The practice of reparatory spirituality opens the door to happiness and true peace. This is an assertion that can go against the popular understanding of Reparation. The spirit of reparation evokes simultaneously the spirit of victimhood and oblation. A negative notion of the concept of “victim”, further confounds the matter. It is to be noted that a certain amount of willingness to suffer cheerfully is a pre-requisite for being an agent of reparation. In that sense we can be victims by choice and not by coercion. This involves an act of the will. If it is so, then the person concerned does so with full responsibility and knowledge. Such an act of the will is made not for a minimal end but for a great good and with the conviction that the suffering itself is of great good to the agent and for the people and issues it is offered. There is a connection between the suffering experienced and the happiness of a person. Ample of caution should be exercised so as not to confuse this with some form of masochism. We don’t suggest that one invite suffering to feel happy. “Here we naturally think what Ven. Dehon wrote to his young religious, Fr. Guillaume. Referring to the “victims” of Marseille, he said: “I prefer to let the Lord handle the whip. I insist less on personal mortifications though I think they are necessary, but I recommend more the patient surrender to the trials, which our Lord will sens us. Our Lord did not crucify himself: He allowed himself to be crucified” (letter of 18.2.-1913).1 This understanding does not come naturallyt, but is a process of mature spiritual training in awareness of the intrinsic nature of reality and the transcendent.
Pain is a fact of life. Pain gives birth to new life. Any phenomenon or experience is enveloped with pain. Human being are always struggling to get rid of pain. They invented painkillers and tranquilizers. This unconscious battle with pain sucks the joy of living. Life becomes a rat race. Human beings become reactive rather than proactive. In order to seek happiness they avoid pain. Life continues with its ever-moving cycle of pain and suffering. Any effort to force it out or any escapist tendencies are absent. Suffering is not accepted for suffering’s sake, but as a vehicle to growth, self-discovery and happiness. Suffering becomes a channel to transcend suffering and to acquire buoyancy that immunizes the person from the crushing effects of suffering.
Jesus was very realistic about the problem of suffering. He did not promise a utopia. He proposed the reality itself: if anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross everyday and follow me” (Lk 9:23). He also recommended that we: “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly” (Lk 6:27). The adherence to the way envisaged by Jesus will demand some suffering: “anybody who tries to live in devotion to Christ is certain to be persecuted” (2Tm 3:12). Jesus suggested that we drop all illusions of a painless life and face the ordinary, the real and the sinful with equanimity. Patience in bearing with an unresolved or seemingly impossible situation can itself be the solution to the problem.
2. Ven. Dehon’s Approach to Suffering
Ven. Dehon had a deep insight into what promotes true happiness and peace. He adopted total surrender into the hands of divine providence as a means to happiness and love. This “abandonment entrust to the omnipotence of the saving love the capability of adopting even our poor cooperation for the salvation of all”.2 The daily oblation and ecce venio consists in offering to the glory of God every pleasant and unpleasant experience in a spirit of humility and gratitude: “In all circumstances, in all happenings for the future and for the present, the Ecce venio suffices, provided it is in the mind and heart at the same time that it is on the lips. Ecce venio, “Behold I come, O my God, to do Thy will”. Behold me ready to do, to undertake, to suffer what Thou asked of me. We can be without anxiety; the will of God will make itself known at every moment. But should darkness and uncertainty fill our mind and heart, let us persevere with patience and love, until it pleases the wisdom and goodness of God to enlighten us again with His light”.3 He saw in the pierced heart of the savior, the great love that desires the happiness of human beings, even though shrouded with problems and challenges. A total surrender is in fact an anti-dote to stress and anxiety that damages life. Dehon lived the words of Jesus: “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Mt 6:34). The life of Dehon was a via cruces indeed! The saving grace came through surrender. The kingdom of God is made with these weak instruments: “Power is at full stretch in weakness” (2Cor 12:9). It is almost as if the widow’s mite, the hanging thief and the recovered sheep cause the greatest happiness for Christ. It is not human excellence that saves the world. The love of God saves the world and we are all recipients of this grace for a happy living. God’s forgiveness and love is greater than any sin. This attitude towards suffering is not a denial of self, but acts complimentary to God’s grace: “It makes me happy to be suffering for you now, and in my own body to make up all the hardships that still have to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body” (Col 1:24).
