The words of a holy religious leader may move the heart to tears, may even move the intellect to conviction, but unless they also move the will to take action, the situation remains where it was. This is where the individual can play his part, even if it remains a very small one. According to Pope John, peace radiates from the individual. “The world will never be the dwelling-place of peace,” he says, “until peace has found a home in each and every man, until every man preserves within himself the order ordained by God to be preserved.” Peace, like liberty and truth and the will of God itself, is not static but dynamic.
We, who by God’s grace have “looked into the perfect law of liberty”74 and found peace in Christ, owe an obligation toward the spread of truth and order. We may not sit still and imagine we have satisfied our responsibilities by offering some of our prayers at Mass for the intentions of the Holy Father. The world is moving, and the Church with it: “they must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth.” Granted that the starting-off place is the human soul, there has to be a start. And how, when you really get down to it, is a start to be made — and in what direction?
First, we have to make ourselves familiar with the nature of what the Gospel is now being called upon to face. This need not involve an intensive course of study: it calls for conditioning our minds to the fact that there is an emergency in the world and that we may not evade it. Whether we like it or not, we are caught up in it. We can either allow ourselves to be caught up as leaves in a spiral of wind, or we can join the whirl and try to show that it is spinning around by the will of God and that Christ is at its center. It will be a question of orientation: am I thinking of other people’s needs in regard to God, or am I thinking only of my own? Is the peace that God has designed for mankind receiving any sort of contribution from me, or do I think of peace as a personal commodity that is best safeguarded by my refusal to get mixed up with outside affairs? Surely what was meant by Pope John’s aggiornamento was precisely this: the recognition that the will of God could be moving in a fast-changing society and that tradition must keep up with it. The implication is not that tradition must be sacrificed; on the contrary, the implication is that it should be made more use of — in the contemporary setting.
A man whose world is limited to his family and friends and the people whom he meets at his work might well object at this point that his horizons are too restricted for participation in world affairs. “If God had wanted me to extend the life of Christ in the contemporary setting, He would have placed me in a better position to do so. Either I would have been called to be a public-relations officer, or I would have been allowed the time and the talent to study the question. As things are, I have as much as I can do to fulfill the obligations I learned as a child from the catechism. I am too set in my ways to start modernizing and updating my religion to suit the changing scene.” The objection would be valid if the demand were for a headlong plunge into the ecclesiastical arena. But nobody is asking you to plunge into the ecclesiastical arena — unless, of course, you happen to be an ecclesiastic, in which case you are expected to make a highly professional performance in the environment where God has placed you — but only to attend to what is going on in your own arena and, if necessary, to widen its boundaries. Nobody is asking you to concern yourself with public relations, but it may well be God’s will that you should give more attention to perfecting your private relations. What is demanded is a more planned and, given the right circumstances, a more extended, application of traditional Christianity.
Much in this will depend upon the God-given sphere of influence. To the foreign secretary of a sovereign nation, the opportunity of furthering Christian ideals would be considerable; to someone who is bedridden, it would be less so. But, as we shall see before leaving the subject, there is no time in a person’s life when the effort to impart the peace, truth, and life of Christ may be laid aside. Pope John was careful to include the laity in the apostolic mission, urging men and women to see their secular callings in a supernatural light and to. direct their professional enterprise toward specifically Christian ends. Pacem in terris presents the Church as a unity, and not as divided between the official and the unofficial. If in the past there has been a gap between those responsible for the management and mechanism of the Church and those responsible for accepting what they get, such a gap must be bridged. The members of the Church are members of its mission: this was understood in the early Church and is coming to be better understood today. But there was a long period when it was not understood, and despite successive pontificates in our own time that have pointed to the original concept, there is always the danger of making artificial divisions in at least three of the Church’s four essential marks.
Following the first recommendation — that we should convince ourselves of need and opportunity — must come the exhortation to do something about it. Relating how we behave to what we believe has never been our strong point as Christians. It might be said that it has never been anybody’s strong point, whether Christian or not. True, but the member of Christ’s Church has more support: laws, sacraments, doctrines — everything is laid down for him, and he gets the grace to pick it up and act on it. How, then, to cope with this dichotomy (keenly felt by St. Paul as he tells his friends in Rome, “I see another law in my members warring against the law in my mind”75) so that we come to be ruled by what we believe rather than what our fallen natures prompt us to? St. Paul gives the answer when he says that the only force strong enough to resolve the difficulty is “the grace of God by Christ our Lord.”76 When the human will has chosen the Father’s will and is living it in the life of the Son, there is order in the soul and neither weakness nor passion has the final say.
