Masters of their craft. J Stewart (best preachers - website). STOTT, THIELICKE, b b Taylor, Tom long, WMD Williamson.
RC - memorable; blind borrowed white cane, train, money? Nice lady how long? Swans ton st. How know cross st? Humorous blind friend - screech of brakes.
~~
JOHN CLAYPOOL
RC - memorable; blind borrowed white cane, train, money? Nice lady how long? Swans ton st. How know cross st? Humorous blind friend - screech of brakes.
~~
JOHN CLAYPOOL
Once a month, while
pastoring a busy church in the 1970s/1980s, I’d receive John Claypool’s printed
sermons in the mail. Invariably the rest of the morning was spent devouring
them. He was – still is - the best ‘writing preacher’ I’ve ever read. If there
is one spot on this planet where I’d choose to spend a six-month
study-sabbatical, it would be in a quiet room at the Southern Baptist
Historical Library and Archives, reading their collection of his sermons.
John Claypool didn’t fit
easily into the conservative milieu of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was
regarded with some suspicion as one of those ‘Moderates’ or ‘Cooperatives’ who
inhabited the cutting edge of theological enquiry and socio-political issues –
especially racism.
John Claypool was ordained
to the Baptist ministry in 1953 and pastored five Southern Baptist churches -
in Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi. Tiring eventually of the
hard-line fundamentalism of his denomination, he left, and was ordained an
Episcopal priest in 1986, ministering as Rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church
in Birmingham, Alabama, for nearly fourteen years. He retired from full-time
parish ministry in 2000 and then served as Professor of Preaching at McAfee
School of Theology, Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia…
Why ‘writing preacher’?
I’ve met John Claypool, and heard him preach. His preaching-style was
thoughtful, and his vocal presentation a bit ‘dreamy’. But his words and
ideas-about-ideas, if you ‘hung in there,’ were often mind-blowing.
But John Claypool was not
simply an intellectual. His brilliant book The Preaching Event (the
1979 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School) discusses the what, why,
how and when of preaching. The preacher, he says, is a reconciler, who seeks to
re-establish trust at the deepest level. We are ‘gift-givers’: too often
preaching can fulfil our own needs for love and status. We are witnesses:
making available our own grapplings with woundedness to help others in their
pain and grief.
Claypool approves of
P. T. Forsyth’s distinction in his 1907 Beecher Lectures, between ‘oratory’ and
Christian preaching. The orator’s goal is to "[get] people to do certain
things… to motivate individuals and arouse them to act in a certain way.
However the goal of the Christian preacher is very different – it’s to
facilitate a spirit of openness, trust, at-one-ment’ between the creature and
Creator. How was/is this trust broken? Through human beings’ suspicions about
God’s love for them. How is it restored? Ultimately, as John Killinger once
expressed it: ‘Jesus was God’s answer to the problem of a bad reputation."
And, Claypool adds, the miracle of the Easter event is central here. Easter is
all about "the patience and mercy of a God who would still have hope for the
kind of creatures who had treated his only begotten Son that way. Three days
after human beings killed him in cold blood, the word was out, not only that he
was alive again, but that he was saying… 'Let’s keep on keeping on. Let’s get
back to the task of dispelling suspicion and reconciling the world back to the
Father…'."
The Christian preacher thus has an awesome task to perform. It’s not simply about moving people around at the level of behavior, but participating ‘in the miracle of primal reconciliation.’
The Christian preacher thus has an awesome task to perform. It’s not simply about moving people around at the level of behavior, but participating ‘in the miracle of primal reconciliation.’
His magnificent conclusion:
"Why do we preach? Not to get something for ourselves, out of need-love,
but to give something of ourselves in gift-love. How do we do it? By making
available as witnesses what we have learned from our own woundedness for the
woundedness of others. When do we do this? At times and in ways that are
appropriate to another’s growing as a farmer nurtures a crop. To do this is to
participate in the extension of the gospel into our own time. Could anything be
a higher human joy? I think not! Let us go, then, under the mercy, with the
great story, and in abundant hope…"
~~
In a memorable interview
with Claypool conducted by The Wittenburg Door magazine
(April/May 1978) he revealed the core issues which made him the person he turned
out to be. His spiritual awakening happened in College when he read C S Lewis,
and with a "real flash of insight saw that Jesus was the clue to ultimate
reality".
