show me your glory

On day two in Banff we were keen to head back up into the mountains, to make the most of the pure, liquid sunshine that has so blessed our arrival (and especially as we hear rain & snow are on their way soon)

The day-hike Jebs and I followed is rated by Lonely Planet as the best in all Canada … and we agree that only ludicrous superlatives will do justice. For both of us this high alpine meadow was simply the most beautiful place we have been in our lives.

Remember the time when Moses asked the Lord “show me your glory”, and his request was granted in extraordinary fashion : “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock … and you will see my back” (Exodus 33 v.21-22)

Well this was a day something like that. We stood on a rock and the Glory of the Lord passed by.

I feel thrilled that my prayer for this part of the sabbatical has already begun to be answered - that the beauty of creation may illuminate the beauty of holiness. For I believe both shine forth from God himself, with power to draw and inspire : glorious mountain peak after glorious mountain peak, gleaming white banner after gleaming white banner …

Later on when settled in seminary & prayer retreat, I want to reflect in more systematic fashion on the theology and practical spirituality of holiness. To attempt a humble survey of the whole mountain range.

But til then, traversing the Rockies seems a time for identifying particular high points to explore along the way. To be challenged & inspired by a procession of individuals who have sought after holiness - and found it.

At the front of that line Jesus set one he christened “the Rock”. Many that follow have been craggy and difficult, though others were more gentle company. Some seem easily accessible, others improbably elevated with shining halo snowlines. Some stand alone, others more visibly join in community. Some are part shrouded from our eyes in a cloud of mystery.

But always God’s saints, like his mountain peaks, come with their own quite unique shapes, scars and sizes. They are one-off, original creations who all must start off somewhere low down, rooted & earthy … just like rocky St. Peter … and just like you and me.

In an earlier post I was keen to stress that last point about holiness, as being called to life which is deeply earthed in God (and may or may not look impressive from a distance) : “It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus”

Evidence for this vital “M'Cheyne principle” may be found in the lives of many, if not all holy men and women. And among the clearest and most celebrated example comes in the person of a humble priest of the 19th century, a peasant farmer’s son called Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney.

So I invite us to make Vianney the spiritual peak we are challenged by this time : a Frenchman to follow along the lofty range from Tozer the American, and Murray M'Cheyne the Scot. (And as we turn to consider him, I apologise that this is a slightly longer post than usual … perhaps that’ll make up for being rather short changed last time around!)

Known as the Cure d'Ars (and in English as St. John Vianney) today’s lived example of holiness is in fact someone deeply reverenced by Catholics as the “patron saint of parish priests”.

But originally Vianney was considered a living disaster zone, even a clerical version of Mister Bean. His shrewd Bishop deftly appointed him to the obscure parish of Ars, a peasant village of only 300 souls, as a quite deliberate pastoral exercise in damage limitation.

Having woefully and repeatedly failed the Latin in priestly exams, he had been ordered to leave his seminary. By rights he should not have been ordained at all - but slipped through thanks to pressure from a powerful patron, who had been impressed by his holiness. Once dispatched to Ars he never read a book or a newspaper, & soon became the butt of jokes by fellow clergy due to his shabby clothing and unkempt manners.

A man who cheerfully described himself as the village idiot, Vianney was however soon to make that village the most famous in all the land. In time a railway would have to be specially built to the tiny settlement of Ars, just to transport the stream of pilgrims from all social backgrounds who came seeking counsel from this humble local parish priest.

For by his untutored holy wisdom John Vianney was widely to become recognised as spiritual director to the entire French nation.

As you read his life (by his contemporary Abbe Trochu) many features of Vianney’s ministry appear eccentric if not excessive. Indeed he ended up worn out and emaciated from tending selflessly to the crowds who flocked to him over forty years, hearing confessions and giving individual spiritual counsel from thirteen to seventeen hours every single day.

He had a spiritual gift for telling the sins of a penitent even when they were withheld, and would often weep in the confessional. When asked why he wept, he would reply “My friend, I weep because you do not weep” …

As a rocky mountain can look foreboding, so the ascent to holiness can appear extreme in our eyes. Vianney’s own fasting discipline meant just water & a boiled potato each day; sleeping on bare boards as a personal penance; and lying prostrate in the chancel of his church for hours before dawn, pleading God daily for the conversion of souls.

