For Part I of this article, click here.

“In this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.” This passage from Pope Francis’s Gaudete et Exultate is cited in the prologue of Pope Leo XIV’s first official magisterial pronouncement, Dilexi Te. This apostolic exhortation, originally conceived as a companion piece to Dilexit Nos, extends and applies the themes of that encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

But how is it that the inmost core of the Person of the Word-made-flesh is manifested uniquely in destitution, such that “love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor”? Indeed, poverty is bound up with every facet of the Christian religion; again Francis, from Evangelii Gaudium: “We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor.” Dilexi te confirms this, adding that “from the first centuries, the Fathers of the Church recognized in the poor a privileged way to reach God, a special way to meet him.” Even before the Incarnation, the word of God has always proclaimed that, as the pope notes, “one cannot pray and offer sacrifice while oppressing the weakest and poorest.”

For Sacred Beauty specifically, in accord with our charism[1], all of our artistry flows from and returns to the Eucharistic Heart of Christ. From St. Peter Julian Eymard, our patron saint:

Jesus wanted to be the poorest of the poor, in order to be able to stretch out His hand to the lowliest of men and say to him: “I am your brother.”

The poor are without honor; Jesus is without glory.

The poor are without defense; Jesus is at the mercy of all His enemies.

The poor have scarcely any friends or none at all; Jesus Eucharistic has very few. He is a stranger, unknown to the majority of men.

How beautiful and lovable is this Eucharistic poverty of our Lord!

Compare with this, from Dilexi te: “The poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord.” These words, which might seem shocking to some, are actually a summation of a passage of St. Augustine from our Augustinian pope. (I will be returning to the question of the meaning of sacramentality, with particular reference to music, at a later point, in upcoming writing.)

I read through the exhortation with strains of the inchoate Gloria, so invested with its own meaning, perduring inexorably in my ears. This music furnishes, for me, an aural analogue of kenosis. I needed to understand the inseparable connection between poverty and the divine, to begin to plumb the utter identity between the two – for while the orientation of the Mass of the Poor as conceived was to the human destitution of the wretched of the earth, I cannot but hear in its music, especially the Gloria, an expressing of transcendent poverty, the ontological ground of poverty, what poverty is originally in God. My mind turned to Alphonsus Liguori, to John of Ávila, to John of the Cross… and above all to Hans Urs von Balthasar, for whom God and creation are profoundly analogical. Owing to the analogia entis, we can say (if we want to put it this way) that contingent reality channels Being at “lower frequencies,” much as the body channels the spirit, at the more limited “frequency” of materiality. (In writings elsewhere, I have often made much of the point that the soul is the form of the body as substance, while the body is the soul’s visibility.)

For Balthasar, following Bonaventure, creation shines to the degree that it reflects the “inner vitality of God.” But what is this inner vitality? First off, two Balthasarian principles, specific extrapolations of the fact that everything in our world of experience is in God first: One is that God, while changeless, is “a happening”; the all-pervading dynamism of the interior life of the Godhead admits no becoming, but is rather becoming’s primordial ground – that is to say, becoming is lower-frequency eternal dynamism. The other is that there is a “super-ordinate super-time” innate to the ordering of the divine Processions. By that very token, temporal sequence, be it aeviternity or common earthly time, is the hitting at a lower frequency of the eternal-though-ontologically-hierarchicalized-though-existing-in-a-perfect-equality-grounded-in-consubstantiality flow of Generation and Spiration.

