Father Gerald Vann

Fulfilling destiny

You have to become a personality, to have a mind and will of your own; you have to learn to see and then to judge, you have to acquire the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of the dove. But then, in the second place, you have to preserve precisely that simplicity; you have to avoid the self-willed piety, the determination to decide at all costs for yourself (and others) what is right and wrong, the idea (sublime) of the virtuous man as the self-made man (opposed to Godly infusion), which turns virtue from worship of God into something very like worship of self (very subtle). You must be able to listen with childlike simplicity to the voice of God and identify your will with His; then you need the strength and maturity of the grown man in order to make your obedience to the voice not the obedience of a slave or an automaton but the creative gift of a lover. (Jesus fulfilling the Law of Moses) –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

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Becoming Love

Demand not only an external detachment but an internal, radical, detachment, a complete death: but this means a radical renunciation of our proprietorship (identity as a human—in truth a child of God) and purely natural exercise of our feelings (being properly human), a renunciation thanks to which a greater love will vivify (enliven) our feelings.  It does not mean a radical destruction of daily reality and human experience….  Between these two sorts of death (external and internal) there is all the distance between the superhuman and the inhuman (authentically human–Godly, or perversely human–worldly): spiritually, it is a greater disaster to abandon oneself to the second, to become hard shelled and cold of heart (distant, aloof, and remote)…as it is to reject the first, which means to refuse the perfection of love and the value to be set upon love.”

.it is a death (internal and external) which does not destroy sensitivity, but on the contrary, refuses it, and makes it more exquisite.  It does not harden the fibers of being human, but, on the contrary, makes them supple, and spiritualizes them.  It is a death which transforms us into to love.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’.

Father Gerald Vann

Father Gerald Vann

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A love unequaled

A call from the Hospice yesterday redefined priorities and established a schedule.  There are eyes upon me at the Hospice and I like it.  It is good for me in all aspects.  The conclusion of the conversation produced a weekly routine of visiting the Jennings Center on a set day.  Daily Mass is conducted at 9:30 AM, allowing attendance and then commiserating with assigned patients.  I am coordinating schedules with Mary to allow her to accompany.  The Easter gift complication made me realize our friendship is important to her on a level I did not comprehend.  I am committed to assuring she is rewarded through our acquaintance.  I recognize how important working with the elderly is to her.  She is good at it.  The patients adore her.  One patient I have neglected due to her distance I have become focused upon.  The last visit she sported a Rosary around her neck and a crucifix.  I have concluded praying the Rosary with her is a must.  We will sit in the gathering area as many of the patients in the Marian Gardens take interest when there is a visitor. The prayers will be shared with many.  The affirmed structured commitment to the Jennings Center stimulates the desire to pursue becoming a Eucharist Minister.  The retreat at home established a rootedness within my Hospice activities.  There is no doubt it is where God is calling me at this time.  I received serious attention and assistance from many when I struck my bottom in that hotel room in Toledo.  It is time to give back.  All for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Father Gerald Vann in ‘Divine Pity’ details dying to one’s self and the world within Jesus Christ not to be a renouncing and rejecting of the world, rather a deeper immersion into the world through faith, hope, and love.  Father Vann utilizes Catherine of Siena as a loving example.

For it was Catherine who, after this ‘mystical death,’ became one of the most famous and the most powerful women of her century, endlessly active, Popes and princes, traveling, negotiating, issuing orders, determining policies, shaping the life of Christendom.  What had intervened during her lengthy near death religious experience? She had learned the truth expressed in the words of the pseudo-Dionysius: Omnium divinorum divinissimum est cooperare Deo in salute animarum: of all divine things the most divine is to share with God in the saving of souls; she had begged Our Lord in ecstasy to take her back to her eternal home (to allow her to remain in death), and she had been reproached by Him—for her egoism.  She had been taught by Him: “You cannot render me any service, but you can help your neighbor.  The soul in love with My truth gives herself no rest but searches ceaselessly to help others.  You cannot give back to Me Myself the love I demand, but I have put you beside your neighbor so that you may do for him which you cannot do for Me.  What you do for your neighbor, then, I consider as being done for me.”

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Power

In the mass, too, God makes Himself a passive thing, to be held and moved and broken by the fingers of the priest.  And you see that powerlessness…But to every human being God gives a similar terrifying power over Himself: the power to reject Him…Power is a commonplace—and, to some, an attractive—thing; yet how terrifying also, when we reflect upon it.  A man has power over himself, over other men, over other creatures, and over God Himself: he has power, in small ways or in great, to change history; he has power to save or ruin souls.

Father Vann utilizes the Pieta as an example of God making Himself powerless.  I recall reading years ago about the scaling of the Michelangelo statue.  Mary is mammoth in size, towering over her Divine Son.  Christ, the Saviour, is reduced in size, seemingly powerless as a corpse.  The scaling is abnormal.  Mary is too large for Jesus.  Realistically, dimensions do not make sense.  Mary, the human, is too large.  Jesus, the Divine, is too small.  Carefully examine the statue.  The human mother, the contemplative model par excellence, the Queen of Heaven, the Seat of Wisdom, possesses the largeness of particulars, the power to define eternity.  Her size represents the powerlessness of God in the hands of humans.   Mary is granted power.  She determines, to express compassion, absorb herself in love, an absolute focus upon her Divine Son.  She is the example of a human life fully lived in surrender and obedience, turning the power God allows into a reflection back upon the majesty and might of God.  Love is returned to love.  The circle is complete.  We humans reign over fate.  Our own and others.  God lays Himself low for us.  Through sheer love, God graces us with power.

