Jan Hulshof sm

‘Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her, to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word to present to himself a glorious church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort’ (Eph 5: 25 – 27).

We find this short text in the fifth Chapter of the letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians. Apart from the address and the greetings at the beginning and a few personal messages and the blessing at the end, the letter contains two big sections: Chapters 1-3 are centred around faith and chapters 4 – 6 around Christian life. In the first three chapters we find a doxology underlining the cosmic significance of Christ, a meditation on the Christian mystery of salvation and on the mystery of the church; a prayer for the Christian community. In the second part we find a discussion of practical implications of the mysteries of the faith, with special attention to family life and a meditation on the Christian meaning of marriage and the letter ends with some personal messages and a blessing. The verses that we meditate on, are in the second part, in the section of family file. They are well known since they are part of a text often used in ceremonies of marriage. There, however, the text is mostly used without the three first verses that contained firm admonition: ‘Wives should be submissive to their husbands as if to the Lord.’

The letter to the Ephesians is one of the most fascinating and profound texts of the New Testament. But the letter is not always popular among modern Christians. One of the reasons, as we all know, are the words: ‘Wives should be submissive to their husbands as if to the Lord’. In a footnote to Eph. 5: 21-33 the American Bible comments: ‘The apostle exhorts married Christians to a strong mutual love . . . He sees Christian marriage as taking on a new meaning symbolic of the intimate relationship of love between Christ and the Church.’ Strictly speaking the text does not speak of mutual love. It says that the husbands should love their wives, as Christ loved the Church. But it says of the wives that they should be submissive to their husbands as if to the Lord. The message that St. Paul wants to convey is that marriage relations should be lived ‘in Christ’. Obviously St. Paul, where he speaks about men and women, is much influenced by his social environment, where women had a clearly lower status than men. His culturally conditioned view of women don’t belong to St. Paul’s message whatever their cultural shape might be. There is still one other reason why some people don’t like the letter to the Ephesians. They find that in the verses we meditate on today, the Church is unduly praised to the skies, where it is extolled as ‘glorious’, as ‘holy and immaculate’. And looking at the Church, as they experience it day after day, they feel that the Church is not at all ‘glorious’, but often rather poor in its performance, that the Church is not holy and immaculate, but touched by stains and wrinkles of all kind. Not for nothing John Paul II over the past years is doing his best to clear up things and to table a number of questions that again and again cast a dark shadow over the history of the Church: the discrimination and persecution of the Jews, the crusades and the inquisition, the condemnation of Galileo. It wouldn’t be difficult to increase the number of items which could be the subject of public confession in the Church, to the present day.

There is still a lot of discrimination of women in our Church. There is serious problem of sexual abuse in the Church by priests and ministers, in many countries. Most people agree that it would be too easy to simply pass the buck to individual priests or bishops in order to keep the Church as public institution out of the wind. So what is this talk about the Church as ‘glorious, holy and immaculate’ all about? Theologians want to help us and they tell us that the letter to the Ephesians does not speak of the Church as it is now, but of the Church as it will appear at the end of times, when everything will be purified, healed and reconciled, when the Church indeed will be holy and immaculate.

Still, the letter of the Ephesians does not simply speak of a far horizon, it speaks of the Church as it is now. The fullness of time has already arrived. The letter likes the perfect tense: ‘It is in Christ and through his blood that we have been redeemed and our sins forgiven’ (1:7). Already now we are fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God (2:19). Obviously, the letter to the Ephesians invites us to thank God who already made this Church holy and full of grace in spite of all sins, failures and shortcomings. The Church is holy, now. The gift of Gods grace and Gods life is definite, not conditional not depending on good behaviour. Of course St. Paul does know that the Church is a Church of sinners, that these sinners are not pure individuals, that these sins in the Church create mentalities, attitudes and structures that are sinful in their turn. And yet St. Paul calls the Church ‘holy and immaculate’. In doing so, he does not varnish over the Church’s shortcomings and sins. He only concentrates entirely on the total self-abandonment of Christ to His Church, on his unconditional love and on the definite character of his gifts of holiness and purity. At the very moment of baptism, ‘in the bath of water by the power of the word’, these gifts of holiness and purity were given to each of us. These gifts of Gods love are unconditional. He gave himself up for her to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the wind, to present to him a Church holy and immaculate.

