Tag Archives: Columba Marmion

Christ Living in Me

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In the midst of his battle against the Arians, St. Athanasius once pithily said, “that which Christ did not assume, has not been healed.”  The point that the Father of Orthodoxy was making was that Our Lord assumed the entirety of our human condition in order to redeem and renew us (2 Cor 5:17).  He did not just generically redeem our actions, in lived them in order that they might be sanctified.  He became a worker, in order to redeem our work.  He entered a family in order to redeem family life.  He had friends in order to redeem friendship.  He ate in order to redeem eating.  He suffered in order to redeem suffering.  He died in order to redeem death.  The list can go on and on, but the point is that whatever He did, He did as the Divine Redeemer, taking both ordinary and extraordinary actions and supercharging them with sanctifying power.

Realizing Our Beliefs

This principle helps us to understand why He lived the “Hidden Years” of His life, seemingly doing nothing but living an ordinary life.  He did not just one day, as Pope Benedict XVI is fond of saying, pick up the mantle of Redeemer.  It was Who He was the moment He took flesh to Himself.  We might be tempted to file this away as an interesting reflection on the truth of the Incarnation, as something that we simply believe, without taking the time to realize it.

The necessity of allowing our beliefs to be realized is at the heart of theology.  What I mean by this is that it is not enough to merely intellectually assent to some truth (that is belief), it must become realized by becoming an active principle by which we live our lives.  St. Thomas Aquinas is not a saint because he wrote the Summa, he is a saint because he lived the Summa.  He modeled his life after the Church’s first theologian, St. Paul.

St. Paul believed in Christ’s full redemption and made it the principle by which he lived his life.  By way of the Galatians, he instructs us to do the same thing when he said “it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; the life that I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God…”

We must first fully grasp that when St. Paul says this, he means it literally.  He is not talking about how he tried really hard to imitate Christ and got so good at it that he acts a lot like Him.  He means it quite literally that it is no longer his own life that animates him, but instead the life of Christ.  By exercising his faith in Christ as full-time Redeemer, he has become another Christ in the world and calls us to imitate him in order that we too might say the same thing.

Linking Our Lives to Christ’s

In short, the secret is that we must link our lives to Christ.  This happens not in some abstract way, but by linking each moment of our everyday lives to the moment in Christ’s earthly life that “matches” it.  This might still sound a little too abstract, so let’s take an example.

Let’s suppose that I just found out that a friend of mine has told a group of people something that I wanted to remain a secret.  I feel betrayed.  Rather than wallowing in that, I go to Christ in His moment of betrayal and speak with Him about the situation.  When He experienced His betrayal, being God, He also foresaw this moment in which I would be betrayed.  He submitted to it in order to redeem this moment for me.  He has already won for me whatever graces I am most in need of. I simply need to show up with my divinely bestowed claim ticket to receive it.  Still, it is His life, not just in the abstract, but really which moves me to respond in accord with the Divine Will. 

Returning back to Athanasius’ point, you cannot find a single moment of your life that does not link up to Christ’s.  Studying His life in the gospels is obviously helpful in making the connection, but it is not absolutely necessary.  You can just as easily tell Our Lord, “I unite myself to that moment in Your life when you were hungry and ask for the grace not to be hangry in my situation” as go to Him when He is hungry after fasting in the desert.  In either case, my willingness to go where Christ has already “remembered” me is the cause of the redemption and sanctification of the present moment.  This is why every saint counsels the necessity of meditating upon the life of Christ.  *****

Doing this occasionally is very fruitful, but once it becomes habitual, you will become a saint.  The life of Christ and your life become practically indistinguishable as you draw all of your movement from His life such that Christ re-lives His life in you.  This is what St. Paul was talking about.  He started by exercising Faith in the Jesus as the Son of God Who died for him and then carries all of that to its logical conclusion by uniting His  life at each moment with Christ’s.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me!    

***Seeing each moment of Christ’s life as a mystery in which I participate through prayer and receive graces He has already won for me specifically is at the heart of adopting this habit.  It is Blessed Columba Marmion who has worked out the theology surrounding this, but I have summarized his thought in a previous post.

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

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With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.