Collect

Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

A Reflection on St Mark Ji Tianxiang

The pious woman was whispering to him. She must have somehow edged her way nearer. She was saying, ‘Father, will you hear my confession?’
‘My dear child, here! It’s quite impossible. Where would be the secrecy?’
‘It’s been so long …’
‘Say an Act of Contrition for your sins. You must trust God, my dear, to make allowances …’
… Somewhere against the far wall pleasure began again; it was unmistakeable: the movements, the breathlessness, and then the cry. The pious woman said aloud with fury, ‘Why won’t they stop it? The brutes, the animals!’
‘What’s the good of your saying an Act of Contrition now in this state of mind?’
‘But the ugliness …’
‘Don’t believe that. It’s dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.’
‘Beauty,’ she said with disgust. ‘Here. In this cell. With strangers all round.’
‘Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can’t afford to.’
‘It’s mortal sin.’
‘We don’t know. It may be. But I’m a bad priest, you see. I know—from experience—how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. … Try not to be angry. Pray for me instead.’
‘The sooner you are dead the better.’
He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he remembered from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. … Hate was just a failure of imagination.


Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory


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It’s been kind of hard to write lately. I’m not altogether sure why, though I have been feeling that my moral life is even less up to snuff than usual, which tends to make me a little shy of writing.


But if writing is my vocation—and I think that it is—then worthiness has, in one sense, very little to do with it (provided I’m honest about my unworthiness).




I learned earlier this summer about St Mark Ji Tianxiang, one of the Chinese martyrs who perished during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Boxers, or, as they called themselves, the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, were a group of ecstatic militants—a little like berserkers, in some ways—who wanted to purge China of foreign influence, which had expanded significantly after the end of the Second Opium War in 1860. Viewing Christianity as an essentially foreign incursion,1 they aimed to compel all foreign missionaries to leave China and all Chinese converts to apostatize; those that didn’t comply, from either group, were murdered. St Mark Ji Tianxiang, a 66-year-old layman, was one of those martyred.


What’s fascinating about him is that he was an opium addict. He spent thirty years cut off from the sacraments because his addiction was considered a sin and a scandal.2 He prayed for deliverance: it did not come.


Or, if you prefer, it came after thirty years of waiting. Personally I don’t prefer, because that answer is both glib and totally discouraging. Nobody wants to wait until the very moment of death to be delivered from something that’s ruining their life and reputation, especially if (as seems likely) it also destroys their self-respect. The platitude is a non-answer.


On the other hand … Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And Jesus said to His Mother, How is it that ye sought me? Another non-answer—though, somehow, a more palatable one. Perhaps because (as our Lord’s habit was) it is, so to speak, frankly cryptic. But that cry of pain, and even of rebuke, came from a sinless mouth. The anguish of nature being assumed by grace (not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God) is not solely because of nature’s sins being ripped out. There’s something painful in being deified.



William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Savior in the Temple, 1859


I forget what any of this has to do with me being called to write. Its connection to my being a Catholic is pretty obvious, though, which of course is what most of my writing, directly or indirectly, is about; and examples like that of St Mark encourage me not to give up. At least, they encourage me a little. There’s certainly a part of me that finds it very appealing to spend another thirty years sleeping around and then conclude with a glorious martyrdom, though another part of me finds both parts of that life plan unattractive. But the project is—well—taking of that manhood into God. The Eucharist is nothing else.


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1Interestingly, China already had many centuries of Christian history at this point—not just from the Jesuit missions under St Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci, but far earlier from the Church of the East, also known as the Nestorian Church, once the most far-flung communion of Christians in the world, stretching from Syria to China. Nestorian Christianity had died out some time in the late fourteenth century before St Francis Xavier arrived in the sixteenth.
2And it was; like St Peter’s apostasy.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Gabriel, I've been following your blog for a while now. I like it's meditstive, conversational tone. I understand what you mean about feeling morally inadequate. I feel this a lot. I don't want to give the impression that I'm superior to others. I worry that I'm a hypocrite. I guess because there are so many Catholic blogs out there run by priests or apologists I worry that my followers think I'm trying to do the same thing they are. In truth, I just want to converse about themes in the books I read or offer a reflection on a verse that's touched me. Perhaps, we need not worry about being hypocrites if we don't claim to be morally superior to others or to have all the answers.

    I find the history of Catholicism in China interesting. A historian gave two talks at my university about the missionaries in China. I wonder whether a deal will he made between the Vatican and China. Should it? The Chinese government is notorious for human rights violations. But the Catholic bishops in China are arrested and sent to labor camps if they refuse to submit to the Communist party. So many Christians complain in America that they are persecuted (when they are the ones persecuting others), but Chinese Catholics have really faced persecution. We need to think more globally. I will pray to this Chinese saint. Peace.

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    1. An agreement between the Vatican and post-Maoist China might be beneficial to Chinese Catholics. I'm not sure. The Chinese government is of course stained with crimes, but then, so is the American, and for that matter the Papacy itself: the number of governments that *aren't* stained with crimes cannot be far above zero.

      But I'm not at all sure whether a rapprochement between Rome and Beijing would really be worthwhile; not only because other agreements with totalitarian governments have gone wrong (like the concordats with Napoleon and Hitler), but because I'm not certain it'd have any real effect. As far as I can tell, the current Chinese "dynasty" will always regard the Vatican as a foreign power, and any attempt on its part to govern the Catholic Church in China will be considered foreign interference accordingly. Until and unless there is a major cultural shift in China (whether towards liberality in religion or towards Christianity specifically), I expect the tension that now exists between the Catholic Church and the Chinese state will continue.

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  2. Prayers, Gabriel. And gratitude for the courage of your honesty, and the last words in particular of the Greene quotation.

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  3. Dear Gabriel please understand, Mark is not a cannon saint because he is a matyr. He is a cannon saint because he showed his will never to give up fighting sin so that he could love God completely, and he was blessed to fulfil that immovable desire he had taken up through martyrdom. We all have sins we fight against what makes us saints is that we love God so much that we desire to rather die than continue to displease him. You may not be there yet but that position comes from God's grace and it is asured grace if we truly go after it by humbling ourselves and trusting in God's will, love, mercy and justice. So let us not settle for anything less than that great love of God with which we are saints.

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