Here Mary comes in. In her person the definite love of Christ for his ‘Immaculate Church’, his bride without stain or wrinkle, is crystallised, concretised, personified . Hugo Rahner, in the first Chapter of his meditations of ‘Our Lady and the Church’, shows how the Fathers of the Church associated Mary Immaculate with the Church Immaculate and vice verse, especially in their commentaries on the Song of Songs. The Latin translation of Ephesians 5:27 ‘ut sit sancta et immaculata’ gave only an additional stimulus to their reflection. As the Immaculate, Mary is the prefiguration of the Church. (By the way, when the Fathers of the Church speak about the Immaculate Virgin, they aim primarily at the virginity of Mary and not at what we call the Immaculate Conception). ‘With the word ‘Immaculata’, Hugo Rahner says, the whole mystery of our own spiritual life is expressed. We ourselves are the members of the Church. What is accomplished in Mary, full of grace; should become a reality again in our lives as ‘Immaculate’ by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ This interpretation of our text is part of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council: ‘But while in the most Blessed Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkly (cf. Eph. 5:27), the faithful still strive to conquer sin and increase in holiness.’ Our calling therefore is to become day after day what, in Mary, we are already, the bride without stain or wrinkle. ‘I plead with you, St. Paul says, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received, with perfect humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another lovingly’, ‘to preserve the unity which has the spirit as its origin and peace as its binding force'. (Eph. 4: 1 – 3). We find in these words essential features of the Marian face of the Church: humility, meekness, patience, forbearance.

We have to work towards this Marian type of Church. We can only do so, if the mystery of our baptism, the cleansing in the bath of water by the power of the word, permeates our daily life in a continuous process of conversion. And no conversion is possible without humility, meekness, patience and forbearance. Our Chapter of 1977 puts it as follows: ‘Our communities witness to the Church’s desire to grow nearer its perfect image in Mary’. These words express a specific challenge for our communities. Each communit6y should reflect the holy and immaculate bride, for who Christ gave up himself and who is personified in Mary. In the 'Summarium' of 1833 Fr. Colin states very clearly that the aim of the Society is to contribute to the conversion of sinners and the perseverance of the faithful . We find the expression also in our Constitutions. As religious and as members of the Third Order we have to pray and work for the conversion of sinners and the perseverance of the faithful. Both are to be found outside the Society: the sinners and the faithful. Both are to be found within the Society: the sinners and the faithful. The idea is not that we Marists are the faithful and that the sinners are outside.

Fr. Colin, in a certain sense, was more worried about mentalities, intentions and attitudes in our Society than about sins. He knew that sins are part of the life of a Christian. They are in a certain sense clear and obvious contradictions of the Gospel. Colin was more afraid that mentalities, intentions and attitudes would sneak their way into the Society. He was continuously aware of the dangers of greed, pride and lust for power. He knew the ecclesiastical world too well not to be worried. Fr. Mayet, usually just the objective reporter of the words of Fr. Colin, has a biting pen, when he expresses a kind of anxious foreboding on this subject in a reflection on Marists who took on work for the sake of making money. ‘When in the Society, people will no longer do works of zeal without money; when superiors will boast of their skill in finding and choosing works which produce money; when there will be much talk about a ministry which produces much money and little glory for God, and little talk about a ministry which gives much glory to God and no money; when members will be rated according to the money they bring in; when there will be incessant talk about stipends for masses or sermons or about the money brought in by the preaching on Advent, Lent or the missions, etc. then there will no longer be a Society of Mary, an apostolic society, but a society of trade, an association of merchants; honest, conscientious, Christian even, if you like, living a pleasant, respectable and bourgeois life. That will never happen. But it is important to resist openly those who have that mindset – no matter who they are – by all legitimate means’

