April 6, 2023 at 7:05 a.m.
No limits
Saint Philip Neri often said, “I am past hope!” and one day, meeting two Dominicans, he passed between them, saying, “Let me pass, I am without hope,” meaning that he had no confidence in himself or in anything he had done. The good fathers, understanding the words in their ordinary sense, stopped him and began to console him, and to ask him a multitude of questions; at last he smiled and said, “I am past all hope of myself, but I trust in God.”
This narrative is taken from “The Life of Saint Philip Neri, Apostle of Rome,” by Father Pietro Giacomo Bacci, a contemporary. Philip’s complete trust in God might easily be dismissed by many of our times as naïve, even childish, at best simplistic. How could an attitude like this possibly be held and maintained by any serious person involved in the affairs of this world, educated, with administrative responsibilities and politically engaged. Except that he was!
Founder of several missionary communities, including the Oratory, Philip was highly regarded by many other distinguished orders and apostolates, including the Jesuits, for his highly effective ministry to the poor of Rome, earning him the title “Second Apostle of Rome” (after Saint Peter). His style was characterized as “practical commonplace,” decidedly unmonastic and unmedieval, and with a notoriously wicked sense of humor. Focused on his conviction of God’s loving presence in our everyday lives, he prayed, “Let me get through today, and I shall not fear tomorrow.”
Truly a man for our times, who faced much opposition and ridicule for his cheerful disposition in the face of a corrupt and indifferent clergy, political factions and worldly attractions. His personal piety, however, never led him to abandon the work of servant leadership. His complete trust in God did not excuse him to slack off and become passive amid the social needs of his time. He even had a ministry to the prostitutes of the city, always eager to engage the marginalized and destitute in conversation.
Some who envy the lives of clergy and religious who seem to be separated from the miseries of working-class citizens might take inspiration from Philip who found a way to combine prayer and hard work. Nor should those — clergy, lay and religious — whose commitments do not permit them the time for contemplation they might desire become discouraged in the work they do. As the author of Hebrews writes, “God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him by your service, past and present, to his holy people. Our desire is that each of you show the same zeal to the end, fully assured of that for which you hope. Do not grow lazy, but imitate those who through faith and patience, are inheriting the promise” (Heb 6:9ff).
Faith and good works (cf. James 2:14-26) both mark a Christian’s life, following the crucified Lord. It is the love of God – or, more precisely, the awareness of Christ’s self-sacrificing love for the sinner — that inspires the Christian to want to live and proclaim that love. As St. Paul writes “we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5: 3-6,8).
As we have been celebrating the mysteries of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, we may be tempted at times to ask why God had to do it this way? Could God not have just snapped his fingers (proverbially) and rid the world of all its ills, overlooking all that had gone wrong, and setting things right again — a kind of reset after it all turned for the worse in the Garden of Eden. It may be difficult for us to grasp that even though God could do this, it is not God’s desire that we be robots, forced to serve out of fear and slavishness in a loveless order. Instead, God wants a relationship of love, a response as free from us as the love God gives us, and without limits.
Learning to love requires us to suffer at times from the uncertainty as to whether our love will be returned. The more we risk in opening our hearts to the beloved, the more we can be wounded by our vulnerability to rejection and betrayal. We see this played out dramatically in the Passion narratives, where Jesus is betrayed by Judas, and then Peter — ultimately by almost all the apostles who, except for John, abandoned him after he shared his Body and Blood with them at the Last Supper, making a sacrament of the sacrificial death that he would undergo the next day on Calvary. He gave them an unconditional divine love, without limits, revealing that God was completely dedicated to them to the point of dying for them and every human being who would ever live. In response, his three closest disciples repeatedly nodded off on him in his hour of agony and, in the 11th hour, abandoned him.
St. Augustine reflects, “Himself unchanged, he took to himself our created nature in order to change it, and made us one man with himself, head and body. We pray then to him, through him, in him, and we speak along with him and he along with us.” To me, his reflection captures what Christ’s life was all about: unconditional love, love without limits, and inviting us in. We, like the Apostles, though unworthy, are lifted up by Christ in prayer, with Him, to the Father. We sigh, yes, in various stages of frailty — our vulnerable, wounded, sin-soaked human condition. HE sighed, too, on the way to the tomb of Lazarus, unabashed to show us the extent of his humanity even as he was about to reveal his divinity. In a way the Lazarus account is a parable of Holy Week: he ate with his friend, who died, for whom he grieved, before he raised him up. It’s our story and the story of God’s love for us.
The reason Christ descended to the depths that he did — with all the graphic torture, rejection and ingratitude that we read about in the Passion and our imaginations can conjure up — is because of how deeply he loves each and every one of us so as to meet us at whatever depth to which we have fallen or been cast into by the sins of others. No matter how sinful, how abased and abused, how abandoned to hopelessness we are, HE is present to us right there in the depths of our fallen state. He descends into the pits of hell to rescue us and lifts us up to the heights of heaven. We neither earn nor deserve it. He just does it. Pure love.
This is the hope beyond hope that, I think, St. Philip Neri was talking about. It invites us to respond to God with the same abandon that Christ pours out in love for us. If God is so generous as to give us everything he is and has in his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, what is the point of holding anything back, and of hesitating to go all the way? Why should there be any limits to what we surrender to God, especially when we have nothing to lose, except everything we are afraid of? Including the ancient curse: death itself. Happy Easter!
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