Why did he enter pastoral
ministry? Among other reasons, to 'earn the blessing of his mother’. When this
realization hit him later, he developed a ‘confessional’ preaching style –
which, he would tell students in his seminary classes, can be a subtle form of
exhibitionism if you’re not careful.
He had a close friendship
with Martin Luther King Jr. (a ‘first-rate thinker’) and was active in the
civil rights movement. Once he was in a coffee shop with Dr. King, and a
journalist took a picture of the two of them. When that photo appeared in the
Louisville Courier, he and his family received hate calls and mail, crosses
were burned in their front yard, and his children were threatened. When he
championed the idea that a Nigerian seminary student (‘that our missionaries
had converted’) should be permitted to attend their church ‘a lot of people left
and the money dropped off’.
Another significant event
was his surprising resignation – after only 5 ½ years - from a church of 5,000
and 11 staff, to go to a much smaller pastorate. Why would a gifted preacher
step down the rungs of the ‘success ladder’ and do such a thing? Simple: he was
tired, and for him ‘fatigue became a moral category’. He was challenged by Gail
Sheehy’s book Passages about the dangers in mid-life of
over-investment in work and under-investment in relationships. Conducting hundreds
of funerals of people he didn’t know (and hoping he pronounced the names right)
became wearing. "A major mistake," he confessed later, was that
"I didn’t call in the community. I acted in isolation: there were surely
many options in any situation that address the panicky fear of a tired
person". So he negotiated a paid month off before starting in his new
pastoral role to study at Yale Divinity School. Slowly he was re-invigorated,
and learned that "God is the God of fertilizer: God can take dung and bring
things of beauty out of it".
~~
John Claypool’s most
‘wounding’ event was the death of their little eight-year-old girl, Laura Lue,
diagnosed with acute leukemia. She lived only eighteen months and ten days
after that first shocking news was given to her parents. Tracks of a
Fellow Struggler, his first and probably his best-known book,
comprises sermons he preached during that time, together with a final chapter
‘Learning to Handle Grief’, preached three and a half years later. It’s the
book I’ve shared with many parishioners who’ve had to journey ‘into the valley
of the shadow of death’ with a loved one.
He often told this story
about his way of handling grief:
“We did not have a washing
machine during World War II and gas was rationed. It was going to be a real
challenge. At about that time one of my father’s younger business associates
was suddenly drafted into the service. My father offered to let them store
their furniture in our basement while he had to be away. Well it so happened
that they had an old grey Bendix washing machine. And as they were moving in,
my father suggested that maybe they would let us use their machine in lieu of
our giving them some storage space.
“The next question became,
who is going to become the wash person in the family?
“In that mysterious way
that families assign roles, I became the wash person at the grand old age of
eleven! For the next four years, I had a ritual every Tuesday and every Friday.
I would come home from school, gather up the wash, take it down into the
basement, fill the old Bendix with water, put in the clothes, add some soap,
and then watch as the plunger would make all kinds of configurations of suds.
It had a hand roller to wring the washed clothes out and I can remember as a
child trying to stick my finger between those rollers to see how far I could go
without it cutting off circulation. In other words, I became affectionately
bonded to that old mechanism in those four years.
“When the war was over my father’s friend came back. One day when I was at school, a truck came to our basement, took out all of their things, including the washing machine, and nobody had told me. It was a Tuesday. I came home and gathered up the clothes, went down in the basement, and to this day I can remember my sense of horror as I saw that empty space where the old Bendix had been. I put down the clothes and rushed back upstairs and announced loudly, ‘We have been robbed! Somebody stole our washing machine!’
