Shall we gather at the river?
Jesus came to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him (Mt 3:13).
“Go into the marketplace and stay with Me” (from the Little Mandate of Madonna House).
This year in Madonna House we are focusing our attention on words that are at the heart of our vocation and spirit. These are the words of the “Little Mandate,” which came to Catherine Doherty in prayer in the 1920s and 30s when she was discerning the call of God to leave everything and follow him into the slums of Toronto to serve the poor.
For every member of MH, these words are the beating heart of our vocation, the core of what God has called each of us to live, do, and be for his kingdom. Many of us find that one line or another of the Mandate comes to the fore of our attention and awareness at different times and seasons of our lives.
For myself at this time, I keep returning to “Go into the marketplace and stay with Me” (Christ). More and more, these words illuminate the ordinary path of love and faith we are all called to walk.
When Catherine received these words, this meant simply going into the heart of the city, into the back alleys and slum tenements where the poor lived, to be present to the anguish and sorrows of the most needy and vulnerable in our world.
As years went by, the MH apostolate took many different forms and addressed itself to many different kinds of human needs and wants.
Catherine’s understanding of the marketplace deepened beyond the obvious and the physical until she could say, “The marketplace is the soul of man, where man trades his soul either to God or to the devil, or to the in-between … [where we encounter] indifference, complacency… the tepid…the absence of love.”
This is deep stuff. That line of the Mandate continues with “Pray, fast, pray always, fast.” The call is to be truly plunged into and present to the spiritual reality of human beings as we go towards or away from God.
For many people, it is often a matter of going back and forth hesitantly in both directions, neither decisively rejecting the Lord and faith, nor truly abandoning ourselves to the fire and light of the Holy Spirit. To be truly present to others in love and compassion, we need to stay very close to Jesus, to pray and fast — first for ourselves in our own sinful tepidity — and then for others in theirs.
All of which somehow leads me to the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan, the feast we celebrate on January 11 this year. This feast is perhaps little understood in the Western Church. In the Christian East, it is the very heart of the Christmas-Epiphany season.
Jesus comes to John to be baptized. The baptism of John is a baptism of repentance for sin. Jesus, who is sinless and pure, plunges into those waters, declaring himself to be one with the sinful, one with those who are filthy and need washing, one with the “tepid, the indifferent, the complacent, the ones absent of love.”
This baptism is crucial to our understanding of the mystery of Christ and the mystery of humanity.
Most people are not flagrantly, colorfully wicked, you know. Most people are sinners of the small variety — think of all the small petty sins of weakness and mediocrity. The small acts of unchastity, uncharity, the little movements of coldness and selfishness, the petty gossiping, the careless little lies, the grubby little jockeying for position and status — normal every day experiences of human unlovingness and egoism.
You know, it’s easier in some ways to think of God loving the big glamorous sinners, the ones who really throw themselves into wicked acts of spectacular crime and scandal. At least they’re not boring. At least they seem to really care about being sinners!
It’s harder to comprehend a God who not only loves us boring, lukewarm sinners, but plunges himself deep into the lukewarm waters of our human reality.
He journeys alongside each of us, not as we choose between committing bank robberies and mass murders as opposed to being missionary martyrs in some far-flung land, but rather as we choose between the smallest and most dreary of vices and virtues.
He patiently calls us, day by day, to love just a little bit more, to be just a little less selfish, to try just a little bit harder, to not give in quite so easily to whatever small weakness of character pulls us into sin.
This is our God: infinitely patient, gentle, and kind, with all human beings of all the shades of grey. This is what he was “baptized” into; these are the muddy, silty waters into which he plunged. The baptism of Christ is the depth of God’s identification with all of humanity in all its reality, which, most of the time, is not terribly commendable.
And God calls us to have that same charity and patience with one another, to live with him in that same marketplace where human beings make their daily little choices for God or the devil, where the great and cosmic actions that settle the fate of every human being are one and the same as the small choices for and against love made by each person in the secrecy of his or her heart every single day.
This is not a glamorous way of love, not one that will generate headlines or even merit a cause for canonization after one’s death. Instead, it is a way of compassion and quiet communion with every ordinary human being on his or her perilous spiritual journey through life.
It contains a beauty and splendor known only by the God who took that plunge into Jordan’s waters and who bears, out of love for us, the sins of all the peoples of the world.
Shall we gather at the river?
