feast

Feast of the Cenacle

Why is TODAY the Feast of the Cenacle? It looks like a rather non-significant day when nothing happens in the world and in the Church. And the date even changes each year! The Resurrection is finished, Jesus has gone up to heaven, and the Holy Spirit has not yet come. There is, however, the “upper room,” also called “Cenacle.” It looks like a very important part of the “charism” of the Cenacle. If we take a look at the readings for today’s feast, we hear first Ezekiel, who makes a marvelous promise in the name of God: “I will give you a new heart, I will put a new spirit into you, I will be your God.” But a promise remains a promise: it gives hope, which is good, but it is only really good when the promise does happen. And suddenly, with the 2nd reading, we find ourselves in the Acts of the Apostles, and this time, the promise comes from Jesus himself: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit shall come upon you: and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem (…) and to the ends of the earth.” Another promise, but it sounds more urgent, so “they returned to Jerusalem and they went to the upper room, where they were staying.” And there, they did nothing but “with one accord, devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers.” (Remember, the “upper room” is the Cenacle). With the recent liturgical changes in most parts of the Church, Pentecost is tomorrow, so the promise will soon come true and the mission will begin, with Mary in the very middle of it. From the Cenacle to the Mission. What does the Gospel add to this waiting in hope? What does Jesus say in his final prayer to the Father with his friends? Just before today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his Father something like, “I’ve done my job: they know now that all you have given me comes from you, and that the words I gave to them are the very words that You gave me.” He is the Word, and they know it. Then a few lines later, in today’s gospel, we hear: “May they be one as we are one. Now I am coming to you, and I am saying these things in the world that they may have the fullness of my joy in themselves. Sanctify them in truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I send them into the world. And I give my life for them so that they may also be sanctified by the truth.” Before the sending for mission, we have the “sanctify them in truth, in your word.” (Two days ago, in Harvard, without quoting Jesus, Tom Hanks proclaimed loudly: “Truth is sacred.”) We have here two possible translations of one Greek world: “hagiazo,” to sanctify or to consecrate, and the meaning of that Greek word is something like, to enter gradually and totally into the life of God. From this Gospel, the meaning we have is that the mission is not first but second, it comes from this inner gift promised by Ezechiel of God’s Spirit being with us, and inviting us to be with Him. This is why they are in the Cenacle, one in prayer before they will be sent for the Mission, waiting for the Gift of the Spirit so that the Mission will truly be God’s Mission. And here, I think we meet Mother Therese on something that was very important for her, but that is very hard to translate into English. The Cenacle Constitutions rightly say: this feast today “celebrates the mystery of prayerful expectation and waiting in retreat with Mary by the first assembly of the Church, directed to that outpouring of the Spirit which sent the apostles to the ends of the earth.” And they add: « We give witness to a good God, after our foundress who said that “God is good, even more than good, He is Goodness: Dieu est la Bonté même.” Your Holy Foundress also said: « The great means to enter the way of holiness is ‘se livrer’ to our good God,” adding: “Make the experience of it and you will see that it is the true happiness that we would seek in vain without it.” Is this not the Gospel of today, sanctification in truth? The only problem is the question that Saint Thérèse poses herself: “What does this mean, “se livrer”?” She admits, however, that “I understand the spaciousness of this word but I cannot explain it. It embraces present and future, it is more than to devote oneself or to give oneself, even more than to abandon oneself to God.” Wow, what does she really mean by this famous untranslatable French word? She tries her best to explain it: “It is to die to everything and to oneself, no longer to busy oneself with the self, except to hold the self always turned toward God. It is not to seek oneself in anything, neither for the temporal nor for the spiritual. No longer to seek our personal holiness, but only the good pleasure of God.” And she adds: “It is a spirit of detachment that does not hold on to anything, neither to people, to things, to time, to places. It is to accept all, to subject oneself to all.” Only the good pleasure of God… She explains further that it might look very difficult, but she insists: “There is nothing as easy to do as this. It only consists in making once only a generous act, saying in all sincerity: My God, I want to belong to you, accept my offering, and all is said. However, we need to remember that we have “given ourself.” And Mother Thérèse concludes: “If we could understand beforehand the sweetness and the peace that we feel when we do not put any restriction with