“My mother, who was not only a musician but also a wise human being, sat me down and said, ‘John, you’ve obviously forgotten how that machine got to be in our basement. It never did belong to us. That we ever got to use it was incredibly good fortune.’ And then she said, ‘If something is a possession and it’s taken away, you have a right to be angry. But if something is a gift and it’s taken, you use that moment to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’
“That was the memory that resurfaced for me the night Laura Lou died. [That little girl] was in my life the way the old Bendix washing machine was in our basement and I heard the voice of my mother say, ‘If it is a gift and it’s taken, you use that occasion to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’ And that memory helped me to decide that night to take the road of gratitude out of the valley of sorrow. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks of walking through the valley of the shadow of grief. I would suggest to you that the road of gratitude is the best way I know not to get bogged down in our grief but to make our way through it.
“Life is gift, birth is windfall, and all, all is grace. And I give you the gift that was given to me and I pray that somehow the sense of life as gift will enable you to make a brave and hopeful journey, not just into the valley of the shadow of bereavement, but through that valley to the light on the other side. May your journey be a brave one. Amen."
“When the war was over my father’s friend came back. One day when I was at school, a truck came to our basement, took out all of their things, including the washing machine, and nobody had told me. It was a Tuesday. I came home and gathered up the clothes, went down in the basement, and to this day I can remember my sense of horror as I saw that empty space where the old Bendix had been. I put down the clothes and rushed back upstairs and announced loudly, ‘We have been robbed! Somebody stole our washing machine!’
“My mother, who was not only a musician but also a wise human being, sat me down and said, ‘John, you’ve obviously forgotten how that machine got to be in our basement. It never did belong to us. That we ever got to use it was incredibly good fortune.’ And then she said, ‘If something is a possession and it’s taken away, you have a right to be angry. But if something is a gift and it’s taken, you use that moment to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’
“That was the memory that resurfaced for me the night Laura Lou died. [That little girl] was in my life the way the old Bendix washing machine was in our basement and I heard the voice of my mother say, ‘If it is a gift and it’s taken, you use that occasion to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’ And that memory helped me to decide that night to take the road of gratitude out of the valley of sorrow. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks of walking through the valley of the shadow of grief. I would suggest to you that the road of gratitude is the best way I know not to get bogged down in our grief but to make our way through it.
“Life is gift, birth is windfall, and all, all is grace. And I give you the gift that was given to me and I pray that somehow the sense of life as gift will enable you to make a brave and hopeful journey, not just into the valley of the shadow of bereavement, but through that valley to the light on the other side. May your journey be a brave one. Amen."
~~
John Claypool wrote eleven
books, and in 2008 a new collection of his sermons on the twelve disciples,
entitled The First to Follow, edited by his widow Ann
Wilkinson Claypool, was published.
He died on September 3,
2005 aged 74. In a eulogy Kirby Godsey, President of Mercer University, said,
“John Claypool touched our souls. Amidst our wounds and our triumphs, his voice
became for us the voice of God - a special measure of grace and with unfettered
gentleness. John's presence in our lives and our histories is more than mere
death can ever take away. He will continue to walk among us, giving light to
our steps, wisdom for our hearts, and hope to our souls. John Claypool's life
and presence and teaching were profound and enduring gifts to the entire Mercer
University community."
~~
Many of John Claypool’s
sermons are available online, including a few on our John Mark
Ministries website (jmm.org.au). I have borrowed some ideas from his
notable homily on Ananias and Sapphira and adapted them here: http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/2400.htm .
Rowland Croucher
JOHN CLAYPOOL
“Loving as Jesus Loved”
John 13: 31-35
The Reverend John Claypoool
May 9, 2004
The Rev. John Claypool, an
Episcopal priest, is the professor of preaching for the McAfee School of
Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta, GA.
Many times the last thing a
person says before he or she is dying takes on a very special significance. It
is as if the very essence of that individual is somehow summed up and compacted
into a single message.
I imagine this is how the
earliest disciples felt about the words that are in our reading of the day.
They were all at table with Jesus, and the impending crisis that would take his
life loomed ahead of them inescapably. And then came those final, poignant
words, “A new commandment I give to you; love one another. As I have loved you,
you are to love one another.” This will become your unique signature in the
world, the way folks will sense your true identity, your essence. This will be
your ultimate reason for being.