It is this order that somehow or other has to be communicated to a disordered world. Having become ordered ourselves — our senses and emotions subject to reason and will, our reason and will subject to God — we have something to offer to a society in conflict. By operating as a whole human being, the mature person that God intends me to be, I can unite with other whole and mature human beings and work toward the wholeness and maturity of mankind. Here is the synthesis of Christian faith and Christian action that results in peace, the peace envisaged by the Gloria in excelsis and Pacem in terris alike.
Very well, then — you are not a foreign minister, not a member of the administration, not a union leader, not a political broadcaster or a columnist. Measure it down to size, and make a realistic judgment of your powers as seen against the background of the life to which God has called you. Are you going to tell me that you see no warring elements in the environment that meets you in your work, in your home, in your social contacts? And, having admitted that such warring elements exist, are you going to tell me that you are utterly powerless in the cause of harmony? We are not talking now of how to effect the restoration of order — each case is unique and must call for the exercise of the practical judgment — but of why we must want to. Like us, other people are members of Christ’s Body. There must be order in Christ’s Body: the members must be subject to the Head and at one with each other. Otherwise the body is divided, which is what the world is today.
Without stepping out of his environment, every man must reduce division and promote order. Take someone in the teaching profession who is concerned about preserving Christian principles in a system of education that leaves them out of account. Is he to look the other way? Is he, without a protest, to choose some other career in which this conflict will not come up? Or someone in the medical profession who sees operations performed that are at variance with his Catholic conscience. Or a lawyer who sees injustice in much that he is supposed to be standing for. Or a religious who finds that the order or congregation to which he belongs is departing from its essential spirit. Or a boy or girl in school who believes the atmosphere of the place to constitute a threat to faith or morals. Are not all these people pledged to pursue the Christian ideal?
In every environment, there must
be struggle and contradiction, and it is everyone’s duty to make a bid for order. Christ’s order is not always man’s (“My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives”77), but it is always for Christ’s followers to point to it. In an age when questions of marriage, race relations, total war, strikes, sex education, capital punishment, and compulsory state controls are live issues, it is important that we set our standards by the mind of Christ.
It might be thought that far from spreading harmony, such tactics as we talk about would be more likely to cause further friction. Here again is where Pacem in terris has an answer. “Peace is but an empty word if it does not rest upon [the] order that is founded upon truth, built on justice, nourished and animated by charity, and brought into effect under the auspices of freedom.” Truth, justice, charity: these are as much Pope John’s theme as they are the theme of the prophet Isaiah. Our encounter with others, whether they are coreligionists or not, is in charity and not in battle. A happier term than encounter is the now more popular one, exchange, suggesting a mutual opening up. Indeed, the whole ecumenical movement is conditioned by the readiness to explore, in the interests of peace and justice and truth, the minds of other people and to let other people explore ours. If charity is not the channel of this exchange, the exchange will not take place. Truth and justice will suffer.
“Human society as we here picture it,” says Pope John again, “demands that men be guided by justice, that they respect the rights of others and do their duty.” This is where freedom comes in to its own, because although there can be no true freedom where truth is not accepted, neither can there be true freedom where there is religious intolerance. Charity must underlie our every attempt to evangelize, or our apostolate is no more than propaganda. “It [human society] demands too that they be animated by such love,” the encyclical goes on, “as will make them feel the needs of others as their own, and induce them to share their goods with others, and to strive in the world to make all men alike heirs to the noblest of intellectual and spiritual values.” The range of charity is as boundless here as it is in the Sermon on the Mount. The barricades are down, and liberty is now given a clear run. “For human society thrives on freedom, namely, on the use of means which are consistent with the dignity of its individual members, who, being endowed with reason, assume responsibility for their own actions.”
St. Paul puts the case for the freedom which is born of charity when he says, “You are not under the law but under grace . . . love is the fulfillment of the law.”78
Sin, by destroying charity, repudiates order and makes freedom impossible. Life in Christ is lost, and fallen man reverts to his fallen state. All this may seem doctrinaire and remote, but when we apply it to the will of God, it has particular relevance. What it amounts to is that sin shuts out the will of God, hinders its action in the world, imprisons man within himself, and lays such a crust of selfishness over his soul that the working of grace cannot be properly seen. The man who has chosen sin has chosen to accept as part of life the anomalies and contradictions that find no place in God’s antecedent will: social injustice, scientific nihilism, immorality — these things are no longer negations to him. Love has so far died in him that the flaws and scars are assumed to be of little or no importance.
