Fr. John van den Hengel, SCJ (vicar general)
Anthropologia Cordis, Taubate, Brazil
It is under the sign of the post-exilic temple meeting the new temple brought to Jerusalem by Mary and Joseph that we begin this week of reflection on our Dehonian personal and communal identity. The second, post-exilic temple never achieved what it set out to be, to be a symbol of the presence of God sought in the Torah. When it was destroyed in the year 70, it was never rebuilt – it remained forever a memory, a symbol of a lost presence, a symbol of an unrecovered, ever-delayed covenant. For Jesus and for us, the temple that was destroyed had already been superseded in the renewed covenant of God and humans in the person of Jesu. And before it was destroyed, it was replaced – as John suggests in his Gospel – by the body of Jesus. Today’s feast of the Presentation presages this event: as the first reading and responsorial psalm insist: today the Lord of Glory comes to his temple. But he comes only as a sign – a sign, Simeon tells Mary, that “will be contradicted”, a sign not of unification but a sward of separation, a sword that will tear Israel apart. Mary appears here as the Israel that will be torn apart. The new temple will forever be torn asunder by the cross.
As followers of Jesus, we will always be part of this contradiction. We will suffer – also we – the sword of separation. If on the feast of the Presentation we also celebrate the symbol of religious life, we must remember that we can be no more than a symbol of this sword of separation, of a Christ dead on the cross – memorials of the death and resurrection. We must forever bear the death of Christ on our bodies and in our communities.
For us this feast coincides with the gathering of the week of our theological seminar, Anthropologia cordis. Such an anthropologia cordis, we know, can only be an anthropology where death is not eh end-point of the self but integral to the heart. The Gospel of this day gives us a reality test. It is very easy to speak and reflect theologically and philosophically – even culturally – about the self-representation, the self-imaging of ourselves, but only in the cross “will the thoughts of many hearts be revealed.” It is the sign that cuts to the core, the sign that, when borne and lived, will allow the true self to emerge.
For Fr. Dehon and the tradition that he sought to appropriate, it was never enough to allow our identities to be delineated only by love. For him it was always love and… love and reparation – love and immolation – love and oblation – or, in the words of Andre Prevot, love and sacrifice. The heart of Jesus for us is the pierced heart – the heart of God dead on the cross. That has become for us the image of God: a love that annihilates self, a self-emptying love, that leaves us with a humble God, or, as the Letter to the Philippians says, a “humbler-yet” God because he is a God crucified, suffering death on the cross. That image is also the image of the Letter to the Hebrews of today: the image of Jesus as “the merciful and faithful high priest before God.”
This week we want to reflect on what this “love and…” means for our self-understanding. For Dehon, as well as for Prevot and the underlying devotion to the Sacred Heart, it sometimes seemed as if reparation, oblation, immolation was only a surplus on our part which we offered to help make up for the lack of love of others. We offered our sacrifices, the excess that exceeded what was needed for God’s justice, and returned it to God for the world. For Dehon, the excess was not the excess of abnegation, self-immolation for others, as it was in the case of p. Prevot, but the bearing of the wounds of existence with patience and equanimity. That is the beginning of our anthropology.
Here the prophecy of Simeon is the example. To Mary in the temple he said, “You yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” The sword of Simeon’s prophecy, exegetes say, is the sword of division, the sword that will pass through Israel because of Jesus. Israel will be torn apart because Jesus will force Israel to make a decision. For the Gospel, Jesus reveals the fulfillment of Israel but this fulfillment is a sword that tore Israel apart. The sword of division of Israel is also the sword that pierce Mary. Mary is here the daughter of Zion. She will bear or suffer in her body the division of Israel, the sword that tore Israel apart.
This tension or division in Mary as a daughter of Israel is a symbol of an anthropology of the heart. Our hard cannot ever be separate from the fate of the world. An anthropology, according to the heart of Dehon, suffers the “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted” as his own (Gaudium et spes, no.1) It will be a pierced anthropology, never settled in itself, protected as in a Buddhist nirvana. Our anthropology cannot ever subscribe to the atomistic self, the self wrapped in itself with a tentacle to the outside, the individualistic anthropology, that has for so long plagued those come from the West. With Mary we bear the woundedness and the divisions of our world in our heart.
The motto of the next General Chapter, “Misericordiosi, in communita, con I poveri”, “Mercifu or compassionate, in community, with the poor” says it well. In our communities we seek to be compassionate with one another but not as isolated from the peripheries, from the poor, but exactly with the poor, with the wounded, with the outsider. The Gospel of this day urges us to take Mary as our example of a heart that has learned how to bear, to live with, the pain, the divisions, the conflicts, the terror of others. For Dehon that was a seeking to combine love with reparation, with immolation, with sacrifice.
May we have a fruitful week seeking for the language and the praxis of a cammino di cuore.