3. The Holistic Approach to Human Suffering
Contemporary human beings are in the process of rediscovering the forgotten link between body and mind, soul and physical, faith and health and reparation and happiness. Spirituality is more real than reality itself. It is the spirituality that gives us the wake-up call to start living. Millions will find it hard to accept. We need to be born again to live fully. There are many contemporary studies done to prove the interconnectedness and oneness of live. The entire holistic philosophy and spirituality is one of the examples. Science itself is complying with this discovery. It is undeniable that intense and indomitable faith has the power to make the impossible come true. This has been evident in chronic cases of cancer and addictions. Faith healing depends on the individual faith in a higher power. A mere relic can generate great faith in a believer. Christian scientists sometimes succeed in healing themselves because they are taught to seek serenity of the soul and surrender to God the inevitable. “Let go and let God” heals and cures.
A rationalist may dub these beliefs as superstitious. There is a need for open-mindedness to possibilities beyond human apprehension. There is a “not-yet” phase to the realization of any truth. Only time throws light on the mysterious. Therefore realizing that science is itself a modern invention and cannot be traced to the origins of the human spirit one has to be cautions of the veracity of scientific conclusions. Neglect of the body-soul link by medicine is very recent when seen in the backdrop of the whole history of healing art. Until the 19th century, medical writers rarely failed to note the influence of grief, anger or resentment on the body. Nor did they ignore the healing effects of faith, love, reconciliation and mental peace. No doubt, modern medicine has tremendous power to provide immediate relief from some health problems and so human beings tend to forget the “spiritual” that animates and rejuvenates our life. Modern medicine can cast out data that is not easily quantifiable or those aspects of anatomy that escape the gamut of a microscope.
Research on terminal cancer patients gives us surprising facts about the link between spirituality and physical health. In his book Love, Medicine and Miracles, Bernie S. Siege, M.D., speaks of his experiments in self-healing as a surgeon, with exceptional cancer patients. He affirms the healing power of love. Patients, who were brought up from their youth without adequate love and affection by parents and family members, moved through life with serious emotional and performance impediments. These finally contracted cancer. The love of God meant nothing to them. It was a long term personality reprogramming that led to a miraculous cure from within. The patients were trained very personally and in its intimacy to experience the immense love of God. Old messages as “I’m not loved” were systematically erased with the consciousness of unconditional love. They learned to forgive themselves and others. The accumulated guilt was expiated: “True guilt seeks, indeed embraces, punishment. Guilt represents the noblest and most painful of struggles. It is between us and ourselves. It is alleviated and mitigated by acts of expiation”.4 They learn to love the uniqueness and imperfection of their personality. It is a tragedy that in crisis human beings develop self-hate. There are countless reasons in the Scriptures, which motivate us to love self. There is absolutely no reason for self-hate. The Scripture declares it: “You are the temples of the Holy Spirit” and “The kingdom of God is within”.
We can also state that, “All illness is meaningful, although its meaning may never be translatable into entirely rational terms. The point is not to understand the cause of the disease and then solve the problem, but to get close enough to the disease to restore the particular religious connection with life at which it hints. We need to feel the teeth of God within the illness in order to be cured by the disease. In a very real sense, we do not cure diseases; they cure us, by restoring our religious participation in life. If the Gods appear in our diseases, it follows that our lives may be too secular and in need of such a visitation”.5
It will not be wrong to observe that sometimes contemporary human beings treat the body like an efficient machine that needs to be kept in shape so that its organs will function smoothly and for as long as possible. If something goes wrong with any part it can be replaced with a substitute as in the case of a machine. If we loosen the grip we have on the mechanical view of our bodies and the body of the world, many other possibilities might dawn upon us. The inner images and feelings we carry have the capacity to promote or retard our happiness and healt. Love remains the urgent need of the present generation. Love is not sought in its abode - the heart of Jesus. In reparation we focus very expectantly on the everlasting love of God which recreates our humanity. “We need the security of love before we can venture far into the quest of personal truth. Only the caring warmth and understanding support of love can provide a safe foundation for growth in truth that is both living and liberating. From the first moment of conception we need to be wanted, cherished and nurtured in love so that we have a reasonable chance of becoming genuinely mature adults, unafraid to be ourselves. If we feel secure in love we shall be able at each phase of our lives to let go of what we are, in favour of what we can become. We do not cling in fear to take the ongoing gift of life that comes to us as our own unique truth. Human love can achieve this creative task and fundamental therapy. But it remains frail and fragile; and experience tells us that we cannot always be sure of it. Many seem to be deprived of such love even in their earliest years. All of us meet with its instability and limitations. Still, there remains the human need for a love that is constant and in which we can trust completely, regardless of what life holds. Such unconditional love is the name for God: the love that casts out fear, because ultimately it challenges our limited conception of truth, and so can and will set us free”.6
