In CRISIS
When Dante and Virgil enter the fourth ring of the winding path up Purgatory Mountain, they meet a band of souls weeping and racing at once, “galloping for good will and righteous love.” Before they can ask a single question, they hear these heartening words:
“Come on, come on, don’t let time slip
away
for lukewarm love!” cried those who ran nearby.
“Zeal in well-doing makes grace green again!”
for lukewarm love!” cried those who ran nearby.
“Zeal in well-doing makes grace green again!”
These sinners are atoning for the sin that
Josef Pieper said was characteristic of our day. It is the devil of the noonday
sun, acedia, spiritual sluggishness: the unwillingness, and the
resulting incapacity, to derive joy from what should legitimately bring us joy.
Acedia, says Saint Thomas, is the sin against the Sabbath, because the Sabbath
is to be celebrated with a restfulness that is more active, more fervent, than
is the necessary toil that burdens the other days of the week. They atone for it
by calling upon the muscular virtue of zeal, engaging, to use the words
of our Lord, all the heart and mind and strength and soul.
The same Greek root gives us our words
zeal and jealousy, and here it is useful to note the
difference. Jealousy properly refers to a demand that what is one’s own remain
inviolate. It may become a vice, as when a jealous husband spies upon his
innocent wife; but God Himself says to the children of Israel that He is a
jealous God, meaning that the worship due to Him may not be granted in the least
to any strange god – to any mere work of that factory of idols, the human mind.
But zeal is that same desire, born of devotion, to ensure the inviolability of a
good that belongs to someone else, and particularly to God. “Zeal for
thy house hath eaten me up,” says the evangelist, when Jesus, angered on behalf
both of the poor and of God, makes a whip of cords and drives the thieving
dealers out of the Temple. Zeal is the spirit that breathes throughout the
celebratory Psalms. “I rejoiced,” says the Psalmist, “when I heard them say, Let
us go up to the house of the Lord.” David is moved by zeal when he dances naked
before the Ark of the Covenant. When Ezra the Scribe reads the book of the law
to the Jews returned from captivity, they are at first abashed and crushed with
sorrow, but he commands them instead to refresh themselves and to feast with
joy.
Zeal reveals to us all the difference between
a world grown merely secular and old, and the youthfulness of Christian love.
The young student Charles Peguy threw all his capacious energy into the
promotion of socialism in France. That was before his dramatic conversion to the
faith; but even in the midst of those years he retired from the prestigious
Ecole Normale for a year – an unprecedented thing to do – to return to his
peasant home and to begin his lifelong poetic meditation upon the life of Joan
of Arc. His Joan simply will not accept that it is God’s will that the French
countryside be ravaged by the soldiers of England. “How will they be saved?” she
asks, again and again. “How will they be saved?” It is her zeal – her
irrepressible love for the poor French peasants, her unquenchable desire to
guard their rights – that opens her heart to the call to give her very body for
their sake. Peguy himself, by then an ardent Catholic, died in the front lines
of battle at the beginning of World War I, a hero for his beloved France.
Or we may think of Joseph de Veustre, a young
man of weak constitution, who fairly cheated his way onto a ship bound for
Hawaii, so that he could hurl himself into work among the lepers on Molokai. He
came upon a sinkhole of physical and moral corruption. He was zealous in his
anger against what should not be, because he was zealous in his love for what
should be. He did not hate the wretched and dying sinners he met there, but
loved them with a searing fire, to cauterize their souls, when he could not heal
their bodies. He did for them what Mother Teresa did for the dying in Calcutta.
This is no cold and abstract philanthropy. “I would not do what you are doing,”
said a journalist once when he beheld Mother Teresa cleaning the purulent sores
of a dying man, “for a million dollars.”
“I would not do it for a million dollars
either,” Mother Teresa replied. Not for a million dollars, but for zealous love.
What did she see in those people, half rotten while they breathed still? She saw
Christ; she saw royalty. Her zeal but gave them the honor they deserved.
That zeal is well expressed by the words of
Christ that haunted her all her life. They are words of relentless love. “I
thirst,” said Jesus from the Cross. “Tell her,” said Jesus in a dream to a young
priest who was to visit Mother Teresa, “tell her that I still thirst.” Jesus
thirsts for the good of all lost souls. He is the Good Shepherd, the one who
does not say, “Well, ninety nine out of a hundred is all right,” but cannot rest
until that one lost sheep is found again and carried home upon his shoulders.
And then there is rejoicing in heaven, more for the one than for the ninety
nine.
What unreasonable love of God, that there
should be such rejoicing, wrote Peguy. That zealous man also wrote that Jesus
upon the Cross wept for love. He did not notice His own mother abandoned to
sorrow at the foot of the Cross, and the beloved disciple John supporting her,
because He was thinking still of that Judas whom He loved so well, and whom He
could not save.
Zeal does not give up; just as youth, blessed
youth, cannot believe in defeat. I am no great exemplar of zeal, because the
noonday sun, and its dry heat, and the dust of the road we travel, lie heavy
upon my heart, and I forget to rejoice sometimes, and I forget to love. I say,
“I have loved enough,” but love does not understand that middling adverb. I say,
“God will take care of me,” and that’s true, but God also has granted me the
great privilege of taking care for Him, so to speak – the privilege of worship.
I say, “I am doing all right,” but that makes no sense at all. The wine that
gladdens the heart has been freely broached for us all, in the Eucharist, and in
all graces showered upon us by prayer, and the sacraments, and a life lived in
Christian love; and would we say, “I am content with just so much gladness, and
need no more”?
Perhaps our frames, sin-riddled, are too weak
for so much joy. If that is so, then zeal “makes grace green again,” as Dante
says. We are short of breath. The remedy is not to lie slack, but to run. We’ll
make a pitiful show of it at first, and for a while afterwards too. But there is
no other way to enlarge the heart than the way of zealous love.
I am absolutely persuaded, too, that zeal is
catching. There are some hardened souls who snicker at the grand foolishness of
youth. But there are others, not so far gone in acedia, who might look upon a
youthful worshiper, or upon the youthfulness of worship itself, and burn with
homesickness for a joy they have lost. For the love of those souls, and for the
love of God, we should race. Few will be the leaders of the race, but the rest
of us, the wobbly-kneed, can at least follow along, and sing, “Jerusalem, my
happy home, when shall I come to thee?”