There is actually nothing
original or brand new in these words. The commandment to love one another goes
back much, much further than Jesus himself. It is one of the themes that is
cited again and again all through the Old Testament. And Jesus had certainly
repeated those words again and again as he walked the ways of the earth during
the days of his flesh. What, then, was the special nuance that made this final
mandate so special and so memorable, as it is, right down to this very moment?
I believe it was that
qualifying phrase that Jesus added to these words, “Love one another.” He made
it quite specific by saying that they were to love one another as I have loved
you. In other words, the unique way that Jesus had incarnated that ancient
ideal was to become the pattern of how the disciples, and that includes us,
were to love one another. Here is one of those places where the famous
imitation of Christ’s ideal got its origin, and it raises the seminal question,
“Exactly how did this one, who became what we are so we could understand more
fully who God is, actually and realistically love?”
St. Augustine has given me
two clues to such a question. He once observed that Jesus loved each one he had
ever met as if there were none other in all the world to love. In other words,
Jesus radically individualized the affection he acted out toward others.
Instead of never seeing the trees for the forest, as the old adage goes, Jesus
reversed that process and never failed to focus on the particular and the
unique in each human being. This represents an extraordinary commitment and
discipline, especially because, even in Jesus’ day, he came in contact with
many, many people and, therefore, must have found it tempting to lump people
together in categories, in classes, and to allow the forest mentality to blind
him to the genuine uniqueness of each human being. However, I do not think I am
being totally naive to say that even though such an ideal is a tremendous,
tremendous reach, it is within the possibility of everyone of us. Here is an
aspiration to which I suggest all of us should commit ourselves and that is to
grow in our capacity to individualize our loving energies. Now to be sure, only
the Holy One can actualize this ideal completely.
I’ve always loved the
little story about the boy who’s trying to learn the Lord’s Prayer, and one
night as he knelt by his bed, these words came out:
Our Father, who are in
heaven How do you know my name?
Such individualized
affection will always remain a mystery to us mortals, and at the same time, let
us never forget we’re made in the image of that extraordinary love. And doing
what Jesus did in loving each one he ever met as if there were none other in
all the world is at least an ideal toward which we can reach even if it always
remains utterly beyond our complete grasp.
The second clue St.
Augustine offers is that Jesus loved all as he loved each. The way he loved was
not only individualized, but it was also incredibly universal. I do not know
which of these qualities is more amazing, but, once again, the great saint’s
description remains true to the memories that we’re given of Jesus in all four
of the canonical gospels. Those eyes out of which he looked when he lived upon
this earth were never filled with contempt or disdain. Even when the words
Jesus spoke assumed a note of harshness, it was because of a concern that he
felt for those whom he addressed. They were never words of hatred. We must
never forget that the opposite of love is not anger or hostility but
indifference. But there is not one example in all of the gospels of Jesus ever
turning away from another as if what happened to that one made no difference to
him. I find St. Augustine’s words to be a wonderful description of that unique
way that Jesus loved and invites us now to love also. He loved each one he ever
met as if there were none other in all the world to love, and he loved all as
he loved each.
As I have meditated on this
extraordinary reality, I find myself agreeing with one of the most important
things C.S. Lewis ever taught me. In one of his very last books, the profound
English scholar examines all the famous Greek words for the concept of love and
then concludes that at bottom they come down to one seminal distinction: the
difference between what he calls “need love” and “gift love.”
Need love, Lewis says, is
always born of emptiness. It is basically inquisitive to the core. A need lover
sees in every beloved object or person a value that he or she covets to
possess. Need love moves out greedily to grasp and to appropriate for itself.
If one were to diagram it, need love is always circular, reaching out to the
beloved to transfer value back to itself. In a popular image, need love sucks
essence out of another and into itself. It does not take exceptional
imagination, Lewis contends, to acknowledge that many times when we humans say
to another, “I love you,” what we are really meaning is, “I need you, I want
you. You have a value that I very much desire to make my own, no matter what
the consequence may be to you.”
