God’s Beauty and Patience

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, 5th November 2017

I discovered Leon Bloy a very long time ago when I was a student. I had a card on my desk with his words “Everything that happens is something to be adored.” I know that sounds extravagant, but God can and does bring good from everything. St. Paul said, “We know that all things work together unto good for those who love God.” Rom.8:28. And St. Augustine added “even our sins” – “all things, even our sins, work together unto good for those who love God” I can’t remember how I came across Bloy’s novel, “The Woman who was Poor” but I do remember the impact it had on me at the time. His novel and others like it inspired me more deeply than the Theology we were studying at the time. I tried to read the novel again recently and found it anything but inspiring! But it reminded me of how disappointed I was with our study of Theology. The dogmas of faith seemed more like mathematical formulas proven from scripture and tradition. It didn’t help, of course, that we studied Theology through the medium of Latin. Because of this, I was delighted, some years back, to discover that when Pope Benedict was a student, he too found the Theology of the Scholastics absolutely dry. And a seminary prefect from the time, called Alfred Lapple, explains it this way: “As they would say in Bavaria, that kind of Theology wasn’t his beer!” He wasn’t interested in defining God by abstract ideas. An abstraction, he once said, didn’t need a mother! But he loved the works of St. Augustine and you know why? Because, (and these are his own words,) “the passionate, suffering, questioning man or woman is always right there and you can relate to that.”

Leon Bloy was a French novelist and essayist that no one mentions much nowadays. He was born in 1846 and died in 1917. A convert to Catholicism, his writings inspired a wave of conversions in France during the early 20th century that included personalities such as the painter Georges Rouault and the philosophers Jacques and Raisa Maritain. He also made many enemies because of the things he said about people, but he defended himself by saying that he was communicating only the mercy and the indignation of God!

I’ve been quoting Leon Bloy over the years and the following will give you some idea of how he wrote:

“God seems to have condemned himself until the end of time not to exercise any immediate right of a master over a servant or a king over a subject. We can do what we want. He will defend himself only by his patience and his beauty.”

 “We have places in our hearts which do not yet exist, and suffering must enter there so that they may have existence.               

 “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             “Chance is the modern name for the Holy Spirit.”                                                                 

But Bloy must have been smiling in heaven when Pope Francis quoted him in his first homily as pope: “When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we confess Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord: we are worldly, we are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.”