Dear Friends,
Have you ever come across a poem
,essay, article or letter and said “I
wish I had written that!”
Here’s one
such piece I wish I had written.
Ode to the Church
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your
presence.
You have given me so much scandal,
And yet you have made me understand what sanctity is.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity,
more compromised, more false,
And yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous,
more beautiful.
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your
face.
And yet how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your
arms!
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though
not completely.
And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another
church?
I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry
in me.
And if I did establish another, it would be my church, not
the Church of Christ.
I am old enough to know I am no better than anyone else.
Who wrote this, anyway? A contemporary of some of us, not someone who
left the church , but rather a believer who moved from place to place within
the church as he followed Christ , teacher and redeemer, let go and embraced as
needed for growth in God. The Italian Carlo Carretto (1910-1988) was a lay leader in Catholic
Action before he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community of desert
contemplatives in Algeria. Eventually, he returned to Italy and published his
thoughts in Letters from the Desert, for
people struggling with their spiritual lives. Writing about Carlo Carreto, the
American hagiographer Robert Ellsberg
says : “Essentially, {Carreto} showed
how to live a contemplative life in the midst of the world, in the desert that
is ultimately everywhere. The challenge of the Gospel, according to Carreto,
was to create in this desert an oasis of love. He died on the feast of St.
Francis, October 4, 1988.”
The mentality and tenacity of
Carreto is a help when we make judgments against the church and want to go
away. Instead, Carreto is a friend who invites us, each in our own everyday
live, to move toward a fuller life with Christ .
Cradle
Catholics or longtime Catholics , even those of us who worship on a regular
basis, sometimes get stale in our thinking about God and other significant
figures: God, Jesus, Mary, the saints,
the community,. Moreover, what has history contributed to our relationship to
all of these significant others? For a
conversation about these topics that stretch our minds as we stay the course of
faith (or not), join me on three successive Monday nights at the SSJ
Motherhouse: Oct 27, Nov. 3 and Nov. 10,7 to 8.30
pm.
Call the Fresh Wind phone to say you are coming. 641-8184.