Now over against this
graphic image, Lewis contends there is another reality that is utterly
different. It is what he calls gift love. Instead of being born of emptiness or
lack, this form of loving is born of fullness. The goal of gift love is to
enrich and enhance the beloved rather than to extract value. Gift love is like
an arc, not a circle. It moves out to bless and to increase rather to acquire
or to diminish. Gift love is more like a bountiful, artesian well that
continues to overflow than a vacuum or a black hole. Lewis concludes this
contrast by saying that the uniqueness of the biblical vision of reality is
that God’s love is gift love, not need love. And then he says, “We humans are
made in the image of such everlasting and unconditional love.” Lewis’ depiction
of gift love really is the foundation stone of the way St. Augustine describes
the way Jesus loved. And the great good news for everyone of us to hear today
is not only that we are loved by God in this marvelous way, but also that this
is our deepest identity as well and is a way we can choose to live our lives.
The theologian Karl Barth
once said, “Jesus is the name of our species, in relation to whom we are still
subhuman but, nonetheless, called ultimately to become.” Jesus would not have
given us this new commandment if it had not been possible.
You and I, with the help of
God’s unfailing grace, can grow into the wonder of loving each one as if there
is none other in all the world to love and loving all as we love each.
http://www.protestanthour.com/05.09.2004.html
~~
~~
DOM HELDER CAMARA
My top three (male) heroes are Jesus of Nazareth, Dom
Helder Camara, and Francis of Assisi, in that order…
(He’s one of three
20th/21st century Catholic Archbishops I admire, each of whom chose slightly
different routes in opposing violent regimes. The other two: Pope Francis, and
Archbishop Oscar Romero).
Dom Helder Camara addressed
a packed Melbourne Concert Hall on May 15, 1985. After a rapturous welcome, he
stilled the crowd by saying ‘I’m just Christ’s little donkey…’ When a baby in
the balcony cried he stopped, looked intently towards the sound, and with the tears glistening in the spotlights said: ‘We want to
make the world safe for you, little one!’
In his playful,
down-to-earth, simple way he told us: ‘Friends, we have 40 times the nuclear
potential needed to kill all life – not just human life – on
our planet.’ ‘Let us be Christians not only in name, but by our lives.’ ‘The
perpetrators of violence who are sinners, yes, but we’re all sinners. Help us
Holy Spirit!’ ‘Vatican 2 insisted that the whole church, not just its hierarchy, are the people of
God… So we priests must work not just for the
poor, but with the poor… Alone we are weak; together we are a
force…’
Many (like Jose Comblin
introducing Into Your Hands Lord, 1987) say he’s the ‘only
Catholic bishop who has a true audience in the non-Catholic world’.
~~
Dom Helder Camara
(1909-1999) was for millions the male counterpart of Mother Teresa: a tireless
servant of the poor.
He was born into a poor
Fortaleza family (his parents had 13 children, but five of them died very young
in a croup epidemic). Ordained a priest in 1931, until 1947/8 he was an
educator. But his appointment as auxiliary bishop (1952) and archbishop (1955)
of the diocese of Rio de Janeiro led to his developing a high profile – with
weekly TV and daily radio programs. He denounced the city’s social and racial
divisions. With the help of Presidents Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961) and Joao
Goulart he initiated many programs to help the poor, acquiring an international
reputation as the ‘bishop of the favelas’ – and making many powerful enemies,
not least of which was the US government. A socially progressive Latin America
did not fit with US policy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. On March 31,
1964, President Goulart was overthrown in a military coup supported by the US.
The next day Helder Camara
arrived in Recife as Archbishop. He said to the diocese: ‘I am a
north-easterner talking to north-easteners… In imitation of Christ I have not
come to be served, but to serve.’ He avoided wearing the bishops’ purple sash,
and quickly abandoned the pretentious palace for three rooms in the
outbuildings of a parish church. He ate at the taxi-drivers’ stall across the
road and hitched lifts around the city instead of running an official car. He
gave away church land for the landless, set up a credit union, took students out of seminaries to form small communities
in the parishes, and set up a theological institute in which future priests studied alongside laypeople, even receiving
lectures from women.
