Today’s Invitation
Today we invite you to explore emptying ourselves, and “cooperating with God’s grace” to find the hope we seek in these times; engage the Palestinian and Gazan struggle against “the jaws of death,” as a sign of hope against empire; and embody this hope with their example as some celebrate Ramadan amidst the rubble of their homes.
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Cooperating with God’s Grace
In this contemporary moment, it can be easy to find our usual sources of hope to be empty. Even before all this current political mayhem erupted, hope was often scarce. For Catholics, hope, as sourced in grace, is co-operative: our hope is always, already made present to us by God. Therefore, it is often us who are blinded from what is always there, unable or unwilling to heed God’s call, hear his silence and to thus cooperate. As the receivers of God’s grace and hope, what does it mean to cooperate with God, to pour our lives “like a libation,” to fight “the good fight,” and to “keep the faith.”
Theologically, this is understood as self-emptying, or kenosis; In as much as we empty ourselves, we are like Christ who emptied himself in the incarnation, dwelt among us, died, and was risen. In other words, in as much as we fight the good fight and keep the faith, we are living in the way of Christ and in the hope of the Messiah. But what does it mean to “empty oneself” and so cooperate with God’s grace, and how can we enter into the hope of the Messiah?
Our political climate is one marked by omnipresent, fear-fueled, selfish desires. There is fear everywhere: fear to speak up, fear that we or our loved ones will be taken from us, fear of what is coming next, fear that this will never end. And this fear inculcates the opposite of self-emptying; often, hate rhetoric justifies dehumanization by teaching bystanders that they have nothing to fear as long as they care for themselves and their loved ones. We are told that if we mind our business and take care of our-self, we should have nothing to fear. Many of us know this to be true by the simple discussions we have with friends and family: in a context of globalized climate destruction, ubiquitous dehumanization, and political fear, how often do we hear, “but me and mines are doing well and taken care of so I’m content.”
As Christianity often does, the imprisonment of Peter shows us another way. Let us attend to this reading and its depiction of hope. Amidst active persecution, Peter was taken into custody, surrounded by guards and sentenced to death. And in the face of what seems a hopeless situation, an angel of the Lord appeared and led Peter to freedom. Note that in Peter’s flight from imprisonment to liberation, it was never clear to him if he was being led to freedom or if he was having a vision and would therefore remain imprisoned. But as a follower of the Way of Christ, Peter is led to freedom and exclaims “Now I know…that all of this is true, that our God really did send an angel to rescue me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were so certain would happen to me.”
In the face of what was doomed to be certain, Peter was led to freedom. This journey to freedom was only made clear and certain in hindsight. The hope that we need today must be a hope like Peter’s: a hope that is unclear to us but is still very much working. We need to nurture a hope that trusts in the angel of the Lord even if we don’t know where it is going. So where can we find this hope today?
Francis Bocuzzi
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