Fr. Thomas Chrysostom McVey, O.P. (1933-2009) (Profession - 1954 Ordained - 1960) A homily given by Fr. McVey to Dominican Laity Mindanao Regional Conference, Davao, 17 April 2009, Annual Conference, UST, Manila, 19 April 2009, ‘Mercy Sunday'

MH Vicaire, one of the great Dominican historians, believed the Dominican Order was ‘the first strictly missionary Order in the Church,' and the founding of the Order was conditioned by circumstances, but especially by one person's response to these circumstances. ‘It is,' Vicaire writes, ‘in St. Dominic's own heart that we have to look for the first stage towards the founding of the Friars Preacher.'1 Timothy Radcliffe, the former Master of the Order, has described Dominic's whole life as ‘molded by response to situations he never anticipated. This merciful man was at the mercy of others, vulnerable to their needs.'2

According to Vicaire, Dominic's most striking gift was this very compassion and vulnerability to the suffering of others. We all know the story of how Dominic sold his books to feed the poor and how he groaned and wept as he prayed about ‘what will happen to sinners.' This vulnerability and sensitivity to others' needs determined the very structure of the Order he founded: Dominic wept, and the Order was born. To this very day, when a Dominican candidate enters the Order, he prostrates himself and is asked, ‘What do you seek?' He replies, ‘God's mercy and yours.'

‘Those who trust in the Lord,' says the psalmist, ‘find themselves surrounded by mercy' (Ps 32.10). The life of a Dominican begins and ends, circumscribed, surrounded, enfolded, by God's mercy, and mercy is at the heart of our preaching and of everything we do.

The Divine Compassion

The name, ‘Dominic,' means ‘of the Lord,' and it is interesting to see just how Christ-like Dominic's compassion was. The miracles of the Lord are often prefaced by the phrase, ‘moved by pity,' or, ‘Jesus had compassion on the crowds.' It is worthwhile asking, what is this compassion, and what were the things that moved Jesus to pity?3

The Greek word - which I cannot even pronounce! - and the strongest word, used in the New Testament for ‘compassion' means literally the inner organs and parts of a person, which are the seat of the deepest emotions. So, as used of Jesus in the Gospels, it means he was moved from the very depths of his being. And the word is almost always used only in reference to Jesus. There are three other cases where the word is applied: to the master who had compassion on his servant (Mt 18.33); to the father of the prodigal son who welcomed him home with compassion (Lk 15.20); and of the Samaritan who had compassion on the wounded traveler (Lk 10.33). In all other cases it is used of Jesus himself.

The Things Which Moved the Heart of Jesus

Jesus was moved by the spiritual lostness of the crowd. He was not annoyed with their foolishness; he was not angry at them; he was sorry for them. The Pharisees said, ‘the man who does not know the law is accursed,' and they were even able to say, ‘there is joy in heaven over one sinner who is destroyed.' Jesus was just the opposite: sinners were lost; they were to be found and brought home.

Jesus was moved by the hunger and the pain of others. The sight of a crowd of hungry, tired people, the appeal of a blind or leprous man, moved him to compassion, which always issued in help and healing.

Jesus was moved by the sorrow of others. The sorrow of the widow of Nain, who lost her only son, was the sorrow of Jesus. He made her sorrow his own and where there was death, he restored life.

The word for ‘compassion and feeling deeply' may have been Greek in origin but the Greeks could not imagine that it would ever be used about anyone who was divine. For them, a god was incapable of feeling. If a man can feel either sorrow or joy, it means that someone else can affect him. If someone else can affect him, it means that that person has power over him. The Greeks believed in a god who could not feel; a divine being that was ‘moved with compassion' was incredible; a powerless god, unthinkable.

But the Christian point of view stresses this pity of God, and it is this that brings us into the very mystery of who God is. I was at a conference in Rome a few years ago when one Muslim scholar said that you cannot understand the Qur'an unless you begin with the traditional introduction before each recitation: ‘Blessed be God, the merciful and compassionate one.' It is, in fact, the key to understanding Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity. What links us together is the awareness that this is who God is: merciful and compassionate.