He also followed certain ascetic pathways borrowed from old school monasticism, that I would not myself consider safe - things like self flagellation as a form of penance. (Alarm bells should sound I believe, whenever self-denying spirituality tips over into being life-denying instead. For God’s creation is good, and he graciously “gives us all things richly to enjoy” as well as to share with others : 1 Tim 6 v.17)

Dallas Willard has a magisterial chapter on this difference, contrasting those who exercise for general fitness with spiritual “body-builders”, who exercise obsessively for the sake of exercise itself. (See his “Spirit of the Disciplines” referenced in my Lee Abbey talk 2 …. more to be said on that important distinction when I get to Vancouver in systematic theology mode)

Be that as it may - we who explore the foothills should be nothing daunted by perils of the rock-face higher up. Let’s just keep hiking one step at a time.

If we would be holy, you and I will need disciplines of both abstinence and engagement to keep us on track. Rather than adopting legalistic practices for their own sake, we must be clear that those disciplines will serve us exactly as practices - practise exercises in self naughting, so that we are trained, fit and strong, ready for when the real life challenge comes.

Certainly by his own private disciplines Vianney learned quite extraordinary humility, despite the constant adulation of his visitors. I’ll only detain you with one anecdote among many, which comes from a time he was criticised by one of his fellow priests.

This was in fact a regular feature of his ministry, often because others were jealous of his fame. Peers remembered his failure and dismissal from seminary, unlettered & unsophisticated. They saw him as odd and eccentric at best, but downright dangerous at worst : a fanatic cynically deploying the trappings of poverty, to draw attention to himself & “play the saint”. They noted his popularity with needy women confessors, and exaggerated tales of rash or simplistic spiritual counsel that he was reported to have given.

The particular instance I’ll recount here concerns a barbed letter of complaint and personal attack that he received from one Abbe Borjon, a much younger neighbouring priest. In it Borjon made no bones about how clearly he resented the practice of pilgrimage to Ars, already established before he arrived among his own parishioners :

“Monsieur le Cure” he wrote, “when a man knows as little theology as you do, he should not go into the confessional …”

In response Vianney’s reply to Abbe Borjon was quite extraordinary :

“Most dear and most venerated confrere, what good reasons I have for loving you! You are the only person who really knows me. Since you are so good and kind as to take an interest in my poor soul, do help me to obtain the favour for which I have been asking for so long a time, that being released from a post which I am not worthy to hold by reason of my ignorance, I may be allowed to retire into a little corner, there to weep over my poor life. What penances there are to be undertaken! How many expiations to be offered! How many tears to be shed!”

I find I need to pause to take that in. Without having met the Cure, you and I might well suspect heavy sarcasm here. But all the evidence is that he was in fact being quite sincere. This is a man who tried to run away from Ars three times, worried he didn’t deserve to be its priest. A man who, when once he was shown a letter to the Bishop denouncing him as unworthy of his office, readily counter-signed it to give his own support.

Certainly Abbe Borjon himself didn’t pick up any sarcastic tone. Instead to his credit those words simply served to awaken his own sincerity, as a fellow sinner in need of grace. He hurried to Ars and threw himself at the feet of the Cure, there to be immediately embraced and forgiven (albeit by one slightly bemused … for in the meantime Vianney had apparently forgotten all about the letter and its barbs)

How does such holy grace become possible? The old saying holds true, but now it carries unanticipated new depth : practice makes perfect. Practice, and time in the presence of God …

I began with Moses and his bold prayer request to see God’s glory. In Exodus 33 there is also a preceding chunk of dialogue, that is highly significant for all of us who would strain to be holy. It went like this :

The Lord said, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’ Then Moses said to him, ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?’

The class dunce becomes a patron saint. He does it by practice and, like Moses, by time in the presence of God.

It is of course traditional to join prayers with patron saints. In closing (especially if we are parish priests, but all are welcome!) here are some words of St. John Vianney, which you may like to offer along with him :

I love You, O my God, and my only desire is to love You until the last breath of my life.

I love You, O my infinitely lovable God, and I would rather die loving You, than live without loving You.

I love You, Lord, and the only grace I ask is to love You eternally.

My God, if my tongue cannot say in every moment that I love You, I want my heart to repeat it to You as often as I draw breath.

Show me your Glory Lord : Amen and Amen.