Frederick
has been very important in my life, but I never met him. You see, he was born in France in 1813, in
the aftermath of the French Revolution.
He had a happy enough childhood it seems, in a very devout Catholic
household. But, as he entered
adolescence, he came to encounter the world as much more complex and shady
place than his childhood had prepared him for. He struggled to find his place in a world of
disagreement, conflict, question and doubt.
He was an exile from the child’s garden. Everything that had seemed so secure seemed ruinously
fragile. What could he trust in to show
him God? He would later write of the
“horror of doubts that eat into the heart and leave the pillow drenched with
tears.” One night he got up from that
tear-drenched pillow and ran. He ran
into St. Bonaventure’s church, vaulted the altar rail and crashed to his knees
in front of the tabernacle. The pitiful
child cried: “Why do you hide your face, God?”
Frederic’s
cry is the same cry as the prophet whose words we hear today from the book of
Isaiah. These are words from a people
newly returned from exile and struggling to rebuild their lives after the
destruction of land, Temple and kingship – everything that had shown them God. One can imagine this communal lament proclaimed
in the ruins of the destroyed Temple. To
pray in such a space is to protest against despair. To stand in such a space and to remember not
the sins of those who conquered you, but confess your own is to show that the
image of God, though dimmed and defiled by your captors, has not been
extinguished in you.
The
cry is for God to show His face, to reveal Himself more powerfully than on
Sinai. The reading opens with the one
claim the prophet can rely on to sustain him and even this has in Hebrew the
raw rough emotional syntax of a childish cry: “You, Lord, our-father… you.”
This cry recurs near the end, but this time with a new overtone, for the
prophet has remembered to look around and hear his neighbors’ cries. He has asked God not just to come, but come
and find His people acting with justice.
Now, the fatherhood of God carries new weight. We know an artist by her art. We know God by His creation. In our sisters and brothers, we see His face.
He is our potter; we are
His clay.
Frederic
would come to realize this, but not at age sixteen in St. Bonaventure’s. In that moment, he got no answer to his
intellectual questions, no escape from temptation, no vanquishing of foe: but
he got peace and trust that God would show His face… later. Two years later, now a student at the
Sorbonne, Frederic was at a loss as to how restore a credibility to
Christianity in post-revolution France, just as the returned exiles struggled
to recreate temple Judaism after the exile.
A sympathetic professor, out of advice, sent Frederic to see Sister
Rosalie, a Daughter of Charity. She
didn’t have any advice for him. She
didn’t even have time for him! “Can’t
you see how busy I am! There are so many
poor people in Paris, and I have this food and these clothes to
distribute. Come! If you must talk to me, at least help me
carry this stuff while we walk.”
Frederic
did help her and returned to help her again.
Within a few weeks, Sister Rosalie assigned him a few desperately poor
families to visit regularly, bringing food and clothes but also prayer and
company. When a cholera epidemic broke
out, Frederic bathed a young man as he died to relieve the fever. As he looked into the youth’s dying eyes, he
saw Christ’s looking back. He realized
what the prophet realized: that God does show us His face. The face of the wounded risen Christ is
disclosed in our neighbor, and most powerfully in our neighbor in need. For when we see that however much poverty
dims and defiles it, the image of God is so powerfully imprinted as to still
shine through, we see a God so powerful as to rescue even us from death.
Frederic,
or Blessed Frederic Ozanam as I should call him, would go on along with Blessed
Rosalie Rendu to found the Society of St. Vincent de Paul at age twenty. He did this because he understood what we ask
for in today’s opening prayer. We prayed
that we might run forth to meet our Christ with righteous deeds, and that’s not
a two-step process: we don’t do good things while we wait to later meet
Christ. No, Advent waiting recognizes
that Christ is right here, in our midst and we meet him when we righteously run
to serve the poor, our master. Now, that
vision is furtive; it’s the vision of dawn’s first light and we are waiting for
the bright clearness of day. But we
don’t stand waiting; we run waiting because we rejoice that God does
show us His face.
This
Advent, Christ says to us, “Watch!”
Watch what marvels he is doing, watch where he waits, where he longs to
find us.
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