4. The Healing Power of Faith and Love
This indomitable faith in the love of God can almost heal and restore the brokenness that paralyses life. Healing energy can work in our heart only through the act of love. This is not a Herculean task, nor does it need the asceticism of the desert. This needs the willingness to accept and acknowledge the existence of a loving God concerned about human happiness and well being. From this comes the ability to find peace and to resolve inner conflicts. From this peaceful state of mind come both creativity and the ability to love unselfishly. Dr. Bernie states: “To me it is the absence of spirituality that leads to difficulties. I know many patients, when they develop an illness or have a recurrence, are angry with God. It’s important to be able to argue with God, as is traditional in Judaism. Continued helpless rage at the universe can’t possibly lead to health. God isn’t sitting up there with a clipboard, saying, ‘Let’s see who I can make trouble for today’. On the contrary, God is a resource. The energy of hope and faith is always open to everyone and can make our lives beautiful whenever we choose it. As Germen dramatist Christian Friedrich Hebbel once wrote, ‘Life is not anything; it is only the opportunity for something”.7
It is when people accept themselves as whole individuals, lovable and loving that they become able to give from an inner strength. Unconditional love multiplies the opportunities to receive love. It fells good to give and sooner or later it returns. Dr. Bernie explain this: “One of the immediate rewards is a live message to the body. I am convinced that unconditional love is the most powerful stimulant of the immune system. If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulin’s or killer T cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love themselves and others fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is: love heals. As the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote: The bodily food we take is changes us into itself; therefore divine love is not taken into us, for that would make two things. But divine love takes us into itself, and we are one with it. When doctors and patients understand the healing power of love, we will begin to add another dimension to medicine. Then we will be well on our way to the glorious revelation predicted by Teilhard de Chardin in these famous words: “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire”.8 It is healthier to love.
Psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, a survivor of the concentration camps, wrote in his work, Man’s search for meaning, that the Nazis found it effortless to send to the death chambers those who had lost hope in life as compared with those who looked into their eyes without hate. Love saved Frankl’s life. When he was offered the golden opportunity to go to a camp with better conditions, he gave his place to someone else. The train sadly went to one of the gas chambers. Another survivor, Jack Schwarz, has told how he moved through a whipping and had a vision of Christ. Overwhelmed with love radiating from the image, he said to the persecutor, Ich liebe dich. The soldier was so struck that he stopped, and was astounded to see the prisoner’s wounds healing right before his eyes. It is when we lose the inner hold on the transcendent and eternal dimension of life that we can lose the meaning of existence.
5. Be an Agent of Reparation
Therefore by choosing to repair, restore, compensate and counter the evil in our own lives and in the lives of others we cease to allow negative and sinful acts and events have control or power over one’s life. We opt to surrender our life into the hands of a loving God. We focus on his power to heal us and to restore peace and happiness in the world rather than our own virtue and merit to reform and establish the reign of goodness. This spiritual outlook has bearing on our life in its most interior recesses and registers in our attitude and reactions to external reality. Love, peace and joy can be diffused in the world only by beginning with personal efforts to repair evil and replace it with its diametrical opposites. The prayer of St.Francis of Assisi illustrates this most beautifully:
Loving God, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O, Divine Teacher, grant that I may not so much seek to
be consolated as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.9
