Arkiv, Høytlesning
Desert Fathers 43
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A priest made his way to a certain hermit in order to offer for him the sacred mysteries. But someone went to the hermit and talked the priest down, saying he was a sinner. When [the priest] arrived as was his custom, the hermit, who was scandalised, did not open the door to him. So the priest went away. Meanwhile a voice came from God to the hermit. It said: ‘Men have usurped my judgement.’ Finding himself as in ecstasy, [the hermit] saw a golden well, a bucket of gold, a gold cord and an abundance of pure water. He also saw the man who was drawing and distributing the water. He was a leper. And even though [the hermit] wished to drink, he did not do so because the one who drew the water was leprous. Again the voice came to him: ‘Why are you not drinking the water? What does it matter who draws it? This man is merely drawing and distributing.’ The hermit came to himself. Seeing the sense of the vision, he called the priest and invited him, as he had previously done, to offer the sacred mysteries for him.
We may have wondered how solitaries partook of the Church’s sacraments. This saying gives us a clue. It presents us with the office of itinerant chaplains making the rounds of hermitages to celebrate the Eucharist for non-ordained hermits. A bond formed in this way between anchorites and settled communities, a bond intended to be of charity.
The spirit of detraction, however, could cause such bonds to snap.
We are presented with a scene of village gossip. It is a tragic, for it involves men vowed to an angelic life, that is, a life supposed to be of pure intention. One hermit goes to visit another to share some titbit of a rumour picked up in the market about one of the chaplains. The other man, whose mind should have been on higher things, exclaims, ‘Well, I never!’, delighting in being righteously shocked, pleased to manifest to all the world that he, an anchorite of devout renown, would have no dealings with a public sinner. Drawing a chest in front of his door, he refuses to grant the priest access. He would rather fast from communion in the Lord’s Body and Blood than allow his reputation to be tainted in the eyes of desert busybodies.
Can such situations really arise among consecrated persons? Yes, alas. They originate in that obscuring of vision which comes about as a result of sin, keeping us from seeing things and people as they are, projecting upon them instead our own perceptions, of course to our own advantage. Not for nothing did St Bruno, whose Charterhouse is the Western Church’s closest equivalent to the desert’s mode of life, speak of monastic life as a process by which ‘an eye is acquired’. The process of conversion is tantamount to the gradual removal of cataracts that keep us from seeing clearly, causing us instead to fumble in a universe made up of moving shades.
The monk in this story, ungracious and unmerciful, does not take the trouble to confront the priest with accusations made against him; he entrusts himself to his blindness. How marvellous that God responds by letting him entertain a vision full of light, made up of gleaming objects and the joyful sound of water poured.
There are multiple lessons in this illumination. The first is explicit and Biblical. St Paul put it firmly in his letter to the Romans: ‘Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God’. We are free, of course, to evaluate human behaviour and to position ourselves before it; but to condemn another is to usurp a divine prerogative.
The vision does not say whether the priest was guilty of a misdemeanour or not. It asks us to view the matter theologically. Faced with the infinite purity of God, and of his gifts, any human being is unclean. Think of Isaiah in the temple. Think of Peter when, in a flash, he saw Jesus for who he is and exclaimed: ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.’ Disproportion must be taken for granted. Even when the dispenser of grace is objectively compromised, human filth just does not have the power to contaminate God-given grace. In Latin theology this line of thought is summed up in the principle, ex opere operato. It is hard to render literally. An adequate paraphrase might be: ‘the work itself is efficacious’. The Church teaches that a sacrament’s beneficial impact, when celebrated validly, does not depend on the celebrant’s or the recipient’s worthiness: it is, for being humanly mediated, an act of God. As such it is imbued with intrinsic potency. That is why God in the vision asks the hermit: ‘What is the intermediary to you? Do you really think a sullied human instrument can obstruct my divine, salvific design?’
The story ends edifyingly. The hermit opens his door and asks the priest in. We are prompted to confront our censoriousness. We are also given hope in the face of disappointment. There has, alas, been no shortage within living memory of bishops and priests bringing shame on the ordained ministry. Their legacy calls for justice, conversion, and tears. Let us not for a moment, though, think, that an unworthy steward can sabotage God’s design. Oh, no. Providence is infallible. God, who can make something out of nothing, can bring good out of evil. Further, he can make the leprous clean.
Christus Pantrocrator from Subiaco. Christ is the Judge of All, and the only judge who knows the full truth of anything, or anyone.