It is easy to use power over others irresponsible: for the pleasure or prestige or self-aggrandizement…It is easy to use it selfishly: turning people into a means instead of ends, means to our own profit, our own good, instead of setting out ourselves to achieve theirs.  There may be a temptation to use it cruelly, for the dark pleasure that cruelty itself gives; or with that particular sort of inhumanity which puts more store on patterns than on persons, on the neatness and efficiency of a scheme instead of on the uniqueness of every individual soul.  Power, in this sense of authority, petty tyrannies, officiousness (unwanted aggressive counsel), or righteous impersonality; and it corrupts for the same reason: it is divorced from love.
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Yet the power is given to us; we cannot be rid of it.  Authority has to be exercised; personal gifts have to be used.  How can we attempt to make sure that our use of power will not, in fact, be an abuse?  Only by making ourselves powerless before God, as the dead body of Christ was powerless only by becoming “stripped and poor and naked” within our own souls, so that the Spirit can invest us with His divine power and transform our impulses and cure our pride.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘Mary’s Answer for Our Troubled Times”

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True Pity

Let us return to Father Vann’s refined contrasting of the sorrow of Mary compared to the women of Jerusalem. Mary’s sorrow is nurturing and strengthening: true pity. The good women of Jerusalem, followers of Jesus, become overwhelmed with emotional self-pity. Lacking definitude, without detailed understanding, Mary’s sorrow comprehends the totality of sacrificing her Son, embracing His crucifixion in silence though it pierces her heart.  Always obedient, Mary questions not the mysteries of God. Her trust in God supersedes her own experiences, emotions, feelings, desires, intellect, and being.  Silence, love, and a sorrowful heart she offers her Son in order to embolden and strengthen Him so He can remain loyal and obedient to the will of His Father.

If Mary’s heart had been filled with the soft sentimental pity, she would not have helped, but would have hindered. Human love helps when it is within the framework of vocation, when it expresses the will of God. A mother’s vocation is fulfilled when she offers her son to God (Hannah), to life, and to his own destiny; it is ruined when she clings to him for her own sake on the plea of saving him from hurt. “Go forth and see the king in the diadem wherewith his mother crowned him.” And this is the crowning (crucifix): her offering of her Son to the Father, her strengthening of her Son for the kingship of the cross.

For the very offering is itself a help to Him, comforting and gladdening Him. For her, the meeting (Jesus carrying the cross) can be only agony: and John and Mary Magdalen must have tried to restrain her, while she insisted, “I must be with my Son; He will have need of me.” And so she shows us a second thing: we are not merely to avoid confusing true pity with sentimental pity; we are to keep clear the distinction between true pity and self-pity. We, for our part, are not often asked to shoulder very heavy crosses perhaps, but the small ones come our way, and they fill us with self-pity; they make us yearn for and expect and perhaps demand sympathy until, in the end, we make others miserable in their turn. It is then that we should think of this scene, compare are noisy lamentations with Mary’s silence, our emotional wallowings with Mary’s strength, our wasted opportunity with the glory of the crucifixion. –Father Gerald Vann ‘Mary’s Answer for Our Troubled Times’

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Unification through overcoming

When prayer seems most hopeless, it may well be most fruitful; when the search for God and the attempt to love God seem most futile and barren, they may well be most creative. Why? Because if then we turn to God in humility, knowing our failure, we make it possible for Him to work in us, and under His creative touch, the soul comes to life, the flame is kindled, even though we remain unconscious of it. At other times, our efforts may, in fact, be egotistic and self-reliant, or greedy of reward, and then we fail, however convinced we may be of our success.

“A man” writes Thomas Merton, “who is not stripped and poor and naked within his own soul will always unconsciously do the works he has to do for his own sake rather than for the glory of God. He will be virtuous not because he loves God’s will but because he wants to admire his own virtues. But every moment of the day will bring him some frustrations that will make him bitter and impatient, and in his impatience he will be discovered…  –Father Gerald Vann ‘Mary’s Answer for Our Troubled Times’

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Mother and Child

Read this carefully. It involves the Passion of Christ. His carrying the cross to Golgotha, encountering the women of Jerusalem and His mother. Perceive and understand the relationship of Mary and Jesus. This is not criticism of the women of Jerusalem. It is a statement about Mary—the women who raised Jesus, who took everything into her heart including the words of Simeon, the Woman of Sorrows remaining silent–the intimacy between mother and Divine Son, the intimacy between the Savior of the world and the Queen of Heaven.

There is a sharp contrast here between His mother and the women of Jerusalem to whom He spoke: and the contrast is in the fact that He spoke. They love Him and sorrow for Him, but their sorrow seems too noisy, as though there is an element of self-pity in it, as though they are, in fact, calling attention to themselves, and instead of consoling Him, they look to Him to console them. In Mary is the silence of strength, and so she can give Him the strength of her silence: it is what she is there to do. In her, there are the two contradictory agonies: the longing to save Him from his unbearable agony and the effort to help Him to finish His work; and it is the second that she must do, giving Him to the world on the cross as she has given Him to the world in the stable.  – – Father Gerald Vann ‘Mary’s Answer for Our Troubled Times’

Silence of Mary: Holy Mary, Mother of God, you who treasured all things and pondered them carefully in your heart, teach us that deep, interior silence which enfolded you throughout your lifetime.

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