St. Paul too, writes that we overcome evil with good. To seek this is to seek the kingdom of God and the rest will flow as a consequence of this: “Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on God’s saving justice, and all these other things will be given you as well” (Mt 6:33). It appears that every good act contributes to the global quantum of happiness and love. We cannot be truly happy when the society we live in fumes with violence and death. Even the happiest encounters are tinged with the overshadowing reality of evil. As long as we continue to live in an unjust world we will be prone to the evil it perpetrates. The happiness of the person is almost proportionately related to the happiness of the society. It is to be emphasized that, “Our bodies reflect or participate in the world’s body, so that if we harm that outer body, our own bodies will feel the effects. Essentially there is no distinction between the world’s body and the human body”.10 How can a human being be genuinely happy by denying someone else his rightful share of life: “Yahweh asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ ‘I do not know’, he replied. ‘Am I my brother’s guardian?’ ‘What have you done?’ Yahweh asked. ‘Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground’” (Gn 4:9-10). Everything else will remain ineffective if we forget to do our individual bit everyday: “Sometimes the reparative life will be lived out by offering sufferings borne with patience and abandonment, even in darkness and loneliness, as a pre-eminent and mysterious communion in the sufferings and death of Christ for the redemption of the world”.11
Reparation therefore refuses to pay evil for evil, because it will only amount to the use of “eye for an eye” leading to unhappiness. Those who use the sword perish by it. The pierced heart of Jesus does the perfect reparation. Jesus hanging on the cross absorbs all hate and malice directed at him without passing it on. The sinful pattern came to a halt because of Jesus’ refusal to b e a slave of evil. The pattern of sin is stopped when people aided with God’s grace emulate Jesus in not becoming harbingers of evil, by not allowing the sins visited on them to control their attitudes and behaviour towards others. This brings out the heart of God: “self-sacrificing love”.12 It was indeed necessary for Jesus to suffer: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer before entering into his glory” (Lk 24:26). Modern prophets of Love - Maximilian Kolbe, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II have proved the efficacy of love in the modern world.
Its only when we assume the role of the good Samaritan and “see the well spring of salvation” in the pierced heart that the world will see the reign of a civilization of love. For it is “from the heart of Jesus, open on the cross, human beings are reborn in heart”, and “animated by the spirit”,13 they become prophets of love and servants of reconciliation for the happiness of human beings and the welfare of the universe.
Conclusion
The spirituality of Reparation as a means to human happiness is a vast topic. I have attempted to throw light on this aspect in a very personal manner. The misconceptions act as hurdles in understanding the immense love of God as seen in the Bible. Love remains the beginning, center and the end of everything. Human response to this fullness of love still remains inadequate. The alarming manifestation of sin is a sign of ingratitude for this love. The ruin of moral values and human catastrophes have their roots in the denial of God and the body-soul dualism. The failure of accepting a holistic attitude towards life can be the greatest danger to a happy life. Everything separated from God can be called deceptive. The absence of faith in God’s love spells doom of live. We enslave ourselves in self-made prisons. Human beings must stop deceiving themselves by believing in the myths of rationalism and materialism. The discovery of who are and the goal of our life should stimulate and motivate us to enjoy the happiness and joy of life. The great truth that God exists and the He is ever busy repairing evil, should be the incentive to begin anew. Happiness is found in this struggle. No person or situation is beyond redemption: “for nothing is impossible to God” (Lk 1:37). Even the last opportunity can be a good beginning to live life in abundance. Why seek happiness where it is not found: “Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come!… Why spend money on what cannot nourish and your wages on what fails to satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and you will have good things to eat and rich food to enjoy. Pay attention, come to; listen, and you will live” (Is 55:1-3). Let us go to the source that heals us: “I shall pour clean water over you and you will be cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all your filth and all your foul idols. I shall give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead” (Ezk 36:25-27) and like the psalmist we will find: “the path of life, unbounded joy in your presence, at your right hand delight forever” (Ps 15:11).
1 A. Perroux, scj: Spirituality : Welcome to the spirit to the delight and glory of God, Dehoniana, Year XVIII, n. 72, 1989/2, p. 221.
2 Angelo Cavagna, scj: Actuality: Reparation in the spiritualità of the Heart of Jesus, Dehoniana, Year XVIII, n. 72, 1989/2, p. 161.
3 SCJ - Spiritual Directory, p. 6.
4 Willard Gaylin, M.D.: Feelings, New York, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 46.
5 Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p. 168.
6 Pamela Hayes: The Heart is a Sacred Space, UK, St. Paul’s 1995, p. 35.
7 Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.: Love, Medicine & Miracles, New York, Harper & Row, 1986, p. 179.
8 Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.: Love, Medicine & Miracles, New York, Harper & Row, 1986, p. 186.
9 Joseph M. Stoutzenberger and John D. Bohrer: Praying with Francis of Assisi, Minnesota, Christian Brothers Publications, 1995, p. 54.
10 Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p. 171.
12 William A. Barry, S.J.: God’s passionate desire and our response, Notre Dame Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1993, p. 123.