All of this, taken together – the inherent spirituality of the music, the witness of Dilexi te, the theological insights drawn from Balthasar – led me to see poverty as the lower-frequency imaging of Divine Power. I find this solution to be sufficiently gratifying that I would like to explore it in a future work; for now, I propose it only so as not to lose the moment. Balthasar wrote in the fifth volume of the Theodrama:

It is quite possible to speak of God’s almighty power, but at the same time, on the basis of the Trinitarian events, one must ponder the way in which the triune God wishes to be almighty. He wishes to be almighty not solely by creating: by begetting and breathing forth, and allowing himself to be begotten and breathed forth, he hands over his power to the Other — whoever that Other may be — without ever seeking to take it back. If one wanted to see this ‘limitation’ of the divine power that pertains to each of the Persons as a ‘necessary’ limitation within the Trinitarian process, that is, as a kind of ‘powerlessness,’ it would be possible to reconcile these two sides of the divine power (genuine omnipotence and the genuine handing over of power) in the higher concept of absolute love…

The ecstasis of annihilative divestment in gift to the beloved is the milieu and ethos of the Persons; it is Mercy, which is ultimate divine power. It is God himself who offers the widow’s mite, insofar as he gives unto penury with no remainder. To be truly infinitely powerful is to be equally infinitely needy and vulnerable; all of these facets must be encompassed in the one virtuosic reality; poverty is, as it were, a mode of wisdom. It is perhaps on this basis that Leo says of the poor of the earth: “Their experience of poverty gives them the ability to recognize aspects of reality that others cannot see.”

The same Lord who hears the cry of the poor is also its prime Protagonist. For Leo, this is reflected Christologically: “[Jesus] is, in fact, an itinerant teacher, whose poverty and precariousness are signs of his bond with the Father.”

The intra-Trinitarian cry of the poor is a piercing-through of Being itself with sheer joyousness. At the same time, again as Balthasar explains a concept from Origen in another work altogether, where there are Persons, there is “Sovereign Subjectivity”; generosity, liberalitas, enjoys the superadded halo of being energetically willed at all points, not extracted as by force. He writes, again in Theodrama V:

The mystery of Being is not something closed but a mystery that utters and manifests itself; at the same time it shows that this self-utterance is not a natural process subject to necessity but something freely given and freely giving.

Any whisper of entitlement – or even of justice, if you will – is fully disruptive to this ethos. This is the “super-justice” of absolute love, original justice which grounds the subsequent order of dignity and rights in the contingent sphere. It is itself divine “right”-eousness.

As Leo puts it in Dilexi te:

In this sense, our relationship with the Lord, expressed in worship, also aims to free us from the risk of living our relationships according to a logic of calculation and self-interest. We are instead open to the gratuitousness that surrounds those who love one another and, therefore, share everything in common.

Jesus himself says in the Scriptures:

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.

This also elevates the logic of the Church’s preferential option for the poor. Leo cites St. John Paul II, who reminded us in Novo Millennio Ineunte that “there is a special presence of Christ in the poor, and this requires the Church to make a preferential option for them.” Indeed, as Pope Benedict said, this “is implicit in the Christological faith in the God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty.” What we see here is not a mere humanistic act of compensation for the deficits of the disadvantaged; the Church finds Christ in the poor because he is there in and with them, and finds herself in emulating the divine gift of self – modeled, yes, in the Incarnation, but first and before all time in the inner life of the Trinity.

Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, cover them,and not hide yourself from your own kin… Then your light shall break forth like the dawn. For Balthasar, light “as such, is life and love”; its opposition to darkness is not that of two poles of equal existential weight, but is, as Erich Przywara might put it, an “ever-greater.” Light is at once self-communicative and revelatory of the other; it manifests its source and it brings to the fore the already-present on which it falls. It is an energetic relationality. In his work Explorations in Metaphysics, Jesuit philosopher Norris Clarke writes:

This natural tendency to self-giving is a revelation of the natural fecundity or “generosity” rooted in the very nature of being itself. We are immediately reminded of the ancient Platonic tradition – well known to St. Thomas – of the “self-diffusiveness of the Good” (bonum est diffusivum sui, as the Latins put it). What St. Thomas has done is to incorporate this whole rich tradition of the fecundity of the Good into his own philosophy of being, turning this self-diffusiveness, which the Platonic tradition identified as proper to what they considered the ultimate ground of reality, the Good, into a property of being itself, of which the good now becomes one inseparable aspect (or transcendental property)… the good is a derivative property of existential being itself, expressing more explicitly the primal dynamism of self-expansiveness and self-giving inherent in the very nature of being as act of existence.