Lastly but more briefly (since this is what the whole of this book has been about, and repetition wearies), there is the contribution to the world’s need that the individual soul can make in the way of prayer and penance. When we pray, we accept and praise God’s will; when we accept our sufferings voluntarily, we praise God’s will. For the evils of the world, there is no therapy like that of prayer and penance. We have this on the authority of our Lord Himself when He was talking to His disciples about exorcism.79 The beauty of it is that while there may be doubt as to how we are to fulfill our obligation as apostles of peace and love, there is no such difficulty when it comes to the practice of prayer and penance. Knowing that such an apostolate is bound to benefit mankind, all we have to do is to get on with it. As our prayer deepens and as our resignation under trial becomes more purified, the scope of our apostolate will become more clear. It will be seen as something all-embracing because it will come from the heart that has Christ at its center. “We used to say that the mission field was on the map,” wrote an American Methodist, Stanley Jones, “but now I know it is in the heart.” Pope John would have agreed with him. This is truly ecumenical, truly the spirit of aggiornamento, truly a reconciliation.
After offering the bread and wine at Mass, the priest prays “for our salvation and that of the whole world.” In the Christian concept, prayer is dynamic, and the salvation worked for is universal.
Looked at in its essential terms of fulfilling the will of God, religion should grow from being a part-time commitment to being a whole-time attitude of mind. The actual exercises of religion may be various, and the temperature in which they are carried out may fluctuate, but when the human will has identified itself with Him who wills all, then a man may confidently say, “I will now not I, but God wills in me.”
Qui pro vobis et pro multis tradetur in remissione peccatorum. The blood of Christ does not stand still. Nor is it shed for the few. The Incarnation and Redemption were for all, and their work is still going on.
Biographical Note
Hubert van Zeller
(1905-1984)
Dom Hubert van Zeller was born in 1905 of English parents in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was in military service during the time when the country was a British protectorate. Van Zeller was educated privately until the age of nine, when he was sent for the remainder of his schooling to the Benedictine Abbey at Downside, England. Upon completing his education at the age of eighteen, he spent a year working at a Liverpool cotton firm before entering the novitiate at Downside in 1924. Unsettled and distracted by his school duties and desiring a more austere way of life, he struggled with his vocation at Downside for many years, even leaving for a brief period in the 1930s to enter the stricter Carthusian monastery at Parkminster.
After his return to Downside, van Zeller became more involved in giving retreats and in writing about spiritual matters. By the time of his death in 1984, he had written scores of books on prayer and spirituality, which won him a devoted readership throughout the English-speaking world. In addition to being a writer, van Zeller was a prolific and talented sculptor, whose works grace many churches and monasteries in Britain and in the United States.
Although a friend of Oxford-educated Catholic writers such as Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh, van Zeller once described his own writing about the Faith as an effort to use “the idiom of every day to urge people of every day to embark upon the spirituality of every day.” Written with moving depth and simplicity, van Zeller’s books should be read by all Christians seeking to pray and serve with greater fidelity in these difficult days.
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Footnotes
1 Cf. Ps. 35:10 (RSV = Ps. 36:9).
2 Cf. John 15:16.
3 Cf. Luke 11:12.
4 Luke 18:9-14; Matt. 6:5.
5 Matt. 6:7.
6 Cf. Matt. 7:21.
7 John 4:23.
8 Matt. 6:31-33.
9 Luke 11:5-8.
10 Luke 18:1-5.
11 Mark 7:24-30.
12 Matt. 7:24-27.
13 St. Cyprian (c. 200-258), Bishop of Carthage and martyr.
14 Cf. John 6:38; Matt. 26:39.
15 James 1:2.
16 Matt. 5:14.
17 Cf. John 12:35.
18 Cf. Matt. 6:22-23.
19 3 Kings 19:11-13 (RSV = 1 Kings 19:11-13).
20 Cf. 1 John 4:20.
21 4 Kings 5:10-11 (RSV = 2 Kings 5:10-11).
22 Luke 9:54-55; Mark 3:17.
23 Cf. John 16:24.
24 1 Cor. 13:3.
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