Features, General, Homilies, Soul Food

Transforming Gentleness: the Grace of St. Thérèse Couderc

September 27, 2020

Homily of Fr. Daniel Patrick Huang, SJ on 26 September 2020, Feast of St. Thérèse Couderc in Rome. I hope you don’t mind, but this afternoon, I would like to reflect a little on your Mother, St. Thérèse Couderc, as a water purifier or filter. I realize that it’s not a very dignified or poetic image, but I hope that it helps explain what has struck me most these days about St. Thérèse: what I would call her transforming gentleness or her fruitful non-violence. A water purifier. This is not an original image, but one I learned from the spiritual writer Ron Rolheiser when he describes how the suffering of Jesus on the cross takes away the sins of the world. How does Jesus, the grain of wheat who dies, bring forth new life? Rolheiser suggests he does what a water purifier or a water filter does. “It takes in the water that contains impurities, dirt, toxins and occasional poisons.” The filter “does not simply let the water flow through it.” It “holds the dirt and toxins inside of itself and gives back only the pure water.” (1) This is what Jesus does on the cross: he holds in himself, bears in himself, the hatred, envy, anger, and violence of humanity, and instead of simply passing it on, somehow purifies all this in his own person, so that what flows out of him instead is love, graciousness, blessing, forgiveness, peace. Doesn’t this describe too what Thérèse Couderc lived in her sufferings? Reading various accounts of her life, I couldn’t help but be struck by the suffering and humiliation she went through, at the hands of a Jesuit Provincial and her own sisters. Looking back, one can see that Fr. Renault’s decision to replace Thérèse as superior general and foundress with a rich widow who had barely begun novitiate was not only ill advised but actually idiotic! What was he thinking? Till today, the writers I consulted struggle to explain Mother Charlotte Contenet’s inexplicable animosity towards Thérèse. I found myself asking: Why didn’t Thérèse fight back? She certainly would have had reason and justice on her side. Or why didn’t she just leave? Why didn’t she just start again, with a group of more congenial companions? Earlier accounts of Thérèse explain her response as humility: Thérèse as “une grande humble.” This seems to have been what was emphasized in her canonization process 50 years ago. But, as some of your sisters have pointed out (2), these accounts tend to speak of the humility of Thérèse in terms of uncomplaining submission, self-abasement, blind obedience to ecclesiastical authority, usually male. Although there is no doubt that Thérèse was deeply humble, this version of humility sounds suspiciously ideological. The more I reflected, the more I realized that Thérèse’s silent suffering was, in fact, less self-abasement, and more like the Gospel beatitude of meekness, what I have called transforming gentleness or fruitful nonviolence. Like her Lord, her dying was akin to the work of the water purifier. Instead of responding to stupidity, prejudice, pettiness, injustice in an aggressive, violent way, which would have continued the cycle of violence, Thérèse takes in all this and holds it in herself, and through the workings of grace in her deepest person, gives back instead kindness, reconciliation, peace, new life. By somehow absorbing in her person all this negativity, at great personal cost to herself, she kept the fragile congregation she so loved alive and united, for the sake of the work she so believed in, the revolutionary, till-that-time-unheard-of work of women religious giving the Spiritual Exercises. Even towards the end of her life, when she went through her “dark night” and could be seen weeping while she prayed for hours in the chapel in Lyons, she brought into her person all the pain and suffering of the Church, her beloved France, humanity estranged from its Creator. Somehow, mysteriously, like a water filter, what emerged from her was light and peace. There is that lovely story of the troubled novice who saw Thérèse in the novitiate in Versailles in 1880, not knowing who the elderly religious was, only seeing somehow light emanating from her, and feeling a deep sense of peace when that older sister looked into her eyes. (3) That this process involved crucifying pain for Thérèse seems clear. How did she do it? Where did she get the inner strength to respond with transforming gentleness to what would have provoked many of us to retaliation or escape? One of the favorite words of our former Superior General, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, was the word depth, depth in the midst of a world of distraction and superficiality. I believe too that depth is the only word to describe Thérèse Couderc. Although her vision of goodness and her Se Livrer came decades later, those two documents capture the depth of her vision and her love throughout her life. Unlike many of us who can only see the surface of things and events, Thérèse was blessed with a vision that pierced beneath the surface to perceive the infinite goodness of God, like “letters of gold,” (4) gleaming and beautiful, present and active in the depths of all reality. And unlike those of us whose attention and desire are distracted and captured by so many lesser things, Thérèse was a profoundly centered woman, whose loving act of total surrender meant being so spiritually free that she held nothing back from God and lived completely from and for God. Because of the depth of her vision and the depth of her love, Thérèse was able to respond with depth to the events, even the most painful and difficult, of her life. Perhaps that is the reason why she so valued the ministry of the Exercises that her sisters were engaged in. It is precisely a ministry of depth that invites people to delve deeply into themselves to see the good God at work in their lives and in their world, and to respond with loving surrender to this