A thing is according to its operation, by a well-known axiom. For us to be good (not merely ethically, but at all) we must be in act, as an illuminative ray of self-diffusive relationality. St. Thérèse had a threadbare habit, held together with pins, that she loved so much that no one could get it away from her. There is something indescribably beautiful about a love that does not wane according to the “desirability” of its object, a love that is specified by the force of its subjective and preferential willing, and neither predicated conditionally nor abashed at its absence of mimetic leverage. The love that is vivifying and generative enough to make things real, even when they have no other luster.

The sixteenth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel describes God’s exercise of the preferential option for the least. The covenantal nurturance offered to one utterly forsaken at birth formed in her a royal dignity. This is what the virtue of poverty does: it sees deep into that which is rejected, according to a sweeping teleological vision, and through the abasement of committed cherishing, projects beauty and newness where there had been only misery. To drive the point home in a way perhaps even more accessible, consider this passage from a great and well-loved children’s book, wherein ontological prowess is conferred on an object just as it, ragged and contaminated, is discarded in a burn-pile:

Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time – not just to play with, but REALLY loves you – then you become Real.

Poverty itself, the giving, and the reversal of fortune incorporating all of the anawim personified by Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham – all reflect the inner vitality of the Godhead. Every story of liberation expresses something, via the succession of events, of the eternality of the Persons, for whom absolute giving and absolute exaltation are a perfect simultaneity.

In his General Audience of November 11, 1964, St. Paul VI pointed out that “the poor are representatives of Christ,” and compared the image of the Lord in the poor to that seen in the pope. He affirmed this truth with these words, cited by Leo in Dilexi te:

The representation of Christ in the poor is universal; every poor person reflects Christ; that of the Pope is personal… The poor man and Peter can be one in the same person, clothed in a double representation; that of poverty and that of authority.

All of this is to be kept close to the heart through the praise in the Gloria text offered to “God, Almighty  Father.” Divine Power – the melding of poverty and authority – exactly as defined by Balthasar is the interpretive key of this movement of the Mass of the Poor.

Late this past Friday night, as I was completing the Sorrowful Mysteries, I gazed over at the Velasquez crucifixion on my living room wall, the Sanctus occupying my mind, atmospherically and again inexorably. With the words “Lord God of Hosts,” the little descant overlay of the two highly trained sopranos among the choristers gracious enough to preview it for us came to prominence. The extent to which it seemed like mockery startled me, this title and this artistry as directed toward the epitome of abandonment, rejection and public shame. As Christians, it is Poverty, the very heart of poverty, which claims our worship. For God’s part, he is so enamored of this virtue, that he permits that he be vanquished by it; as St. Peter Julian Eymard preached, “the man that is poor in spirit will triumph over God himself.”

Note: We finished the Gloria, at least in its most basic contours, sometime past midnight, this calendar day. Whatever the ultimate destiny or merits of this music may or may not be, I love it. Working on it makes me happy, grateful, alive. As I am able to eventually share it here with all of you, please be aware of the great love and deep joy with which it is offered.

Blessed Michael McGivney, pray for us.

 

Image: Cristo Crucficado, Diego Velasquez; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Cristo_crucificado.jpg

[1]               Paul (Chu) and I founded a Private Association of the Faithful called Sacred Beauty (the name refers to the person of Christ), which was formally recognized in the Diocese of Bridgeport in 2018. Our charism is to allow the beauty and holiness of God to be made present in the world, first through Eucharistic contemplation, then through artistic and intellectual creativity and receptivity informed by and dedicated to Jesus in the Eucharist.