Pax Christi Minnesota

February 28, 2009
9:00 am	to	10:30 am

PC Twin Cities invites you to join them for their upcoming Meditation and Prayer Gathering

Saturday, February 28

St. Joan of Arc Parish Center, 4537 3rd Ave. So. Minneapolis

These gatherings are open and welcoming to all who wish to join for reflection and prayer.

Larry Thomas will facilitate and has provided the following reflection piece from Mary Lou Kownacki.

Taken from an Essay by Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, entitled: “Love beyond Measure.”
It was published in 1993 by Pax Christi USA. [Note: the essay is divided into four parts, and the following is Part 2, “The Height of God's Love.”]

THE HEIGHT OF GOD’S LOVE
Height moves the eye upward, toward the mountaintop of God’s dwelling place.  The spiritual writer Anthony DeMello reminded us that we become like the God we adore.  If I look back on my life, the God I search for, the God I adore, has passed through many prisms.

My earliest recollections are of a Judge God and this God frightened me.  So I kept rituals and worried about rules and eternal fire.  Then the novelist Leo Tolstoy introduced me to the God who lived in others, especially the poor and outcast.  And I devoted my days to soup kitchens and houses of hospitality.

Then in the Vietnam War days I met the God of the prophets and I confronted the powerful who ground the powerless into dust.  Those were the days consumed by picket lines, long fasts, vigils, mass marches, and civil disobedience.

Then my heart was snared by the God of peace who is never glorified by human violence.  So I went about trying to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Lately, I have been searching for and seeking the God of this quotation by Thomas Merton: “I have overshadowed Jonah with my mercy…have you had sight of me, Jonah, my child? Mercy within mercy within mercy.”  My heart is restless for this God because it is a God I cannot comprehend.  Yet I believe that to experience fully the height of God’s love I must swim in this ocean of compassion.

So all I do is repeat the mystery and watch carefully.  “Have you had sight of me, Mary Lou, my child?  Mercy within mercy within mercy.”  Now and then we catch sight of this unfathomable mercy, now and then we get a glimpse of this compassionate Love.

One of my earliest memories of meeting a compassionate heart took place in the early 60s and it is what attracted me to nonviolence.  I can remember being transfixed before the TV as I watched blacks and whites sit at segregated lunch counters.  They refused to move until they were served, while angry whites poured ketchup on their heads, smeared mustard through their hair and eyes, and pelted them with racial slurs. 

I wondered how people could absorb such hatred and violence without striking back.  Then I read an account in the Catholic Worker newspaper where a black man was quoted as saying, “ I will let them kick me and kick me until they have kicked all hatred out of themselves and into my own body where I will transform it into love.”  That unidentified black man is a glimpse of the height of God’ love.

Another place where I found it was in hearing the story of Pax Christi’s birth.  Pax Christi is the international Catholic peace movement.

Pax Christi, Latin for the Peace of Christ, was born in a prison.  Not just any prison, but a prison filled with resisters who were waiting to be sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.  It was World War II and France was occupied by  Germany.  Herded together in a French state prison were French resistance fighters and others—mainly priests and religious—who had harbored hunted Jews.  One of the resistance fighters asked a fellow-prisoner, Bishop Theas, to celebrate Mass.  Bishop Theas was in prison for nonviolent resistance –he had condemned, through a pastoral letter, the persecution of Jews, the deportation of French workers to Germany for forced labor, and the reprisal-destruction of whole villages.

The prison was seething with hatred and anger because a few weeks before—in retaliation for the killing of a few Nazi soldiers—the inhabitants of a small village had been herded into the village church and the church set afire.  Bishop Theas agreed to celebrate the prison Mass, but he chose for his homily the theme, “Love your enemy.”  He read to these brave, honorable, courageous French freedom-fighters what they least expected: “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for those that persecute you.”  Some of the prisoners disrupted the bishop. “ This gospel is terrible,” they said.  “ This gospel is impossible to live.” Bishop Theas replied, “ I cannot preach anything to you but what Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies.’ Not more—not less.”

Then he led the prisoners in the prayer that Jesus taught us.  When he came to the line, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he paused and added one word–”Germany.”  We can only imagine the terrible pain and anguish, the shouts and screams ripping through the hearts of the prisoners, “They killed our children.” Certainly, we can understand any explosion of grief and anger.  But Bishop Theas gently insisted that this was necessary.  He repeated the word–”Germany.”  Many could not finish the prayer.  Some did.  All understood, perhaps for the first time, the height of love to which Jesus called us when he taught us how to pray.

Bishop Theas was eventually released from prison, but the incident altered his life.  Because of it he was determined to devote the rest of his days to reconciliation efforts between France and Germany.  When a French lay woman, Madame Dortel-Claudot, approached him about organizing a prayer crusade for reconciliation between  the French and German people, Bishop Theas blessed the effort.  This prayer crusade was the beginning of Pax Christi.

Or how about Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz, and whose journals were recently found and published.  In a concentration camp, Etty writes an imaginary conversation with a friend: “Yes, life is beautiful and I value it anew at the end of every day, even though I know the sons and daughters of mothers are being murdered in concentration camps.  Do not relieve your feelings through hatred, do not seek to be avenged on all German mothers, for they, too, sorrow at this very moment for their slain and murdered children.”  And in another journal entry, “ I believe that I will never be able to hate any human being for their so-called ‘wickedness,’ that I shall only hate the evil that is within me….”

What does it mean to love like that?  What does it mean to bathe creation in such mercy?  Certainly the unidentified black man, Pax Christi’s birth, and Etty Hillesum’s journal offer us an incarnation of the height of God’s love.