He was one of the few bishops critical of the military’s reign of terror.
Progressive priests, social activists, trade union leaders, members of Congress, writers and journalists were
tortured and/or imprisoned. Accused of being a ‘communist subversive’, Helder
Camara was exiled in his own country; for 13 years from 1970, the government
banned him from public speaking and forbade even the publication of his name in
any media. Although under constant threat of assassination he refused a
bodyguard or even a lock on his door.
One night a frightened family sought Dom
Helder. One of theirs had been arrested and was being tortured in the
police barracks. The bishop phoned the chief of police: ‘This is Dom
Helder. You are holding my brother.’ The policeman, surprised, stutters: ‘Your
brother, Eminence?’ ‘Yes, despite our different names, we are sons of the
same Father.’ The chief made all sorts of excuses and
ordered the release of the man…
One of Dom Helder’s
collaborators, Father Henrique Pereira Neto, was barbarously
assassinated in Recife, after being tied up, dragged along the ground, shot
three times, and hung from a tree… Another priest, Father Tito de Alencar, was
given electric shocks, kicks, and blows with a rod. His torturer asked him to
open his mouth to ‘receive the sacrament of the eucharist’. When he did they
inserted an electrified wire… Helder: ‘It’s absolutely terrible. I go regularly
to hospitals or prisons, or the morgue, to collect or identify collaborators
who had disappeared – priests or laypeople…’
But internationally, he was
a ‘star’ – receiving over 80 invitations a year (accepting only four or five).
‘And I go not to attack Brazil, but injustice everywhere.’ Nominated
three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, he missed out (once to Henry Kissinger
and Le Duc Tho). So the ‘People’s Peace Prize’ was created for him – worth two
and a half times as much (which he donated to agricultural projects in his
diocese). He was also awarded the Pacem in Terris (‘Peace on earth’)
Award (named after a 1963 encyclical letter
by Pope John XXIII that urged all people of good
will to secure peace among all nations). And many doctorates – often from
prestigious universities (Harvard, Louvain, the Sorbonne etc.). ‘It’s never for
myself: I’m simply the representative of the people sem vez sem voz, with
no hope and no voice…’
~~
Dom Helder Camara was a
prophet, rather than a revolutionary or theologian. Within the body
of this frail man, there beat the ardent and joyful heart of a troubadour, who,
like Francis of Assisi, blessed all people. He often said, “In the heart of
a priest, there cannot exist a drop of hatred. We share the same Father, we are blood sisters and brothers, in the blood of Jesus Christ.”
He articulated the
suffering of the poor, espousing pacifism (rather than ‘passivism’):
‘The seven capital sins of
the modern world: racialism, colonialism, war, paternalism, pharisaism,
alienation and fear.’
‘For me, [humans] are not
divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed,
between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to
struggle for justice.’
‘Charity is not justice…
Aid is necessary, but not enough. Until… international trade policy [is
addressed] the poor countries will continue to get poorer, to enrich the
wealthy countries more and more…’
‘Capitalism which
puts profit before people, is intrinsically evil.’ ‘But a radical version of
Catholic social policy is as anti-communist – because we are non-violent – as
it is anti-capitalist.’ ‘I never saw Cuba as a solution… Changing orbits isn’t
really liberation – becoming a satellite of Russia rather than of the U.S.’
‘28% of incomes in Brazil
go to 1% of the population; 80% of the cultivated land belongs to 2% of
landowners.’ (1970, UN Commission for Latin America). ‘Paul VI was right to say
“The earth was given to us all, not just to the rich.” ‘In our continent more
than two-thirds live in sub-human conditions.’
‘Read the encyclicals,
especially Populorum Progressio which encourages the wealthy
to stand in solidarity with the poor.’
More people know Dom
Helder’s famous quote than anything else about this great man:
When I give to
the poor they call me a saint; when I ask ‘Why are they poor?’ they call
me a communist!