We know that Colin, for many years, wanted the surplus funds of the houses of the Society to go into the bishop’s coffers. Colin found it necessary to review this attitude, and in 1849 Mayet recorded his change of mind in the margin of his Memoirs, adding a personal note of caution: ‘Father has changed his mind. Nevertheless it is well for it to be known that, had it been possible to leave this article without harm to good government, he would have done so. It is a desire he has cherished for thirty years.’ Commenting on these texts, Fr. Coste writes: ‘Colin is renouncing the power that the free disposition of money gives to religious. If a religious order is very rich and even if it gives all the superfluous funds to good works, the fact that it has given so many thousand dollars to this group is a sign of power. ‘I give my money to those I want to !’ And that is a sign of power. And the idea of Colin is to destroy that, to destroy this possible corruption that this power will create in us. And this money will be used for good works, but by the bishop. It will be for the bishop to decide; either the money will go into the bishop’s funds, or the bishop will decide whether to give it to somebody, and that will be his charity, not our charity. And I think that goes very far, and that is full of meaning.

Mayet tells a nice story about a magnetic diviner who, in 1844, told Fr. Colin there way a treasure hidden in the grounds under the house of Puylata, recently bought by the Marists. He asked permission to do the excavation and then go halves with him. 'Very Reverend Father Superior would not hear of it’, Mayet notes down. ‘Father Favre, the principal theologian of the Society, told him that he could easily have the search done himself, particularly as he had not prompted the move made by the diviner. Father Humbert, Bursar General, was very keen on making a few probes, but Reverend Father Colin would never permit it. Even though he knew a search might be made lawfully his decision was based on an attitude that is easy to appreciate. This is of more value to the Society than any 400.00 francs – namely the dependence on the help of God and the protection of Mary without which all the assistance of this world is of no avail.’ We see, here, as it is very often the case, to have a moral theologian at hand, can be quite practical for a bursar, but founders better do without.

The ‘no’ to pride was as essential for Colin. He knew that the world of clerics was, is and ever shall be full of ambitions and aspirations, encouraged rather than restrained by a very elaborated system of honors, dignities, titles and ranks. He also felt that the pulpit was for many preachers the place to put on a show and to display eloquence and learning. ‘A preacher, he said once, will often have thoughts of pride, and of conceit, when he thinks he has preached well, or has found a good turn of phrase, but he holds such thoughts in contempt and uses them to make an act of humility and laugh at himself and his folly. ’ Some preachers thought it beneath their dignity to preach for a small congregation. I know from experience that those things still happen today, of course not in Ireland, but in Holland, yes. Colin, who by the way was an excellent preacher, surely did not consider himself too important to preach for small congregations. During our summer holiday Ad Blommerde and I visited quite a number of the churches in Le Haut Bugey where the first Marists preached their missions. What struck us about these churches was how small they were. In Corlier the farmer opened the fence of the cowshed to let me take a picture of the Church. In the first part of 1825 Frs. Colin and Déclas preached a mission at Corlier, an annexe church of Izenave, the parish of Antoine Jallon, learned and very short-sighted, who soon would become a Marist and who came to Corlier to help the two Marists. In the ‘Memoire sur l’Origine’ Fr. Jeantin records: ‘A fact that gives a good idea of our modest beginnings, took place during this mission. One morning Fr. Colin preached in front of an audience composed of one person and Monsieur Jallon. At night monsieur Jallon preached in front of the same audience, now with Fr. Colin. Afterwards Colin said Jokingly to his confrere: you were in the lucky position of being so short-sighted. You preach for one person as if you have a crowd in front of you; for you it does not matter. I would have liked to see you in my place!

We know that Colin laid down some specific rules in his first drafts for a Marist Rule, to symbolise, as it were, the three ‘no’s’: the ‘no’ to greed, the ‘no’ to pride and the ‘no’ to power. In doing so, Colin was asking for a continuous process of cleansing of our mentalities, of our intentions and our attitudes. Our new constitutions try to pass on this concern to us. Baptism and religious profession are not simply the endpoints of conversion, but rather the starting points of an ongoing process of conversion . The need for conversion and forgiveness finds expression, according to our Constitutions, in the reception of the sacrament of reconciliation, in interior and exterior mortification and in accepting the trials, difficulties and privations of daily life . If our communities would not house sinners, why should our constitutions tell us that the Marist community is a place for continuous conversion? And by saying that the cry of the poor makes an urgent appeal for a conversion of minds and attitudes, our constitutions tell us that our Marist lives are affected by greed and self-centredness. At times the awareness of one's own condition can be disheartening. Mary is a sign of hope for us. In her the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkle. ‘And so they [the faithful, who strive to conquer sin and increase in holiness] turn their eyes to Mary who shines forth to the whole community of the elect as the model of virtues. ’ Her holiness and purity do not make us feel poor and dirty. They only make us aware of our own desire to grow in holiness and purity. And they incite our hope. Because the holiness and purity of Mary are not the results of human moral efforts, but of Gods infinite grace and mercy.

