March 28,2010.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together for our Badaliya Prayer on Sunday March 28, 2010 at
3pm at St. Paul's Church in Cambridge, in the small chapel located in the Parish
Center. Please join us in person or in spirit as we pray for peace and reconciliation
in the Middle East and especially in the Holy Land.
Our gathering together this Passion Sunday to pray the prayer of substitution
gives us an opportunity to revisit some of the meaning of this sacrificial prayer
that Louis Massignon described. May reflecting on these quotations after hearing
the scriptural Passion of our Lord at this Sunday's Mass bring us to ever
deeper commitment as contemporary members of the Badaliya.
From Annual Letter #1, 1947.
"[Substitution is realized] by practicing the material and spiritual works
of mercy in a certain way each day. "The one who considers the One for
whom he works while working, ceases to consider his own works". This is
our goal. We have to begin that which we cannot finish, to sow, more than to
harvest...."
"[Substitution is realized] by gradually living, starting from the House
in Nazareth, the growing "fiat" of Christ and His Passion within us
that started with the "fiat" of Mary".
"[Substitution is realized] by admiring Jesus in our brothers and sisters,
by loving Him in them, we love them more. To pray for all their ancestors, all
past generations, because, for us, every man is the "ambassador" for
all his relatives whose destiny enters into his own, and through it, enters
into our prayer. And not like a dead weight but like the beginnings of a more
beautiful and real future".
Massignon suggests that we must have "An Attitude of Simplicity".
He writes: "There is only one love, and it is God Himself, the love of
the only One for the only One, of the lover for the beloved, of Jesus for the
Father, that He has given to us. We will only have on high, Foucauld said, that
which we have given here below. The immortal life of our soul will only be "beatified"
if it is totally united from here below in love. Nothing other than the Gift
will remain of us, this spirit of life that we will have communicated to our
neighbor, to other members of Christ, through our substitution for them, our
hospitality to His Body and His Blood, to his Angels and his Saints, and our
tenderness toward His Mother".
"[It is] our response of love that shows Islam that the Incarnation has
truly taken place, since the Cross shared by us makes us live out of compassion
for our brothers and makes our intercession before the Face of God pure".
Massignon writes that we must "Prove to [God] that we desire Him by dying".
He writes "If it is true, my God, as You have said it Yourself, that to
die proves completely to the friends for whom we die, that we love, let us premeditate
together on how to die with Him in order to prove to them how much God desires
them. The novitiate for our Vow is to practice tirelessly the industrious patience
of love, to search with a contained and discreet fervor for the "fiat", "falyakun",
of Mary".
"Let us die to ourselves before this Eucharist of mercy and reconciliation,
this morsel of grace without any face, who cast himself in us, this frail offering
of an abandonned victim of torture, who leaves us completely free not to follow
him to the end, to this consolation, and to this seed of immortal resurrection".
Let us close our prayer as we enter into the holiest week in the Church calendar
with Louis Massignon's own prayer for Good Friday written in 1961:
"May the intentions of our fast on [April 2], Good Friday, be truly and
fraternally ecumenical, dedicated through substitution to the most abandonned
of persons, to the most "underdeveloped", to those who are oppressed
by a loveless technology, in order to hand to them the Marian cup of the milk
of human kindness". (April 14, 1961 Convocation 74)
May you be blessed in this Easter Season 2010.
Peace to you.
Dorothy