The 1985 Garth Hewitt song
says it well:
And Fortaleza, your most famous son
has shown us all the way,
Dom Helder Camara,
he had the right words to say,
He said when you feed the hungry
they’ll call you a saint,
but never ask the question why…
Why are they hungry?
They’ll call you a communist
for asking the question why.
For they’re hungry from our opulence,
and they are homeless from our greed,
as the rich world makes its living
from the poor world on its knees.
And a nation roams the streets tonight,
you can see them everywhere,
One hundred million children
like an army of despair.
has shown us all the way,
Dom Helder Camara,
he had the right words to say,
He said when you feed the hungry
they’ll call you a saint,
but never ask the question why…
Why are they hungry?
They’ll call you a communist
for asking the question why.
For they’re hungry from our opulence,
and they are homeless from our greed,
as the rich world makes its living
from the poor world on its knees.
And a nation roams the streets tonight,
you can see them everywhere,
One hundred million children
like an army of despair.
~~
‘They’ll call you a saint’.
Will they? My vote would be ‘yes’.
For example:
# He knew the difference
between Pharisees and saints: ‘Pharisees are strict with others;
saints are rigorous only with themselves… as generous as the goodness of God,
boundless as the mercy of God.’
# Saints are prayerful.
Dom Helder had made a vow – “the vow of the clock” – to rise at 2
am every morning to pray, until Mass at 6:00 am. He kept this vigil every night
since seminary.
# Saints tend to inhabit simplicity
the other side of complexity. (Dom Helder had a favourite guardian angel,
Jose, with whom he conducted entreatries when in trouble – which was often).
# They’re willing to
‘cleanse the Temple/ speak truth to power’. To a young ‘forceful’
bishop who told Camara he disagreed with his ‘non-Christian humanism’ Dom
Helder asked ‘What have you read or heard about my view of the world?’
‘Nothing’. ‘And have you read other works you denounce?’ The bishop answered:
‘I can see that today is going to be a turning-point in my life!’
# Their friendships include
everyone from [some] popes and cardinals (especially Montini and Suenans), to
ordinary poor folks.
# They know their spiritual
gifts, and use them. One of Camara’s was networking, eg. his brilliant
behind-the-scenes lobbying-for-the-poor at Vatican 2 and his various efforts
(eg. Medellin) at convening conferences of bishops.
# Dom Helder was obedient to
his superiors, and was a faithful Roman Catholic to the end. ‘Yes, I argue
[with everyone] but my bishop must always have the last word’.
# Miracles? How
about these: those sent to kill the archbishop, disguised as beggars or
taxi-drivers, could not bring themselves to do it, but confessed and asked
forgiveness from their intended victim.
# They’re humble.
‘There’s real danger of pride in humility: “Look at me! I am a poor bishop, a
bishop of the poor! Not like those bourgeois bishops!”.’ His regular prayer was
that of St. Francis: ‘Pray to the Lord that I may become what people think I
am’. ‘My education thesis was a disgrace: I haven’t kept a single copy of it
and I hope no one else ever finds one!’ He was short of stature (just over five
feet tall, and weighing about 120 pounds): that would have helped. He wrote
meditations in his vigil-time, perhaps read them to a few friends, then
destroyed them. (‘Flowers bloom, then must fade…’). Fortunately some survived,
like these (from A Thousand Reasons for Living, pp. 63, 112):
By the grace You grant me
of silence without loneliness,
give me the right to plead,
to clamour
for my brothers and sisters
imprisoned in
a loneliness without silence!
~~
It is worth any sacrifice,
however great or costly,
to see eyes that were listless
light up again,
to see someone smile
who seemed to have forgotten
how to smile;
to see trust reborn
in someone
who no longer believed
in anything
or Anyone.
I once invited Dom Helder
to write a chapter for a book (with a ‘discursive meditation’ flavour ) I
was editing. His postcard reply (in Portuguese):
‘If the Lord gives I will give… Shalom! Dom Helder.’
How can you argue with
that? I’ve used this response ever since when asked to do something beyond my
wisdom or outside my time constraints!
Rowland Croucher
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