God, said St. Clement of Alexandria, is ‘rich in pity.' God is indeed - and it is a wonderful image - ‘all ear and all eye.' The very essence of the Christian idea of God is that God freely chose to feel for and with us.

We are so used to the idea that God is love and the Christian life is love that we forget we would never have known this without Jesus, of whom it is so often and so amazingly said that he was ‘moved with compassion.' The word in Hebrew for ‘compassion' is hesed. It is Jesus who gives flesh to God's compassion, his hesed. As one child in catechism class, when asked, ‘Who is Jesus?' said, Jesus is ‘God with skin.'

God's Hesed

The Hebrew word, hesed, is a word packed with many meanings. The root meaning is ‘God's merciful love,' but it is so nuanced and has so many other shadings to describe the many subtle ways in which God relates to us. God's hesed is attentive to our needs; God is thoughtful, as a friend is; God's love, his hesed, is loving kindness; He is gentle and tender, like a mother; He is merciful and endlessly forgiving, as a father should be. But perhaps most characteristic of God's hesed is that it is tough, it can withstand any shock. No matter what we do, God remains faithful and merciful, as witnessed by St Paul in his letter to Timothy: ‘If we have died with Him, we will also live with Him; if we endure, we will also reign with Him; if we deny Him, He will also deny us; if we are faithless, He remains faithful - for He cannot deny Himself' (2 Tim 2.11-13). That's who God is!

Unbelievable Mercy

There is still an unbelievableness about God's merciful love for us: we are a strange people who just can't take Yes for an answer. Yet, as John writes is his First Letter, ‘Even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts' (1 Jn 3.20). This is also why the parables of mercy in Chapter 15 of Luke's Gospel strive three times to make the point. God's love is like that of the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to go after one lost. God's love is like that of a woman who, having found her lost penny, gives an extravagant party. God's love is like that of a father who welcomes his son back, no questions asked. We have gotten used to these stories so they no longer shock us, but that is just what they are meant to do: what shepherd would be so stupid as to put 99 sheep at risk for the sake of one; what woman would be so stupid as to waste a lot of money on a party over the finding of a lost coin? And what father, ‘filled with compassion,' would receive a prodigal son as he did.

No shepherd would do this; no woman would do this; no father would act like this. But God does! That is the point of these stories. St. Catherine of Siena saw this clearly and declared that God is pazzo d'amore! God is ‘love-sick,' crazy with love, for us!

Meister Eckhart, another 14th c Dominican, went even further: ‘If God were to stop loving us, He would cease to be God.'

If we trust in this love, then we find ourselves, like the psalmist, ‘surrounded by mercy' (Ps 32.10). Such love makes the prophet, Jeremiah, exclaim, ‘the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness' (Lam 3.22).

St. Catherine of Siena could not get over this boundless mercy: ‘You, God eternal - in your mercy and unutterable grace you have fallen in love with what you have made... let humankind, Adam's child, whom you brought back for love alone by the death of your only-begotten Son, blush for shame at not having done your will - you who want nothing other than that we be made holy. Eternal God, in divine charity you made humankind and for love you became one with us.'4

Catherine most often prayed to the Father but, on the feast of St. Paul, in 1377, she prayed to the Trinity: ‘You made us in your image and likeness so that, with our three powers in one soul, we might image your trinity and your unity. And as we image so may we find union. Through our memory we may image and be united with the Father, to whom is attributed power. Through our understanding we may image and be united with the Son, to whom is attributed wisdom. Through our will we may image and be united with the Holy Spirit, to whom is attributed mercy, and who is the love of the Father and the Son.'5 In this same prayer, she addresses St. Paul, who had ‘joined [his] soul's powers with the divine persons': ‘You joined your will with the Holy Spirit, loving perfectly that love, that mercy you knew was the reason for your creation and for every grace given to you without your earning it. And you knew that divine Mercy had done this for one purpose: to make you blessed and happy.'6

I have often wondered about the marvelous preaching that was given in 14th c Siena that echoed, as did Catherine's prayer, St. Thomas's teaching that ‘we needed God to become flesh if we were to be saved.'7

There were, in fact, great theological battles in the 13th c between the Franciscans and the Dominicans over the motive for the Incarnation. The Franciscans arguing that God's goodness just naturally bubbled over; St. Thomas and the Dominicans arguing that God became man because of our need: ‘if we had not sinned, God would not have become man.' We could be saved no other way. No other way than the way of mercy and compassion, by God coming to us in the man Jesus.

