefully. Despite all of my Jesuit mind tricks, I couldn’t go back to sleep again after we moved from the beach.

Huddled on the sidewalk, I surrendered myself instead to the various thoughts drifting through my mind. Trying to forget the pin pricks in my back caused by sleeping on the sand, I began meditating on the events of our trip.

At sunrise a few hours later, I suddenly recalled the question my student had asked me in March. “What if the next pope is a Jesuit?”

Yeah, right, I remembered thinking. What if pigs could fly? God sure does have a sense of humor.

The thought occurred to me that, had I seen Pope Francis riding the Buenos Aires subway during his time as archbishop, I might not have paid any attention to him. But now he was the Vicar of Christ, the successor of St. Peter, preparing to celebrate Mass with three million of us on a cold and windy beach that would soon be bathed in a warm sunlight.

Had I seen Jesus Christ on the subway in Rio that week, I’d like to think I might have recognized him. But I’m not so sure. As St. John the Evangelist knew, it’s hard to see the invisible God until we recognize him in our visible neighbors.

Even St. Thomas the Apostle struggled to recognize the risen Christ in the witness of his brothers and sisters.

As I thought about these things on the sidewalk, it occurred to me that common desires had kept our group together in Rio: our shared longings for food, shelter, medicine, transportation, and dry clothing. Like the residents of the slum Francis visited, we lived in constant need, isolated within a country that didn’t really see or understand us. While we didn’t suffer as deeply as the city’s poor, we felt closer to God’s people in our experiences of deprivation of things we normally took for granted — things such as hot showers, drinkable water, climate control, and readily available food. But it also struck me that there were deeper longings, hidden beneath the surface, uniting our hearts and minds on pilgrimage: God’s longing for us, our longing for God, and our longing to bring God’s love to others.

Although we had traveled to South America to see Pope Francis, we gradually realized it was Jesus Christ himself who awaited us there. On this journey to God, we immersed ourselves wholeheartedly in the experience, stirring the deepest desires of our hearts. And we started to see how God was responding.

As Pope Francis emphasizes, to long for God makes us long to share God’s love with others. This longing conjures up deep emotions in all of us, particularly surrounding our experiences of sin and grace.

Sin, the Obstacle That Distorts Our Longing

For Francis, who often talks about the reality of the devil, sin and grace are more than ideas in a book. In his view, deeply rooted in his Catholic and Jesuit traditions, sin and grace manifest themselves within us as attitudes of selfishness and love. While sin diverts our longings to self-centered goals, grace fuels the longing for God that empowers us to go to the margins as missionaries.

How do Catholics understand sin? Some of us look to definitions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines sin as the “failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (CCC 1849). Sin “turns our hearts away” from God’s love (CCC 1850).

Building on these meanings, Pope Francis describes sin as the selfish act of hurting others on purpose. Sinful attachment turns us inward rather than outward, causing us to ignore people in need. He writes:

To go out of ourselves and to join others is healthy for us. To be self-enclosed is to taste the bitter poison of immanence, and humanity will be worse for every selfish choice we make. (Evangelii Gaudium 87)

Francis calls sin a “selfish choice” rooted in our shortsighted longings for false idols like money, sex, and power. Indeed, he has consistently rejected the false idols of secular materialism, noting that too many of us spend more time obsessing over our pets and cosmetics than caring for our fellow human beings. He adds: “The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits” (Evangelii Gaudium 57).

Here the pope evokes a key theme from his Ignatian spiritual tradition: the satanic temptations of riches, honors, and pride.

For the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the selfishness of sin is inextricably bound up with these three temptations to indulge our feelings of entitlement over others. Such feelings originate not in a healthy self-esteem, but in the assumption that we deserve more from life than we have received and more than others possess.

St. Ignatius notes, as does Pope Francis, that nothing is ever good enough for the selfish person, whose noble longings gradually become reoriented (disordered) toward secondary goods at the cost of our primary relationships. In a letter to a Portuguese Jesuit dated March 18, 1542, Ignatius declares that “the most abominable of sins” is ingratitude, or the habitual refusal to acknowledge the gifts God has given us.

Like the unfulfilled corporate executive, unloved by his parents and family, who always needs to buy “just one more” house or car. Or the eighteen-year-old American athlete who squanders a multimillion dollar professional sports contract after being drafted out of high school. They earned their money, the world tells us, so why can’t they enjoy it?

Ingratitude thrives whenever we give free reign to our self-centered longings. It feeds our disordered craving for possessions rather than loving relationships, affirming our selfish longing for instant gratification at the expense of God and others.