Conversion aims at forgiveness and forgiveness aims at reconciliation. What St. Paul two thousand years ago said to the Ephesians applies to my life, to day, word for word: ‘Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger, harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another, compassionate, and mutually forgiving,. just as God has forgiven you in Christ.’ Today many people get a bit suspicious, when they hear these beautiful words. Aren’t we often too kind to one another? Aren’t there forms of compassion that hide and gloss what is evil? Indeed, compassion and love require sincerity and truthfulness. This is what St. Augustine says in his 7th homily on the first letter of St. John. ‘Sisters and brothers, if you want to live out love, then I assure you that love is not a little something, not something very cheap that requires no effort at all. You don't live out love by mere kind-heartedness – let alone by being indolent, indifferent and careless. You should not think that you love your servant by only sparing the rod; that you love your child by allowing it to grow up without discipline, that you love your neighbour, when there’s never a word amiss. That’s not love, but weakness.’

The first step in the process of forgiveness and mercy is the perception of what is wrong and evil, and the courage to call wrong and evil what is wrong and evil. And we have to train ourselves to be honest with one another. There are, of course, always circumstances that make misbehaviour more understandable: family-background, education, negative community experiences, expectations of other people, etc. But I am not helped by somebody who only always tries to understand everything. A police psychologist assigned by the judge to give psychological treatment to prisoners delivered a talk at a workshop for religious on reconciliation. He told us that the decisive step in the whole process of healing is to break through all kinds of exculpation, justification and defence, used by his clients. The whole treatment was directed towards one aim: to reach the point where a person recognises that he is responsible for his actions and that, before being victim himself, he is perpetrator. Only at that point can certain circumstances be put forward for consideration as well.

This applies also to daily experiences in our familiar communities. One has to be told. The regular examination of conscience is for every Christian one of the means to foster spiritual growth. I have to admit that I often learned more about myself by the observations of my confreres than by the results of a private examination. There are always some things about me that I don’t know, that I even can’t see, but which are known to others, which can be seen by others. One needs a mirror to see his own face. If somebody holds the mirror up to my face at the right moment he or she helps me tremendously. Growth in our communities requires confrontation and challenge as fuel for movement . But confrontation and challenge require courage and frankness. It’s easier just to go on living on the basis of an unspoken agreement: ‘Please, don’t tell me what is wrong with me and I shall not tell you what is wrong with you.’ And so we keep peace, but this is not the peace which Christ came to bring us. A Marist community which is peaceful in this sense of the word can never be what our constitutions call ‘a place for continuous renewal and conversion’ and is rather the opposite of what a Marist community has to be: ‘a sign of what the Church is called to be in the world' .

However, we need more than courage and honesty to make confrontation productive. Honesty can also be like hitting someone over the head. The effect can be a worse situation than the original one – hurt feelings, angry recriminations and the fracturing of community. Confronting for the sake of growing together is more than merely speaking the truth. We need to train ourselves in a way of what Evelyn Woodward calls ‘constructive confronting’, remembering a Pauline expression that couples truth and love: ‘Rather, let us profess the truth in love and grow to the full maturity of Christ, the head. Through Him the whole body grows . . . and builds itself up in love . . . This is the essential question. To be kind to one another, compassionate, and mutually forgiving, looks easier than an attitude of outspoken confrontation, but it is not. One can speak frankly to a brother or sister in different ways. There is a way of telling the truth which does foster solidarity and communion and another way which does not. You can tell somebody the truth in order to help him carry the weight of what he has done or what he has failed to do. You can also tell the truth in order to exalt yourself and humiliate and isolate your brother or sister. St. Paul is very clear:’ Love is never rude, it is not self-seeking . . . Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth.’ (1Cor. 13:5)