The extent of that mercy and compassion is shown many times in the Gospels. My own favorite is the healing of the leper in the first Chapter of Mark. The leper approaches Jesus and says, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, Jesus stretches out His hand and touches him, and says to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean' (1.40-44).

This is interesting because Jesus could have healed the man with a word. Instead, He stretches - reaches out - to touch the man and heal him. ‘Stretching and touching' is what God does in the mystery of the Incarnation; God stretches, God touches us, and says, ‘I do choose. Be made clean.' But a strange thing happens in this story. When Jesus touches the leper, he himself becomes ritually unclean. He tells the leper to go to the priest, make an offering, so that he can be certified as fit to rejoin society. Jesus restores the leper to society but he himself is excluded. The other side of the coin of compassion is vulnerability and it is vulnerability that makes compassion credible: not just feeling the pain of another but, by entering into it, risk being wounded, by making another's pain one's own.

This is something St. John Chrysostom knew well from his own sufferings. In his commentary on Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians, he wrote, ‘It might be possible for a person to love without risking danger; but that is not the case with us!'

Contemplating a Merciful God

Contemplating God's mercy and the blood poured out for us had a profound effect on Catherine, as it had on Dominic himself. In Fra Angelico's frescoes in San Marco, Dominic is often pictured at the foot of the cross, either weeping, kneeling and grasping the wood of the cross or seated at the foot of the cross, with the Gospel open on his lap. Both Dominic and Catherine were transformed by the experience. And so should we.

There is a beautiful image in Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians where he compares Moses' veiled face with our unveiled faces: ‘All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another' [alt trans: ‘ever increasing glory'; ‘the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory'; ‘reflect his glory even more' (3.18).

We are transformed into what we contemplate; we become what we see.

I think this is what makes the ancient Jesus Prayer so powerful: the constant repetition of the prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, be merciful to me, a sinner,' coupled with breathing in and out, is meant to make the prayer connatural, second nature, like breathing. It becomes part of us; we become what we pray.

Merciful Dominicans

How does this work out in the life of a Dominican? How do we become transformed into images of the merciful and compassionate God? Paul helps us here. In his letter to the Ephesians, he describes God's ‘stretching and touching' as being saved by grace, ‘so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life [alt trans: ‘that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them']' (2.7-10).

The works of mercy, the ‘good works' we are to ‘live in,' are traditionally described as actions by which we come to the aid of our neighbor in spiritual or bodily need. ‘Instructing, advising, consoling, comforting, are spiritual works of mercy, as are forgiving and bearing wrongs patiently. The corporal works of mercy consist especially in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. Among these,' says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘giving alms to the poor is one of the chief witnesses to fraternal charity: it is also a work of justice pleasing to God.'8

St. Augustine tells us just how we are to ‘live in' these good works. ‘Observe those [people] who want to live a good life, are already deciding to live a good life, and yet are less capable of suffering ills than they are prepared to do good. Yet a Christian's strength includes not only doing what is good, but also enduring what is evil.'9 We are to ‘live in' these works by being not only compassionate and merciful - mirroring God's own compassion and mercy - but also by becoming vulnerable.

One example of this vulnerability was given by our French brothers in Bordeaux, who gave asylum, in their church, to Moroccan refugees. This caused some discomfort to the congregation and led one of the auxiliary bishops to complain: ‘People come to church to pray; not to put their lives at risk!' What a silly thing for a bishop to say. We do go to church precisely to put our lives at risk. This is what the Eucharist is all about! Timothy Radcliffe, in his latest book, quotes the writer Annie Dillard, who claimed that listening to the Gospel is the most risky thing one can do: ‘The Churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares.'10

The Word of Comfort

When the Order was confirmed, Pope Honorius declared that it was founded to be ‘useful' for the salvation of souls. Everything in the Order, everything - vows, common life, study, prayer, monastic observances - everything was to be judged in terms of its ‘usefulness' to others. I believe that it is especially in our vulnerability that we Dominicans become ‘useful' to others.