If our longing for God leads us to the margins in places like Rio de Janeiro, then our longing for possessions often fuels a lasting ingratitude that closes our hearts to others. Francis argues in his encyclical Laudato Si’ (May 24, 2015) that this longing, writ large, drives the consumerism that destroys our planet’s natural resources and exploits the poor. But he also says we can break this cycle if we turn back to God.

From Sin to Grace

As he showed us in Rio, Pope Francis knows how fearful narcissism dominates our hearts in a consumer society, steering our longings away from Gospel joy. But he also recognizes that we can accept our selfishness as a positive challenge, using our own painful experiences of sin’s effects as a motivation to reject its hold over us. Rather than a burden, sin can be a challenge to redirect our longings to God, reopening our hearts to his grace.

The first step from sin to grace, as Francis reminded us in Brazil, is admitting to ourselves we are sinners in need of God’s mercy. Once we unmask the selfishness we ignore in ourselves and condemn in others, Francis suggests we can then use our experience of sin as a useful kick in the pants.

Francis himself demonstrated this healthy self-awareness one year during Lent, going to confession publicly in St. Peter’s Basilica.

While leading a penance service there on March 28, 2014, the pope, along with sixty-one other priests, had moved toward confessional boxes and chairs near the walls to offer the sacrament for individual penitents. But as the papal master of ceremonies showed the Holy Father to the place he would use to hear confessions, Francis pointed to another confessional nearby, insisting that he himself would be the first to confess.

As Francis knelt in front of the wooden confessional box, his white-clad back to the congregation, photographers and videographers captured the unusual moment. Although Francis goes to confession every two weeks, even the most recent popes have rarely been seen confessing their sins to a fellow priest in public.

For his part, the priest to whom Francis confessed was a little nonplused by having the pope as a penitent. When the encounter was finished, he grasped the pope’s hands and kissed them in reverence.

By living only for ourselves, many of us allow our sins to become habitual and thoughtless vices, abandoning humble self-awareness as we concentrate our longings on enhancing our own sense of wealth and prestige. But the example of Francis says we can begin to overcome these selfish longings if we learn how to expose them to the world — and to ourselves — for what they really are.

St. Ignatius notes in the “Two Standards” meditation — these standards are the battle flag of Christ and the battle flag of Satan, between which all of us must choose — that after we gain riches and honors, the Evil One tempts us more easily to pride, the sin of thinking we are better than others because we have acquired more stuff and respect than they have. Rather than love people on society’s margins as Christ does — including not only the materially poor, but also, for example, the lonely or bullied or socially awkward — we learn to despise them as much as we implicitly despise ourselves. True empathy thus becomes impossible, at least until we rekindle our longing for God.

From Pride to Humility

In little ways, all of us practice the sin of pride in our lives, as when we pay more attention to our gadgets and possessions than to our relationships. Or when Catholic teachers “play the professor,” as Pope Francis put it on a visit to Ecuador in July 2015, talking down to young people to feel superior to them rather than striving to reach their hearts with Christ’s transformative love.

For Pope Francis as for St. Ignatius, our downward spiral into pride begins with our desires for money and fame rather than for loving relationships — a disordered longing for idols that is always demonic, but often grabs our hearts because we do not recognize it as evil.

While horror movies like The Exorcist depict Jesuits as demon fighters, the devil is more than a Hollywood villain or theological concept for Pope Francis. The devil’s chief activity in today’s global society, as Francis preached it to us at World Youth Day 2013, is to cultivate a self-despairing consumerism among Christians that redirects our hearts away from God and those who need his love.

In the pope’s eyes, only a humble awareness of our fundamental human equality as sinners in need of God’s mercy can reverse this sinful movement of our longings away from God. Once we are hardened in the selfish and ungrateful conviction that we are entitled to more than others, we risk shutting our hearts to God’s love for good, destroying ourselves and our planet in the process.

Rather than being struck by lightning in divine punishment for our sins, Francis notes that we find ourselves miserable and our relationships in chaos when we act selfishly, robbing us of Gospel joy. Our lives become empty and meaningless because we love nothing and no one other than ourselves. It is precisely in this experience of misery that God challenges us to turn our hearts back to his grace.

The Grace of Love

For Pope Francis, love is the opposite of selfishness, being rooted in our longing for God and in our experiences of his grace. Grace calls us out of sin, builds upon our longing for God, and finally bears fruit in the love we show our neighbors on the margins.

So what, then, is grace?

The Catechism defines grace as “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us” (CCC 1996, emphasis in original) to move from selfishness to selflessness in our lifelong path to holiness. If sin directs our longings away from the God of the margins, inviting us to seek fulfillment only in ourselves, then grace moves us outward to love those who we recognize are as incomplete as we are.