St. Augustine knows, by experience, that a person is always more than what he did or what he failed to do. When it finds something good, love feels happy. When it finds something bad, love tries to better it. Never love someone’s failures, but always love the person. For the human person was made by God, but sins were made by man. Love the human person made by God, don’t love the failures made by man. If you love the human being, you want to free him from his failures. If you love the human being, you want to better also his mistakes. Even if at times you feel forced to take firm action, act out of love for the good of your brother or sister. The dove that descended on the Lord, is the symbol of love. In visible form of a dove the Holy Spirit appeared in order to pour out love in our hearts. Why? Because the dove is without venom. Even if she defends her nest using bill and wings, she fights without bitterness. That’s the way a father acts who has to punish his child in order to bring it up .

Over the past years we have focussed our attention very much on ‘mission’. One of our first priorities is to build a community as a living sign of what the Church is called to be in this world. Such Marist communities are not only aware of their mission towards others. Day by day Marists themselves need to be reconciled with one another, with oneself and, at the deepest level, with God. In their work they know the tensions between compassion and challenge, between comforting love and unvarnished truth, between peace and confrontation. Only by living out these tensions within our own lives and within our communities and work can we experience the grace of conversion and reconciliation we preach to others. The Sacrament of reconciliation, recommended as an indispensable source of healing and growth, symbolises this process of daily conversion and reconciliation and brings it to its sacramental fulfillment. But it cannot simply replace it. If we look at the community rule on fraternal correction in the Gospel of St. Matthew, we notice that we don’t need to bring everything before the public eye of the Church. ‘If your brother should commit some wrong against you, go and point out his fault, but keep it between the two of you.; The mystery of Christ’s love works on this level. And even if the two of you don’t succeed in settling the dispute among yourselves, you can ask the help of two or three witnesses. Only if your brother ignores everybody, then go to the Church.

In her book ‘Poets, Prophets and Pragmatists’ Evelyn Woodward deals with the subject of how to handle conflicts in communities. She thinks that proposals of prayer and discernment are easily used as a kind of defusion technique to side-step thorny issues. ‘I hasten to say that prayer and discernment are priorities for me, but I do not believe God zaps us with sudden solutions or circumvents the usual painful human process of coming to terms with our own earthly reality using the natural gifts of communication, compassion, intelligence and relationality. When prayer is SUBSTITUTED for human effort and responsibility, I believe it is illusion. When it is understood as the faithful living out of the deep invitation to be true to our own humanity, to cry yes to the authentic demands of that humanity in the knowledge that there is a God, who constantly, subtly and invisibly lures us to harmony, THEN I believe we are for real.

In a certain sense, what Evelyn Woodward says about prayer, applies even more to sacraments. The sacrament of reconciliation is no substitute for human effort and responsibility. Yet, I have a slight feeling of discomfort to say this. Prayer and sacraments, surely, are no substitute for human effort and responsibility. But the problem is that, whereas we can, under certain circumstances, handle a conflict, we cannot handle sin. Sin is not simply a problem to be resolved by an increase of responsible moral efforts. Sin lets me down the drain so much that I can’t get out under my own steam. Here I would follow St. Augustine rather than Pelagius. And because we cannot, in the strict sense of the word, handle sin, there is the Reconciliation as the Gift of the Risen Lord. Reading the documents I am struck by the tremendous importance of the sacrament of Penance in the ministry of the first Marists and not only of the first Marists. In several big cities Marists exercised and still exercise the ministry of reconciliation. In Sydney the confessional of St. Patrick's has a long and outstanding tradition, since 1868. The French father Piquet was famous, after him others, among them Fr. Aloys van Houte, a Dutch missionary in the Solomon's who, at the age of 47, came to Sydney, where he died in 1990. When he celebrated his golden jubilee of profession, a confrere had figured out that Fr. Van, as he was known, had heard about half a million confessions. There are several anecdotes that illustrate his pastoral approach of mercy. Since it is unthinkable that Fr. Van himself would have told such stories, they must stem from the theology of the community.

I mention this Marist tradition of hearing confessions for two reasons. First of all, this tradition confronts us with the question whether there is a real effort among ourselves to revitalise the practice of penance and reconciliation. The second question is whether there is a real effort to revitalise the ecclesial ministry of reconciling, to which we are encouraged in Nr. 12 of our constitutions?