There is a remarkable passage in Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians that serves as a charter for how Preachers are to be ‘useful.' He writes: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.' And he continues, ‘For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. If we are being afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are being comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we are also suffering. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort' (1.3-7).

Our own sufferings, all the evils we endure, are, as Augustine said, part of a ‘Christian's strength.' So is ‘doing good,' but it is the ‘enduring evil' that makes it possible for us to ‘do good' by entering into another's sufferings. We are not technicians who can take away pain; we have not the tools for that. What we do have, like Dominic, is our tears, and our presence.

Our greatest resource in responding to another's need and another's pain, is our own experience of suffering - and of being comforted.

Parakletos11

There is one more word used in the New Testament that is a great help in understanding just how a Dominican should image and mirror God's mercy. The word is parakletos, which we immediately recognize as Paraclete, the word given to the Holy Spirit, the ‘comforter.' But it is much richer and broader than ‘comforter.' A paraclete is ‘someone who pleads our cause, an advocate,' who ‘befriends and stands by me,' someone who ‘makes me strong, who enables me'; one who gives me ‘power and courage,' who is ‘counselor and helper.' A paraclete is someone who ‘exhorts and urges' me to some action. These are all qualities of a preacher, a Dominican, perhaps best described in Isaiah: ‘The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word of comfort' (50.4).

If we cannot give an encouraging word of comfort, we had best keep silent.

The Lines of Brokenness

I want to end with the witness of someone who shows us how and where we are to preach. Pierre Calverie, one of our French brothers, was bishop of Oran in Algeria during the 90s. Because of his attempts to bridge the gap between peoples, he was killed by a bomb 12 years ago. Three months before he died - knowing he might be killed - he wrote this:

The Church accomplishes its vocation and its mission when it is present in the ruptures which crucify humanity in its flesh and its unity. Jesus is dead, spread-eagled between heaven and earth, arms stretched out to gather together the children of God dispersed by the sin which separates them, isolates them, and sets them over against each other and against God Himself. God has placed Himself on the lines of brokenness born of this sin. In Algeria, we are on one of those seismic lines which divide the world: Islam/the West, North/South, Rich/Poor. We are truly in our place, because it is here that one may glimpse the light of the Resurrection.12

It is always the martyr - the ‘witness' - who reminds us Dominicans who we were meant to be and what we were meant to do. A Dominican is attentive - ‘all ear and eye.' A Dominican preacher is one who performs an act of mercy and compassion, one who, becoming vulnerable, dares enter into others' pain.

A Dominican who preaches offers comforting encouragement - encouragement like that of St. Catherine of Siena, who exhorts us today: ‘If you are the person you were meant to be, you will set the world on fire!'

Dominic, Pierre, and Catherine dare us today to be who we were meant to be - and to set the world on fire!

Chrys McVey OP

Fr. Chrys McVey is a Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, who was born in New Jersey, in sight of the Atlantic Ocean. However, he spent half his life in the deserts of Pakistan, "where," he says, "his education really began." He served there in various capacities--as pastor, novice- and student-master, seminary professor, director of a pastoral institute, executive secretary for the Conference of Religious, and as the first provincial of the newly independent Dominican vice-province of Pakistan.

After 40 years in Pakistan, Fr. Chrys was appointed Socius to the Master of the Order, with responsibility for Mission, and served six years on the General Council of the Order in Rome. He remains a member of the Dialogue Commission of the Order and the Order's Commission for the Promotion of Study. He has contributed chapters to many books and has written for international journals on Pakistan, Dominican Spirituality, and Contextual Theology, as well as on the theological implications of the dialogue with Islam for Christian faith and practice.

For him, coming to St. Joseph's is like rounding the circle because his great-great grandparents, from Genoa and from Donegal, first settled in Greenwich Village when they arrived in the 1840s.